Burlington's Cranky Storyteller

An Interview with Tom Banjo
By Scott Witmer

     Tom Azarian (aka Tom Banjo) is best known for mixing traditional American folk music with cartoon storytelling in a unique form of street theater called The Cranky Show. The Show itself is a homemade mockery of television: A light-bulb inside a wooden box illuminates a screen made of wax paper. The screen is part of a roll of paper that is covered in cartoons depicting the lyrics of old-time folk songs. Tom performs the songs as an assistant turns the crank on the side of the box that rotates the roll of paper and makes the scenes unfurl. The Cranky Show performance incorporates music and art into a communal experience that feels a lot like sharing stories around a camp fire. I talked with Tom about the Cranky Show and about his life as a folk artist.

Have you played music your whole life?

Well, not yet! Once I'm in the boneyard, then I've played all my life. (laughs) But yeah, since I was around 11 years old.

Did anyone else in your family play music?

My father played violin and mandolin and my older brother played mandolin, the fiddle and guitar. And of course, a lot of neighbors played too: guitars and banjos.

What was that like growing up? Would you all get together to play?

Yeah, that was before television. Saturday nights, we'd take turns at each other's houses. Four or five neighbors would get together, sometimes bring their families over and sometimes have supper, and then just play music. It was all the old music. I guess you'd call it traditional music.

Is that how you learned to play, from playing with everyone else?

Yeah, everybody knew those songs: "Red Wing," "Red River Valley," "Irish Washerwoman." And there was a whole lot of songs that people were singin', and there were some popular songs too.

"Listen to the Mockingbird" was popular. It was a show-off fiddle piece, where you'd make the fiddle sound like a mockingbird. You chip away at it with a bow and you get all these sounds out of it. (laughs) Later in the '60s, there was a guy in Florida who wrote a song called "Orange Blossom Special," and that became a great crowd-pleaser because it was a fast fiddle tune. It sounded like the old-fashion steam train with the whistle and everything. It starts slow and it picks up speed, and that would always please the crowd. And people forgot about "Listen to the Mockingbird," because in the '60s, "Orange Blossom Special" became the show-off fiddle piece.

Is that a bluegrass tune?

Not originally, but bluegrass people adopted it. They used it a lot. They'd use the whistle part. They'd do it on their strings, and then they'd slow the rhythm of the bow down so you'd get the rhythm of the train. I remember those old steam trains too. These modern trains, they don't have the same rhythm, and the whistle is totally different from the haunting steam whistle that would get dragged out long. It was really piercing and then it would go in the distance as the train went. It was really ... I guess you'd call it romantic, in a way. The old steam whistle, yeah.

Did you play a lot of music as a kid?

Not all the time. I was going to school and I didn't do too well in school at all. They kept me back two years. I stayed back in the 1st grade and in the 7th grade. But when I was in the 7th grade, I was the only guy shavin'! (laughs) I graduated from 8th grade, but I had side-burns. I had a big set of side-burns and I remember slightly turning my face in the crowd at the school picture, I was so proud of them.

Have you always drawn cartoons?

Yeah, I did that in school, and that's why I'd get a lot of bad marks in arithmetic and science and everything. The only good marks I got were in art and history.

Were you influenced by any of the newspaper comics or comic books that were then coming out?

Oh yeah, yeah! Comic books were a big deal, more than they are today, because there was no television and there was not all this plug-in stuff. There was the radio, and if you went to a drug store or a bar they had a jukebox, and if you put a dime in you could hear songs. But comics were a big deal, especially for little kids, because at that time people weren't as affluent as they are today. It was a big deal to go to the movies for a quarter. What all the kids did in those days is they'd save their comic books. We'd get five or ten or even 20, and then we'd trade with all the other kids. We'd swap a Mutt & Jeff for Donald Duck, and we always had used comics. It was always rotating.

So you got to read all the different kinds of comics ...

... of the day, yeah.

Which were your favorites?

Mutt & Jeff, the Katzenjammer Kids ... Blondie.

Were those collections of newspaper strips?

They were regular comic books. Dell comics, with the colored cover and everything.

Is it true you put out your own comic book not too long ago?

Oh yeah, me and a friend of mine put out a comic book called Green Mountain Oracle. He did his art section and I did my art section, then we mixed it in together.

You printed it yourselves?

We paid for it ourselves. That was in the late '80s.

Did you know anyone else who did that sort of thing?

