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Roy Robison Narrator

Carl Warmington

Interviewer

September 5, 1987 Leonard's Piano Store in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Roy Robison -RR Carl Warmington -CW CW: I'm talking to Roy Robison, who for many decades has been involved in jazz music as a performer and as a historian. Today we're going to talk about jazz music in the Twin Cities, with special emphasis on the music scene at the campus of the University of Minnesota. Roy, I'd like to start off by having you tell me about your earliest musical memories--something about how you got started, maybe your parents' interest in music. RR: Well, of course, my earliest musical memories were of my dad, who was a vaudevillian at the time. The type of music that my dad and mother sang and played was essentially ragtime, I suppose. CW: That must have been in 1910? RR: Yes, 1910, 1912 and around there. At the same time, my mother's sister was a very fine classical singer. And of course, I heard the usual songs--the Galli-Curci records of the time. I liked Galli-Curci, although she didn't come that early. I also listened to Melba and Caruso and Tetrazzini and people like that. Then the first popular music as such that I remember hearing--I don't know what the band was. But I do remember hearing a band on the stage of the old Orpheum Theater. It probably was some band of the caliber of Paul Ash or someone like that. I wish I could remember. From then on, I started hearing the local bands around town. One of the first ones that I recall very vividly--and that other people don't remember too well--was a band at the Nankin Cafe led by Jack Ermitinger, who was a fine banjoist. Now he had a band that could hardly be called Dixieland. Probably it was kind of a cross between Dixieland and ragtime. But they played well and they played a lot by ear, which wasn't too common. Those are my really earliest memories. That, of course, was before or during World War I. CW: When did you get your saxophone? RR: I didn't have a saxophone until about 1922. I started out on a tin flute--actually a little more like the fife than anything. During World War I, a friend of mine played snare

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drums. Another one played bass drum. And we got a little fife and drum corps together. We performed all over. We performed at the Old Soldiers' Home out at the Fort [Snelling], and at different churches. We even marched in the Armistice Day parade, by the way. We led the Armistice Day parade. I've got an old newspaper clipping somewhere. That started it. And then, I started hearing bands like Jack's. I mentioned Jack Ermitinger. And I remember hearing a band at Saint Paul that played--this would be probably somewhat later, maybe in the early twenties--a Dixieland style. I was really intrigued by that. The idea of improvised music was always intriguing to me. CW: By whom were you influenced in terms of special musicians that you heard on records? RR: Well, of course, I was very influenced by Rudy Weidoft, who was a friend of my father's. When I was a kid, Rudy sent me an autographed picture and wished me well. CW: Did you ever play any of his solos? RR: Yes. I used to play a saxophone solo. CW: "Valse Bluette" or "Saxophobia?" RR: Yes, I guess so. I played those. Although later I got to think of them as sort of old hat and corny. They were written saxophone solos. CW: How about musical instruction during this period? Did you have any? RR: I didn't have any. I just picked it up. CW: How about the influence of the public school music system? RR: It didn't have too much effect on me, Carl. As I said, basically I was an improviser. I didn't read too well in the beginning. I learned to read better as time went on. I still haven't learned to read piano very well. CW: How about the first band that you played in? Can you remember your first job? RR: Yes. I remember it very well. My very first job was with Keogh Gleason. He went on to MGM in Hollywood and become a set decorator for quite a lot of movies. Keogh Gleason and myself, and--I cannot remember the fellow's name, it might have been Bud Haymeyer--a drummer. Anyway, the three of us went over to Keogh's house and we played things like "Darktown Strutters Ball" and pieces like that, and that started it. Then Keogh got me a couple jobs. We'd do that type of playing. We started playing sunlights in high school. CW: Where did you go to high school?

