Ian Priestman
"if the bar’s set really high, then if you get over it,
it’s just a massive thrill. A massive thrill!"
GC: We’re here with Ian Priestman, currently an instructor at LBCC, also accomplished musician and entertainer. And Ian, I take it from your accent you are not from Corvallis, where were you born?
IP: I was born in Hull, England. H-U-L-L, on the northeast coast, Hull is part of Yorkshire. Not known for very much. High, top of the league tables in crime, bottom of the league tables in education and entertainment, and top of the league tables in obesity as well.
GC: Could be any large American city.
(laughs)
GC: Where else have you lived?
IP: I’ve lived in London, for a short time, maybe about a year and a half total. And I’ve lived around the valley, lived in Corvallis for a year, Tuesday and weekends for about four years, Lebanon for a couple of years, Albany.
GC: What brought you to the States?
IP: I did a teaching exchange to swap jobs with an American professor from LBCC. He did my job in England at Hull College for one year and lived in my run-down shack; I lived in his palatial residence in Corvallis, and at the end of the year we swapped back. He then retired, I applied for his job, and got his job. So I kind of think to myself that somewhere, somebody somewhere, intended me to be here.
GC: So you’re enjoying yourself here?
IP: Yeah, there are ups and downs, you know, for the most part I don’t think I could move back home. I think socially it leaves something to be desired, I don’t think there is the same strength of friendships here than there is—people are more—relationships are more transient here, whereas at home a lot of my old high school friends are still there, you know.
GC: You play guitar, but do you play other instruments?
IP: Yeah, I play the piano, saxophone. I don’t do any of them that well, just enough to get by, really. I can hammer out a tune on the piano but I can’t do anything complicated.
GC: If someone asked what type of music do you play, how would you describe your own music?
IP: My own music, music that I write myself . . . it’s a difficult one, really. It’s difficult because I don’t have a style of music, it’s whatever takes me, or the point where the idea comes to my consciousness, you know. So if I’m thinking jazz at the time, I might write a jazz song, but if I’m thinking folk, I’d write a folk song, you know. These are definite styles, well I don’t have a consistent one—it all depends a lot of the time on the lyrics, really.
GC: Do you have a set way of doing things? Do you come up with a lyric or a melody or vice versa, is there something—?
IP: Yes. I mean the pattern—I’m pretty new to songs, really, I’ve only been doing it about five years; I’ve just played other people’s work. The pattern that seems to be emerging is I’ll get a little idea on the guitar, a musical idea, I’ll put it to one of these devices, and I’ll kind of store it. Less frequently I’ll get a lyrical idea and I’ll store it, and then at some point or other I kind of think, well that lyrical thing should go with that musical idea. The interesting thing is, when you put them together, usually they snap into place—hardly any fighting goes on whatsoever. You know that? The bond between the two is usually immediately inseparable.
GC: That’s an interesting concept. Different from what I’ve been hearing. Do you remember any particular song as a child or growing up, something that influenced you?
IP: Yeah, yeah, big time. Simon and Garfunkel, my brother was a big fan. I wasn’t from the counter-culture generation but my brother was, so he used to play, well, we played Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and Book Ends, you know just him in the league now, which takes me back to playing with my Lego bricks in the front room of my parents’ house, and hearing all these references to American cultural icons, like Bob Dylan, who I didn’t know at the time, but people like Robert Frost and Robert Mcnamera, and as a kid I was thinking, who are these people? Where is this place America where they’re singing about, what goes on there? You know, references to towns like, let’s see, “we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,” or things like that, and I’m thinking, what is this place? So Simon and Garfunkel influenced me greatly.
GC: Is that one of the first songs you ever sang, or played?
IP: First tune I ever played was the James Bond theme. ’Cause it’s easy. (laughs) First tune I ever played was on harmonica. My brother was learning to play the harmonica and put it down and went somewhere, and I picked it up, and I saw he was playing the music to On Top of Old Smokey, and I saw blow six, blow six, blow six, blow six, and I just whacked it out, I did it, and caught the tune immediately.
GC: Have you been an entertainer all your life, or has music been always secondary?
IP: No, music, really, yeah. I do act in local community theatre, usually the English role. (laughs) I try out for the American roles, but my accent isn’t really quite right.
