hal's DEATH BY JEFFERSON STARSHIP INTERVIEWS & CONCERTS:
Part 1, Papa John Creach / JS @ the Catalyst, Santa Cruz CA Oct. 9th 1992

CD 1:

00.0 Phone msg left by Steve Keyser (JS manager at the time)

00.1 Hal's interview with Papa John and Gretchen Creach

Jefferson Starship @ the Catalyst, Santa Cruz, Oct 9th 1992

first set:
1. Other Side of this Life
2. Crown of Creation
3. I'm on Fire
4. Lawman
5. Shadowlands
6. First Pull Up, Then Pull Down
7. There Ain't No More Country Girls
8. Women Who Fly
9. Ride the Tiger
10. We Should Be Together

CD 2:

second set:
11. Blows Against the Empire
12. Wooden Ships
13. PJ's Down Home Blues
14. Somewhere Over the Rainbow
15. Genesis Hall
16. Have You Seen the Saucers
17. Dark Ages
18. America > "Get Ready" poem
19. Volunteers
20. encore: Girl With the Hungry Eyes

ExtraInfo:

With the manager Steve Keyser's permission (phone msge included)
I had interviewed Papa John Creach at a Veteran's Benefit in San Jose on
Sept 26th, 1992, and as I uneasily sat backstage in a trailer
before a smirking Paul Kantner and a tired Papa John and wife, I did my best
to do an interview. I did fairly well, I thought -- until I looked down and
saw that I had not pressed "record" on the tape!!!

To my humiliated discomfort, I had to extend the interview on Papa John to
make up for lost time. You can hear this unpromising start for the first time.

Well, I thought, that was the end of my interviewing the band.
But no -- the band invited me backstage at the next concert, this Catalyst show,
to complete the interview. This time I took
physical notes in pencil on the handout for the concert, and
wound up writing perhaps the best review of my hobby career
(as Papa John and wife smiled at me as I kneeled in front of them,
while Jack Casady had to jump across my legs to get to the fridge).
This is included below. . . .

Paul? I guess he was amused as usual at his discomforted fans, as he
not only played a wetdream of a concert for me -- BLOWS! my favorite, BLOWS!
-- he invited me backstage to interview Darby Gould and
Prairie Prince a few days later (all tapes to be released here shortly 8')).

So, 12 years later, I proudly present the first-gen of the concert that the
band sent to me. At the end I will append the interview transcript, and also
release the full interview tape (for the first time).

Enjoy! Part 1 is my personal dedication to Papa John and Gretchen.
We miss you, Papa.

Media Type: FLAC

My review from the interview:

Papa John Creach Spartan Stadium 9/26/92 & 10/9/92

From jupiter2@netcom.com Thu Jan 26 10:38:15 1995

[This is the third in a series of interviews with individual
members of Jefferson Starship: the Next Generation. The
group has an as-yet-unconfirmed local concert Nov. 21st [the
San Jose Cabaret--very loud 8'(]. Prairie Prince had
a broken collarbone and was asleep in his car at the
Sept. 26th Vietnam Vet's Benefit, Darby was singing for
two bands at the Oct. 9th Catalyst, and Paul was tired, so the
other interviews will be forthcoming after the next concerts.]

Papa John Creach paid $40,000 for his fiddle, which he bought
in San Francisco because of the way it felt in his hands;
but unlike B.B. King and Lucille, he gave no pet name to his
prize. Not that he needed to do so: the main female
in his life has always been his wife, Gretchen.

At 79 she is a bright and aware woman, born in Austin, Texas,
brandishing an M.A., and proud of her years teaching in schools
(two of her three brothers taught at universities).

Look around when Papa John walks on stage and you'll see her in
a Sunday dress, earrings, and close-cropped white hair which she
attributes to a Cherokee grandmother named Sylvia; Gretchen's middle
name comes from that relative, and she titles her personal management
company, Sylvakian Music, after her namesake.

Mrs. Creach's role was immediately apparent as guardian and manager.
But, after she scrutinized me at the door of the trailer assigned
to the Jefferson Starship at the San Jose Vietnam Vet's Benefit, she
quickly opened up to me with a synopsis of her husband's life as we
awaited his arrival; she was gushingly proud and happy that someone
wanted to talk about him. Beaming over my tape recorder,
she would occasionally lower her voice and conspiratorially
tell me things that were "not to be repeated", as if I were
some old friend.

Papa John was born in 1917 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, the
son of a machinist and one of ten children, the last other of which,
a policeman, died last year. Love of music was in the family,
and an uncle even played violin.

"John!" Mrs. Creach called out; "here's a nice young man who wants
to talk to you!"

Papa John addled up, a wiry figure who admitted that "music keeps me
young!" His whole frame exuded a boundless energy, and he refused
to sit down, hovering instead over the food trays or fussing with
his instrument case. "Feel my fingers" he told me, displaying long
splayed fingers that felt like those of a seventeen-year-old; "I
keep them limber by playing". There is also the help of a doctor,
and Mrs. Creach happily named off three others: a wise precaution
since Papa John's near-fatal bout with the flu caught on a European
tour a few years back. Europe still has a place for Papa John,
and later he proudly showed me a German CD of his with its press
release in that language.

