October 2008

David Eisner: World music man

photo: Julie Wiatt

"People still want to see and hear the musicians and share the experience with other music lovers, which is different than sitting at home with headphones plugged in."

Interview with Howard and Diana Kohn

In 1974, David Eisner found a deal in Berkeley Springs too good to turn down. He had done his College Park thing (University of Maryland competitive swimmer and psychology major) and his Takoma Park thing (proprietor of the Maggie’s Farm head shop and proprietor of a music store).

He was ready to move on, and, for a paltry $25,000, he purchased a high-ceiling house with commercial space, living quarters, six fireplaces and a backyard stream on the main street in Berkeley Springs.

For seven years, what David calls his “back-to-the-land phase,” he settled into this charmed spot. After a while, though, he was drawn back to the horn-honking hubbub. In 1981 he reopened his music store in Takoma Park, and for two years he shuttled between the two towns.

“That drove me crazy,” David recalled on a recent afternoon, sitting in an Old Takoma eatery. “I had to give up one of them.”

He ultimately chose Takoma Park for a different kind of charm—an eclectic collection of people from far-flung places whose eclectic, far-flung musical tastes suited his own. The instruments on sale in his store range from lap dulcimers to an Irish bouzouki to monkey drums to a wooden pennywhistle.

During the next 25 years David’s House of Musical Traditions at 7040 Carroll Avenue became a legendary destination for musicians seeking the impossible to find. At the same time David became the “Music Man” of Takoma Park and Silver Spring, a local concert impresario at the scene, it seemed, of every funky, offbeat and fun-loving musical event in the area.

Then, a few months ago, David moved again. This time, however, it was just across the street, to 7010 Westmoreland Avenue.

After all these years, why the sudden move?

Business changed. A lot more orders come over the Internet, and in the old store we had to move boxes and climb over Styrofoam peanuts to mail anything. We had no discrete warehouse space separate from retail.

I also wanted to separate the $200 starter guitars from the $3,700 Gibsons. In the old store a kid would come in and flail away on a starter and then point to a Gibson and say, hey, let me try that one. You really couldn’t say, I’m sorry, man, you can’t do that. I has the same problem with a 36-string gorgeous Celtic harp which was next to a three-year-old yelling “mommy, mommy” and banging away on a floor tom. So, in the new store, we have a guitar salon on the second floor, and a special room for harps and hammered dulcimers. And lower-priced instruments are on the first floor. Not that we’re snobbish about it, but…

Your new store used to be occupied by Mary Chapin Carpenter and Studio One Artists.

That’s a cool legacy. I like that.

Chapin left a while ago, but now there seems to be a music renaissance right at the corner of Westmoreland and Carroll.

Very true. We have a new sound company called Sounds Reasonable, a very talented bunch of engineers, plus we’re also doing professional audio repair. Then next door there is a new dance studio—Kelly Mayfield with Echo Park—and we’re using her studio as performance space for unamplified concerts. You might call it a house concert, but we’re going to call it the Emerging Artists series because it’s not in someone’s living room where you sit on a couch and bump into the paintings behind your head. This is a little more professional but still has the wonderful vibe of a living room.

A couple more doors down is Charlie Pilzer of Azalea Recordings, who is moving Airshow here. Now Airshow is not just any old studio – this is a Grammy winning, tremendous track record, nationally known studio. Charlie got tired of driving his Prius back and forth between Takoma Park and Springfield, Virginia, and I am thrilled. So now, within 50 yards of each other, there is our music store, a pro audio repair service, a dance studio, a performance space, a recording studio and also, I almost forgot, a new digital mastering and music lessons space above Curves.

You and Charlie are prime movers for an upgrade of the auditorium at the Takoma Park Community Center, now scheduled to happen sometime next year. Will that be a concert venue?

When they do the renovation they will remove the City Council dais on the stage and replace it with a modular unit, so the new auditorium can be a venue for lots of events. Concerts will be a piece of cake. It’s about a 200-seater that slopes back nicely. Not a lot of parallel walls or hard surface. It already sounds good and with a little more acoustic treatment it will sound great. It could get a lot of use. I’d certainly run stuff in there.

To back up, you also are the producer for a weekly series of concerts through the Institute for Musical Traditions—folk, bluegrass, Celtic, and so on.

IMT is a non-profit which we started in 1981 and incorporated in 1988, and we highlight not only local bands but also talent from around the country and from around the world.

For me, the common denominator is putting humans and music together, either by selling instruments, repairing their instruments, teaching them how to play instruments, making their instruments sound louder or, with IMT, bringing them together as an audience for live music. The main IMT venue now is St. Mark’s Presbyterian, which holds 250 people.

So the City auditorium would be the right size for IMT concerts?

Yes, although sometimes I say that St. Mark’s only holds 250 because we do have bands that draw big crowds. On October 20 we have the Medieval Babes, from the United Kingdom. They do early music, but they stretch it and put a more modern twist on it. They’re fabulously popular. The last time they sold out St. Mark’s two weeks in advance. So this year we’re putting them at the Glen Echo Spanish Ballroom, which holds 500 easy, with room to move around and dance.

Ipods haven’t cut into the live music scene?

I applaud Ipods and digital downloads and all the personal music technology, but it’s not the same as live music. People still want to see and hear the musicians and share the experience with other music lovers, which is different than sitting at home with headphones plugged in.

What’s your take on Live Nation getting the franchise for the new concert hall at the old Penney’s in Silver Spring?