GC: I imagine music was a big part of your time in school also.
IP: You mean, college?
GC: College, yeah.
IP: Yeah, although I did a business degree. And also I did it part-time, I didn’t do a full-time student, I didn’t go to very many rock concerts, if you will, at the university. I went to some, but not like a group of full-time students would go every week, you know. I was always just one of the local population.
GC: What’s been one of your bigger challenges as far as being a musician?
IP: Biggest challenges? Uhh. (pause) Couple of the them, really. One is always realizing that you know there are people better than you, you know, always realizing that. I went to London when I was eighteen and thought I’d work in a band. So at auditions they lead you to the studio and you'll hear a guy playing like Eric Clapton and I had to go in and follow him, and consequently I didn’t get anywhere. Also realizing that even the younger kids could quite often knock your socks off.
GC: Was there any guitarists from the past that you idolize or model yourself after?
IP: Yeah, Mick Ronson. Mick Ronson was from my home town, from Hull, England, and he became David Bowie’s guitar player. And not only did he sound good and play good, he looked good too, he looked the part, you know.
GC: Who was your greatest supporter when it comes to your musci?
IP: My music? You mean my own music?
(pause) I think my wife has supported me, she encourages me, that sort of thing. My dad was very supportive in my younger days to the point of maybe trying to take over a little bit by trying to become the band’s manager, you know. So yes, I think those two are really my only supporters. (laughs)
GC: What bands were you in starting up?
IP: I was in a band that used to play the working men’s clubs in Yorkshire, from the age of about 19 to taking off to come here at the age of 33, really. It’s more of a cabaret type band, really. I was also in a band at that time that wrote their own material. We got pretty good locally, but we didn’t have the expertise or the management skills to take it any further. I was playing music on my i-pod when I was in Boston (recently) and I thinking how good it was, how avant-garde and smart it was, but we didn’t have the management skills to be able to promote ourselves, to manage ourselves in places, so it kind of—and then our singer left to join a quite well-known indie band actually; they split up and then I joined him professionally for a couple years in London, and that ended when I was about 30.
GC: So have you ever experienced the starving artist syndrome?
IP: No, no. That was probably one of the—you know if you’re really going to go for it, you’ve got to be totally focused, I think. You know having a day job obviously doesn’t keep you that focused, really. You know, trying to make a compromise.
GC: From your past or present, are there some songs that you continue to play and would play no matter what, whether they’re requested or not—you want to hear them, you want to play them?
IP: Oh, um. (pause) Well, you know, I mean I often do—at a performance, I’ll often do Rocket Man right at the start, because I know that I can sing it okay, and I know the lyrics off the top of my head, so I’m comfortable doing it and it kind of establishes yourself, it kind of establishes you down if you start it off doing a song you know. I don’t know that it’s my favorite song, but it’s one that I know I can do.
GC: You said you don’t have a website, but you have a Facebook page, so people can go to that.
IP: Yeah.
(Ian places a booklet on each table, at his performances, that list about 10 pages of songs from which listeners can pick and choose.)
GC: Do you have any wild stories about the day?
IP: (laughs) About “the day”? You mean about the past?
GC: Or the prime.
IP: You know I was going to write a play about the northeastern working men’s clubs circuit. It’s not a glamorous circuit, it’s full of wannabes. (pause) Do I have any wild stories? Not that springs to mind. I remember being snowed in in a club in Yorkshire and having to stay in the club overnight, just us, in the bar.
GC: Well, that’s not so bad.
IP: You know. All of our equipment was settled, that was quite fun. Nobody else in there, just us and beer.
GC: Any embarrassing moments?
IP: Any embarrassing moments? Voice has given out before. I used to—I used to wear a pair of shorts, England rugby shorts, until my wife pointed out that the shorts were, although perfectly acceptable in England, were far too short for over here, and that people were kind of embarrassing her by remarking on how short these shorts were. Just kind of like those speed-dos.
GC: Yeah, I can see where that might be embarrassing. What do you do other than music? To relax, or to—what other interests or hobbies do you have?
