the hum / By Bob Doran

Ms. November

Accordionista Tara Linda plus Barry the Fish, The Dirty Dozen and dueling tributes

(Aug. 12, 2010)  Late last year I got an email from Oakland-based accordionista Tara Linda. She was coming up to Humboldt to visit and although she did not have any gigs lined up, she wondered if I might know how she could get on the radio. By chance, she was coming on a Wednesday, the day when my good friend Vinnie Devaney has his Fogou show on KHSU. (He refers to me as his co-producer since I regularly supply him with music for the show.) He’s always happy to have a studio guest so I brought Tara up to the station to play a few songs on her button accordion and baritone ukulele. (She’s a fine songwriter with a strong but sultry voice and true presence.) We talked a bit about her Texas roots and her local history and she left me with a couple of her early CDs and the “West Coast Accordion Babes Pin-Up Calendar” (she’s Ms. November).

It was a return to Humboldt for Tara, who got her graduate degree in fisheries at HSU (she was then known as Linda Rao). As a grad student she had little time for music aside from a drum class with Eugene Novotny. She went on to use her degree to land fisheries-related jobs in Sacramento and elsewhere, but eventually, as she put it, “The calling of music took over.”

Tara Linda PHOTO BY BOB DORAN

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Tara’s music background included playing drums in punk bands in Texas where she grew up. “And I played drums in power pop bands for years,” she recalled, “then I started hearing these waltzes in my head. I needed an accordion to play them. I’d heard Tex-Mex back in Austin — when I started playing accordion I got back into my roots — got into Flaco Jiménez and others like him — and expanded my musical horizons.”

When she visited last year, she was putting the finishing touches on a new album, Tortilla Western Serenade.Now that it’s out, she’s bringing her accordion back to Humboldt to celebrate. “Tortilla Western is a cross between spaghetti western music from the movies, rock and Tex-Mex,” she explained. “For me boleros, tangos, rancheras and waltzes are a natural soundscape embodying the Wild West with tremolo guitar, accordion and Latin drums. It was music I wasn’t hearing elsewhere — I had to create it. The songs are about the West: ghost towns, missions, the landscape from California to Texas.”

Tara Linda plays a Hohner button accordion and has an endorsement deal with the company. That led to an opportunity to interface with one of her heroes: “Hohner liked what I was doing, so they arranged to have Flaco appear on three songs. [He’s another Hohner endorsee.] It was an amazing experience.”

Tara’s Tortilla Western tour is with a band she calls The Gila Men with guitarist Az Samad (who just played at Westhaven Center for the Arts) and Raphael Herrera on drums and percussion. Tara takes the lead on accordion, baritone uke and bass. You can hear her Thursday evening at Persimmons Garden Gallery, or on Friday morning on KMUD, where she’ll help with the Fun Drive giving away CDs and Accordion Babes calendars on Brian’s World between 10 and noon. Saturday night she brings her band to the Arcata Playhouse.

Some time earlier this summer I got a Facebook invite from Absynth Quintet for a gig in Berkeley where they opened for the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, a resurrected hippie stringband with roots in the ’60s. Surfing the Web for info on that band, I came across a site called Chicken on a Unicycle, a massive archive focused on the Bay Area music scene of that era. It has a collection of band family trees including one showing the connections between Cleanliness and Godliness and Country Joe and The Fish, an infamous Berkeley band founded in 1965 that included Barry Melton on guitar. The Chicken/Unicycle tree ends in 1970. If it extended a few more decades it would show that Barry, now a retired public defender, still identifies as “The Fish” and still plays psychedelic rock. Fresh from a European tour with members of It’s a Beautiful Day, Barry’s headed our way with an all-star band that includes Lowell “Banana” Levinger III from The Youngbloods on keyboards and guitars, Peter Albin from Big Brother and the Holding Company on bass and Roy Blumenfeld from The Blues Project and Seatrain on drums. Oh, how the branches intertwine. Barry and friends play Saturday night at the Riverwood Inn, then on Sunday afternoon at The Peg House in another of those benefits for SoHum/Leggett high school music programs. 

When a group of musicians joined forces in New Orleans in 1977 as The Dirty Dozen Social and Pleasure Club, they revitalized the second line brass band tradition of the Crescent City, spinning it in a new direction by adding funk and bebop elements. Before long they refined the name to The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and became a local, then international institution. Three decades later they’re still playing funky music on trumpets, trombones, tuba, etc. and they still sound great. See for yourself Monday, Aug. 16, when DDBB hits the Red Fox Tavern for a Passion Presents show.

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