When the Birchmere deal fell apart that bothered me because those guys are friends, and they would’ve been a good fit. I really wanted to see a local business go in. Seth Hurwitz from the 930 Club would’ve been good, too. So when I first heard about Live Nation I felt, oh, no! But I’ve mellowed from that position.

The strength of Live Nation as a music producer is immense. Not to acknowledge that they can produce top acts would be idiocy. Live Nation will select an act that’s on tour and say, when you’re done playing New York, and Philly, and Baltimore, your next stop is Silver Spring. That’s the basic economy in how they will bring in high-level talent. Will their taste in music always match the demographics of Silver Spring? On some nights, absolutely not. But overall this will work.

But the Birchmere would’ve worked better?

The good news is that Doug Duncan, who was County Executive and was the main man behind the Birchmere deal, is the new Vice President of University Affairs in College Park, where they’re building a new arts center. And he has announced it will include the Birchmere. So everybody wins. In Takoma Park we’ll have Live Nation to the left and the Birchmere to the right.

Ellsworth Drive in Silver Spring has had a lot of success with an outdoor music series. You were involved with the “Function at the Junction” series in Takoma Park this summer, which was similar but smaller. Is it possible to duplicate the Ellsworth success here?

Well, I’m happy Ellsworth is there, and the Junction and Old Takoma are here. For our Junction series we had four really good bands on four successive Friday nights. The triangle at the actual Junction has too much noise from trucks and buses, but we set up over by the side of the Coop, which is a much better spot.

The City kicked in a reasonable amount of money to pay the bands and engineers.
But if you wanted to make it into a bigger deal, more like Ellsworth, that would mean getting more funding. You get the funding, and I’m happy to do it. To me, it’s just looking in my phone directory, calling up my buddies, Joe Uehlein and Billy Coulter and Lea. It’s not hard. I’d love to do more outdoor music.

Of course, Takoma Park sets the standard with outdoor festivals.

Absolutely. How many towns of this size have three annual music festivals with almost no corporate sponsorship? We’ve got the Folk Festival, the Street Festival, the Jazz Festival, and I’ll bet between the three there’s less than a total of $40,000 in corporate sponsorship.

You’ve always handled the music at the Street Festival, and the festival is always a success. What makes it work?

The Street Festival didn’t always work. It was re-invented every year until Andrea Urciolo stepped in and started to take care of all the grunt work, the permits, working with the City, arranging for crafts people and food vendors, which left me to arrange only the bands and sound engineers. After that, for several years, Andrea and I would sit down and say, let’s cut that, let’s try this. But we had a basic routine. It was like spring training with a lot of familiar faces.

Then Andrea retired, and I thought I’d have to start all over, but she handed it off perfectly. Roz Grigsby from the Main Street program does it now, and it’s the same as with Andrea, no dropped baton. We have all the procedures down. It’s pretty easy.

Roz and I were joking that we could take the festival on the road, so to speak. We could export it. It’s not an insignificant amount of work, but we have the institutional memory. We’re not offering, but if another town asked, Roz and I could consult on how to do it.

You had 18 different bands this year. Where do you find them?

We’re really fortunate that Takoma Park is crawling with musicians. Of the 18 bands, ten either had a resident or a very direct connection to Takoma Park. And that’s the way it should be. Next year that lineup will change by 30 to 50 percent so people don’t come to the festival and say, hey, that’s the same as last year.

Actually, way more bands apply than we have spots for. Nobody does it for the money. We pay an honorarium, but like I tell them, you can use it for a very nice pizza night. But they understand it’s a great setting and can lead to other gigs.
The key is the trust between myself and the bands. Joe Uehlein will say he’d love to play it, and I will say yes, and that’s it, end of contract. I know he’ll get his tech sheet over to the engineer and be ready to play on time. We need everyone to be punctual. The festival hasn’t run over by more than seven minutes ever, which is important because the City has to reopen the street on time.

In the first years of the Folk Festival you came in all the way from Berkeley Springs.

Yeah. I remember sitting at the top of the hill at Takoma Park Middle School in the middle of the festival and thinking, it’s great to be here, but I live in Berkeley Springs. Then I moved back here, not just because of the festival, but I love it. I remember one time, at the Saturday dance the night before the festival, we had a pickup truck filled with sweet corn that we were going to cook the next day. At the end of the dance, the emcee said, can I get some volunteers to shuck corn? We came out of the dance, sat on the tailgate of the pickup truck and shucked corn. You don’t get a better community feeling than that.

Any other special memories?

There was the time Sam Abbott asked his good buddy Pete Seeger to play, and Pete said yes. Now we had a problem. Because no other musician wanted to be playing on another stage while Pete Seeger was playing. Pete played at 3 o’clock on the field stage, if memory serves, and when he came on, we had all the other stages go dark. That was the way we solved it.

But it also raised the question, do we want to have headliner acts? Which is one main reason we don’t seek out headliners.

Chopteeth is becoming sort of a local festival legend.

Did you notice that Chopteeth is the only band that played the Jazz Festival and Folk Festival and also closed down the Street Festival. They’re a good act to bring down the house. Although Mike, the guitar player, was complaining because I scheduled Chopteeth to play at the same time as the Nighthawks, and he wanted to go over to their stage and hear them. That’s a good problem when you have musicians wanting to hear each other.

Final question—how did you get connected to Medieval Babes and the other bands that aren’t local.

The cool thing about having a shop like House of Musical Traditions is people come to me. This month there’s a group coming over from Bangladesh. It used to be East meets West, but now it’s a two-way. The Eastern musicians want to import some of the Western influences.

A lot of different options and opportunties come our way because we have a reputation that we’re willing to listen to anybody and support almost anything.

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