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Glenn Jochum
HHS Class of 1967
I remember music (if little else) from a very early age; I soaked up everything around me whether it was the Ink Spots, Burl Ives, Frank Sinatra, or later, Elvis. I grew up in a house where music was as important as the evening meal. My father played Hank Williams Sr. and a bunch of cowboy songs on the guitar and was a hit at all of the neighborhood parties. I always had a melody going in my head. They say there are seven modes of learning, or so, and music and verbal were always my strongest…
My older sister, Gail, who got me hooked on Murray the K and the Billboard Top 40, had asked me to keep track of the songs for her. I used to listen to the radio every Monday night and write down all of the chart positions for the songs. This developed my ear for pop music. The birth of rock and roll affected me personally. I remember well the excitement of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and the rest.; and when the Beatles led the wave of the British Invasion in 1963, to be followed by Motown, Stax, and the whole Summer of Love and psychedelia, this felt like church to me.
To this day, I associate songs with certain events, like the first time I skidded out on a slick road, the song “Liar, Liar” was playing. The time I got lost at Sunken Meadow, at age four or five, I was humming “Unchained Melody” in my head. My first slow dance, for example, was “The Way You Look Tonight” by the Lettermen…
I had a paper route at age 10 and 11, and the biggest event of the week was riding my bicycle downtown, with my pockets full of freshly earned coins and dollar bills, to buy my favorite five or six songs of the week; I would then play them until the grooves were worn!
I also used to practice and hone my harmonies in church, while singing an octave above or below my fellow parishioners, and probably much to their consternation.
I played trombone, from age 10 to 15, rather than developing any interest in guitar or piano, which was more the music of the day. It wasn’t until the Beatles came along that I realized that guitar and piano-based music was what thrilled my soul. So I quit the trombone.
My sister Beth, who was three and a half years younger than I, taught herself how to play guitar and would figure out all of the latest songs from Simon and Garfunkel to the Beatles. I would harmonize with her.
Then, my brother-in-law Craig married into the family, bringing a huge repertoire of songs from the 50s and 60s into the mix and we formed a little family band every time we got together.
In my fourth year of college, music, finally, became accessible enough for me to pick up an instrument and teach myself to play. A friend at college gave me a Gordon Lightfoot album, the one with “If You Could Read My Mind” on it, and I was hooked. I had written poems in my late teens and early 20s and now I was ready to try to put these kinds of feelings and thoughts into song.
After graduating from Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania Dutch Country with an English Literature degree, I still had no clue what I wanted to do, but knew that I didn’t want to enter the corporate world. A friend from Huntington, who worked as a bartender in Montauk, urged me to go out there and see what the scene was like. My first image of that ‘scene’ came while standing outside of the Shagwong Restaurant on Main Street
and watching this solo guitar player sing John Denver and Loggins & Messina songs. We became friends and, much later, reunited and played together in a trio.
I discovered that Montauk was perfect for me. I got to explore my creative side and live the life of a ‘free spirit’ for a few years, while working for wildlife photographer Peter Beard and pitching a tent in the woods of his estate. At this time, I joined my first band as the lead singer and we became the house band at the Lakeside Inn during the summer of 1974. Meanwhile, a girl I would later date gave me my first guitar, a Yamaha, and I began writing songs (one of the highlights of this period was meeting Mick Jagger at the Shagwong).Some of those songs are among my favorites today, because of their simplicity and innocence.
I left Montauk after a relationship soured and went to regroup and live at home with my parents, but my father gave me an ultimatum — I had to move out of the house within a year. He suggested that I give up my ‘gypsy ways’ and see what the local recruiter had to offer someone with an English degree. Within minutes of my visit to the Navy recruiter, I had signed up for the delayed entry program as a navy journalist. While I awaited my enlisted tour of duty, I continued to write songs about my experiences.
This intensified when I went overseas and began to miss home and family and I wrote primarily about traveling… My songwriting came in spurts… The mid-70s, late 70s and early 80s, mid-to late 80s, and then became more sporadic, which it remains today. In the mid-80s, I wrote primarily about the environment, which I saw was in jeopardy on Long Island. In the late 80s, my marriage broke up and subsequently I began a new relationship, and this was the subject of another 40 or 50 songs…
In 1988, I put an ad in a music store to form a band and it was answered by a bass player named Steve McCarthy who eventually became a good friend. We formed Walking Shoes, which lasted another two years and became a rock and roll band playing primarily in the Hamptons. This morphed into a group called Blind Justice, a band that broke up in a fight on stage.
In 1992, I put another ad in a local paper looking for more musicians and Steve Sacher, of Southold, answered that ad. We formed a group called Asphalt Monster, but changed the name because we were playing a charity event where it was deemed inappropriate, so we became Four Directions. We added fiddle as well as another guitarist and, because we were mostly playing my songs, it was decided we would call ourselves the Glenn Jochum Band. This was an amazing run from 1995 to 2002, where we played hundreds of concerts from libraries to the North Fork Environmental cruise, to bars and cafes, street fairs and summer concerts series.
After seven years I felt claustrophobic and that I needed a change, so we drifted apart. I reconnected with my old Montauk friend, Dennis Foster, as well as Steve McCarthy, and we formed a trio that lasted for two years. When that ended, Steve and I brought in another guitarist named Seth Singer, who hailed from SoundBeach. We began as a trio and transformed into a quartet when Steve left and we replaced him with Jimmy Ruiz of Greenport. This winter we added an old friend of mine, Ernie Schneider, to play drums.
Business was so good, as the saying goes, that I opened up a branch office. Three years ago, I decided that one band was not enough to support my ability to make CDs of my own songs, so I paired up with longtime softball friend, Rick Hall of Southold, to play harmony-based songs we both love.
