Peter Harper: the man with the famous last name

Peter Harper at Opening Bell Coffee in Dallas. (Photo: Peter Harper collection)

Peter Harper has a famous last name, but he is hell-bent on making a name of his own.

He has turned out an album, rich and lyrical, self-titled Peter Harper. He admitted that he was not trained musically although he grew up surrounded by music; his family has run the famed Folk Music Center in Claremont, California for several generations. His first love was art, sculpture and it has informed his approach to music.

“I wanted to sculpt something that I couldn’t find the words for and I couldn’t find the imagery for and so I had to transition to the guitar…sculpting sound,” he once said in an interview. And that is the way he talks; in full paragraphs, often apologizing for being so verbose.

He visited Dallas for a few shows and after his show at the Opening Bell Coffee shop, he explained his craft. He said most people write songs by trying to find just the right chords, “but I picture it differently; I am sculpting airways.” And he gave the example that talking is bending the airwaves and those airwaves oscillate the hair in the ear of the listener and send signals to the brain. So when he is writing he is shaping the air around the listener and the listener is affected physically and emotionally. And there is a delicate balance; if you send the wrong sounds…

One of the songs he wrote is called Caroline, a haunting and touching song. So I put the question to him: who is Caroline? Is Caroline your mother? A past lover? The answers to those questions, he would not reveal. To reveal would be to destroy the magic, he said.

He said, he gets the question about Caroline a lot. “Caroline is unique,” he said. And in a way it is a victory to his point about ‘shaping airwaves.’ The fact that so many people ask about Caroline proves there is “an overlap of sensation.” He has achieved that balance; he has shaped the airwaves.

Like his mother before him, he grew up around the family-run Folk Music Center which is part museum, part repair shop, part music school. There are instruments from every continent: “mandolins, ukuleles, but no marching bands, no brass or wind, no electric. Acoustic.

“People walk in and stop at the door and their mouths drop. There is nothing like it. I’ve seen everything. I drove around the country three times!”

But he didn’t always have such reverence for the family business. As a child, he said, he took it for granted. “It was where I went after school and spent every day of my life; nothing special. If you grow up with a whale, you don’t think what a big whale, it eats a lot. It’s just a whale.”

It was not until he was about 20 that “I saw the world differently and took a long look; not everyone had a music store. It was something special.”

For Thanksgiving holiday, his grandmother would cook a huge meal and anyone who visited the store who did not have a family or a place to eat a special holiday meal would be invited. There would be “a lot of unique personalities. People would play the best and worst music.”

In college, he picked up the guitar. “I learned a few chords but I didn’t take to it. It defeated me for years.”

In his early thirties, he wrote a few songs and played them for his mother. “She said, your voice is spectacular, your lyrics are great, but your guitar playing is terrible,” he said; and he laughed at the memory.

With that, he switched from the guitar to the ukulele “and I immediately found my way around it.” With so many knowledgeable people around the the Folk Center, one Jerry O’Sullivan encouraged him to pick up the tenor guitar, a four-string guitar. O’Sullivan told him, if you get the ukulele, you would get the tenor. And so it was.

Peter Harper, the California kid, finds himself in Dallas and he constantly and publicly thanks one Bill Wisener, who runs Bill’s Records just down the street from where he was playing at the Opening Bell. “Why just stay in California? Why not find new places and new people?” He looks forward to coming to Dallas to again. And at the end of his little concert, he told his listeners, “May be next time, I’ll bring my band.”


                                        **********************

Related articles
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-ben-harper-duets-20140629-story.html#page=1