No, we just did that on our own. I remember traveling to Burlington and trying to get the stores to sell it in Burlington and Montpelier and a few in St. J. It was a lot of traveling. I was living in Cabot back then. I had a farm in Cabot. But we drove all the way to Burlington, because it's the biggest city in Vermont, to distribute the comic books.

What were your stories about?

I had one about environmentalism. I made an old lady called Super Hag. Instead of Wonder Woman, where you have a pretty girl in a bathing suit, I had this old lady all in black with a shawl, and she would fly though the air like Batman. (laughs) But she was an environmentalist. She'd fly around the nuclear plant, try to organize protests, and she'd meet all these different characters. And my friend was into American history, so he did a whole series on the Green Mountain Boys with Ethan Allen.

      The Folk Revival

How did you get involved with the folk revival of the '60s?

Well, it was funny, because I was already there. I didn't know there was a folk movement. We always liked the old songs; my dad, my brother and all my friends. We just called it ... we even called it classical, because we didn't know. We knew that it wasn't commercial music that you'd hear on the radio that was made to make money.

In the late '40s, early '50s, Hank Williams was one of the first big country music stars. The teenage kids were singin' his songs. You'd go to a drugstore and all his records would be on the jukebox: "Jambalaya," "Hey Good Lookin'," "Cold Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart," and all those tear-jerkin' songs. He had a lot of other songs too, about social life, about prostitutes and homeless people. But the big record companies didn't want to publish it, because teenagers are not gonna buy that kind of stuff. They don't want to hear songs about homeless people and divorce. He was very moralistic. He was like a Southern Free-Will Baptist, so he had a lot of gospel songs. He didn't write them, but he sang a lot of them, and he did a lot of what was known as recitations. He'd play his guitar--he had one electric guitar playing in the background mournfully--and he'd recite half of the song, just by talking it as the music goes along, and it would tell a story. One was called, "A Picture from Life's Other Side," which goes on and has these hard-luck stories to tell, but the music's still goin' on. But see, they weren't big sellers. People wanted to hear the up-tempo stuff.

But seein' just about 'round the early '60s, folk music got popular because there were some commercial people that did folk music, but it was pasteurized, like they had a "do-wah" chorus, but they were singin' folk songs and they were collegiate. There was one called the Tarriers and one was the Kingston Trio. They were college kids all dressed the same way with crew cuts. They pop-ized it. (laughs) But it became a big hit, so then folk music became fashionable and it took root in the colleges, because college kids were more interested in the folk music than a lot of the folk themselves. And that's why I hung out at colleges, because I knew I could play on the college radio.

The folk scene developed from musicians like yourself, who were attracted to the campuses and coffeehouses.

Yeah, in the late '50s, early '60s. I went to Northamption (Mass.). Buffy Sainte-Marie was playin', before she got famous. Taj Mahal was playing in Northampton and Amherst in a coffeehouse called Saladin. That's when nobody knew them, before they hit the big time.

Did you play with them?

I would play in the same venues, like would follow Taj Mahal's act. A dozen or so people would play what was known then as folk music.

Were you by yourself or in bands at that time?

Both. I started in some bluegrass bands. Cobble Mountain Boys was one. Around my hometown there was the Cobble Mountains in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. And then we were in the Ridgerunners before that. In Vermont we played as the Cobble Mountain Boys too, back in '57-'58. We played in southern Vermont a lot for the American Legion or family reunions, and there were some bars that we played at and some schools we did.

Did you travel around to different campuses?

Yeah. I went to Northampton, Amherst and Springfield, those coffeehouses. Then I went to the University of Connecticut. At that time Judy Collins was there, and we played together at parties and on the radio station--then she went on to get famous. She sang that song "Send in the Clowns," and "The Blind Girl Down by the River." Dave Grisman, he was playin' mandolin. He later played with the Grateful Dead. And there was quite a few others. I can't remember all their names, but we did a lot of shows, played at high schools and festivals.

This was mainly old-time folk music?

I liked a lot of Southern Mountain stuff, so I did a lot of Southern Mountain, Appalachian-type banjo stuff. When I was a little kid I used to hear a guy called Uncle Dave Macon on the radio every Saturday night on the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville. And Uncle Dave Macon would play the banjo. My father bought a 5-string banjo, but we didn't know how to play it. I tried to figure it out on my own. I went down south to North Carolina and Tennessee and listened to some of the older people play back in the mountains, because they played the old style. But bluegrass-type banjo got popularized by Earl Scruggs, who was from North Carolina. I tried to play that style too, but I was never any good at it, so I just mainly kept to the older style. I do three or four styles myself.