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RR: I went to both South High School and West High School. CW: That's in Minneapolis? RR: Right, both in Minneapolis. That led to my first exposure to really good popular music. We didn't call it jazz music in those days. It wasn't jazz at all. It was just music--pop music. We didn't refer to any of the campus bands as jazz bands. But I think my first exposure there was probably hearing Paul Wilke's Orchestra, which was a very fine campus band. That was probably in 1922, 1923, somewhere around there. CW: Paul played banjo. RR: Yes, Paul played banjo. He had a very good orchestra. A guy named Kramer was the trumpet player. CW: Kenny Kramer. RR: Yes, Kenny Kramer. I don't remember the trombone player's name. It was a good band. They played somewhat of a Dixieland style, I suppose, or rather a campus style. I think there really was a University of Minnesota campus style. For instance, what Doc Evans was playing later was really Dixieland. But the style of music played on the campus in the mid-twenties was pop music and a lot of ballads--just the pop songs of the day. CW: How about the Marigold? Did that ballroom have an effect on you? RR: You bet it had an effect on me, because that's where I first heard the original Dixieland jazz band. No, I'm sorry. That isn't right. The New Orleans Rhythm Kings--oh, I remember them. What year were they there? CW: They were there in 1925. RR: It was before that, Carl, that I first heard them. CW: But they were there twice. RR: Yes. I know you had to be eighteen to go in. Art Goldberg and I would stand out in the alley and listen to them. We'd get a soapbox or something and stand up right by the window where the bandstand was playing and listen to them. CW: Exciting--it was a great band. RR: Yes. That was a really great traditional band.

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CW: Did you have any experience with traveling bands? RR: Oh yes, the usual--traveling through Minnesota and Iowa and the Dakotas and Wisconsin with the bands. CW: With whom did you play? RR: Oh, with several different ones--Cec Hurst, Hap Kastner, and the inimitable, wonderful Chappie's Vagabonds. CW: [Chuckles] Can you recreate the experience of playing with a traveling band during those days? It certainly must have been very different. RR: It certainly was different. They were rather well organized, the traveling bands. They kept the same personnel and they played a bit of everything. Say a typical traveling band with Cec Hurst. We played at the Marigold. With Cec Hurst, everything was very organized. CW: How did you travel? RR: In buses. Sometimes an old Packard or something dolled up. CW: During the winter? RR: In the winter, they traveled on buses. I never played in the winter. I played late in the fall with Chappie and one late fall with Hap Kastner. Hap Kastner was a bit of a character. I wouldn't say Kastner's was a typical band. Hap was a character really with a capital "CH." CW: Was he the most interesting? RR: Hap was the most interesting, by a long way. I was in Minneapolis, and I got a phone call from Keogh Gleason. He said, "Can you come down to Springfield?" He was with a band down there. They played pretty well. And so I went down. I played with the band that very night. Hap was the drummer and he was unbelievably bad. He'd roll on the drums--he just had no sense of time. CW: And he was the leader. RR: He was the leader, yes. He kept time with the bass drum, and that was all. Then he just snared away with no meaning. So as soon as I had a chance to talk to Keogh, he said, "What can we do? We can't put up with this." I said, "I know. I think we're going to have to give him drum lessons."

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Neither Keogh or I had ever quite figured out what he was doing. So Keogh got out the drums. We did little beats that we'd seen other drummers do. We started giving Hap drum lessons. Through our wonderful instruction, he got to be passable. He never was better than passable. But he was a good organizer and a personality, and he booked the jobs. We controlled the band musically, really. CW: Since this was during Prohibition, would you want to comment about drinking, drugs, smoking, and girls? RR: [Chuckles] Girls--you should know that no musician ever paid any attention to girls. As far as drinking, I don't think there was too much drinking--not by musicians, not then. We couldn't do much. There was some. CW: Drugs? RR: Drugs were not too common in the twenties. By the thirties I think they were getting more common. Then marijuana was coming around. But I didn't see much drugs. They didn't use drugs. There was a lot of drinking, of course, during Prohibition. An example was one night in South Dakota. This was typical of Prohibition days. There was inevitably a bootlegger outside a pavilion when you went in--he sold moonshine to whomever went by. I was standing out there during intermission. Somebody had gone up to him inquiring about getting some moonshine. And whoever it was said, "Is it any good?" And the dealer in the moonshine pointed to somebody laid out on the car seat and said, "Is it any good? He was drinking it." Out cold. That was the touchstone then. CW: Of course, one of the problems was that musicians had to sample the dancers' bottle to be sociable. RR: Yes, that's true. Yes, you did have to do that occasionally. I wouldn't say there wasn't any drinking, but actually there was very little. CW: All right. Let's talk about campus bands at the University of Minnesota. Can you name some of the campus bands that you played with? RR: Well, I never played with Wilkie. I played individually with him, but I never played with his band. Otherwise, the better known campus bands that I played with were Art Goldberg, Norvy Mulligan, and Dave Ackerson. Those are probably the few really top bands--those three. Art Goldberg had the best organized band. Norvy had a very fine band. Norvy later did very well, and we used to play together. So did Art. Art went to Hollywood and became great in movie music--but under the name of Arthur Morton. He was a music major.

