Like virtually everyone in the folk music community, I've been deeply saddened by the death of my old friend, Bruce Phillips: U. Utah Phillips, the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest. Like everyone else, I have wonderful memories of Utah Phillips on stage. I presented him on stage at least 15, if not 20, times. And like many others, I have some personal memories of a long friendship. I first met Bruce back in the summer of 1971 when he spent some time in Montreal working as MC of an extended Folklife program being presented by the Smithsonian Institution at the American Pavilion, at Man & His World (which ran for several years on the Expo '67 site). Even though I was just 17, a long friendship began. In 1972, as a student at Dawson College in Montreal, I founded a folk music concert series and, of course, wanted Bruce to play it. I made some phone calls and tracked him down in San Francisco and asked him to come and play. At that moment, he was with Malvina Reynolds and suggested that he and Malvina would make for a good concert combination. Well, he didn't have to convince me and the concert with Malvina, in the spring of '73, remains a vivid and wonderful memory. Over the 1970s and '80s, I produced a lot of concerts with Bruce. A few were in concert halls, but most were at the Golem, the Montreal folk club that I ran for a long time. He came to Montreal once or twice a year, often for several days at a time, and I'd spend many hours with him exploring parts of the city I'd probably have never gone to, and talking to people I'd probably never have met, on my own. One time we were in Mendelsohn's, a junk shop in the skid row area. The old man behind the counter was giving Bruce a load of BS about a deck of cards that he was trying to sell him for $10. Bruce bought the deck of cards. Walking out of the store, I asked Bruce why he let the guy con him out of $10 for a used deck of cards when he could have bought a new deck for a buck or less. "I got the cards for free," Bruce told me. "I paid $10 for the show – and for all the years he put into developing the show." I was once given the hat Bob Dylan wore on the cover of Nashville Skyline. It came to me from the late Tex König, a folksinger friend who was friendly with Dylan in the early Greenwich Village years. Tex had it from someone who had it from Dylan. That hat was a prized possession for awhile. Until Bruce Phillips conned me out of it by convincing me he was starting a folk music museum in Spokane, where he was then living, and that he "needed" the hat for the museum. I kind of knew there was no museum, but, hey, it was Bruce Phillips and he really wanted the hat. Who was I to say 'no'? A couple of years later he told me that he'd given the hat to Ed Holstein in Chicago. I was in Chicago a couple few years after that and tried, without any luck, to get Eddie to give the hat back to me. That was more than 20 years ago. The old Philo recording studio in North Ferrisburg, VT, where Bruce had an old caboose, was just a two-hour drive from Montreal and I was part of the crowd that hung out there in the '70s. We had a lot of good times there back in the day, and also over in Saratoga at Lena's, and at the Executive bar next door, at a ton of festivals in Canada and the Northeast. In 1976, I spent a week on the road with Bruce driving him around to gigs in New England. It was when he was running for president on the Sloth & Indolence ticket. The last chance I had to spend some time with Bruce was in 2005 at the Champlain Valley Folk Festival, in Ferrisburg, just a few miles from the old Philo studio. Despite a busy festival schedule for both of us, we had a chance to visit, share a meal, and do a radio interview. I hosted an annual songwriter's panel at Champlain Valley from 2000-2006 and Bruce was one of the participants that year. There's a picture of the panel and another of just me and Bruce in my Myspace and Facebook galleries. My Folk Roots/Folk Branches feature segment to air this week on CKUT during Folk Directions was already recorded before Bruce passed away. My next Folk Roots/Folk Branches feature, scheduled for June 12, will be a tribute to Bruce.
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