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GC: I am talking to Mina Carson. What instruments do you play? Or, are you more of a vocalist?
MC: I play the guitar; I played the guitar since I was 11 or 12. And I’ve played the fiddle for about 10, 12 years now. And that’s about it. I fooled around on the mandolin, but then a band member picked up my mandolin and played it so much better in five minutes that I kind of gave it up.
GC: Do you consider yourself a vocalist?
MC: Well, I sing. (laughs) I’ve heard good singers. I’m not one of them, but I can carry a tune and I can do pretty good harmony.
GC: If the audience was to say what kind of music are you playing, how would you describe it?
MC: That’s such a good question. Luckily with the fiddle it’s really easy, its Celtic-inflected music, but you know what I’ve been telling people about my current band that it’s the baby boom folk rock peace band. (laughs)
GC: What is your current band?
MC: River Rock. Sometimes River Rock and Ed Dee. (look for the Ed Dee interview on the home page)
GC: Can you go back in time and tell me about some of the first experiences you had with music, as a child, do you remember anything specific?
MC: Yeah, it was the kind of thing that I don’t think we’ve given enough to my children. Even my mom, who considered herself as not musical, sort of steeped us in camp songs and folk songs and you know we’d sing in the car, she’d teach me rounds.
GC: What sticks out in your memory?
MC: Yeah, White Choral Bells. (laughs) Yeah, White Choral Bells, it was so beautiful. And I remember learning that as a kid on the way to New Hampshire, I grew up in Maine, and I think I was probably six years old. And my mom, bless her heart, recognized that I liked music and she put me in piano lessons as a dutiful thing and I didn’t practice so, it didn’t pay and my teacher was kind of a stuffy old dude. He was probably a stuffy young dude, but he seemed like a stuffy old broad. Mr. Eves. And so she just pulled me out of that after a couple of years, ’cause it wasn’t worth her money, and I understand that now. And then when I was in sixth grade, she said—we had a friend who was learning classical guitar, and he was older than I was, and she said what about the guitar? And it was just such a brilliant idea. It was 1960 . . . let’s see, I was born in ’53 so it must have been, you know, ’63 or ‘64, when all the folk music was happening, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan—you know, stuff was happening. So she found this wonderful gal, who was a Bowden College faculty wife, and she taught me classical guitar, she taught me folk guitar. And I learned enough chords to start playing in little groups when I was in just sixth or seventh grade, and I would be the camp guitarist. I was always the one with the guitar.
GC: Do you get a sense…were you playing the same sort of music then that you’re playing now?
MC: Very much so, very much so. The exception is that I also joined a choir, and I did choir music all the way from sixth grade up through college and a little bit beyond, but in recent years I’ve kind of given that up, I just have such limited time, and I have the band and I have this fiddling, and I so haven’t been doing choral music, but I’m hoping when I retire I’ll get back to it; ’cause it’s really exciting, you know?
GC: Do you remember the first time you could play a song? Little as I play I can remember the first song I could actually play all the way through.
MC: What was it?
GC: Me and Bobby McGee
MC: Oh, that’s good!
GC: I was wondering if you have any memories of—
MC: Oh my gosh. Probably Down in the Valley. (laughs)
GC: Were you ever in any groups at schools?
MC: You know, probably, probably. I was never part of that crowd. (laughs) But I had, and my sister had, I had in junior high, which is what we called it then, and there I had a friend—I had two sisters, and I had a friend who had a sister and the five of us became the Benito Five, and Benito was the name of our summer camp, and we became the Benito Five, and our mothers got us together one week to practice, and we started playing these hilarious gigs, like for a woman’s prison (laughs), in a work—you know like one of those jobs when you’re in a work camp, and just funny, funny stuff, old people, older people.
GC: How did you break out from that?
MC: I think it probably crumbled, ’cause we were so good. And then what did I do in high school? And then I started chasing boys who played soulful folk music. (laughs)
GC: And how long have you considered yourself a professional?
MC: Since I consider myself—?
GC: A professional.
MC: You know, the only reason I would be a professional musician is that I’ve made about $13 over the years.
(laughs)
GC: So you never got over the starving artist phase, or you’re still a starving artist?
MC: Oh, I’m a starving academic now. But no, I wasn’t. And I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what I remember, because I keep going back to this in my mind. And what I remember is that when I was graduating from college, in 1975, with a very good degree which is absolutely useless, and I had decided I was going to try to teach school—without certification, because, you know, I had none—(laughs) I didn’t want to go through it. But I went on vacation to Cape Cod with a friend who had a house down there, and we went out and sat in a coffee shop, and there was some guitarist up there playing. And I thought, that’s what I’d like to do. And I didn’t follow it up. So I had a freak glimpse of being a starving artist, and then I gave it up.