You also play guitar and mandolin, right?

Yeah.

But mainly banjo?

Yeah, but I play a lot of guitar too. I've played guitar longer than I've played the banjo.

How did you get the nickname "Tom Banjo?"

At the University of Connecticut, there were three or four Toms that people knew, and I was the only one who played banjo. There was very few banjo players in those days, and when people would refer to me they would say, "You know, the guy who plays banjo: Tom Banjo," and so it stuck.

      The Cranky Show

How did the Cranky Show come together? How did you get the idea to do it?

From Bread & Puppet Theater. In the '70s they would have a Cranky Show that they would play out in the field. They had three or four Cranky Shows from different people.

Was it like yours?

Yeah, except they never put lights in it. They wanted to keep it pretty authentic and keep it traditional, so they never put a light in it. And a lot of 'em were just black and white. I don't remember any in color.

Were they stories?

Stories or songs, yeah. A friend of mine who worked with Bread & Puppet gave me his old cranky box, and so then I took some American folk songs and sometimes I'd make up a verse or two myself to put in there, and I would just draw it out in pictures as I imagined the song to be.

How long does it take you to do a whole song?

Well, a short song without too much detail, I would say anywhere from a week to two weeks. One with more detail and a lot of landscape painting and background work takes longer. Of course, if the song is long it would take longer. I've spent up to almost three weeks or more doing a longer one, working everyday at it. I draw it all in pencil in the beginning. Then I go over it with black magic marker. I do all the coloring with acrylic paints plus colored magic marker. Then I tape the edges on all the rolls so it doesn't tear.

How did you get the idea to put the light behind it?

I just thought of that.

How do the moving silhouettes work?

I had an old wooden spool that had thread on it, but I use dental floss instead of thread because thread would break, but you know how strong dental floss is. So, by winding the dental floss, I figured out how to make the horse's head move with a cutout silhouette. I used to have a peasant walking with a goat following him with the goat going like that. They all work with rubber bands inside that the people can't see, with tacks holding them in place. So it's really a tacky outfit, literally! (laughs) You know, dental floss and tacks and rubber bands! It makes the whole thing work or sometimes not work. Sometimes something would break, a tack would give way, but it's so hokey that nobody seems to mind, 'cause it's anti-TV, and everything in TV perfectly works.

So you like the accidents that happen.

Well, no, I like it to go through too, but I mean if accidents do happen ...

It's different every time.

And sometimes it gets put into the act. In Bread & Puppet, it's the same way. When something funny happens, or something out of kilter, the audience don't know, "Gee, was that an accident, or was it supposed to be in there?" And the audience goes away trying to figure it out.

Do you ever plan little accidents?

No. Sometimes I'll hesitate on a scene before it's cranked. And there's a few places, like where I have the cat in "Froggy Went A-Courtin'," the cat appears and the cat's eyes glow at a certain place. I had done that with the mule song, so I have the mule's eyes glow.

Or in the poem "Dangerous Dan McGrew," where there's the line about being in the darkness alone at night and the moon shines above it all.

Yeah, see in the beginning I used butter. I used to rub butter on the moon. It makes the wax paper clear so the light shines. But then, after a couple of weeks, it becomes dull.

(laughs) So you have to keep buttering it?

No, I glue a kind of transparent paper. Like for the cat, in the middle of the Cranky Show the cat's eyes glow. I used to have butter on that too. But I cut the eyes out, and I get butterscotch candy paper that's kind of yellow, the wrapper from the butterscotch candy, and I glue it in the back, so it looks like it's really glowing. (chuckles softly)

I like the extra details that aren't in the lyrics.

I just use my imagination and figure, like with "The Cat Came Back," I realize a lot of my drawings are from the '30s, that kind of style, so I use 1930s furniture and couches and lamps and stuff. I don't put modern furniture in there.

With something like the old-fashion wood-burning stove in "Froggy Went A-Courtin'," which looks authentic, do you use photos as a reference for the drawings?

No, that I drew from memory. We had a stove like that when I was growing up. But I did use pictures for scenes like in "Dangerous Dan McGrew," the crowded barroom scenes. My style, it starts to all look the same, so I did some kind-of realistic drawings from photo magazines, travel magazines, pictures of ranchers and farmers, to get all the different faces in the backgrounds there.

