This article first appeared in the S. Louis Beacon, June 6, 2012 - With the subtly of a snowflake and the whisper of the wind, Buddy Mondlock draws on life experience to bring irony and insight into our lives. His delicate notes light on so many subjects: love, loss, lies — a life lived.
His is not a life of "Leave It Beaver" lore but rather one more esoteric, brimming with liquidity yet buoyed in reality, rutted in mud and precarious as birds on a wire. Such is the life of the American folk singer. One who notes life’s finely wrought irony. And melds it as playfully and deceptively as "The Cats of the Colosseum," who swipe his wallet as he swallows whole the history and majesty of his surroundings.
In truth, Mondlock is one of America’s national treasures as well as one of its best-kept secrets. That is in part due to his astute lyrics that juxtapose the ideal, the poetic, the triumphant with the swarthy, the desperate the muddy underbelly of the human experience.
For those in the know — those folk music fans who have moved beyond Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, as well as Peter, Paul and the now-late Mary — Mondlock is a standard. The go-to guy whose play-on-words speaks to us in quiet tones embued with a sense of hopefulness and melancholy at the same time. From his earliest works like "The Kid" and "On the Line," Mondlock has carefully carved gems out of cliché and circumstance.
"On the Line" is a play on words marrying a clothes line of unmentionables as a metaphor for his experience watching Suzanne Vega perform and relating to her approach to music.
“She did and I do, we hang it all out there, like laundry on the line,” he said.
Since the early 1980s in Chicago clubs, Mondlock has brought meaning to music. This soft-spoken wordsmith consistently hammers out songs that offer subtext. Real substance. In his own words, he is “the kid who ran away with the circus.”
His mother's guitar
Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Mondlock’s family regularly ordered music from the Columbia Record Club, and they listened to folk artists. As he tells it, he discovered the guitar when his father gave one to his mother.
His mother did not know how to play the guitar. Still, she admired the instrument and wanted others to, as well, so she displayed her treasure as décor.
And that guitar became a curiosity for her 8-year-old son.
“I would sneak downstairs early in the morning and carefully take it down and pluck at the strings,” he said.
He begged his parents for guitar lessons.
“And they did a smart thing — they told me ‘your hands are too small right now, but if you still want lessons when you are 10 and your hands have grown, then you can have them.’ Of course that was all I could think about. By the time, I was 10, I really wanted to do it.”
Throughout the remainder of his youth, both of his parents encouraged him to pursue his passions and do what he loved.
He played all through high school with his friend, bassist Mike Lindauer, who still performs with him on occasion. As he began playing clubs in Chicago, like the Artful Dodger, he continued to take lessons, to listen and to give lessons. He also started penning lyrics and experimenting with melody.
His influences at times speak directly to his own work. In his signature song, "The Kid," Mondlock echoes Paul Simon’s "The Boxer" in its first-person lyric. What makes the piece his though is the honest, even self-deprecating, stanza toward the end that largely evokes childhood images of pirate ships and big tops:
Time was talking — guess I just wasn’t listening
No surprise if you know me well.
By the time he was in his 20s in the 1980s, he had written enough songs to have standards: Enough songs that when he tried to book himself into a club he had played many times before, he was told to get some new material.
Going national
That’s when Mondlock decided it might be time to hit the road and broaden his audience. He went to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Tennessee, an annual mecca for singers and songwriters from all over the country. Since 1972, the Kerrville Music Festival has attracted major acts like Willie Nelson, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Guy Clark.
And it was Clark who helped launch Mondlock’s career.
Mondlock performed for Clark in an amateur tryout setting that is a regular part of the festival. It is a casual, friendly setting under a large tree on the property and is specifically designated as a time when budding musicians can get feedback from experienced and often well-known professionals. Mondlock played his song "No Choice," another piece that speaks to his devotion to music that seemed apropos for the occasion:
It was a love so big that it filled his heart
Til it swelled and finally burst apart.
And where the love spilled out they called it art
But he never really had no choice.
Clark liked the song, asked for a recording and offered to work with him to get a record deal, make music and write songs for himself and others. In just months, he was working with Clark and has been building his reputation with witty, wry lyrics and sing-able melodies ever since. Fast forward five albums, and Mondlock continues to tour and make records.
Nanci Griffith recorded "Comin’ Down in the Rain" even before he did, and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others, recorded "The Kid." He has collaborated with Art Garfunkel and Maia Sharp on a project that brought the singers together as songwriters and musicians.
“Billy Mann came to me because he wanted to get Arty into writing songs and not just the singing of them,” Mondlock recalled. “And of course I was really excited to work with Art Garfunkel — I have been influenced so much by him. And I felt it would great to work with Maia, too.”
Collaborating can be tricky sometimes, and mostly it is rewarding, Mondlock said. He and Garth Brooks once collaborated on a song over the telephone. One had an idea, and the other had the guitar and that was enough to bring it all together. The key to great collaborations, said Mondlock, is open communication and openness to your ideas and those of others.
“Arty was really brave about the songwriting side of things,” Mondlock said. “He jumped right in, and that’s what you have to do. You have to put your ego aside and put yourself out there. He was really strong."
The result was an album, "Everything Waits to be Noticed" and a tour, as well as the knowledge and experience of another successful collaboration.
In St. Louis
This weekend, St. Louisans will have the chance to experience Mondlock both as a singer and a songwriter.
He will perform at 7:30 p.m. June 9 at Music Folk, 8015 Big Bend Blvd. in Webster Groves. For those interested in working on a song or two, you can catch Mondlock during his “Getting it Together,” a collaboration writing workshop from 1 to 5 p.m., June 10, also at Music Folk. Tickets for the concert can be purchased in advance or at the door, for $17.50, and space at the workshop must be reserved in advance for $50.
“The workshop is for anyone who is interested in that kind of thing,” he said. “Poets, creative writers and anyone who is interested should come. You don’t have to play an instrument. We are really talking about creativity.”
Yes, we are.