(View Intro Video Clip)My name is Jack Fronk. I'm sixty-nine years old, and I'm basically a guitar player. I also play Native American flute. I've been playing all my life, which probably means I've been playing some fifty-five, almost sixty years. I've always been playing music.

History
I have been playing more or less continuously, but I did take a break. After the sixties in San Francisco, where I played rock and roll, and lived with the Family Dog, and lived in communes, I decided it was time to leave San Francisco and I moved to Vermont. Before leaving San Francisco, I traded my electric guitar for an old Gibson, so for the next ten years, pretty much wood-shedded in Vermont playing acoustic guitar.

Influences (View Influences Video Clip)
As a guitar player, I think my earliest influences were really the Count Basie band, and also the chant. I'm a chant master. I spent the first ten years of my musical career with the Gregorian chant, teaching chant, having a chanting choir, and working in manuscripts, so that background came into my musical playing. When I played rock and roll, it was heavily influenced by the chant, and by the saxophone, and rhythm section of the Count Basie orchestra. How does Gregorian Chant relate to rock and roll? One of the things about chant is that it doesn't have a meter. It's not four/four time, it's not three/four time, it's groupings of notes; five notes, four notes, three notes, to build melodic lines. So it fits right across a rhythm section, but gives the solo line a real soaring, melodic quality that fits right in. Especially during the sixties, it just blended in very well.

Equipment
Well, I'll tell you a little story about my equipment. When I was (in the sixties) living at the Family Dog, and working at San Francisco State College at the time, my buddy, who lived with us as a band member, was a sound engineer. His name was Charlie Butten, and he had done the initial sound equipment for the Rolling Stones when they came through the country. He also built Eric Clapton's equipment; those Marshall amps were actually Charlie Butten's amps. He lived with us and he built our equipment. Sometimes, we didn't have a lot of money, so what was our sound system at home for playing records, he would rewire it on Saturday nights and we would take them to the clubs, and we got home before he went to bed and went to sleep, he would put them back together as our phonograph system. That equipment got bigger and bigger and bigger, to the point where we built a club out in the Mission called Rock Garden. The stage was a fifteen foot bass speaker, with coils that actually blasted right out onto the dance floor. We had towers of amplifiers, and when we played concerts that were out of doors, you could hear that band clean across the city. But that was all custom built stuff. I personally right now have an amp that was built probably in the sixties. It's an all-tube amp, probably weighs around 100 pounds, and I wish to hell I had a lighter amp, but that's what I use. (Two weeks after this interview, Jack bought a lighter amp).

(View Charlie Butten Video Clip) We were talking about Charlie Butten, who built these amps. Whenever we traveled around the country, if Cream showed up, we would have to sit behind stage, because they loved to have Charlie on set while they were playing. The thing about Charlie was, he didn't like rock and roll; he always put earplugs on. We built those amps, testing them with the Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra. We played through those Cream amps when they weren't using them. My job was to talk to Eric (Clapton) and to get the type of sound he wanted to get out of those amps. I would translate that into sine waves and drawings, and then Charlie, who was pretty much mono-directed, just did amplifiers, just did sound systems. He had his floor covered with diodes, and he would sit in the middle of the floor with stacks of Pepsi and cigarettes, and would put these things together. And because he had no real formal knowledge, or way to chart these out, and he was afraid that people would steal his ideas; he used to finish these little connections, and he would dip them in plastic, and then he'd wire them into the system, so no one could steal his thoughts. He built me an amp, one that I used quite a bit, that the sound went through the wires, and went through a light bulb, right through the filament, and out the other side down into the speakers. That was a real tube amp. The interesting thing about Charlie was that, apart from us using him in rock and roll, he really did not have a professional career, and the last I heard of him he was repairing sound systems for the school district down in San Jose.

We were talking about CD's. I copy a lot of CD's just wherever I hear them. The three groups that I play the most, I would say, is Luther Alison, you know, you got me; I'm a sixty-nine year-old man, I cannot remember names. Who was that other one, I had it a minute ago.

Talking about equipment, and digital equipment, I have never really used much digital equipment. I don't like pedal effects, I don't like the noise they create, or the distancing I feel from the sound. I like immediate sounds when I hit a note. I like sound immediately through my amp. I do use a volume control pedal so that I can get a little more volume when I switch to lead lines and cut it back when I have to do the rhythm section but I don't use any pedal fix. I like a solid amp and I like really good pick-ups on my guitars. My guitars have top-of-the-line pick-ups and that's where the sound comes from.

