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William H. (“Will”) Lydgate a.k.a. WillYum
BIOGRAPHY
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| I was born at home in our house on Middlefield Road in downtown Palo Alto, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. In the days before Silicon Valley, Palo Alto was a sleepy college town, populated by intellectuals, working class folks and hippies, home to members of the Grateful Dead, and the neighborhood where Ken Kesey was first turned on. Mom was a teacher at a nearby Community College; dad was a woodworker who spent a lot of time making sawdust in the woodshop in our garage. My sister Emily was four years older than me; she once told me that when I was born, she thought our parents were going to throw her out. I spent a lot of time blowing sawdust about my father’s shop with the air compressor hose, as well as laughing, playing, demanding cookies, and throwing fits when they were not offered immediately. I was raised in an atmosphere of creativity, music and fun, surrounded by art and artists. When I was still a little kid Dad took me with him on his trips to crafts shows on both coasts to |
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| exhibit and sell his woodwork, and there I met all kinds of interesting people who handmade beautiful things. I have distinctive memories of walking around those big exhibition spaces, looking at the cool art objects, and it wasn’t until I was older that I realized what a big influence growing up around art and artists had on me. |
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Music was always a part of my life. Dad was a guitar player, Mom played the old upright piano we had in the living room, and my sister banged away at Fur Elise and tooted on a recorder. I remember singing at home a lot; Mom accompanied us as we sang the old Ford car song: I’m a little hunk of tin, nobody knows what shape I’m in -- honk honk rattle-rattle-rattle-crash beep beep. At pre-school my favorite songs were The Wabash Cannonball, possibly because it had a cannonball in the title (I was a fan of pirates at the time), I Am a Pizza, and an elaborate story song we called Going on a Lion Hunt: can’t go over it, can’t go around it, can’t go under it, have to go through it! The memories are dusty, but still strong in me.
My elementary school, was an “alternative” version within the Palo Alto public school system, complete with a farm on school grounds. We had line dances and a harvest festival, and two of my favorite teachers, Bill and Rick, would play guitar and lead us in Jimmy Buffet songs like Cheeseburger in Paradise and Volcano. Rick, my teacher for third through fifth grade, was one of the best teachers I have had. A big moment in my early musical and psychic development was riding with Rick in his car on the way to a field trip, when he played a Jimi Hendrix tape “smash hits” . I was thrilled, and the next day rushed out and got the tape and started singing Stone Free, which I think worried Rick a little, as he wondered what kind of influence he was having on me.
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About the same time I started playing music officially in my elementary school band program, with the trombone as my first instrument. My parents arranged for me to have private lessons with a guy named Kent, who came to our house once a week. We worked in the living room next to the piano and blew our spit valves out on the carpet. I remember how Kent used to puff out his cheeks and do a Dizzy Gillespie impersonation. Under his tutelage I excelled at trombone, and after conquering our school program I moved on to All- City Band, where there were strange-looking kids from other schools I had never seen before.
I was great at music, but increasingly restless about everything else in school. As my personality developed, my parents decided that maybe I needed an even more alternative educational environment, so I was switched to a place called Peninsula School, whose alumni include Pigpen of the Grateful Dead. Peninsula was one of those semi-free-range schools where the kids are in charge of their own learning. Most ended up like me, confidently creative and emotionally balanced, but somewhat behind our age-mates in things like spelling, penmanship and multiplication.
I still didn’t fit in, however, and got kicked out for various infractions. Eventually my family elected to provide home schooling, which included independent reading and tutoring by various students from Stanford University, located just down the street. At about this time I began to study tabla at the Ali Akbar College of Music, and got diagnosed with ADD. With a better understanding of what was making me so energetic, I was able to return to public high school, which in this enlightened part of California allowed me the accommodations I needed to get by.
I always thought I would be a musician, and at home I must have mentioned that I wanted to play bass. (I decided that guitar players were a dime a dozen, but that a good bass player was valuable.) |
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I remember Dad coming through the sliding glass door into my room carrying a hard shell case. Inside was a Peavey bass, big and funky/funny looking, with a nice after-market bridge. Dad gave me my first lesson. He taught me how to tune, and gave me some treble clef exercises. (Dad taught me like a guitar player, because that was his instrument.) Freshman year in high school I began studying with Bay Area bassist Joey Fabian, and every chance I got I hung around Griffin Stringed Instruments, a famous acoustic music shop just down the street from our house, with many legends on its walls, and lots of really great acoustic instruments. I spent many happy hours shut in the electric bass showroom.