GC: Do you have talents other than music—you have academic talents?
MC: Well, yeah, I’m smart, enough. (laughs) I don’t have a lot of talents.
GC: Stepping back from music how do you realize your creative needs, hobbies, relax?
MC: Oh, God, what do I do? I take pictures. I peruse the web. I walk, I walk, I walk, and I listen to audio-books.
GC: Is there any correlation, do all these things come together ever as a single element—?
MC: No, I can’t figure myself out. No, that wouldn’t make sense. Except I have—okay, here’s what makes it different, and I’ll be curious to know how many other musicians you find. And you might want to incorporate a question like this—I don’t know how to get at it, but you’re getting at it well. For me, what I have liked more as I get older is to be an observer. That’s what the photography is. It’s being an observer, being a spy, being on the outside looking in. But then I get in front of a classroom or I get in front of an audience, and, again, as I’ve gotten older and more experienced, a lot of the stage fright has gone away—not all of it, but a lot of it, so it’s not as nerve-racking, because I don’t, I don’t ever expect to be the best, and that kind of is okay. It’s that stage persona versus the private persona are so…, what I find doing music useful for myself, because it makes me be on stage. And that’s a big piece of me. As I get older, as I say, I think I’m really less invested in how I come off. You know my kids laugh at me, I’ve got double chins, you know all that kind of stuff. You know, face it. You get older and your face goes to hell, and that’s it, but it’s fun to be in public.
GC: Anybody influence your music more than another person?
MC: Bob Dylan.
GC: Bob Dylan?
MC: Yeah. Bob Dylan and Bach and Beethoven. (laughs)
MC: You know, it had to be. I had to say the Beatles, I really had my first twelve-year-old eww response to the Beatles, and after that I understood them. So I think the Beatles and James Taylor, gotta add those guys. Taylor’s music, you know I haven’t followed it over the years, but I listened to the first two albums and after that I was less compelled. But that stuff that he dug out of his soul, I wore out that—that was back in the vinyl days, and I wore it out, I just wore it out.
GC: Do you think somebody like yourself would need to be in a mental institution to come up with that?
MC: No, I think he probably broke through what he went through, and he probably knew go to a mental institution not to jump off a cliff. So that’s a good thing.
GC: You started in a camp situation. You were talking about doing folk songs. What do you continue to play now, what’s your favorite type of music?
MC: You know, that’s—since I picked up the fiddle I find it, I’m so glad I’m in the band because otherwise I would rarely pick up the guitar. And again it’s that performance thing, when I do, and I’m in my living room, and I’m playing, I think, God, I’m so good, listen to me, I’m singing this beautiful song, but I feel crazy to do anything with that, or with the fiddle. I can just practice and practice for hours on end, sort of like doing a crossword puzzle or something, you know? And I’m not making a lot of progress, but it’s like I picked it up so late in life that, although I get frustrated, sometimes I think oh, I’m just throwing it out the window, it’s not like I’m ever gonna get famous.
(laughs)
GC: Yeah, you’re by yourself, you’re playing your instrument, you’re somewhere else. Is there one song that you always come back to?
MC: Yes, yes.
GC: What song?
MC: Tambourine Man. Hey Mr. Tambourine Man. The most important song in my entire life. You know, two years ago, a dear, dear friend died. He was an adult when I was a kid, I kind of worked, was his helper one summer, with his family so he was twenty, thirty years older than I was. And he died in Boston, about, oh God, ten or fifteen years ago, I guess. Maybe more. Between ten or fifteen years ago. His wife asked me to come out to the memorial service and bring my guitar and do something. And I thought, okay, that sounds great, and I’ll do one of my original songs or something, And then I knew on the way out that the right thing to do was Tambourine Man, because he loved to sit around last summer, summer after my senior year in high school, I was on Martha’s Vineyard with his family, and this other girl wandered in, and they just picked up all the strays, it was the summer of 1970, and they picked up all these strays, and we could sing all the time, and Russell was a high power mucky-muck attorney in Boston, so we come to the vineyard and relax and say hooray, Tambourine Man, so.
GC: My recollection of the song is that it was drug-related.
MC: Oh, I think it was. Yeah, I’m sure it was. And I just loved the visions, I never thought about drug-related or anything like that, I was so naïve.