IP: I started writing some comedy, usually about cultural differences between the two places, between England and America. I want to do an open mike as a stand-up comedian, just to see whether I can do it, if my material is good enough. Kind of realized that I’ve got the entertainer gene in me, so I just want to see how far it can be taken, you know. (laughs)
GC: Do you keep up with the current songs or the pop songs?
IP: Not at all, no. I’m completely lost as regards to what’s new. I just wait for albums to come out by the people who I love, like Leonard Cohen, John Cale, Wreckless Eric etc. I get the latest album and then I just wait for the next one to come out, you know.
GC: You’re saying the word “albums”—kind of identifies ... I was going to ask you about CDs. Rolling Stone magazine said that in 2011, digital sales outstripped physical sales of CDs for the first time ever. Do you have any thoughts on that—good, bad, indifferent?
IP: No, I think that all ways the music can get out to the masses is good. Obviously a download won’t have the same information that an album would, there’s something to be said for reading the liner notes, taking the album out of the sleeve, that a download doesn’t really have. The advantage I suppose is that any musician now can sell their music, you don’t need a label anymore.
GC: If you could play with any artist dead or alive, who would you choose to—
IP: Well if he was dead, it would be a little bit of a distraction, asking questions about being dead. (laughs) (pause) I don’t know who that would be, really. I guess Mick Ronson, like I mentioned earlier on. Wreckless Eric, is another one, because it's more achievable, rather than Davi Bowie or Leonard Cohen. I did have kind of a fantasy of playing music with a guy called Wreckless Eric; he was in the British New Wave era of the late ‘70s. And he occasionallly tours around here, and he’s very much into spontaneity in performances. Kind of contemplated sending him a tape of me playing saxophone to his music, so that I could maybe sit in next time he comes around here. But I don’t know whether I’ll get round to it.
GC: “Music is”—what would you say?
IP: (long pause) I suppose I’ve blown it if this is word association, because you’re supposed to say the first thing that comes to your mind.
GC: I think you’ve gotten past that, yeah.
IP: (laughs) I sometimes think it’s overrated. At the end of the day I think, well, it’s just twelve notes on a stick, so is it really worth sacrificing everything for? On the other hand, I realize it can make some people incredibly—you know…happy
GC: In that vein, what separates a technician from the artist?
IP: Technician? You mean in the studio?
GC: A very skilled guitar player, but he’s not considered really an artist.
IP: Something else I was thinking about the other day was that, you know, you could be the best guitar player in the world or whatever but I don’t know that it’s easy to make a living out of being that—great guitar players of the world are so…. that’s probably why they can’t make any money. I think a great technician sometimes is a little too accurate, a little too lost in precision, whereas I like a little bit of slapdash, I like a bit of the human being in there too.
GC: Playing your music, how does it make you feel, what does it bring out in you?
IP: That’s another thing I was thinking about on the weekend, when I was writing for the gig. You get a really diverse range of emotions from apathy, about a week before the gig; to a sense of time urgency when you’re kind of rehearsing for it; to a sense of “is it worth all this hassle” when you’re loading your gear up and; to driving to the gig where you start to feel “do I really want to do this,” it’s just a gig, you know, people are forgetting it by the end of a week. So after the performance, if it goes well it feels great, if it’s not gone well it feels like a nightmare. The end of it all is a massive stress release, stress from—that you’ve got it, it’s done, and then the interesting thing is the drive home, you start to think, I could have done that better, I could have done this better, and the whole process starts all over again.
GC: Interesting that you bring that up because you talked earlier to me about stand-up comedy. Throwing yourself out there in comedy seems to be even worse than trying to strum She’s Coming Round the Mountain. What’s motivating you?
IP: Because if the bar’s set really high, then if you get over it, it’s just a massive thrill. A massive thrill.
GC: Is there anything you’d like to add? Anything we should know about the entertainer Ian Priestman, who you can see around town?
IP: No, not really, only that I think when you’re older as a musician there’s less of a sense of time urgency to get your CDs done or rehearse or whatever, because you just think to yourself, I’ll get it done in my own time, I just want to watch TV tonight, you know. So I like that fact of it, rather than as a youngster thinking that everything was time sensitive and an investment in your music. Just take it easy.
GC: Great. Thanks very much for your time.
April 2012 / Emended for length and clarity