To this date, I have written more than 300 songs and have recorded nearly 50 of them in three CDs. My goal is to eventually record more than 100 of the remaining songs…
During the last two years, I have played nearly 50 gigs a year, mainly on the East End vineyard circuit. There are only a few weekends, from May to November, when I don’t have a performance to look forward to, and that’s the way I like it.
If it sounds simplistic, I apologize, but I am happiest when playing, performing, and writing music. I have no illusions of fortune and fame, just of continuing to be paid to do what I most love. To me, that equates to success. I don’t need a big stage or record contract to validate my art. As long as it makes me happy, my friends and family enjoy it, and I continue to celebrate the blessings of song, I feel as if my purpose on this planet has been fulfilled.
Answers to questions most often asked:
1. What comes first, the music or the words? When a song feels the most natural to me, it comes as one vehicle, or close to it, with some tinkering and refining later on. I have, however, written a melody from words that I came up with, but more often a melody appears in my subconscious and I then custom-fit lyrics to it. Some songs get a complete overhaul over time, others lay unfinished or in fragments on the cutting room floor hoping for another chance. A few songs have taken a decade or so to come to fruition. Many musicians loathe this question.
2. In what forms do songs often come? When I first began songwriting, I would just play and play the guitar until I found chord patterns that I liked. Through repetition, words would just find their way of adhering to the tunes. Increasingly, a new melody comes in the form of a dream, or just presents itself when I am miles from a guitar or a tape recorder. It is up to me to then try and remember the melody, if possible, through whatever distractions occur between the moment of conception and whenever I can get near a recording device. I try to remember to bring a tape recorder with me when I travel but I usually forget; lots of songs are lost this way.
3. Do you ever try collaborating or writing with a musical partner? My first musical songwriting partner was my best friend in grammar and junior high school, 1967 HuntingtonHigh School alumnus Chris Abeles. We wrote a song together on trombone (that wasn’t too shabby) when I went over to his house after school during a snowstorm. My second fellow collaborator was my sister Beth, though she was by far the superior part of that equation. Those songs were puerile, being as they were written by people who were 11 and 14, and had to do with pre-teen and teenaged angst. My sister Beth went on to become an incredible songwriter and band leader who made a name for herself throughout the Capital Region in upstate New York. When I was in the navy, I wrote a handful of songs with a fellow sailor named Mike Reilly, who I have since lost touch with. One of these is It Takes Two to Eat Mangoes, which is featured on my latest CD, My Vacation. In 2007, I wrote a song with my musical partner Rick Hall and we have performed it live many times. It’s about a real tragedy that took place in Calverton, Long Island, in 1926 when a railroad train full of wealthy people were traveling to their resort homes on Shelter Island and the train hit a faulty switch, causing a pile-up and ruining a prosperous pickle factory which lead to a number of deaths. Rick and I often talk about collaborating
on songs in the future and I would certainly be honored to work with my sister again someday. Note: Glenn also had the pleasure of collaborating with New Suffolk composer and friend George Cork Maul on writing songs and commercial jingles (one of which was bid on at an auction and purchased) for an East End Arts Council fund-raiser that they performed live with others at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center in March 2007).
4. Do you write about your life, or is most of your material fictional? I am what is known as a confessional writer for the most part, but even I sometimes dabble in fantasy and take poetic license. Sometimes it is fun to rearrange some of the facts in a song. An equal delight is writing impressionistically, which feels like painting. You start with an empty canvas and just let your imagination pick the colors and supply the details. One of the songs written this way is Rose in Her Hair, as yet unrecorded. All of the imagery comes from somewhere deep inside my brain, from a composite of different places I’ve been, both real and imagined. I also enjoy the polar opposite of this, which is starting with a historical event and trying to paint a picture from what is already known about the subject. The Hector is a prime example of this. I was on vacation in Nova Scotia in 1994 and stumbled upon a ship restoration project in a seaside town called Pictou. From this, I pieced together my interpretation of what the ocean voyage of this ship might have been like. The Hector was Nova Scotia’s version of the Mayflower. Another method of writing begins with an archetypal or historical framework and also draws from personal experience. Ghost Dancer from my first CD, On the
Beach, is taken from the Native American experience, but combines details of the massacre and round-up of the Sioux and Blackfoot nations by our government, and the brave but often peaceful defiance of those tribes. In the early 1990s, when it felt as if the wheels were coming off of my own life, I wrote this song as a prayer to survive the turmoil.
Note: Glenn won an honorable mention in the acoustic folk music category of the 2004 Great American Song Contest based in Portland, Oregon for his song "Meadow of Light," which appeared on the 2003 CD Nasty Weather.
5. What have been your most memorable moments performing? Opening for legendary folksinger Eric Andersen at StonyBrookUniversity in December of 2004 would have to be up there. My sister Beth and I played four of my songs before Eric went on. I had seen him numerous times over the years in a variety of venues and even taken a songwriting seminar with him up at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck and interviewed him three times for different publications. Playing at the Twin Forks Music Festival last September in Riverhead was a different kind of thrill because I got to mingle with real hoboes and their friends at a camp set up by the railroad tracks. My navy buddy Patrick Mullikin did a colorful piece on the festival and it was published in the Vermont dailies. Also, this June we played a benefit for the U.S. Marines at Clovis Point Vineyards in Jamesport and afterwards a gentleman approached us and asked us to play at his party the next day in Queens. It turned out to be the owner and they put on this amazing feed in three adjoining backyards in JacksonHeights. It proved to me that you should never turn down a free gig because there is a good possibility that they all lead to something unexpected.
For more information about Glenn Jochum and upcoming performances please Google Glenn Jochum, contact him at glenn.jochum@stonybrook.edu, or if you have a g-mail account, blog at http:glenn.jochum.blogspot.com
