Pete and Maura Kennedy
If this isn't serendipity, what is? by Richard Cuccaro
It's about half past noon and I've finally gotten around to registering for the on-line,
three-day free trial of Sirius satellite radio. I then begin listening to Pete and Maura
Kennedy's show, "Dharma Café," which runs from 8am to 2pm every Saturday on
the "Folktown" channel. The show is named after a song on their latest CD, Stand,
about a woman who discovers the world she's longed for at a café where she can meet
friends and play and sing; a familiar theme for the Kennedys. The first song I hear is
the title track of Mary Gautier's latest CD "Mercy Now." This is followed by two tracks
by Harry Manx, a Canadian almost never heard in these parts. Harry's slide traverses
middle-eastern tonalities on a track from a Gordon Lightfoot tribute CD. Gordon, himself
follows with "Early Mornin' Rain." Pete breaks in and talks a bit about Black History month,
then plays Robert Johnson's "Dust My Broom." A track from Taj Mahal follows that.
Maura contributes a rundown of tour dates for artists around the country, some widely
known, some less so. Buddy and Julie Miller are playing in Louisville, Steve Earle is in
Winnepeg, Gandalf Murphy is playing in Amenia, New York, Chris Smither is playing
in Monroe, Minnesota, Terence Martin is in North Eastham, Massachusetts. All this is a
testament to the far-reaching nature of satellite radio.
What we're not hearing is music by the Kennedys themselves. This show is about giving
back to the community they love, both performers and listeners. They're bringing the patter
of their stage act, including inspirational literature, such as Aldous Huxley or Joseph Campbell.
For years, at the coffeehouses around the country where Pete and Maura play, terrific local
artists have opened up for them. They've wanted to tell many thousands of people about
those artists and now they have that opportunity. Nearing the end of the broadcast, I learn
about an artist new to me, Cisco. Maura then reads an inspirational quote about living together
in harmony. This is followed by a rendition of "Over the Rainbow," by Eva Cassidy, then
Bruce Springsteen's live version of Warren Zevon's "My Ride's Here." The web stream
suddenly cuts out before I can hear the last minutes of the show, but I've had a good taste
of the eclectic nature of the program.
Pete and Maura Kennedy make music that is pure folk-rock, jangly guitars and harmonies.
They're the heirs apparent to the Everly Brothers and The Byrds. In an interview held last
year with WFUV's John Platt, Pete speculated that their music is what the Byrds might sound
like if they were recording now. As I found out during my own interview with them, the path
to where Pete and Maura sit today is an amalgam of hard work and serendipity.
Maura gets the music any way she can
There were seven kids all a year apart and not a lot of money. Maura's father was an English
professor at Lemoyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her mom stayed home and raised
the kids -- more than a full-time job. There was no real music in the house. They didn't have a
stereo. Living up in Syracuse, the only radio Maura can recall was the news -- listening to see
if the school was closed because of snow. Her main exposure to music was in the folk mass in
Catholic church. It was, "Peter, Paul and Mary, stuff like that," she says.
A few TV shows provided another spark. Because they included music, The Monkees, and
The Partridge Family and The Hudson Brothers were her favorites. She remembers,"I loved
music so much that I would get it any way I could. I didn't even have a record player until I
was a teenager. The Monkees were a pre-fabricated band with kind of poppy songs, but there
was a bit of a folky element there, and some good songs. So, I knew, as a kid, that my life
would be in music. Any time I heard anything musical, I would be drawn to it."
Pursuing it
One summer, when she was about 10, neighbors down the street had an upright piano that
they were getting rid of. Her parents thought, "Oh, that'd be good for the kids." So they
wheeled it down the street. She says, "You could see there were about 10 coats of chipped
house paint on this thing, turquoise and red and stuff. I just hung around that piano all the
time, for about two years. I didn't take lessons or anything. I just loved to finger around the
keyboard and come up with pretty sounds and chords. My dad put it in the garage, not realizing
how much I would use it and it drove him a little bit crazy. One day I came home from school
and he had hollowed it out and made it his workbench." One can only picture a very upset
12-year old Maura. She concedes, "He felt bad when he realized he shouldn't have done that.
All I could think was, I've gotta get another piano." When she was 12 or 13 she got a paper
route solely so she could buy a piano and did just that. A year later, her parents picked out a
piano, put a down payment on it and put it on layaway. Maura paid every week on it and
bought it eventually. "That's when they realized I was serious. It took me a good year to pay
for my half of the piano. They let us take the piano, so I didn't have to wait, while paying for it."
She got her first guitar when she was eight. It was an inexpensive, used model with a warped
neck. It was difficult to play and she set it aside.
