Boonedocks holds Boonapalooza Sept. 2 on the deck
Painting by Hank Feeley
From staff reports
Labor Day is nearly upon us, and summer is on the wane. Send summer 2018 off in style with an afternoon-long mini-music fest on the deck at Boonedocks in the heart of Glen Arbor. Boonapalooza returns on Sunday, Sept. 2, with a lineup that includes: Cabin Fever; Luunappi; N3Z; Straydoggies; Uncle Z and Unusual Suspects.
Since we’ve profiled most of these local bands and musicians over the past couple years, we’ve borrowed a few choice nuggets from those stories. Read the full profiles at GlenArbor.com.
June 10, 2017
When you greet Glen Arbor’s ubiquitous cottage remodeler, musician, and leader of the Cabin Fever Band, he holds out a polished rock. It is probably a Lake Superior agate with a brilliant center full of wispy clouds surrounded by concentric rings of layered complexity in a warm colorful glow. You soon realize that the character of Tom Fordyce is just the same.
Fordyce and his blood brother Tom Keen (who sadly passed away in 2013) built or renovated cottages in the area for 30 years, and the Two Toms hatched the Cabin Fever Band at Art’s Tavern back in 1981. Fordyce began sitting in with Jack Lane, who played music once a week in the corner by the old wood stove (under where Carl McBride’s trophy fish hangs now). Keener began playing, then banjo player Billy Judd, the bartender at Art’s, joined in. Lane moved to Traverse City, but the Cabin Fever Band remained. Sometimes the two Toms would appear as the duo Tomfoolery, playing hilarious non-hits like “Blue Hairs Drivin’ in My Lane”, “The Dog Song”, “The Fred Song”, “Mail Order Dog”, and “I Lobster but then I Flounder”. —Norm Wheeler
July 10, 2017
I track down Joe Wilson at a sweet two-story house tucked in the woods in Leelanau County. It’s daytime, so Joe is the daycare dad of his seven-year-old son Oliver, a friendly 2nd grader. Joe’s wife Emily is out digging in the dirt somewhere in The County running her Green Thumb Landscapes business. A brilliant dobro player, Joe gigs most nights in one of the many bands it takes for a local to piece together a living as a musician up north. Sundays it’s The Hot Biscuits at Martha’s Table in Sutton’s Bay, Mondays it’s Cabin Fever at Boonedock’s in Glen Arbor, some Fridays it’s the Joe Wilson Trio at Union Street Station in Traverse City, some nights it’s at Hop Lot in Suttons Bay, or the Aurora Winery with E Minor. Joe has schlepped his axe and his gear in and out of pretty much every full- and part-time music venue across the north. How did he make the choice that required not just talent, but patience, determination, luck, and moxie?
“At some point in college, not expecting it to make sense, I quit Michigan Tech and started working in coffee shops with the long-term goal of being a musician,” Joe recalls. “Houghton was a tough place to do it. In remote areas it’s hard to play five or six nights a week, people get sick of you. I needed a city, or a region closer to cities.” So Joe left Houghton when he was 23 to join his twin brother Andy working at Elderly Instruments in Lansing. “I thought of myself as a rock and roll electric guitarist playing in jam bands. Elderly exposed me to a ton of stuff including folk music. There are a lot of guitarists in Lansing, but nobody was playing dobro. I loved the sound of it, and realized that if I could do that, I could be somebody.” — Norm Wheeler
July 20, 2016
Jonah comes from a family of musicians. His father plays the guitar. His uncle, George Powell, a boat builder, plays the mandolin. Victor McManemy, a cousin, plays the guitar. Both his parents sing. Family friends, the Evans, are musicians. Jo Ellen Evans directed the choir at the Methodist Church where Jonah sang when he was growing up; and Jeremy Evans, who is the music and theater director at the Leland Public School, used to be the director of the Leelanau Community Choir that Jonah now directs.
Jonah’s parents, who met while in the choir together at Grand Valley State College, love music themselves and when Jonah was about four years old went out and bought him his first of many violins. Initially Jonah studied violin with Ellen Boyer, using the Suzuki method, and when she got a regular teaching job, he began to study fiddle with Fred Johnson in Kinsley, an excellent fiddler who played by ear. After that he studied for several years with Judy Gienow, the principal violinist at the Traverse Symphony Orchestra.
“The difference between a fiddle and a violin,” Jonah explains, “is how it’s played.” The fiddle came with the first settlers from Ireland and Scotland and the music and the playing became part of America’s backwoods heritage. There’s a characteristic sense of humor in many of the American folk tunes. The song, “Bought Me a Cat,” which goes through all the animal sounds is a classic example. I once heard Jonah sing it all the way through in his excellent baritone, acapella and alone, at a concert. — Kathleen Stocking
Luunappi, N3Z, Patrick Niemisto:
May 26, 2017
“You’ve got to do what you dig, / Dig what you do / On this rock spinning through the sky …” So sings Patrick Niemisto in one of his original songs that you can hear on the summer sundeck at Boonedocks in Glen Arbor, or on the CD N3C by the local power folk trio New Third Coast. That’s just one of the bands and venues frequented by Niemisto, the busiest man in local show business. Besides gigging every day all summer (sometimes twice, for years), Patrick produces other’s CDs in the Holy Wah sound studio in his basement, provides gear and/or sound for countless gigs and musicians, arranges for the seven-nights-a-week summer of music on the Boonedocks deck, teaches private lessons, champions the next generation of up-and-coming musical stars, teaches audio tech at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, and presides over the spiritual epicenter of the local folk music scene at his home in the woods in Leelanau County with his wife, Mary Kay.
