Dulcimer player Rick Scott helped establish B.C.'s folk scene

Globe and Mail

8 hours ago

As a boy, Rick Scott was taken by his father to the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in 1954 to see the original production of Peter Pan, with Mary Martin in the lead role.
Sitting first row in the balcony, the wide-eyed child witnessed Ms. Martin floating toward him on a harness, staring at him as she sang, 'Look at me way up high, suddenly here am I, I'm flying, I'm flying.'
The legendary production inspired a desire to perform, and perhaps Ms. Martin's lighter-than-air exuberance in particular made a lasting impression on the future entertainer. His career as a musician with the beloved British Columbia-based hippie folk trio the Pied Pumkin String Ensemble was marked by a determined effort to uplift audiences.
'Rick told me that every Pied Pumkin gig, they would set out to levitate the hall, and if they didn't do it in the first couple of hours, they would keep going to 1:30 in the morning, until they got everybody high,' said folksinger and friend Bob Bossin. 'It was a remarkable commitment to both being in the moment and being with the audience.'
Mr. Scott, a musical joy spreader with a theatrical soul and an infectious sense of rhythm, died Aug. 1, at his home on rustic Protection Island in the harbour of Nanaimo, B.C., after an extended illness. He was 77.
Over a 55-year career, the singer-songwriter, virtuoso dulcimerist, stage actor and children's entertainer released 19 recordings, either solo or with Pied Pumkin (alongside Shari Ulrich and Joe Mock) or Pied Pear (with Mr. Mock). On stage, he charmed audiences with maximum effort and a generous spirit.
'His approach was full-on entertainment every minute as big and dramatically as he could,' said Ms. Ulrich, a Juno-winning singer-musician. 'He would engage people in any way that would make them smile and feel a little better.'
With dulcimers he made himself, he played dive bars, folk clubs, festivals, schools and symphonic halls in 12 countries. The musician earned three Juno Award nominations for his children's albums.
'He was a man who seemed energized and rejuvenated by the act of play,' said Fredrik Collin, a friend from Protection Island.
Mr. Scott's 1996 album Philharmonic Fool was subtitled 'songs for kids of all ages.' The record included The Wild Bunnies of Kitsilano and Angels Do, which he wrote for his granddaughter with Down syndrome. As a goodwill ambassador for the Down Syndrome Resource Foundation, based in Burnaby, B.C., Mr. Scott emceed the 2005 World Down Syndrome Congress in Vancouver with Fred Penner.
Inhabiting hippiedom his entire adult life, he lived irrepressibly to his own tune. In the mid-1970s with Pied Pumkin – a numerologist suggested dropping the second P in pumpkin – he helped foster a communal folk music scene in British Columbia.
Since 1999, he regularly appeared at the annual Special Woodstock, a farm-set music festival in Duncan, B.C., that features the artistic talents of people with disabilities alongside professional musicians.
He was born in New Jersey and raised in New York and Texas. After graduating from high school, he served as a military policeman and faced off against the young people taking part in 1967's antiwar March on the Pentagon in Washington. D.C. It was a life-changing event for Mr. Scott.
'He told me he thought to himself, 'I'm on the wrong side,'' Mr. Bossin said.
In 1970, at age 21, he embraced the back-to-the-land movement of the era and drove from Annapolis, Md., to Pender Harbour, B.C. With him was his friend, the American luthier JR Stone, who taught him to build dulcimers. Mr. Scott quickly learned to play the stringed Appalachian instrument in a style all his own.
'I like to say he was the Jimi Hendrix of the dulcimer,' Mr. Bossin said. 'The music and rhythm weren't coming from his wrists and fingers. It just sort of emanated from him.'
Busking outside the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design), Mr. Scott was among the musicians who inspired and appeared in the 1972 animated short Street Musique, directed by Ryan Larkin. Mr. Scott also contributed to the film's score.
He was a shaggy-haired man of his cosmic time, co-founding the scene-starting underground music paper Dill Pickle Rag. In 1972, he took off to Japan to perform for a year as the Lotus Eaters with the Japanese-Canadian photographer Taki Bluesinger (a.k.a. Takao Sekiguchi) in a whisky bar.
Returning to Canada, he formed Pied Pumkin with Ms. Ulrich and Mr. Mock. The indie roots music pioneers launched one of British Columbia's first independent labels, Squash Records, with the release of their self-titled debut album in 1974, followed a year later by the cheekily titled Allah Mode.
Among Mr. Scott's early compositions were Orville Goes to the Country, People I Love You, Lotus Eater's Blues and Yo De Do Do. The trio toured widely and sold some 30,000 albums from the stage or by mail, packaged in cut-up cardboard boxes from grocery stores. The acoustic music, which could be described as Birkenstock bluegrass, was a danceable, counterculture blend of folky singalongs, unanticipated arrangements and irreverent humour.