She got back into it, at age 14, joining other kids playing and singing in folk mass. "If you wanted
to join it, they couldn't say no, and it was great. People there were really nurturing. Two girls were
really good and had really nice guitars. The rest were sort of average or not so good.I fell in the
latter category at first, but they helped us all along."
In a very good high school, Maura was in music activities more than anywhere else, especially in
her last year &endash; theory courses, music history, chorus, and was playing upright bass at that point.
That last year was more like a music conservatory. She was on the right course for her life.
The college years
Maura started out at Potsdam State College but didn't care for the program. She went back to
Syracuse, going to school part-time at Lemoyne College, where her dad taught, getting all her l
iberal arts courses together, essentially, for free, while saving money to go to her first choice,
Ithaca College for Music. She then concentrated on music at Ithaca. Maura's band experience
took a leap forward there, She states: "I got into a roots rock band at Ithaca. I was playing guitar
and singing. There were five in that group &endash; bass, drums, two guitars and a fiddle. That was my
third band, but the first decent band for the gigs." Ithaca is only about 50 miles south of Syracuse,
so when she got out of college, she went back home to live, so she could keep playing in the band.
There, she got her first student loan bill. Needing money, she went to a temp agency and trained
in a word-processing software. She was sent out as a WordPerfect expert. With typical moxie, she
bluffed her way through, at first, then became so good, she wound up working 50-60 hours a
week, doing gigs on the weekend. Exhausted, she decided to leave it all to pursue only music.
In 1990, she moved to Austin, Texas, with part of the band.
Here, the story gets really interesting and Maura tells it best:
"Originally, the whole band was going to move, but three of them chickened out, so we were down
to a duo. For the first time in my life, I was living in a town that was a music city and making my
living playing music. I played every night, an average of nine gigs a week. Austin is a really
romantic place to go, if you're a musician, but there are so many musicians there, that the clubs
don't pay. You play for tips most of the time, so you have to play as much as possible. Trying to
hold an audience was the main thing. There's so many good things happening on any given night.
I usually performed in a duo, sometimes hiring other people on bass and drums. There was this
really great club called Chicago House, a folk club that is no longer there, where I hung out a lot.
I'd play the lounge gigs, then go there and meet with my friends I'd end up collaborating with them.
That was really cool."
The Big Romance
"In 1992, I was doing happy hour every Tuesday at the Continental Club. A friend of mine, also
a musician tended bar there. One night, she said "you gotta come tomorrow night. This guy Pete
Kennedy's comin' and he's great. My band's backin' him up." I said, "I've never heard of him."
For some reason, I had that Wednesday night off.and she convinced me to come and hear Pete play.
It was great. I never heard anybody play guitar like that. I was drawn to Pete right away. After his
show I started talking to him about guitars, music and songwriters.We clicked instantly. He was staying
with Terry, a friend of mine. The next afternoon, Terry organized a guitar pull. He invited all of our
musician friends over and Pete was there. We sat around in a circle &endash; Kelly Willis, Michael Fracasso,
among others playing on each other's songs. I heard more of Pete songs, this time acoustically. Again,
we were drawn to each other's music. When the group broke up for the afternoon, Pete had his guitar
in one hand and his suitcase in the other. He had to get to Telluride, Colorado, where Nanci Griffith's
next show was.
In a moment of bravery, I went up to him and said, 'Don't go yet… stay one more day and write a
song with me.' He immediately put his guitar and suitcase down. We went out to the back yard to a
picnic table and started writing. Within an hour we had written our first song "Day In and Day Out"
&endash; less than 24 hours after we'd first met. It's on our first record, River of Fallen Stars. That sort of sealed
our fate although initially we didn't really know it. Actually we sort of knew it, but didn't acknowledge it.
We played and sang a few songs and harmonized a little bit, but then it was time to go, and off he went,
to Telluride. About ten days later, he called me &endash; I didn't have his number. He said 'We should get back
together &endash; we should go on a date.' We were 1,000 miles apart. I had another couple of days off.
We decided to both drive 500 miles and meet halfway in Lubbock, Texas, at Buddy Holly's grave.
That was our first date. We drove to Lubbock and met each other there."
Pete- an early rocker
Pete's older sister - seven years older - was a "sock hopper" in the 1950's. The first records he heard
were by the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Pete states: "She watched American
Bandstand every day. I had another sister a year younger than me. We got to like all that music because
watched it with her every day. I was maybe seven years old. My younger sister and I had little tennis
rackets and we used to pretend to be the Everly Brothers, kind of what I'm doing now, except those
weren't real guitars yet. We used to sing the songs and lip-synch along with the records.