Niemisto’s virtuosity on bass, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and sometimes banjo has evolved in step with the humor, pathos, and poetry of his voice. That’s because he plays and sings every day of his life. A Yooper Finn from Pelkie near Baraga, he lived home on the farm while attending first Michigan Tech and then Northern Michigan University until he graduated with a music degree in 1982. He was soon the K-12 director of vocal music at Glen Lake School. At one of his first Christmas pageants at Glen Lake, one robed wise man passed the baby Jesus (a doll) across the stage to another robed wise man (perfect spiral) as the show ended. There was an uproar in the community, then a meeting with the principal. Niemisto convinced them it wasn’t in the script, so he wasn’t fired. He retired from Glen Lake in 2013 after 30 years of nurturing Leelanau County talent. — Norm Wheeler
July 7, 2016
Singer-songwriter-instrumentalist John Kumjian’s new CD, “Vulnerable,” is particularly poignant in light of his recent health scare. The popular “Mr. K,” as he’s known to hundreds of kids he taught at Glen Lake School, nearly died on the operating table two years ago.
Kumjian first came to this area in 1999 and took the job as band director at Glen Lake. Nine years later, he underwent an amicable divorce. Four years after that, he retired from public eduction at the age of 58. “It was time to move on,” says Kumjian, who felt he wasn’t having a real impact on the kids. “I’m not happy with public education nationally right now,” he explains. “I felt it was time to go, and took the early retirement incentive.”
As things would have it, Kumjian fell ill almost immediately after he retired. After an on-again, off-again Fall of 2013, he landed in emergency right after the new year. A March 2014 colonoscopy revealed colon cancer, Stage 2.
Those of us who follow Kumjian on Facebook received regular updates from him on his health. His sister Judy took over the updates when he had surgery in early April, but four days after surgery, the updates stopped. The silence was maddening. Something was wrong. —Linda Dewey
Nick Foresman and Jason Elsenheimer, Straydoggies:
July 21, 2018
If you were at least 12 years old in 1981, lived in the United States, and were hooked up to major media, you surely heard about it. After a decade’s hiatus, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel agreed to reunite for a free New York City concert to save Central Park, which was in danger of being closed. In an effort to save it, the city put on a series of concerts.
On a cool September evening, a record-breaking crowd sat on blankets and listened to favorites like “Mrs. Robinson,” “The Sound of Silence,” “Homeward Bound,” and “Scarborough Fair,” crooned by the iconic ’60s duo who made them famous to the tune of an eight-piece backup band.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and everyone there knew it.
In a way, that may no longer be true, if Nick Foresman and Jason Elsenheimer have anything to say about it. The two, who also sing locally as the Boone Doggies, have recreated that show down to the exact same musical arrangements and dialogue, and have taken it on the road across the country.
They brought the free concert to Glen Lake’s Old Settlers Park on July 27. — Linda Dewey
Uncle Z: Zernow, Zack Light:
Aug. 3, 2017
In this installment of our series profiling local musicians, we interview the duo Uncle Z (Doug Zernow and Zack Light). Together they bring a special kind of kinetic energy to perform rare but recognizable songs. You’ll catch yourself nodding and singing along if you join them on the deck at Boonedock’s in Glen Arbor.
Zernow: I started taking accordion lessons when I was in third grade. There was an accordion school in Dearborn that had an aggressive recruitment program. After I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, I wanted to play guitar. I stated taking guitar lessons at the accordion school. One day the teacher left the room while I was playing some boring song from the old Mel Bay instruction book everyone used. When the teacher came back I was playing stuff I had worked out on my own—probably “Day Tripper” or something like that. I thought he might be angry, but he seemed surprised and kind of impressed. I knew I was on to something. I tried some other schools and teachers, and even learned to read music (sort of), but found I did better figuring songs out on my own. By 5th grade I had a little band (guitar, plastic organ, maracas) and we played a four-chord instrumental I’d written, in front of the class.
Light:I’m not sure I know when I became a musician, but a distinct moment in time that reified “musical awareness” for me was a situation at the (Traverse City) “Boardman Building”, where I saw a couple climbing four steps to ingress the Building. The steps were canted slightly to the East, giving me the vantage point of, for lack of better terms, the illusion of a bass guitar fretboard, and the couple’s traverse up the stairs perfectly illustrated intervalic movement, rather than linear movement, a huge asset in playing, garnering better speed, articulation, and, if playing flajolet notes, intonation.