I remember my first lesson on electric bass as one of the best I ever had. I approached it with great interest, really digested the lesson, and took to heart what Joey Fabian taught me about fingering, lessons that benefit me to this day. I constantly worked my hands on a finger strengthener called “The Grip Master,” not realizing at the time that I was using the heavy duty, maximum tension model, intended not for musicians but for mountain climbers. My focus, and grip of steel, paid off, enabling me to develop the muscles in my ring finger to the point where it was as strong and flexible as the other fingers. The rest of the time of the time I enjoyed a fairly normal teenage Bay Area existence, walking to school, hanging out with a few good friends, and growing pot in my closet. |
Then I moved with my father to Hawaii. My Dad’s family has roots in Hawaii going back to 1865, when as a young boy my great-great grandfather came to the Big Island from Berwick-Upon-Tweed in England, by way of Canada, to start an iron works to service the local sugarcane mills. His son my Great GF was a big figure in the islands, and his legacy is remembered today by Lydgate Park, a state park on Kauai named in honor of his contributions to the local community and culture. It was a big move but I remember being very excited about it.
On Kauai, as I finished high school, I studied bass with the school’s music teacher, Mary Alfiler, formerly known as Mary Gannon, who had been the bass player in an all-girl psychedelic rock band, Ace of Cups, which back in the day opened for Jimi Hendrix, Santana, and The Band. Mary’s group never cut an album, but all their friends became big, and her band is still remembered because its name appears as the opening act on so many famous concert posters from that era.
The high school I went to on Kauai had the same loose approach to education as Peninsula School, and I was able to come to school every day barefoot with my Ukulele. (Given Hawaii’s laid-back style, this wasn’t as out of place as it may sound.) Often I wouldn’t really go to class, instead accompanying Mary the music teacher as she made her rounds from classroom to classroom, teaching the younger grades to play and sing. I learned Opihi Man and countless other ukulele songs, as well as the chord shapes to accompany them (if you move to Hawaii, and you have any interest in music, you get handed an ukulele). And I remember playing Mary’s vintage basses: a Mosrite from the 60’s and a classic old Gibson. In the school’s Music Room Mary had a 4-track cassette recorder and a bunch of instruments, including an upright piano and a drum set. We used to jam in there all the time -- with varying degrees of finesse and cacophony, |
Will Lydgate, Steelgrass Farm co-owner, stands by
one of the award-winning hives at Steelgrass Farm. Steelgrass tied for second place
in the best appearance category of the First Hawaiian Natural Honey Challenge on the Big Island. |
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but we were learning. Down the hall from the Music Room, the men’s bathroom was all tile and mirrors and concrete and had this long reverb time. It was there that I developed a love of singing in reverberant bathrooms. I got to perform at many of the school assemblies, and when it came time to play at graduation, all six of us in the senior class were in the band except for one student, who boycotted the ceremony because she wasn’t allowed to wear her lip ring.
At some point during high school I acquired a 1964 pre-CBS Frankenstrat with some major mojo. The guy I got it from who told me to subscribe to a magazine called Musician’s Friend, and Berklee College of Music must have bought the magazine’s mailing list, because sometime later I got in the mail a pamphlet advertising Berklee’s Five-week Program. I gazed at that pamphlet for many hours, hesitating because I had heard Berklee was a school for people who wanted to be commercial musicians. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to write advertising music, but I was sure I was serious about my music, so I decided to enroll, and right after graduation I headed to Boston.
Needless to say, attending the Five-Week Program was one of the most wonderful experiences in my life. There were all these interesting people around my age, and an amazing sense of excitement about music and the creative self. Coming from a small and sometimes small-minded island to this thriving, vibrant community in Boston was a revelation. A group of attractive female ballet students from Boston Conservatory was also doing a summer program; we shared the same cafeteria, and I remember having a great time hanging out with them that summer. I also recall maxing out my mother’s credit card at an Israeli restaurant called Café Jaffa, where I often went for lunch.