The Folk connection
When the folk boom happened, it was like a natural transition. To me, they weren't two different things.
If you liked the Every Brothers, it was easy to like Peter, Paul and Mary, because they were really doing
a similar thing, except they had one more voice and they were singing socially conscious songs. "If I Had
a Hammer" might seem mild-mannered to people now, but it was such an intense, hard-hitting song
when it came out, during the Civil Rights movement. I looked at their albums and noticed that this guy,
Bob 'D-eye-lan' wrote a lot of the songs. When Dylan put out his own records, I didn't really 'hear' him
until he did "Like a Rolling Stone, " because that was his first hit. Then I got into "Positively 4th Street."
I also liked Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry a lot.
The guitar - beginnings
He started playing, strumming the acoustic, when my older sister got a guitar &endash; about 10 or 11 but not
taking it seriously. The pivotal point was Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan
show. That was revolutionary to Pete, because they were just a few years older were doing something
they had completely made up themselves. "They were having so much fun and they were really good at it."
Pete grew up in Washington, D.C. During the summers, the family visited relatives in New York and
New Jersey. Through the summertime, he soaked up New York radio. "Cousin Brucie, stuff like that,."
1964 and 65 were pivotal years. He saw the movie "Hard Day's Night" in a theater and saw the Beatles live
in D.C. in 1966. Other live acts would include The Stones, Buffalo Springfield, Cream, and The Doors.
Folk music and rock and roll were indistinguishable to Pete. If you played an acoustic it was folk. If you
strapped on an electric and played the same song, it was rock. Dylan's switch to electric? No problem!
The young professional
Pete started playing in bands when he was about 14. They played "Gloria," "Louie, Louie" and Satisfaction,"
all the garage band rock songs. He says, "For some reason, I could play guitar right away. I got a paper
route, like Maura did." Pete went to Sears and picked out an electric guitar. Six months of paper deliveries
paid for it. He immediatley started playing by ear. The songbook and album for Rubber Soul provided lessons.
Looking at the chord charts gave him the chords to those songs. The other songs he wanted to learn had
the same chords, only in a different sequence. And, since he could play leads, he became the lead guitar player
in every band, so it was always easy to get jobs in bands. He says, "I've never had another job in my entire
life [present radio gig excepted] except playing guitar in various bands. I've been very fortunate in that
respect and I'm very aware of how lucky I've been."
The long college career
Pete says, " I went full-time to Boston college and I decided two things. One, Boston was too cold, and two,
going to school full-time didn't give me enough time to play guitar. So I started to go part-time for another
10 years or so, at George Mason University, in Fairfax, VA" (He got a degree in History)
From clubs to the road
During that time, Pete played guitar as a freelancer, in a lot of groups around D.C., The Nighthawks and the
Danny Gatton Band among them. He had taught himself to read music, so, while he did the club circuit, he
also put a tuxedo on and played with the National Symphony and for tour versions of Broadway shows like
"Cats" and "42nd Street" when they needed a guitarist. He was also doing studio work with different
singer/songwriters. There was a small group of musicians who were doing that kind of work. Among them
was John Jennings who discovered Mary Chapin Carpenter at an open mic at a local club. Jennings encouraged
her to record and when she got signed by Columbia, she assembled some of the group and went on the road.
After a few years, Jennings needed time off and Pete was asked to take his place. In this way, Pete broke out
of the D.C. club circuit and went on the road in a really professional way, "with tour buses and stuff like that,"
as he put it.
The Mary and Nanci road shows
He spent a year on the road with Mary Chapin Carpenter in 1991 and then the tour wound down as Chapin
needed time off to write and record. The last gig turned out to be very special. In October, he flew down to
Austin with Chapin for a telecast of "Austin City Limits." It was an acoustic in-the-round set-up. Along with
Mary and Pete, there were The Indigo Girls, Julie Gold and… Nanci Griffith and her band. As Pete tells it,
"Nanci didn't have a lead guitar player. Although I didn't know her music, I had heard some of her better-known
songs. Since I was just sitting there, when Nanci played, I just played along with her band. She didn't seem to get
mad about it, so I just kept doing it. At the end of the program, her manager asked me what I was doing, and
I said this was my last gig with Chapin, so I was gonna be off for a while. He said, 'Nanci wants you to join the
band if you want to do it. We're leaving for Europe in 10 days and you have to learn a lot of songs.' I said,
'OK, send me the CDs and I'll learn 'em. Let's go!'"
