Every warm Wednesday in the Spring, a group of amateur musicians escape their day jobs to play an informal hour of Old-timey music at the Compass. This week, Street presents the personalities behind this long-standing Penn institution.
A doctor, a lawyer, and six computer guys walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, some kind of band?"
It's Wednesday noon at the Compass, Penn's tiny Times Square at 37th Street and Locust Walk; staff in suits and students in sandals are sitting at tables and on benches, everyone enjoying the first warm and sunny day of spring.
The Locust Valley String Band begins to arrive.
Dan Dougherty is first. He wheels his monster acoustic bass down the Walk from his office in Penn's Information Systems and Computing wearing dark shades, grey jeans and a faded T-shirt.
Next comes Steve Gribok, an intellectual property lawyer for Duane Morris LLP. He took the Green Line from 19th Street, getting to the jam just before Larry Toto, who is still in his blue scrub shirt and carrying his banjo.
Todd Seeleman comes with a guitar, music stand, and a folder full of music. He's a system analyst at the Graduate School of Education and has the voice of a PBS narrator.
Tony Olejnik (silent "j"), also of ISC, plays four instruments, but today he brings only a mandolin that cost him $46 and a bicycle pump.
Guitarists John Lupton and Josh Beeman walk over together. Both are information security specialists in ISC. Lupton hosts a weekly country music radio show for the University of Delaware. Beeman qualified for Star Search while at UCLA in 1991. He still looks like Mr. California, Oakleys and all.
Kari Groff, Chief Resident of Psychiatry at the HUP, comes skipping in last with her fiddle. However she started playing music on the violin. (They're the same instrument. The difference is the style of play and the player.) Three years ago she went to folk music camp in Woodstock, New York and now she's the boys' "little sister", rarely missing a Wednesday session.
It is a charming scene - seven middle-aged guys and a woman in a blue dress playing hillbilly music. All the tables and benches are quickly taken, so people share and others sit on the ground. No one is brave enough to dance except Groff, who clogs in sandals while Steve picks up slack. But there is plenty of foot-tapping, and the Compass glows.
* * *
As Dougherty remembered, the Wednesday jam session started "about ten years ago . Or wait, it was about twelve years ago." The group was created by Dave Millar, an information security officer in ISC.
It was different then. They met at the Biopond and played lots of different music - jazz, rock, bluegrass, folk - whatever they all knew. It was open and low key and members came and went. Some retired, some had kids, some moved away. The listserv is full of "lurkers," as guitarist Todd Seeleman lovingly calls them, people who haven't been around for years but still get the e-mails and show up every once in a while.
After Larry Toto joined the jam five years ago the group narrowed their repertoire. He played banjo, but not bluegrass banjo, and the group shifted toward Old-timey, which could accommodate everyone. "It gives you immediate camaraderie with other people," fiddler Steve Gribok explained, since "you can all play the same tune."
Old-timey is simple music, easy to learn if you're already good with your instrument. "I hardly even know the names of all these songs," Seeleman said, chuckling. "What chords are they? A, D, G? Then I'll just pick up the melodies by ear, because they're all within the pentatonic major scale."
Locust Valley meets every Wednesday for an hour at lunch, even indoors in the winter. But when they play they don't have much time to socialize. "It's like having an affair," Toto said of their weekly session. "We all work, we all meet for an hour, and then we all go back to work."
So when they sat down just to talk last week, they had a lot to discuss. Six of them lounged on leather couches on the second floor of Houston Hall, laughing and joking and learning all the things they never knew about each other.
Seeleman: "Does anybody socialize outside the group?"
Groff: "It took me two years to learn your names."
Seeleman: "I happened to run into someone who played with us at a restaurant once, which was very exciting."
Olejnik: "Maybe that's why we get along so well."
They stumbled over each other's histories like they had just met.
Groff: "I'm looking for someone to play flat-picking bluegrass guitar with me."
Toto: "What about me?"
Groff: "You play flat-pick guitar?"
Toto: "Yeah!"
Steve Gribok wasn't at the social hour, but he did send an email to Larry Toto detailing everything the group has done.
Everything.
Gribok reads legal documents by day, but he plays Old-timey and Irish fiddle by night. "My wife gave me a fiddle for Christmas the year that we got married and I taught myself how to play. That was 32 years ago. It takes my mind off of lawsuits. I also grow tomatoes and green peppers and make salsa, but I play music every chance I get, which is not enough, and I come out on Wednesday to play some more."
Toto, a hardware/software engineer at the Medical School cyclotron, shares Gribok's passion for Old-timey. He joined a few rock bands when he was younger, but seven years ago he bought a banjo and taught himself to play. "I picked up the banjo when I saw someone playing claw hammer. I said, 'That's what I want to do' and I started learning every way I could: books, LPs, CDs. I picked up the banjo every day."
Kari Groff was late, but livened up the party the minute she sat down, laughing as she told the guys that even after being in the group for three years, she still gets interrogated by her colleagues. "My favorite thing is when we walk around with all of our instruments and I run into people from my department. They'll ask me later, 'Kari, who were you hanging around with in the middle of the day?' I tell them, 'It's the band.'"
Groff loves Old-timey and Irish, but she started in another musical world. "I grew up in a very classical household. My parents were professional musicians. My mother was a classical pianist, my father was a classical bassist, so I focused on classical music. The first night I played Irish music at Plough and the Stars, my parents came. I think they were a little shocked after the 15 years of classical violin lessons they'd paid for."
Old-timey is Irish with an American twist, like Dan Dougherty, whose father and grandfather were Irish traditional musicians. "My grandfather was a fiddler and my father was a mandolin and a banjo player. I listened to [my dad] and picked it up over the years."
Now Dougherty plays mandolin, guitar, tenor banjo, trombone and bass, which is his favorite. He's always dragging the big instrument somewhere, which explains the family penchant for minivans. "If it can't fit the bass, we can't use it."
The name "Locust Valley String Band" is brand new. The group had been unofficially called the "Nooney Tunes" for years, but Toto and Gribok wanted a more Old-timey moniker, something that everyone liked. However the group's come-and-play ethos, while keeping things relaxed, made deciding on a new name a major effort. Toto is the closest thing the group has to a leader. But even he concedes, "All I do is send out e-mails."
With no one technically in charge, the name hung in limbo until Tuesday, when an e-mail scramble finally produced the "Locust Valley String Band."
The former Nooney Tunes have played lots of gigs around campus, most notably for Penn's Trustees at World Caf‚ Live. The Fortune 500's apparently had a good time dancing to Red Haired Boy and Arkansas Traveler. The band has also played for Groff's psychiatry department, for Earth Day, for the School of Design, and as the headliner for the College's 60-Second Lecture Series in the spring and fall.
They've been paid with open buffets, open bars and some real money here and there, but the reward has mostly come from the crowd. "There's nothing more fun than having the whole house stomping up and down to the rhythm of your arm on the bow," Gribok said.
* * *
At one o'clock the band plays their last tune. It is almost Irish, the melody smooth and sad. When they finish, the crowd claps, and the group shyly acknowledges their praise. Groff announces they'll be back next week if the weather is nice, and anyone can play if they bring their instrument. They'll be there all summer too.
Groff, however, won't be. In July she'll join the program of pediatric psychiatry at NYU - another group member quietly moving on.
The band packs up their three guitars, two fiddles, mandolin, banjo, and bass. Everyone says goodbye and "See you next Wednesday" and then they leave, walking back to their scattered offices. Some of the crowd disperses, but most stay to finish lunch or the newspaper. "I was just wandering by," said Graduate Student Ariel Kraten. " They made my day"
