Local musician entertains studio staff with tales of the past

FALLBROOK – The team at Sonic Rocket Productions had a special treat when local Fallbrook resident Bob Roth and his wife Olivia stopped by for a chat. Roth had contacted Sonic Rocket about converting some old LP's to CD and had a very interesting story to tell.

Back in 1959, he was a junior in high school in Chappaqua, New York. He and his high school pals put on an original musical at their school. It featured five professional multi-instrumentalists playing banjo, accordion and so much more. The show was called "Rough and Ready." The lead role, Annabelle, was played by Beebe Besch. Besch went on to be a professional actress but, unfortunately, she died in 1992. She had several solos in the performance. Roth played her father, "the colonel" and had one solo in the production.

The vinyl albums that Roth brought in were interesting as well. Roth had carefully preserved the recordings for 60 years. He also brought in couple of smaller discs of songs he had written and performed in his youth. Roth told us he "got hold of a bass fiddle" and started playing small venues in Greenwich Village, New York, at the time when Bob Dylan and many of the Beat Generation poets were roaming the streets. Roth said he never got to meet Dylan as "those guys played the better clubs... We were in the dive bars."

Allen Ginsberg was a big part of the scene in Greenwich Village, as was William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and other poets who frequented the many bars in the area. Several famous abstract expressionists were also frequent visitors and collaborators of the beats including Jackson Pollock or "Jack the Dripper," Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. The team at Sonic Rocket had fun imagining Roth lugging his "bass fiddle" down Bleecker Street with the sound of Bobby Zimmerman's harmonica playing in the background.

Roth shared a story about one of his tunes, "Starvation Creek." He went to officer candidate school in 1963 and got orders to the Philippines. He drove across the country and stopped in Utah to get gasoline and something to drink. As he did, he struck up a conversation with an "old geezer" at the counter. They were looking at the map and saw a dry river marked on it called "Starvation Creek."

The story goes that a young couple got caught in a freak snowstorm and did not survive the winter. Roth found out later that the whole story was a myth as only a couple of cows actually starved, but he knew immediately that this was the stuff songs are made of. When the spirit moved him, he pulled out his Martin 0017 guitar and wrote a catchy tune about it. This tune and several others were on one of the smaller discs.

These discs were unusual. They were smaller than a standard LP and very heavy. Only one side of the vinyl had the 'grooves' normally associated with a vinyl record. The technicians at Sonic Rocket thought it may have been made in one of those "recording booths" where wanna-be songwriters could put some money in the slot, sing their song and out would pop a record. Roth told them between officer candidate school and deploying for duty he had two months to kill, so he "went around and tried to peddle the demos to all the producers scattered around Broadway and 40th Street in Manhattan." Roth even wrote a song for Peter, Paul and Mary, but it was never recorded. The song was fun and would have fit right in to their repertoire.

Roth said he hopes to reconnect with some of his old high school pals and send them a copy of the CD, once it is finished.

Some of Roth's music will be posted on the Sonic Rocket Productions website, http://www.sonic-rocket.com, for those interested in stopping in for a listen.