Seastones had asked me to remind Papa John about a 1970 concert in
New York when the Jefferson Airplane, finishing at Fillmore East,
had wound up encoring later with not only the Grateful Dead but
Papa John; an incident that would cause weeks of comment nowadays
but bare mention then. But Papa John did remember his first brush
with the rock-and-roll crowd, having tapped his bow against the
nose of some "unruly kids!".

The kids in his family had their own kind of musical get-together:

"My younger brother played bass, and then Dixie played guitar,
and Richard played drums." Upon reflection he recalled four
sisters and five brothers; one of the sisters played piano
and another was a classically-trained vocalist.

"Back in those days they weren't doing very big concerts
and that was during _the Depression_ and its like if we don't
straighten ourselves out we'll be back in that same place again."

Asked if he saw any familar signs, he quickly answered:

"Signs, yes, they squeeze you out of your money and you don't
have any place to go! I came up during the Depression. You
couldn't get a place and they were serving, like, in big cities,
you were on a soup line--you hang out with that type of thing
and that is heavy."

He slowed down a moment and you could see the memories in front of him:

"Now, as we were, my dad, he used to be a molder in a steel mill but when
that shut down we moved on a farm . . . and that's the way we ate.
The first year we damn near starved to death but the second
year we were the fattest people in the world! We had chickens,
worked a chicken farm; we had all the best vegetables and my mother canned.
We had a whole big basement, house, and come Thanksgiving we
even brewed root beer; my dad was a winemaker and we had crops
of wine down in the basement--"

"So that explains the sparkle in your eye!" I cut in, while
Gretchen laughed "yes!" and Papa John rolled back his eyes with a smile.

"We would go out and collect elderberries, blackberries, out wild,
and if we didn't can them we would then put them in the old wine
jug! Ha, ha, that's all out of Michigan, and Pennsylvania, that's
Beaver Falls, and we would all go out in the woods and get them."

Papa John then recalled that he--

"Left home about 21. I was playing already professionally; we had
a group and that was Melvin Banks, Sayles, that kind of people.
We were working hotels, the restaurants, and they were mighty pretty."

Gretchen had mentioned Bessie Smith as a hero of her husband's,
but Papa John said that he really liked:

"All your great artists today . . . Bessie Smith I like but I never
had that chance to play with her; I wish I could. And Louie,
we used to play down in Chicago."

"Kinghead Benson used to play with him", Gretchen added and Papa John
continued:

"I was so busy with my other stuff that I had no time to play
with others . . . I knew Cab Calloway . . . Count Basie,
Pearl Hines, I knew all of those cats . . . I learned
all of this stuff from studying: I like rock, I like
the blues, I like jazz, and I like classical--I like
learning some overtures to play! I can get up there and can
play with the orchestra, I get a kick out of it, but of course
there is no money. . . ."

"Plus teach" says Gretchen, "he gets prestige for that."

"Best I can do" Papa John agreed humbly. As the crowd in
the audience judges for itself, that is very good enough:
Slick Aguilar mentioned earlier that Papa John was the
hit night after night, and he was right. But as for the
numbers that are the crowd pleasers:

"I've been playing 'Over the Rainbow' for years . . .
used to play 'Danny Boy', 'Summertime', all of those tunes like
that . . . now OtR is something that I like really well but
I need to do some of those other numbers like that that I know.
I've got so much in my repertoire that I need to do, back in
'Stardust' days and Hoagy Carmichael and all."

Both husband and wife remarked on the difference of the rock crowd,
but his subsequent and frequent playing with the Airplane,
Hot Tuna, and various incarnations of the Starship has indeed
mellowed his opinion, and he has no need of his hearing aid in
joining in with vocalistic scrapings on his fiddle.

On his own Papa John has his own blues band in Los Angeles, where
the couple make their all-too-seldomly-occupied home; Gretchen,
bemoaning the fact that she couldn't even make a dental appointment,
was later able to proudly announce at the Catalyst concert
in Santa Cruz that she finally had the chance and was booked.

Joining them there backstage during Darby's opening number with
her other band, Blind Tom (a mix of heavy metal and folk-blues
that had her bringing on Tim Gorman and doing an appropriate
"Acid Queen"), I knelt before Gretchen (while Jack Casady
stepped over my legs on his way to the fridge) and stumbled
across a love story. . . .

"She tells me you have been married for twenty-seven years" I had
commented to Papa John in San Jose, only to have him wave a no
and say quickly "twenty-nine". When asked the difference in
Santa Cruz, Mrs. Creach laughingly admitted, "we shacked up!".

She had first heard him play in Portland, Oregon, where, tired of
teaching, she had a restaurant, the Casbah, with its cook,
Mr. Penny. There musicians congregated after hours, one of whom
was "Johnny Creach"; he disappeared for a few years, only to
return suddenly.

But Mrs. Creach knew he was coming: her boxer dog,
Mr. Mike, recognized him before she even saw Papa John walk
back into her life. It was another two years, but they
finally married in Las Vegas.

Papa John grinned in the corner, warming up his fiddle, and
from Gretchen's smile you could tell she would always be
happy sitting there and watching him play; the couple had
no children, but they had each other, and the loving young ones
in the audience.

hal

[Postscript: In the L.A. quake of January 1994 Papa John suffered
a heart attack and subsequently died a month later. He will be missed.]