Carl Gustafson
Vocals/Harp
Carl considers himself a performer rather than a musician. He says: “My father is a true musician. He can read a Rachmaninoff piano concerto as though it is a grade school primer. I not only don’t read music, I don’t even like listening to it.”
Carl prefers silence. “I like quiet repose. Amplifiers have destroyed my hearing anyway. I have lost whole ranges of hearing awareness and my ears ring without mercy.” Strange talk coming from a man who has made his living in music for the last seventeen years, and started his first band in nineteen sixty-four.
Carl lives the music life for the adventure, the creativity, and the thrill of those special nights. He explains, “Sometimes we make people forget all their troubles, forget they are human, forget that life is mortal, and they transcend mundane existence into a plane of exhilaration. At these times I want to live forever…”
In writing songs, Carl likes the poetry of music, defining an emotion in a minimum of words with a maximum of clarity and the beauty of melody. “If you give yourself to the lyrics of Miss Peggy’s After-hours Pic-a-Rib Café which I wrote about a special lady, a unique place, and a poignant time in my life, you can actually go there with me and share my fondness of that memory. To me, that’s what it’s all about, this music business—not money, not fame, not prestige, just small enlightenments.
Carl lists his musical highlights in snatches of memories that form a collage in his mind, “They’re like a fantastic kaleidoscope shifting and fading and reappearing. A hot summer night outside the roadhouse in Cherryvale, Kansas, when I hear the band playing inside without me and the fireflies dance outside and the crickets chirp in chorus—that’s as vital to me as being on the main stage at the King Biscuit Blues Festival.
Growing up in the vast emptiness of Wyoming made Carl a fiercely independent personality who has loved living outside the hierarchies of society. He reminisces about it: I was driving the bus over a high mountain pass in the midst of winter. The band was asleep in the back. The silence was absolute. A high full moon shone through the misting snow creating an eerie glow that filtered into the recesses of the thick growths of pine. A cliff fell away to my right and a frozen stream meandered at the base far below. Mountains framed the moonscape above me and no tracks appeared on the road ahead which lay covered in the softest snow. No one on the face of the earth knew where I was and my inner peace was profound and complete. That’s when the road life is worth every sacrifice.”
