Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe Rathburn.
Hi Joe, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was born with a natural affinity for music. I got it from my mother who could play piano. I was drawn to it and as I got older, I could grasp and repeat melodies vocally and on most instruments. I started playing around on guitar at around age 8. In the dead of winter in mid-Michigan a man from one of two major music stores in the nearby city of Flint, came to our very rural neighborhood going door to door selling guitar lessons. My folks invited him in, and he broke out a lap steel guitar and promptly showed me how to play Aloha ‘Oe using a steel bar in my left hand to fret the strings. My parents signed me up. I believe I took two lessons then quit. For a while I played every guitar I came across with it lying across my lap, using my thumb on the neck in place of the steel bar, until I finally switched to the standard method of playing a six-string guitar. I then began teaching myself using the available popular song books at the time. One of my neighbors was taking guitar lessons. He was learning Chet Atkins style, while another neighborhood friend had an older brother who was a full-on rocker and practiced in his garage through his Marshal stack. I was influenced and encouraged by both of those friends.
By the time I reached junior high school I joined the school band, playing cornet, and eventually tuba. That was short lived, but I did learn a bit about reading music. Also, by junior high I was good enough on guitar to jam with my peers. There were a couple friends with whom I spent a lot of time playing music.
I listened to a pretty eclectic mix of artists. I signed my first record deal with Columbia at age 13. Yup, they sent me 12 albums for a penny and all I had to do was agree to buy one record a month for a year at the regular price. My dad found out about it and made them cancel my contract because I was a minor. But I got to keep the initial 12 albums free. They included: Al Kooper/Mike Bloomfield/Stephen Stills – The Super Sessions, Deep Purple – Shades of Deep Purple, Judy Collins’ – Who Knows Where the Time Goes, Donovan – Greatest Hits, The Bee Gees – Odessa, Stephen Stills – Stephen Stills, Cream – Disraeli Gears, Loggins and Messina – Best of Friends, Two Simon & Garfunkel albums – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, and Sound of Silence and two more I can’t remember.
After becoming known in high school as a musician by performing at classmate’s parties, coffeehouses, and dances, I got word that a bar owner in a nearby town was trying to put a band together around his son who was a drummer. Somehow, I got offered the job of bass player even though I didn’t own a bass. But, a classmate of mine who was a much better guitar player got the guitar position in the band, and his little brother was a bass player but too young to play in a bar, I got to borrow his bass and joined the band. The guitar player and I were both only 17 so we had to spend our breaks outside the bar.
I was a busboy at a pancake house at the time, but when I learned that the band would pay me more in one weekend than I’d earn in a week schlepping dirty dishes my music career was launched.
Since then it’s been a steady procession of gigs from bars/restaurants, concerts of all sorts – churches to arenas, house concerts, community concerts, private parties, corporate events, busking on the streets and in parks, studio work, recording sessions. You know, the gamut.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Like any vocation, one faces high and low points. I think any struggles I faced were self-inflicted inasmuch as I really didn’t have a plan. I merely knew I wanted to play music for a living the rest of my life but had no specific goals in mind and just played it day by day. Which meant life happened to me instead of vice-versa. I finally got ’round to taking songwriting seriously and deciding I wanted to make recordings. That’s when things started to go a bit more smoothly.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a mostly self-taught guitar player and singer who has performed for a living since 1972, and a songwriter who has recorded since the late 1980s. Those are my two worlds – Performer of cover songs, and Performer of original songs.
What am I known for? Good question. Folks seem to know who I am, but I can’t say how or why. I’ve never been “famous” or “popular” on any grand scale, but I’ve managed to get by OK. I’ve not been the most prolific writer, but I’m proud of the few albums (I’ll always call them “albums”) I’ve recorded: 1997’s Little Suns, 2001’s Rockwells and Picassos, and my 2005 Live at Dark Thirty album. They’ve earned me a modicum of respect, at least many people have told me how much they love them. I’ve been nominated for some awards for those recordings. One song called The Dad I Had, took Best Traditional Folk Song honors out of a field of 140,000 songs one year in the Just Plain Folks Music Awards. I’m kinda proud of that achievement and that song. I’m hoping to release what may be my swansong album soon. I feel it will be my best yet. It’ll be called Soul Radio.
I guess I’m also known for bringing musicians and audiences together. I’ve produced several notable songwriter showcases over time, bringing together performers who might not have met otherwise and introducing them to audiences who might never have heard them.
Also, in my cover song identity I played for 20 years at a restaurant called The Tin Fish, located just outside PETCO Park. I played there before every San Diego Padres home game. That’s 81 times every baseball season for 20 years. Do the math. I was the Tin Fish Troubadour. A LOT of people know me through that connection and in 2013, the tenth anniversary of that gig, I released an all-baseball CD called – The Baseball Songs.
I also did a stint with band at a local resort in their outdoor venue called The Barefoot Bar. Every Sunday afternoon for two and a half years we played cover songs done in various Caribbean Island styles. The band was called The Banana Republicans and consisted of me, and five other much more experienced musicians. The music director/keyboard player, Allan Phillips, was from Venezuela and had been in Up With People and was a master multi-instrumentalist (also holding down the bass chair with his left hand), the band leader/trumpet and EWI player, Mitch Manker, had been in Ray Charle’s band. Carl “Papa” Lawrence played steel drums and had come from Trinidad. He had been a boy there when the modern steel drum as we know it today, was invented in the 1940s. A man name of Bo Wade played drums and was one of the best I’ve ever worked with, and Jamey Scott was the other guitar player who had recently graduated from SDSU with a music degree. He’s gone on to be one of Hollywood’s and the video game industry’s most in demand sound designers and composers. That gig led me to play in another cover band called Koko Loco which specialized in the music of Jimmy Buffett. That formed my loose relationship with the Parrot Head community who embraced my original music as well.
What sets me apart from others? Well, I guess I’m not as driven as many of my peers seem to be, and I’m OK with that. I do what I do and get recognized for it sometimes if I’m lucky, but it’s simply the doing that matters to me. To be able to do what I love, earn a living at it, and make a few people happy along the way is all I can ask, I suppose. I’m a man of modest needs and wants.
Also, I don’t seem to be able to write depressing songs, or songs about sad topics without giving them a positive spin.
What I’m most proud of is getting the woman I’d eventually call my wife to fall in love with me. We’ve been married since 1986 and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. We’re both musicians by trade, and we’ve managed to buy a house and live in San Diego for all these years. That’s not too bad.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Once in my career I played bass and sang in a Michigan based power trio called Skyhook. We opened for some big named acts: Kiss, The Guess Who, Chuck Berry, The James Gang, and The New York Dolls, and once even headlined over Rush who were on their first American tour. I also backed up a songwriter once and we opened several shows for Ray Charles.
Contact Info:
- Website: joerathburn.com
- Facebook: facebook.com/joerathburn
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@JoeRathburn
Image Credits
Jeff Wiant, and Dennis Andersen