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CW: Tell us a little bit about the Art Goldberg style. Why was he so popular? RR: Art had a very well organized band. He didn't play any written arrangements. He played what we call head arrangements--which means that you got together and played a little phrase, and then somebody else put in the same phrase or played the harmonic part of it. Art was really a superb musician, and a likeable guy, too. Art was all business on the job, but he would relax later. Why was he different? I can't explain why Art's band was as good as it was. CW: Well, how about his background? RR: Art came from a very musical family. His brother was an organist who played in local theaters. Art was a well-schooled musician with the ability to improvise, which wasn't too common then, you know. It is a fine talent, actually. CW: Of course, as I remember Art, he performed a very good accompaniment, with his bass hand playing tenths. RR: Yes, right. He was playing that before Fats Waller did. Art was playing the same kind of tenth or bass that later became sort of a trademark of Fats Waller, or Art Tatum, or Oscar Peterson today--playing those big tenths. Art was a small man, but he had big hands, relatively big. At least he could hit the tenths in the band. CW: The piano players, as I recall, were playing kind of a counter melody rather than playing the bass that was supporting the soloist. RR: Yes. When you were playing a solo, Art did not play a full piano. We had pianists around the campus in those days who were probably excellent pianists. I can think of one in particular, Gordy Leitz. Gordy was a fine pianist, but he played too full all the time and that didn't support the soloist. Art would play just chords of a kind. Anyone who knows any of Fats Waller's records--the style he played in the twenties and thirties--knows he played the tenths and then the chords above it. CW: Well, I can remember in those days that you were in such demand, not only by one band. You were playing with probably several bands at the same time. You were noted for your improvisation and a rather far-out improvisation. Can you describe what you tried to do on the saxophone? RR: Well I don't know. When I was playing with Art Goldberg, the trumpet player was Fats Palmer, a fine trumpet player by the way. In later years I talked to Fats, and he said, "You know something? You were a pretty good saxophone player, and you were the loudest one." [Chuckles] I think that's kind of true.

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CW: Let's talk a little bit about improvisation. At this particular time, as you said, musicians were playing by ear, and the more popular musicians or the soloists could improvise. How do you describe improvisation? RR: I don't know. If you "ain't got it, you ain't got it." It's awfully hard. I've tried to teach people to improvise on piano. I think it's probably impossible to teach improvisation. CW: There are books now that talk about improvisation on the harmony. RR: Yes. CW: And on improvising on the melody. RR: That can be done. You can teach them to improvise on the chord by using arpeggios that are based on that particular chord. To me, it's not true improvisation. The best improvisers don't necessarily stay with the chords--not always at least. CW: Of course, some of the musicians, as I recall, would be able to play kind of a counter melody, or kind of an obbligato that was effective, too. RR: Yes, on a piano. The best exponent of that was Norvy Mulligan. Just as recently as a year or two ago when we got together, Norvy was on the piano. He played a left-hand kind of tenths with his thumb. He would play a counter melody. It would never be the leading note of the melody. He wanted it to be kind of a counter melody. It was an individual style. My daughter, who is a fine classical pianist and a good jazz player, was really intrigued by Norvy. She had never seen that done before. Norvy is an original. I don't know whether Norvy originated it or not. I had never seen it before in playing. CW: Well, it was helpful with his singing. I think that's it. RR: Yes, right. CW: The melody stood out strongly. RR: Right. Norvy was a fine singer of pop songs, too. CW: When did you make the switch from sax to piano? RR: Oh, I was always playing piano a little bit back in those days. I think probably in the late forties or early fifties I started playing piano and getting a few jobs. I did play a few jobs on piano even back on campus in the twenties. CW: I can remember your playing in the thirties. RR: Yes, I was always playing piano.

