rg College. The last occupant of the century-old building was a funky old co-op, the late lamented North Country Co-op. A rather grubby little place, back in the day before co-ops had to stock 45 kinds of natural salad dressing and a shopper could actually get a question answered by a staff person, without hearing "I don't work in that department." Back when co-ops were actually non-profits, as in donating all their profits to a food shelf at the end of each fiscal year, instead of declaring eminent domain on neighboring senior citizens' houses to enlarge their own parking lots...but I digress.To this little store in January of 1990 came wide-eyed me, a few weeks shy of twenty-five and thinking I knew it all. Bush the 1st was in power, it seemed like the Reagan era would go on forever and we were on a mission of whole wheat flour and soymilk.
Bill Kubescko was one of the blur of "bearded guys" when I started. (Did they all have beards? In the winter anyway...Hey, I had hair halfway down my back!) It took a few weeks to separate him from the others, but since my shift often began at 4:30 in the morning and he came in at 7:00, I soon figured out he was that music guy, who often was heading to Europe on tours and coming home with batches of new cassettes, and 
eventually, cds. He's rave about hiking the hills in Wales and eating local cheese and drink
ing local ales, but the raving was mostly about the music.It was the early '90's, right? So that means no internet for most people, no mouse on the computer (remember DOS?) and the log was a hardbound book of blank paper in which the staff communicated by notes that varied from really mean to very funny.
To me in those years, world music meant South Africa and West Africa. Staying out past midnight at a Mahotella Queens show when I had to work at 4:00 the next morning is a painful memory...four hours of sleep before a full day of work is just wrong. All the big highlife and Afro-Pop acts played First Avenue in those years...Fela, King Sunny Ade, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey.
With his shiny new Euro-music, Bill K. showed me there was a whole world out there, and I listened eagerly, almost every morning. He was managing and touring often with Boiled in Lead in those years, so there was lots of Celtic, both rockin' and trad. He brought in boundary-crossing British stuff like the Barely Works (founding member Sarah Allen is still seen at the Cedar once in while rockin' that giant flute in Flook) and Edward the 2nd and the Red Hot Polkas. (Whatever happened to them, anyway?) He'd come back from hanging out with the Oyster Band sporting funny new haircuts. I think my first Cedar experience was an Altan show, because one of the other co-op coordinators (former Cedar house manger Bill Hayes - Bill H. in those days - had written in that paper log that they were "hotter than a turf fire in January."
Crossing p
aths with music pals in Europe like the guys in 3 Mustaphas 3, Bill brought in Ivo Paposov's Bulgarian Wedding Music and Musikas' neo-trad Hungarian folk, sounds for which I really had no frame of reference in those days. Ea
stern Euro music was so new on everybody's radar, as the Wall really had just come down. Both acts would later perform numerous Cedar shows, and, I like to imagine, paved the way for some of the Balkan mash-up stuff that I love so much now. Ivo played for years with Yuri Yunakov, who later moved to New York where he became teacher and mentor to the recently-immigrated-from-Tel Aviv Ori Kaplan who later helped found Balkan Beat Box. Uh huh.I have only one clear non- musical memory of Bill in those years. Time were tough, yeah? The economy was pretty lousy and people used to come in to the co-op and try to steal food, figuring we had no security system. One day a pair of guys ran a good distraction scam and one of them ran out the door with a bunch of meat, expensive stuff like steaks and roasts. Bill ran out the door and chased them for blocks, but they had a pal waiting in a car and got away. He came puffing back to the store, and just started crying. Whether ashamed of his failure to apprehend the thieves, or more likely, knowing Bill, just saddened about the state of the world that would cause people to turn to such activities.
Sometime in 1992 or '93 the Cedar Board of Directors came looking for Bill K. Read here for a nice little history of Bill's time at the Cedar that local music journalist Bill Snyder wrote for Mpls-St. Paul magazine a couple of years ago. They hired him to take over.