So Pete learned Nanci's repertoire and went to Nashville where, after one or two rehearsals, the band flew over
to England, did a tour over there and came back to the U.S. This began a period of constant touring on planes
and tour buses in the U.S. as well as England, Ireland and Scotland. During the tour, Nanci came up with the
concept of Other Voices, Other Rooms, an album covering favorite singer/songwriters. Pete says, of the collaboration
on the album, "We talked a lot." Nanci's friend Emmylou Harris was consulted as well, for selection of songwriters.
Pete felt very involved as a member of the band, rather than as a peripheral sideman. His guitar solo begins
the album on "Across the Great Divide." It came out in January of 1993. The tour was remarkable. Pete
recalls, "The various people from the album, like Arlo, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Iris DeMent, Carolyn
Hester, Tom Paxton, and Alison Krause started showing up at various gigs. "That whole year was an amazing
education, watching all these singer/songwriters close-up, on stage, doing what they do, interacting with Nanci.
It was like getting a Master's degree."
Iris DeMent was touring with Nanci, singing harmony and also being the opening act. She became a headliner
on her own, and left, creating a slot in the band. Maura and Pete had met and were corresponding while he was
on the road. Whenever there was a break, he'd go to Austin. Maura had recorded a batch of Nanci Griffith songs
on a 4-track recorder where she sang all the vocal parts, both lead and harmony and she knew every part of
Other Voices, Other Rooms. Pete gave Nanci the tape and she was amazed that someone would go to that extremely
precise analysis of her music and know her vocal style that well. When Iris left the tour in 1993, Nanci offered
the slot to Maura and she joined the band. The tour took both of them on a tourist-like trip through the British
Isles. It was there that most of the songs for their first album, River of Fallen Stars were written, on days off
between shows. In addition, Nanci pushed them to perform their new songs as an opening act. They'd alternate
with Frank Christian, who was also in the band. Nanci also understood that Pete and Maura had opportunities
as a duo. When the time arrived for them to leave to embark on their career, Nanci found someone else to play
guitar, so there was no obligation. They remain good friends.
A New York Beginning
The Kennedys signed with Green Linnet Records, a Celtic label looking to expand into folk pop. Cherry Lane
Music a publishing house, helped get their songs out and played. There was an immediate response, as
River of Fallen Stars clicked. Calls came in quick succession from key New York institutions. WFUV,
Fordham University's Americana radio station called and Rita Houston asked them to be a part of the
Required Listening series at the Bottom Line, the premier club in Greenwich Village. Allan Pepper,
its owner called, excited by the album, offering them gigs.. They headlined an average of 3 or 4 times
per year and opened for many acts. They also became part of the cast of two recurring Bottom Line series,
"The Downtown Messiah" and "The Beat Goes On." Legendary free-form DJ Vin Scelsa called to offer
them a guest appearance on his show. "Hey Vin" on their Angel Fire CD is written for him. Rita, Allan and
Vin became friends and mentors. Pete makes a particular point to say how grateful he and Maura remain to
this day to all those genuinely wonderful people mentioned here.
Pete and Maura were married in October of 1994, a few months before the release of River of Fallen Stars.
Subsequent CDs include Life is Large, Angel Fire, Evolver, Positively Live! Get it Right, and their most
recent, Stand.
A year ago, they were approached by friend and long-time New York and SIRIUS DJ, Meg Griffin to re-create
what they do on stage for a satellite radio show. Thus the "Dharma Café" radio show was born. Although
the show is broadcast on Saturday, they prerecord it on an afternoon during the week. From an aerie perch
that overlooks midtown Manhattan they describe the wonders of looking down and seeing Times Square and
luscious sunsets. When each show is done, they go home to pack up for their weekly road gigs.
Coming home from a recent gig, they were sideswiped and flipped over, narrowly cheating the grim reaper,
tightly strapped inside their very sturdy squared-off Scion XB. The folk audience is very happy to have the
road warriors still with us. Serendipitous? We think so.
Their gigs this month include:
Mar 3 8pm The Blu Lounge, Williamsburg, Bklyn, NY Free
5 8pm Woodlands Coffeehouse , White Plains, NY $18
11 8:30pm Steel City Coffeehouse , Phoenixville, PA $12
12 7pm The Turning Point Cafe , Piermont, NY $20
13 3pm University Cafe , Stony Brook, NY $10
18 8pm Jammin' Java, 227 Maple Ave E, Vienna, VA $15
19 6:30pm Wisp at Deep Creek Mountain Resort , McHenry, MD
25 8pm Pioneer Arts Center of Easthampton , Easthampton, MA $12/$10
26 Good Folk Coffeehouse , Norwalk, CT $20
Web site: www.kennedysmusic.com
Booking: The Granata Agency
Mary@granataagency.com