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CW: Did you ever have any instruction? RR: No. I played by ear. CW: But that was very helpful. We haven't said anything about your song writing. Your contemporaries certainly can recall the beautiful songs that you composed. When did that start? RR: Oh, I don't know. Everybody has some sort of a hobby, like knitting or something. I wrote songs, I guess. CW: Not only the music, but the lyrics. RR: Yes, lyrics. CW: Well, that was important. Can you remember the first song? RR: The very first song, yes. It had some terrible lyrics. I'd written things before, but the first song that did anything--my dad took it in 1921 or 1922. How old would I have been? Fifteen years old or something like that. It was called "I've Often Wondered About You." Dad took it when he was in Chicago. It was played by Paul Ash, who had a big theater band at the Chicago Theater. That was in about 1922, and they played semi-symphonic and pop music, too. So that was my first experience of having my songs played. CW: Was it published? RR: No, it never was. I didn't hear it played by the Paul Ash band. My dad heard it, but I never actually heard it played by the band. CW: How about some of the songs that were played and later became popular? RR: Well I think probably one of my best songs was used by--I can say this with certainty--the best dance band that ever played regularly in the Twin Cities. And that was the Ben Pollack Band in the early or mid-thirties. He used one of my songs for a theme song. CW: Where did he play? RR: He played at the Boulevards of Paris over on University Avenue in Saint Paul. That was a great band--a really great band. CW: What was the name of the song?

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RR: It was called "In the Evening" then. Now I call it "Just in the Evening." I changed the lyrics a bit. CW: Why don't you just play a phrase or two with the words? RR: [Playing piano] CW: While you're sitting at the piano bench, I'm intrigued as to how you get ideas for tunes. RR: Oh, I don't know, Carl. They just come sometimes. I'll be fishing, and all of a sudden they come into my head. I usually carry a piece of scratch paper around with me to write them down. CW: How about the tune that you built on just the simple panatonic scale? RR: No, I've forgotten it. [Playing the piano] I've forgotten the lyrics myself. They were pretty awful. Oddly enough, every once in awhile somebody will ask me about that. It was a pretty terrible song. CW: Well, let's go on to recording. Did you ever do any recording? RR: I did some recording with Norvy Mulligan back as early as 1924 or 1925, on the Gennett label. I'm not sure of the year. I don't know what ever happened to that recording. I can't remember what we recorded. CW: I'm trying to locate the recording that Norvy made at the Nankin. Any idea? RR: I've heard about that too, and I don't remember where it is now. Did you ever ask Norvy himself? CW: I've asked his wife, Jo, and she hasn't been able to locate it. She found a picture of Mulligan at the Nankin. But I suppose there are ways--we might check this with old record collectors. Do you know any old record collectors? RR: Yes, Bob Bouchet. People like him would know. CW: Just keep that in mind, and the next time you see him, I would be interested in that. RR: All right. CW: Well, you've mentioned Ben Pollack. Do you recall the musical days when so many of the big bands came to the Twin Cities?

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RR: Yes. It was quite an era. In the beginning I think most of them came to the Hennepin Orpheum Theater. I've forgotten much of it now. I only remember the beginning and the end, when radio took over and vaudeville died. They were still clinging to the band. I can remember many of the better bands that came here. CW: What are some? RR: Well, Duke Ellington came here. CW: Isham Jones? RR: Isham Jones, yes. Now, there was a fine band. That later became the nucleus of Woody Herman's band. CW: And at one point didn't he buy Occie [Oscar] Westlund's band--that was at the Marigold? RR: Yes, right. CW: That's another example indicating the caliber of musicians that were here in Minneapolis. RR: There were a great number of good musicians in Minneapolis, during the twenties and thirties particularly. There were very fine musicians here. Many of them later went on and had careers in New York, playing for bigger bands. I can't think of... CW: ...Charlie. RR: Charlie Teagarden. No, not Charlie Teagarden, Charlie--oh, I should know. CW: Yes, the graduate of the Working Boys Band--Margolis. RR: Yes, Margolis. Right. He was beautiful--he played with Paul Whiteman and others. CW: Did you participate in any of the campus band "battles of music?" RR: Oh yes, indeed. I remember one so vividly--I'd been playing with both bands, and it ended up being Goldberg's band against Mulligan's band. I don't think anything came to a conclusion as to who had the greatest of the bands here. [Chuckles] CW: But that was usually for a senior prom or military ball. RR: Senior prom, right. CW: What would you do, augment the normal band?