Soon after, he started spicing up their mix of swing dances, square dances and Cajun dances, using his global connections to bring his kind of world music to the Twin Cities. I have a very clear memory of running into Bill at Riverside Bank shortly after he started at the Cedar. "You gotta come check out this band from Finland! Just come over and I'll give you a job for the night. Give this disc a listen!" (Volunteer protocol was a bit more casual 15 years ago.)
The disc was Seleniko and that night was, of course, the legendary first-ever Värttinä show at the Cedar. (And other than a South-by-Southwest showcase a few months earlier, one of their first ever U.S. shows.) Finnish septuagenarians drove down from the Iron Range in res
A few months later, another Bill K. tip,"this band's from Sweden and does more of a dark thing" had me there in the tiny crowd for Garmarna's first Cedar show. Other than a quick gig an the Entry the night before, this was their U.S. debut. I'd never really heard a live hurd
y-gurdy before, much less kulning. I have so many very clear memories of that night; of Emma stepping back from the mike and looking expectantly at the crowd before letting letting fly with the high pitched stuff, of Stefan looking up from a totally psychedelic hurdy gurdy solo with an expression like "was that OK?", of Rickard raving about a band they'd seen at the Entry the night before. I think they'd just released Vittrad in the U.S. on Drew Miller's record label, having met him on the internet somehow. Small crowd notwithstanding, Bill was grinning away in the back again, knowing something big was happening. [Look how young they look in this photo from the Vittrad era!]Just so there's no confusion. Bill K. was all about the hand shaking, the back patting, the story telling, the did-you-ever-hear-that-one-album-by....., the introducing of one artist to another (like the wild night Bruce Molsky was in town with Fiddlers Four and they came over to a house party where Altan was playing. Whew!) In his early tenure at the Cedar, he briefly had an assistant named Nicole (I think.) I ran into her on the West Bank shortly after she was hired and asked her what she was going to do in that job. She shrugged and answered "Learn how to schmooze?" That was our Bill, he loved to schmooze. Not just because it was part of his job, he actually was just naturally in schmooze mode, most of the time.
He'd come back from WOMEX with stacks of discs to peruse. The last few years he'd just hand me all the Eastern stuff and I'd do mini reviews of them all. The Croation Roots collection...not so great. Stuff like Baba Zula, Little Cow, Burhal Ocal & the Trakya All-Stars got the big Mama E Dub thumbs up. Ill be writing about several of these bands in the next few weeks, and you can see Baba Zula and Little Cow at the Cedar in September! Check out these sweaty guys loving them some Burhan!
So many memorable concerts over the years...Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, selling out the hall on a Monday night, the silent crowd yearning for every note, Bill K. grinning away in the back. Shooglenifty showing up five minutes before we opened the doors, whipping out a one tune sound check, smoking a few cigs and then playing one of the most amazing shows I've ever heard at the Cedar. A roomful of teenagers sitting on the floor singing along note perfect to finish a song with Ani DiFranco when the mike went bad. Karan Casey taking the stage after the rest of the Solas gang had nailed a blistering set of reels, wondering to the crowd "How can I follow that?" then sending up the most ethereal a cappella song. And on and on and on. Bill was always there in the back, grinning, schmoozing, hosting.
When bands come through town, many still ask "Is Bill around?", because he was the host of the party at the Cedar for 15 years. I'd like to think that some of that rubbed off on me when I'm in "Queen of Hospitality" mode as a house manger; bringing a plate of cookies to the green room or remembering what various artists like to drink, or who has what food allergies, or how old a musician's child is, in short, doing the things that make the Cedar feel like a little piece of home.
* * * * *
I used to house sit for Bill and Mag when they'd drive the kids out to California every summer to see the in-laws. He'd pay me in blank cassettes, knowing I was greedy to attack his massive cd collection.
They have one of those Felix the Cat clocks on the wall over the wood stove, the kind with the eyes and the tail that move back and forth. When I think of Bill K. in super-gleeful mode, anticipating a really good show, I think his eyes look like of the eyes on that Felix, his face grinning ear to ear.
Thank you, Bill K. for all the sweat, joy and love you poured into the Cedar all those years. We are much the richer for it.
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