After the five-weeks I headed off to Southern Oregon University where I had planned to study Electric Bass. After Berklee, I assumed that every college would have an electric bass department. It turned out all they had was an Acoustic bass teacher, and he was there only on Saturday mornings because he worked as a lawyer during the week. So Saturday mornings I did the best I could to drag my college-aged self out of the dorms, walk over to the music building, take a bass out of the bass locker and learn acoustic bass. I couldn’t be more thankful for that; playing upright bass is a unique skill and one that takes a real teacher to teach. All of my upright bow technique came from that teacher.
Southern Oregon was a liberal arts college, offering music but also many other subjects. Opting for as much music as I could, I tried to make my school experience just like the one I had had at Berklee. What I wanted was a music school, so I did the best I could with what I had. My other classes consisted of ear training, theory, and choirs. I sang a lot, and eventually became a voice major. As my Berklee teacher Whit Browne later told me, “if you can’t sing it you can’t play it.” I played out a lot with local bands and played bass in the jazz band, but I yearned for more. Where was the comprehensive music study like I had had at Berklee? Where were the players? Where was the experience?
Just before my Junior year at SOU started I got a call from a friend who had recently joined a band called Giant People. Apparently the band was looking for a bass player. I felt that this was my opportunity. As visiting bass player David Santos said at a Berklee clinic I attended, "if you want to get a great gig, seek it -- take steps in the direction towards your goal." So I did the audition, got the gig, and put schooling on pause. Touring with the band was a fun time in my life: I had arrived. We wore suits, played at cool clubs, we slept on people’s couches and floors after gigs. Some of it was gritty, but most of it seemed glamorous to me.
After a year of touring with Giant People I was armed with newfound confidence, and decided it was time to return to my formal education. This time I was determined to go to a real music school, Berklee. With four semesters left to go for my degree, economic times were tough, and I learned that I was needed back at home on Kauai at the farm. It was time to pitch in. I was sad to leave Boston, but at that time it felt right to come home.
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Our family farm grows chocolate, vanilla and bamboo, and we have a good-sized agritourism component. Fortunately for me, we also have a state-of-the-art recording studio designed by Berklee Professor Stephen Webber, for which I serve as manager and recording engineer. This has brought me into contact with many successful musicians. One of them, my hero Bill Kreutzmann, was the original drummer with the Grateful Dead. To have Bill call me up and say, hey Will, do you wanna jam? -- that is a cool thing! Graham Nash lives on Kauai and has sat in with us on gigs. I have played multiple gigs with Donavon Frankenreiter, a seriously great musician and international recording and touring artist. We played a super fly hotel opening with him at the Edition Waikiki (Christina Aguilara was right by the stage!) and the next week he was playing on Jimmy Kimmel. |
One of my favorite studio sessions was recording Buffy St. Marie for the Wavy Gravy movie St. Misbehavin', which also allowed me to hang out with Wavy, even go to the beach with him. Getting to sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ with Wavy at the top of my lungs while he accompanied us on his monochord was a singular experience. Our studio has engineered and worked on voice projects for numerous companies including Dreamworks, ESPN and HBO. I am in a wonderful band called the Yes Men. I have the pleasure of being a songwriting partner with Preeta Carlson, a true talent. I also have the pleasure of teaching music at Kauai Pacific School, the best little school on Kauai’s north shore. I am excited to teach music, songwriting, engineering, and production.
All of these experiences have made me into a man who loves art and music what they can do for the human experience. I am very excited to be writing music, playing music, producing music, engineering music and voice recording projects. I am even more excited to be teaching all of the above things in my community. I remember what bassist Michael Rhoades from Nashville told me: the rising tide raises all ships. I take that to mean, the better we all get the better we all get. The more I learn and the better I get at what I do the more I can contribute to my community. The more I can tribute to my community, the more my community gives back to me. I have learned that to really get, in this world, you must give. Service is the ultimate task before us. In the words of the modern Saint Wavy Gravy, ‘put your good where it does the most’. I am so excited to do just that! And to do whatever I can to deepen my art and my craft! |
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- Will Lydgate |
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