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RR: Yes, we would. We'd augment our normal band--always add a bass player if we didn't have one, and maybe another horn. CW: And then you'd have continuous music. RR: Gosh, that's right. We would keep it going all the time. CW: And in a sense, it was almost a "cutting contest." RR: It was, yes. It was a cutting contest. CW: Just blow louder or... RR: ...Maybe that's why I was always the man who could blow louder. You know, it was strange. I think during that period of pop music on the campus of the University of Minnesota, the quality was unusually good--from 1925 or around there, probably till the early thirties. Then, of course, the Depression disintegrated the music scene. For one thing, the sororities and fraternities were having fewer dances, so there was less music. Well, there were a lot of strange things that happened. CW: What's the strangest? RR: I think the strangest had to do with Norvy Mulligan. Norvy Mulligan and Gordy Bowen, who also had a band--he was a bandleader and a fine saxophone player--decided there was so much work on campus that they would get a booking agency started. So they went over in Dinkytown. They rented some offices, and I forget what they called it--"Campus Bands, Inc." [Chuckles] They were going to book things like dance contests. In those days, they would have afternoon rushing by the sororities--the sororities, not fraternities. They would have a band for the so-called rushing, where they'd try to get prospective members of the sorority. And they'd hire four or five piece bands. That was basically part of what Mulligan and Bowen were trying to do--to control that aspect of it. Well, I remember going over to one house. I was playing saxophone there. We sat down, and I think we had two saxophones and two drummers. Somebody came over from across the street. They had two banjo players and two piano players. This happened more than once. So without any great effort on our part, we switched around a little bit and would end up with a better combination. CW: Can you recreate the excitement of the dances after the football games? RR: Really, when you think of rock, it is kind of a manufactured excitement, you see. Dixieland was really a normal, actual excitement, a genuine love of that type of music. I think one of the things that was so much different with the rock or jazz or pop scene was that that music was not a music of just teenage kids. It appealed to young adults as well--

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and even more than that. For instance, the good dance or pop bands of that time were the bands that were recording. Their records were sold to everyone from fourteen to forty or eighty. It wasn't the departmentalized scene like it is now. CW: That's interesting. RR: It was very much so. It was the music that those people wanted and loved, and that was it. CW: That was a great period for jobbing musicians. Can you visualize Tenth Avenue between Fifth and University? RR: Oh, yes. That was Sorority Row. Fraternity Row was University Avenue going up the other way. No one sorority would have a dance every Saturday night, but they had at least one dance a month. So with twelve or fifteen sororities that were there, on any given Saturday night, there would be three or four bands playing, sometimes more. There were times on holidays and when you might have a band at almost every fraternity and sorority on campus. CW: Do you have memories of the Minneapolis Musicians Clubhouse? RR: Oh, yes. Well, there's another thing, too. To become a member of the best campus bands, even then you had to be a member of the union. Even the kids had to. You couldn't get anywhere without being a union member. CW: That's on the campus. RR: That's on the campus, right. We had to be. A good share of them couldn't read music. So it was kind of a little put-on thing. They'd go down and... CW: ...They'd be recommended. RR: Yes, they'd be recommended. They would already play something. They'd know what was going to be put up in front of them, you know. They would play "Dinah" or whatever it was. They would play it by ear, and yes, they would pass the test. I can think of campus musicians who couldn't read a note of music, really. CW: Well, I wonder now if you couldn't talk about some of the characters in the musicians' fraternity at that time. RR: There were a lot of them. It's harder to think of the ones who weren't characters. Oh, I can think of quite a few. And campus musicians probably had fewer characters than the traveling dance bands. There were some kind of strange ones. I don't want to mention names. Maybe they have daughters or sons...

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CW: ...The roster I made of musicians during the twenties now totals about 175. A lot of students worked their way through college. How about summarizing your musical activities since the campus days? RR: Out of sheer necessity, I became a pianist in--I don't know what you would call it--piano bars. I was the typical bar pianist sitting there. "Hey, play `Melancholy Baby.'" CW: Were they in Minneapolis? RR: Yes, in the Minneapolis metropolitan area. We played at places like Herb's and the Starlight. During the thirties I played with Walton's band. Say, I've forgotten. There's a character--Sammy Scheiner. CW: I played with Sammy. RR: Yes, you played with Sammy. In fact, you introduced me to Sammy. [Chuckles] Why did you do that? CW: Why don't you describe how Sammy would play his choruses? RR: Well, we didn't teach Sammy how to play. I figured he was too strong-willed for us to do that. We didn't do what we did with Hap Kastner. But occasionally we'd be playing some simple tune, and I'd say, "That's not E natural, Sammy, that's E flat." And it didn't bother him. He just went on. He said, "Oh, yes." He'd play it. It never bothered him a bit. He played with a lot of vitality. CW: Yes. RR: And in his own style, he played very well. I would hit a few wrong chords here and there, and it didn't matter to Sammy. CW: One of the humorists at that time described a piano player--I don't think he was referring to Sammy--as having a "Can't We Be Friends?" right-hand and "I'll Get By" left-hand. RR: [Chuckles] That was Sammy. CW: Sammy went on to graduate from law school and became a very prominent attorney. RR: I think quite a few musicians became attorneys and doctors. Dex Lyons became a successful doctor. He was a good trumpet player. I keep overlooking people like Dex. I don't think about him. He was one of the good trumpet players.

