Mark Graham Seattle, Washington March, 1996
We are in Seattle, Washington, actually in the house of Mark Graham, and Mark Gram is with a band called Open House as well as, he says, some other things, and he's gonna tell about how Open House got together. Okay, well, Paul Kotapish and have been playing music together on and off since about 1981and I think the first time they played together Micheal O'Domnhaill who Kevin [Burke] had been playing with at the time had been in a serious car...auto accident and couldn't play and Kevin needed someone to accompany him on a little tour so he talked to Paul who is friends with Grey Larson and Malcolm Dalglish, so they sort of got together for a tour, so when they came to Seattle Kevin brought over Paul for dinner, so I sorta met him there and we sorta sat around and yucked it up for a while and for about the first three or four or five years I knew him I don't think we ever played a tune together and then we...when I moved to Boston in about 1983, and actually about...just before I moved to Boston I'd played a little bit on one of Kevin's records called Up Close and I moved to Boston and I came back in about 1987 and then he and Paul were playing every once in a while so Paul and he got together and played and then I came along one time...we had a little trio there and we played a couple of gigs and then in about 1989 or 1990 we did a couple of tours to the Southwest, down to Tucson, Albuquerque and a couple of other places and in the meantime Sandy [Silva] and I had a little duo called Hoof and Mouth and we would do some performing together so I suggested one time that Sandy come along and play. And so we did some gigs and it worked out pretty good and so we started working on a show ith the 4 of us..so we just started working on it. A few dozen tours later here we are and that's the history of Open House. Thank you. It's an unusual band, isn't it. Yeh. It's unusual in that they're not too many bands that just have guitar and harmonica and fiddle and that in itself is slightly odd, not too odd but slightly, and the addition of Sandy as an actual musical entity in the band makes it fairly interesting. I wouldn't say necessarily unique but not your run of the mill band anyway. How do people react to Sandy because I know that some...because I had read some things on the Irish Traditional about how she..<garbled>...do you care what people think? Most people...she is a very good Irish step dancer and a very good Cape Breton step dancer and she studied all those things very seriously and if she wanted to do that, she could do that. the thing that she's tried to do is develop a style that takes a number of these elements and uses them in more a musical and dramatic way than just the regular Irish step dancing because she's into the kind of the visual aspects of the dancing too and you know if you don't use any of your upper body while you're dancing there's a lot less visual interest than if you do, so she's tried to incorporate elements of flamenco dancing which has a very complex kind of hand movement and various other kinds of I really like the boot dance... Like that Hungarian dancing, but yeh, people generally enjoy it a lot. Is there a goal to Open House? A goal...what do you mean? A theory? The theory is that we all like what we like and so we want to play..and we all have different kinds of strengths and so we just see what we can do with anything we bring into the band. I play a lot of country music and blues music and old time music and am kinda interested in playing New Orleans music so I try to bring those in...well, its not like I TRY and bring those in but those are the kind of music I like to play so I'm interested in bringing them out there so we just try and see if we can weld them into a form that is entertaining and new. And the same with everybody else. So do you have something coming up? Yeh, we are going to be playing down at the South by Southwest conference in the 3rd week in March just coming up this weekend, then we'll be playing in Europe from about June 18th, or June 20th to July 18th, playing in Sweden and Finland, then France and England and Austria and Spain and then after that I think we have a couple of festivals...The Wheatland Festival and then just more touring during the fall, all winter and then back again, to California and then back east you know a regular tour schedule. Do you play much around here? Yes I do. You mean the band Open House? We don't play any in town. But you do. Oh yeh, I play different kinds of blues and -- gigs, I play with a guy named Orville Johnson who is a great guitar player and singer and we have a duo, we just recorded a CD that will be coming out actually this week and has some of my original songs on it...some of his songs, a few blues tunes and some old time music, some New Orleans music... I'll have to put you on a different radio show. (Laughs) Is Open House developing new songs that I haven't heard? Oh yeh. We're always trying to come up with something new. Some different sets of reels, some Serbian music, some polkas, a couple of new songs....we're always trying to change the show. So what were you doing with the Lounge Lizards? Well, I know those guys because I try and write...you know the music that I write which is sort of novelty music, satirical, kind of humorous music and they like to do that too, so we have a mutual interest. I s'pose! They're pretty goofy. Yeh. So they have a show they put on every year around the time of the South By Southwest and so this year I'm going to go down and plant that too as well as perform with Open House. OK. So what's Kevin Burke doing? Well, he's living down in Portland and playing with a band and he also sometimes tours with Patrick Street. I think they have a tour coming up sometime in May. And he plays by himself and sometimes with Ged Foley and he's always got something going. Is there stuff going on up here? There must be. There is a lot of Irish music. There's some great players up here. A fellow named Dale Russ, Tom Creagan, Connor Burn <?> people you might not have heard of.. They don't make it down to Texas. No, but they're world class players. Are they? Yeh. And Joel Bernstein, one of the best...well, for playing Irish music one of the best Irish harmonica players of all time. And the lots of other players and singers. It's a pretty thriving scene up here.