MARK OLSON

“I suppose it would help to define summer and what it means to me. Summer is a time and place you look forward to and by looking forward you miss. Growing up in Minnesota you almost get sick with anticipation for the three months of warm weather. That is why I learned to bask in the colors and glory of late summer, it’s really over then and you’re grinding it out with just a few days left to do something special with … 

All the dreams and nonsense have vanished, and it was just about that time of year, say August 26th, that I saw a friend of mine one morning acting agitated outside the fence of the State Fair in St. Paul, MN.

I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, so I asked him, and he sheepishly told me he was going to hop over the fence and go dumpster diving for free pancakes. Now, I knew he had always been an anti-work / pro-barter system kind of a guy, but I didn’t realize that he was this down on his luck. So, I paid our way in and we stuffed ourselves full of pancakes and sausages and then I asked him if he wanted to go to Oar Folkjokeopus Records (now Treehouse Records) with me and go through the new shipment of used records that came in on Wednesdays (I knew someone who worked there). 

We bought five folk blues albums average price $3.99. I don’t remember the names of the albums but they were by Koerner, Ray and Glover, Mississippi Jon Hurt, Howling Wolf, Blind Lemon Jefferson and whoever wrote “walking with my baby down by the San Francisco Bay.” AH!  Jesse Fuller. 

My friend didn’t have any money but he was a good musician and he had a big rundown house where we spent the afternoon playing and learning songs off of these records. So that is my favorite summertime music. I am sorry I don’t have any titles but I think of it as a genre … sort of a cultural community art form.”

-----MARK OLSON

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