(laughs)
GC: We all were then. Have you ever been in a situation where the band was too exuberant, or some kind of strange reactions?
MC: No, I used to work as a psychotherapist, and that was strange.
GC: Okay. (laughs) Have you had any embarrassing moments on stage?
MC: Oh yes, so many. I can hardly, hardly begin to count them. Let me think. Yeah, and this is the part where I’m really gotten over and moved on in terms of music production, I rarely literally freeze anymore. And there were a couple of times earlier, once when I was studying classical guitar again in college, and once, or twice or three times—I picked up songwriting and music again when I moved to Corvallis in the early ’90s, so about twenty years ago now, I let the guitar slide and not done anything with music, and I picked it up again and I started writing songs, and—I wanted to play out, I wanted to perform, and I was a solo act at the time. And the first two times I performed, I’d get to a place in one of the songs, it didn’t matter which one, and my fingers would literally freeze. And I’d have to stumble through that. And it was really humiliating, so I played out about once a year, you know, ’cause it was too much to go through. Anyway.
GC: You currently seem to have no fear of the stage anymore.
MC: Yeah, like last night, getting up with Ed, (Ed Dee) you know and doing that one song, it was amazing. I didn’t screw up the guitar, I didn’t screw up the lyrics—I don’t know what was going on. So we had just been playing in the afternoon and I didn’t have a really big investment in it, and I want Ed to like me and I want him to like my music, because he’s so good. But that song I’m really confident in. Anyway. So yeah, I just—less internal pressure, more of a let’s jump off the cliff here, kind of attitude.
GC: Rolling Stone Magazine, in 2011, said that digital sales outstripped physical sales of CDs for the first time ever. Any thoughts on the music industry and the death of the CD?
MC: No, and I’ll tell you why, because I’ve never tried to make money that way. And I think you’ll have a really fascinating time writing, you know talking with musicians who are dependent on sales one way or another for their livelihood. And I think that the difference between CDs versus digital downloads, which is of course not as important as the difference between digital downloads and pirating, you know and file sharing, that kind of stuff. I think some people have—and I’m not speaking of myself now—but I think some people have really strong feelings about when they put out a CD, they get to put it out as an album, that is conceptual, beginning to end. You download individual tracks, and it gets away from that conceptual. But everyone’s ready to make a dollar, no matter how they make it.
GC: If you had to perform with anybody, currently alive or deceased, who would you like to sit next to?
MC: Long silence on tape …….
GC: There you go. I’ll edit that out.
(laughs)
MC: Oh, that’s easy. The Indigo Girls. (laughs) D’oh! What took me so long!
GC: The Indigo girls, sure. Why would you want to play—why pick them?
MC: They’re brilliant songwriters, they are brilliant on harmony, they have a lot of flexibility in terms of being very elastic on stage, and they love music for all the right reasons. There’s a wonderful film of the—what’s the traveling women’s—?
GC: Oh, Lilith Fair?
MC: Lilith Fair, yeah. There’s a very good video about Lilith Fair that shows the summer when the Indigo Girls joined the tour, and just what they did, and their chemistry, that they would make people get together backstage, so they sat down with Sheryl Crow and some other musicians and just sang, and moved around, and got stuff ready for stage, and you know made her play her accordion, and it was just great. They understand about music.
GC: And music—how has it helped you in your travels? Where have you been? We talked about you went to visit—
MC: Oh my gosh. When we were writing that book, and I really—I’m such a bad music person. I don’t spend money on concerts, I don’t spend money on music, and when I get it I take it from the library, or YouTube videos, or anyway. But when we were doing the book, went to New York, went to Chicago, you know, went to some other, few other places, went to conferences, sought people out, we went to—oh yeah, we flew out to DC to interview the Indigo Girls, interviewed them in the green room before they went on. Oh my God! Oh, the other thing, we interviewed this wonderful woman musician who sang Bitch and Animal. Yeah, in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. I mean, whoa. That stays in my mind, I remember the muffins that I ate. (laughs) They were so cute and so wonderful.
GC: What keeps you going?
MC: The band. The band. Otherwise I’d just be taking pictures all the time. The band and the Celtic group, the love of Celtic group, the changes—and I love, now that I’m older, I love community music making. And the Celtic group makes it easy, because the tunes—you learn the tunes and you play the tunes, and you don’t have to negotiate things you don’t know about choosing the harmonies and whether that’s the words, and sometimes people come and want to sing in the Celtic group, and I think that’s great, but I don’t enjoy those moments because someone’s got to decide what are the words, and blah blah blah.