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CW: Before we leave Sammy, I thought you would mention how Sammy would play a chorus and for the break at the bridge, he would turn around and sit on the piano. RR: Yes, he would. Oh, we were playing down at Curley's. Now Curley Shapiro was a bootlegger of the late twenties. When the repeal came along, Curley got one of the clubs downtown and called it Curley's. He became very legitimate and wore a tux and everything. Curley was a very easy-going man and bootlegger. I can't say the same about his brother. He was a militant. I played with a five-piece band down there. Nate Wexler was the trumpet player--he did the comedy routines. Nate later went to New York and did pretty well. But we had a band that was--oh, I wouldn't say it was a great band or anything. We had some pretty good musicians. The trumpet player was a good comedian, and it was a decent enough band. But we got by on humor, I think, maybe more than anything. Well, I'll tell the typical gag. Nate would get up and make announcements suddenly, like "Flash! Rebels make Spanish fly." That was a typical joke. CW: What other clubs did you play in? You were playing piano now? RR: No. At that time I was playing the saxophone, so that was in the early thirties. But I can't leave Sammy without a few more of the anecdotes, then I'll jump forward, because Curley's was really a fun place. CW: It was in the basement. RR: No. Curley's was downstairs on Sixth Street, right in the middle of Sixth and Hennepin. That was quite a place. A lot of strange things happened at Curley's. We were playing after-hours there. Finally, they started to enforce after-hours drinking. So Curley had the bright idea of serving drinks in coffee cups. You would come in at one-thirty at Curley's, and here would be all these people sitting around drinking liquor--but it seemed like they were drinking coffee. CW: Well, don't neglect the nightclub scene or the bar scene. RR: Oh, that was really something. CW: Hennepin Avenue had quite a few. RR: Yes, right. Later in the fifties, it became a pretty big scene. Of course, there were more clubs. Another thing we've forgotten, Carl, was the scene on Sixth Avenue North where the black bands played. That was a big thing. CW: What were some of the places that we're talking about?

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RR: Well, there was the Harlem Breakfast Club, which was just called the Breakfast Club sometimes. There was the Cotton Club. I can't remember the one that was across from the Harlem Breakfast Club. CW: Musicians' Rest? RR: Yes, Musicians' Rest. CW: I imagine Minneapolis supplied a number of successful black musicians. RR: Oh yes, the Pettifords. Some went on to own their own clubs. The Pettifords played with Ellis Newman. That was a different scene. The black musicians--I guess there was a little Jim Crowism back at that time--never played on campus, never did. There were good black bands around. I remember there was a black band that played regularly not too far from campus. They played at least Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, and they were called Eli Rice and the Cotton Pickers. CW: Oh, yes. I remember them. RR: That was a fairly organized dance band. They didn't play too much jazz. CW: Now move out on Nicollet. RR: Oh yes. That's when you're getting into the really great scene. I remember sitting like I am with you, that far away, and watching Fats Waller sit there and play in his inimitable style. Louis Armstrong and people like that came regularly to those places. There was the Happy Hour and another club up the street--I can't remember the name of that. CW: Did you play in that area? RR: I played at the Happy Hour, not with a good band though. I played with a terrible band that I've tried to forget--just a terrible band, with some fellow nicknamed Beany or something. He called me up and said, "I have a band at the Happy Hour." I said, "Oh, boy." You know, there I am. Little did I know. CW: Well, let's move along and talk about your musical life in later years and retirement--how you kept up with music. RR: I got into the record business for a while--quite a while, in fact. Then I moved to a small town--Mora, Minnesota. Out of nowhere, I became a librarian, which is about as pitiful a career. One day the local Methodist minister up there said, "I've got a job for you."

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And I said, "What?" He said, "You're going to be the librarian." It was a new library, and he was on the library board and decided I was it, you know. CW: What do you have now in terms of musical instruments? RR: It's pretty extensive, maybe a little too extensive. At home, I have a piano and an organ and sound equipment. CW: Thank you, Roy Robison.

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