Do you intentionally pick songs with stories to illustrate?

Yeah, usually a ballad. The definition of a ballad is a song that tells a story. But modern disc jockeys, they don't realize. They think a ballad is anything that's slow and beautiful, but the definition of a ballad is a song that tells a story: events, places, names, dates. It has a climax to it and everything.

So it seems like the Cranky Show songs are all ballads except for "Arkansas Traveler," which is a series of old jokes, and the Robert Service poem.

And "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" doesn't tell a story so much, but it just has different scenes of the land of milk and honey, where a hobo or somebody who doesn't want to work would want to go. It's more like fantasy land.

They made a lot of school songs from "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," and they pasteurized it. They took out phrases like "bein' drunk" and "not workin'" and "lake of gin" and "The cops have wooden legs and the jails are made of tin / They can put you in and you bust right out again." They took a lot of those words out and just left the "buzzin' of the bees and the lemonade trees."

Do you know the original version?

Some of it. I knew parts of the original when I was a kid, and then later on I went in the library and I found out there's all different versions. There's even a risque version that I've heard but don't remember.

      Anti-TV

Much of the content of the Cranky Show supports environmental and humanitarian causes. You seem to have a strong social conscience.

I was influenced by my dad a lot. We always thought that there was a lot of bad things goin' on in the country, a lot of injustice, a lot of inequality and everything. In the late '50s and '60s I was in a few protest actions in the civil rights movement.

The Cranky Show itself is a protest of the mass media and how the radio and TV dictate corporate culture.

Yeah, with television, it's all canned. It's all pre-packaged and ready to go for digestion among the people. Actually it's more like pre-digested food. They don't have to bother eatin' it! (laughs) It's like you take a pill. Your thoughts are thought-out for you. It doesn't seem to generate any new ideas. With TV here, it was supposed to be the big thing: "Oh, TV's comin', people are gonna become more educated now because they can hear news from different countries and different cultures, and people won't be isolated and narrow-minded anymore." But people are more narrow-minded because it keeps people stupid! (laughs) It misinforms the people!

The Cranky Show uses a lot of satire, like in "Arkansas Traveler," when they're driving past the green fields and there's a sign that says "Future Home of Wal-Mart."

Oh yeah! If you take a ride out in the country you'll see signs like that anywhere. They're proud to have the Wal-Mart! (laughs) And block up the scene with a big wall so you don't see the rolling hills and everything, because progress is Wal-Mart. We all know that, right? (laughs) The commercial brainwashing seems to work! People seem dumber than ever. It's weird because everybody goes to college nowadays, but people are just so isolated. Like with nuclear power: when that came in, it was going to be so cheap you wouldn't have to meter it. People never talked about all the other problems. And DDT, I remember when they said you could have a spoonful of it and it wouldn't hurt you. Now they're trying to ban it!

     Austin & Burlington

You go down to Texas in the winter.

Not all the time. When I can afford it I do. My son lives down there, and I have some jobs at clubs in Austin.

Is the music scene much different from Burlington?

It's just like the Burlington scene if you magnify it 50 times bigger, except there's a much bigger Mexican-American population.

Are there people there who play old-time music?

Not too many, but there are. Austin has just about every kind of music. It's got Balkan music, rhythm & blues, bluegrass, jazz, folk, pop, funk, just so many kinds of music down there. I think it's the biggest music city outside of Nashville. Nashville is mainly pop and country, but Austin has every kind of music. A lot of the big recording companies have moved down there, and so there's musicians from all over the country you'll find in Austin, including a lot of Vermonters. And it's a nice city. I hate cities, but if I had to live in a city, it'd be Montreal or Austin.

What do you think of the Burlington music scene?

There's just not enough places! There's so many good musicians, and so many who are gonna be good, but there's just not the opportunity here. You only have a handful of clubs, and they usually get a lot of out-of-state, out-of-town acts. There's just not enough clubs here in Burlington. There's a lot of musicians here, but you don't hardly get to hear a lot of them because there's no opportunity to play where people can hear. There's all kinds of groups of different kinds of music in town here. At Radio Bean, you get to hear a lot of different music there, because you don't have to be a big star or a big name from out of state or something. But all these big shots and big stars, when they started they where nobodies. They all started in some little coffeehouse somewhere. I remember some of them, like Taj Mahal, Judy Collins and David Grisman. They were all musicians that would play for the local firehouse or the cub scouts or whatever.