'They didn't sound like anyone else, and they created an audience that was intensely loyal,' said Gary Cristall, who ran the Vancouver Folk Music Festival Society for 17 years upon its founding in 1978. 'Rick and Pied Pumkin helped build an alternative community.'
After Ms. Ulrich left the threesome in 1976, Mr. Scott and Mr. Mock carried on as Pied Pear. The duo toured, released three albums and represented Canada at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tenn.
'Rick lived life through the eyes of a man-child and played with open eyes and heart, with an unbridled imagination to enlighten the day with wonder, joy and laughter, bringing music to life,' Mr. Mock said. 'Music was food, spirit.'
Mr. Scott dedicated himself post-Pied Pear to acting, even learning to walk tightrope for the title role in the stage musical Barnum. Falling off the rope once, he hurt both knees. The experience would inspire 2012's The Great Gazzoon: A Tall Tale with Tunes and Turbulence, a four-CD audio novel with music.
Pied Pumkin reunited often over the years, including for a midnight concert for Vancouver's millennium celebration in 1999.
At B.C.'s Hornby Island Music Festival in 2001, 53-year-old Mr. Scott pulled a muscle in his back partway through a Pied Pumkin performance. A masseuse, a physiotherapist and an acupuncturist all responded to his plea for help. Mr. Scott later spoke of the experience fondly: 'Lying on a table in the middle of a field with a dozen needles sticking out of me, staring up at a meteor show.'
Richard Gaston Scott Jr. was born July 14, 1948, in Englewood, N.J. His father was a clinical psychologist. His mother, Genevieve Scott (née Heatley), was a poet and sailing enthusiast. A stepmother, Hilda Scott, entered his life when he was 12.
In kindergarten, the precocious toddler enacted a mime routine entitled The Happy Woodsman, which incorporated much chopping and many pratfalls. By the time he graduated high school in San Antonio, he was already touring Texas playing bass in the rock band the Embers.
On Oct. 21, 1967, Mr. Scott was in uniform as a 'riot cop,' in his words, when American political disruptor Abbie Hoffman led the flower-powered March on the Pentagon that involved a concert by folkie Phil Ochs and a speech and by pediatrician/activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. There was even a hippie-dippie attempt to 'levitate' the Pentagon building.
'It was this great moment,' Mr. Scott told The Globe and Mail in 2001. 'It was total foolishness. People were just sitting out on the grass, blowing giant bubbles and playing drums and flutes. Inside the Pentagon, there was this war situation. They didn't know what to do because it weren't in the manual. They finally decided that if the building did start to lift off, they would shoot 'em. They couldn't quite grasp the concept. To me, that's pure anarchy.'
Disenchanted with the political conditions in the United States, Mr. Scott moved to Canada in 1970. In 1971, he hitchhiked up B.C.'s Sunshine Coast with Mr. Stone, his first wife, Sue (P'chi) Scott, and his dog, Mousse.
'It was tough for three hippies with a dog to catch a ride, but after about half an hour a woman driving a beat up Ford Pinto pulled over,' Mr. Scott later wrote of the experience. 'Big and shaggy, Mousse immediately climbed into the front seat and laid his head down in the driver's lap.'
The woman agreed to take them to Pender Harbour but first had to pick up a friend. The friend turned out to be her rock star beau, Graham Nash. The driver was Joni Mitchell.
'I was amazed when she took up my dulcimer, tuned all the strings to the same note and proceeded to play A Case of You from her Blue album,' Mr. Scott recalled.
In 1999, Mr. Scott had two of his dulcimers stolen from his car in Vancouver. One was a traditional acoustic model with two heart-shaped sound holes, built by Mr. Stone. The other was a unique electric dulcimer, the subject of his song The Ballad of the Electric Snowshoe.
The theft shattered Mr. Scott.
'A part of what connects me to the children I play for has been stolen,' he told The Vancouver Sun. 'I play all over the world, and those two instruments were unique. A piece of that has been stolen.'
That same year, Pied Pumkin played a 10-week, 25th anniversary tour. In 2000, they released the live album Pied Alive.
Ms. Ulrich recalled running a song idea past Mr. Scott. It was called Making Friends With Gone, inspired by the deaths of people close to her. Though Mr. Scott was typically supportive and encouraging when it came to other musicians, he was not in favour of Making Friends With Gone.
'He had just lost someone in his life who he cherished,' Ms. Ulrich said. 'He told me he didn't like the song, and that he didn't believe you could make friends with gone. That keeps popping in my mind, of course, because that's what I have to do now.'
Mr. Scott leaves his stepmother, Hilda Scott; sisters, Sandra Woodall and Tara Scott; children, Jorg Scott and Tai Scott; stepchildren from his first marriage, Jason Metz and Sebastian Metz; longtime partner and manager, Valley Hennell; and stepson, Whelm King.
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