GC: What do you feel is the difference between an artist and an outstanding musical technician?
MC: Oh, I’ve never been able to decide about that. I got the [indistinct], but I haven’t said yet because I didn’t really think about it, but I think you need to ask about the songwriting, because for me one of the reasons that I—oh there we go, there we go. Yeah. One of the reasons that I do Celtic music is that I don’t have to write the songs, they’re all out there. I don’t have to think about writing the songs. And if I had to, I could write ten tunes in ten minutes. To me, getting the tune is like falling off the chair, and getting the lyrics is pure hell. And I really don’t think I’m a musician or doing music unless I’m actively writing songs, and I so rarely actively write songs, that it’s like pulling teeth, that a lot of times I don’t feel like a musician. So that’s—I think that my answer is to me an artist is someone who’s adding something to it, you know, adding something to the music, and I’m not a technician at all, not one bit. I am—every so often I think of myself as an artist, when I finish writing a song. So that’s not prescriptive, that should not be prescriptive, that’s not healthy.
GC: Is there a process you always follow when you’re writing a song?
MC: No, I come up with—usually there’s something they put out in the news, or some story gets to me, or I get a catchphrase, and then I go from there. One of my favorite songs I wrote very quickly, and that was just—you know how they say came to you, you don’t know where it came from—it’s a song about Abraham Lincoln of all things, that I just, I love it, it came to me in about half an hour. And sometimes that happens—rarely. Most of the time for me I have to labor over a song for over a year, coming back to it, coming back to it, coming back to it—it’s horrible.
GC: Do you have a website?
MC: I don’t have one, but you’ll find—Laurie Childers’, she’ll have Laurie Childers’ website, (see home page on this site) and also Michael Everett’s website—you need to talk with Michael too.
GC: To finish, just say what comes to your mind, nothing long. “Music is . . .” ?
MC: Right, right. Music is . . . ineffable. (laughs)
GC: Could you spell that for me?
MC: (laughing) I think it’s spelled how it sounds. Got two F’s and an A. (laughs) Music is completely mysterious to me.
GC: Music makes you feel . . .?
MC: Good. As I’m older, I’m more and more picky about what I listen to, so.
GC: What reason would you give people to support music, the Arts?
MC: Well, besides that it feels good, I think it’s a social glue. Glue is not good word. It’s a social soup mix. (laughs)
GC: Any wild stories about “the day?” and your music that you’d care to relate?
MC: God I wish. (laughs) Oh . . . no. You know, I learned a very important lesson—when Laurie and I, when we first started playing together, and it’s a long time ago now, like ten years at least, I mean long in an adult life, ancient in a kid’s life, but one of our first gigs was in front of an audience that was coming in for a lecture. And we were doing a pretty good job, and someone in the front row asked us to turn down the speakers because they couldn’t hear, because they were having a conversation. (laughs) Luckily I was with Laurie (Childers) so I didn’t feel so hurt, but we gave this look at each other saying, I don’t think so! But it was—and when I first started playing out as a solo player, I liked to play The Beanery downtown, because it was so noisy that no one could hear me so I could get over my stagefright. But that kind of thing, that’s what I remember. I’ve got, no good raucous stories from the day.
GC: Anything you want to add?
MC: Yeah, there’s a funny story about the Celtic group. You never know what people are going to want, you never know it, and I think I’ve told you this story before, but we’ve been migrating around—Imagine is the best, best place to play, once a week we just play, no audience or nothing needed. But Imagine is commendable, they’re welcoming, it’s warm, everyone can find the place, and we were migrating around downtown, and this guy drives through town every six months or so, got us switched somehow from the Old World Deli over to the downtown Beanery. And [indistinct] house fans, go talk to them, move over there, they’ve got a little stage, you know, secure in the Old World, not very good, you’ve got to pay to play, I mean come on. So we moved. And within six weeks, the people at the counter were saying, um, um—do you think you could come like every other week? (laughs) And the people who were in the Beanery on Tuesday nights didn’t want Celtic music in a corner. They wanted to listen to Netflix and read their books. And we weren’t bad either, and I’m a pretty good judge, we weren’t out of tune, we had some pretty good players, like they were like, no, we don’t want you here. And so when they said can you come every other week I said, well no, we’re going. Thank you. (laughs)
MC: So, you never know. So that was a parallel story with the audience, you know, saying, just turn down the speakers, we want to talk to each other.
GC: I want to add that Mina Carson has co-authored a book, Girls Rock; read it and I recommend it. A well researched, academic piece about women in Rock ‘n Roll.