(View The Music Video Clip)The Music: My early guitar style was sort of unique in the sense that I didn't learn it from anybody; I just sort of developed it as I went along. I spent an awful lot of time at the ocean. I was playing with a rock band that was very successful, and it was almost abstract in the sense that I brought a lot of chant and modal music into a Southern rock band. There was a combination of unusual rhythms and unusual harmonies and long melodic lines. I developed this style of playing at the ocean. I'll show you how that went.

It's something you can hear above the crashing waves.

See, there are a lot of doubles and triples and unison notes that not only I, but people around me could hear, and people would be picking up driftwood, tin cans, bottles. It was always fun, we'd form a circle, gather some driftwood and start a fire, sit around and spend an afternoon playing music in that way, a sort of chant, a new age tribal  it was a lot of tribal music, a lot of tribal gathering.

Over the years, more recently, I've had a wonderful teacher, Carrie Yates, who has been helping me learn a lot of the real technical side of the blues; the chords, the patterns, to which I could apply my already existing sense of melodic line and structure. That's been a way that's melded together.

Before I got into the blues, however, when I got back to California, I enrolled in a course at Contra Costa College taught by Wayne Organ on digital computer Pro Tools. Although Pro Tools is ordinarily used to mix input live sound, you can also actually write with a pen, you can score music, write directly into it. If it's not recorded, you can write music, and you can score it as you go along. And you can use samples, and you can hear it as you write. As I was writing music, I could make it the sound of a violin, or synthesizer, or piano or whatever instrument I wanted. So I got into writing long, extended pieces, with lots of different tracks; strings, synthesizers, woodwinds, and so forth, and developed my suite called 'Across the Years.' Now that I'm retiring, for the third or fourth time, and moving to the mountains, my goal is to get back and start carrying forward that music composition I used to do. We have a nice little blues band here in the Bay area, and I'm going to be teaching blues guitar at View College in Chico. I hope to put together a blues band up there, and play around some of the clubs, and maybe Shakey's pizza, hit the big time, and do my own recording at the same time, and develop my own CD's. So that's my plan for the future; it's a sort of culmination of two lines of thought; the classic, modal, ancient music, and the contemporary urban blues.

My piece, 'Across the Years' is the story of a love affair. It's in four movements. The first movement is the girl in blue jeans, where I first met the love of my life, then a section, the good years together, the third section is the winter of discontent, which is self-explanatory, and the fourth is little eyes full of wonder, which is about my little granddaughter, when she was born. The third piece, which by the way is available on cdbaby.com, I wrote visually instead of listening. I decided to try a piece without a key, in twelve tones, and I wrote the thing out so it visually made patterns. When I played it back, it actually made sense musically as well as visually, although it's totally atonal, it's really quite an exceptional piece of music. Shortly after I finished that, I decided I wanted to develop my own CD cover and CD labels so I took Adobe Photoshop course and did a lot of art. I have a master's degree in art from San Francisco State College, so I have this whole side of me that worked professionally in art. I was a professional batik person, sold my clothes, Wearable Art, at Macy's in Union Square, and did a lot of things in the art world. I have a web site, actually, for my art, which is velvetlight.com. If you want to check out my photography and graphic art, you can do so there.

I have some nice equipment. I have three principle guitars; a Fender, a Strat which I got recently, and a couple of very old instruments. I have a Danelectro, 1949, and a 1950 Gibson. Both of which are in mint condition. After having them knocked around quite a bit, I've had them restored. I have this Gibson amp here, which is a 1945, 46 back when they made them by hand. Everything was wound by hand, and a Danelectro 1949 twin reverber (like a Fender twin reverb amp- ed.) Back in the days when we had the band, Charlie Butten was making our equipment. He developed the sound equipment that we used on stage. I had a little fun with each amp that he experimented with. Those are the pieces that I've been using. I also play other instruments. I have a collection of Native American flutes, which I play and perform on the flute circles, and drum circles that occur around the Bay area. And I studied a bit of ancient Persian music, so I have a santour and play that on the bamboo flute as well. I like to combine really ancient music along with the blues into my repertoire. They go together very well.



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