Have guitar, will travel. Musicians at coastal restaurants perform to their own beat and just for the fun of it

 

By JORDAN ESSOE/YachatsNews.com

Few people show up specifically to hear you play. But there’s a microphone and an audience. Sometimes no one claps. Sometimes no one really looks at you. But the tip jar catches a handful of bills. And if you step outside for a cigarette break by your van, you can hear the ocean.

It’s a version of the dream.

Self-taught guitarist and singer Ian Smith, now in his late 50s, plays the Drift Inn in Yachats several times a month. In his 20s and 30s he really wanted to be in a successful band, but found most bands break up within six months to two years, and you spend a lot of your time on self-promotion.

He likes the laid-back nature of performing at restaurants, which allow him to focus purely on the joy of playing music.

“Every time I really pursued this professionally, it became a job,” said Smith, “and the music suffered.”

Restaurants in south Lincoln County that host live music can attract bands and solo acts from across the country who want to play small seaside gigs in the Pacific Northwest. It doesn’t pay much, but the musicians and singers don’t do it for the money.

Since the Covid outbreak, more of the talent is local. Many of the performers who play at the Drift Inn live in town, like Smith, or come from nearby Waldport or Newport. The restaurant has live music every night and a rotating stable of around 30 regular players. Few musicians travel from farther than Eugene.

It isn’t a raucous scene. Musicians sit or stand in the corner and play softly, careful not to compete with the diners’ conversations. Set lists are usually crowded with covers of familiar classic rock hits from the 1960s and 70s, geared toward entertaining both tourists and retirees.

Steve Cook, 68, who plays regularly at both The Drift Inn and The Hilltop Cafe Bistro in Waldport, has a group of cover songs that he never detours from. He plays the exact same set list, in the exact same order, every gig. He always starts with James Taylor and always ends with Cat Stevens.

“It’s probably no different than having the same menu,” said Linda Hetzler, owner of the Drift Inn. She explained that some customers really like being able to get the same thing they had last time.

Cook says people noticeably perk up when they recognize a song they already love and will lip-synch from their table while they eat. He feels a camaraderie with the diners.

“The audience is pretty much my age, in their 50s, 60s, and early 70s, so they like to sing just about every song I play.”

He admits the repetition of his set list can frustrate restaurant staff. Especially during the height of the pandemic when he was one of only two local musicians willing to gig, and he was playing the Drift Inn as many as 16 nights a month, for nearly two years.

“They would ask, ‘would you please change your song order tonight?’,” Cook said. “And I’m like, ‘no.’”

“The biggest running joke among servers was you could tell what time of the night it was just based on what song Steve was on,” said Zoë Thomas, Hetzler’s daughter, who cooks, busses, and books all the musicians at the restaurant.

Singing to his own beat

In contrast to Cook, Smith prefers to play his own songs and never works from a set list.

In a typical 2½-hour set, Smith might pepper in a couple tracks by Gordon Lightfoot or Taj Mahal, but he largely performs his own music. He improvises song-to-song what he’ll play next, reading the audience’s temperament and following his own muse.

“If the room is kind of quiet, I’ll start with an instrumental or songs that sound old-timey,” said Smith. “But after a while I just start going, and it can be a very sharp turn from one song to the next.”

Smith is a favorite of both staff and customers at the Drift, where he plays two to three times a month.

“Everyone has their followers, but in general I feel like people get the most excited about Ian,” said Thomas. “He doesn’t just do covers, and he does different things all the time. Sometimes he plays barefoot. You can just tell he loves what he’s doing.”

Smith describes his style as “singer-songwriter stuff” influenced by folk, blues, jazz, and world music. There is often a melancholy quality to his guitar work and his lyrics seem to frequently announce a kind of freshly embraced optimism.

“What I do is pretty pleasant,” said Smith. “I don’t do harsh music or edgy lyrics. I do a number of instrumentals. At worst it might not be what someone is into, but it’s not going to bother anybody.”

As a younger man, Smith struggled to write his own music. Then he watched a film where a musician described their own process like this: play a couple chords and then wait. Listen carefully for what notes should follow.

That insight had a profound effect on Smith, who began to trust his own instincts in the pursuit of finding the “right” notes. “Now I’ll hear the song going in a direction, and I just basically follow it,” said Smith.

He chases after ideas musically, but rarely sets out to write a song about any specific subject. Lyrics come second. “Almost always,” said Smith, “because I am a guitarist first and a singer second.”

As a result, he sometimes develops funny, busy songs like “Barefoot Boogie,” which Smith laughs while describing and quoting from it. “It sure sounds like the song is about something, but it really has nothing to do with anything. It’s just a fun song with a whole bunch of lyrics.”

 

Overcoming adversity

For June Rushing, a Depoe Bay singer and musician the same age as Smith, song lyrics are a slightly more sanctified ground.

“When you sing a song, you have to become the story,” said Rushing. “Sometimes I’ll start writing a lyric with an idea for a melody and struggle with it. I’ll put it away for six months until I realize the direction I need to take it in. And if the story is not one that you can portray, you really want to stay away from it.”

In “I Am Gone,” a song she wrote while going through a divorce, Rushing sings “I don’t know when you ever hear me. I don’t know think you recognize the song. I don’t know why I continue to try. When you’re here, I’m not there, I am gone.”

Rushing’s music, often a collaboration with her husband and lead guitarist Joren Rushing, is a little more impassioned and rock-influenced than many other acts that play on the coast.

Her voice is both smoky and sweet. When she sings there is the sense that her voice is always rising. That she is drawing from a deep reservoir she is only barely tapping into.

Hetzler, who presented June Rushing and her band every Wednesday for seven years at the Drift Inn, described her voice as reminiscent of Mama Cass.

“When June sings, she doesn’t even need a microphone to fill the whole restaurant with sound,” said Thomas.

But everything changed in 2019.

Rushing remembers it was May 2 because it was her father’s birthday. She felt fatigued, short of breath, nauseated, had a tightness in her chest, pain behind her left shoulder, and was overwhelmed by a sense of doom.

“Typical female, I ignored my symptoms,” said Rushing. “My husband was in the hospital with a serious illness, so I just thought I was having a long, extended panic attack.”

After four days, she finally went to a walk-in clinic in hopes of getting a sedative, and they told her she was having a heart attack. Although doctors told Rushing she would get better with time and rehab, five months later they discovered she had several blocked arteries and she had triple bypass surgery. Surgery was successful, and five months later she was supposed to finally be able to return to singing and playing music. But her first gig back was scheduled for what turned out to be the first day of the Covid pandemic lockdown.

She tried to see the forced break from her art as an opportunity to continue to rebuild her strength and heal. But just singing around the house with her husband didn’t quite scratch the itch for someone who wants to be on a stage.

“As a performer there’s a part of your soul that just doesn’t feel alive if you’re not performing,” said Rushing.

While singing is an emotional and technical feat, it is also a physical one, and the bypass surgery has taken its toll on Rushing’s body. When she breathes too deeply, it’s quite painful.

She’s working back up to belting notes again, and has already played a few gigs this year. To future potential venues and restaurant owners, she says, “Let us play. Please let us play. We want so badly to play.”

She says performing is part of what keeps her healthy.

Smith, who also stopped playing gigs for two years during the initial waves of the Covid pandemic, agrees.

“There is something about playing music for people that is good for mental health,” said Smith, who describes feeling fantastic after playing at a restaurant. “Because for two hours it was nothing but music.”

For any musicians who might want to get into the local scene, Smith says he may or may not recommend it, depending on what you want from performing.

“If you want feedback and attention, then I would say no. Because you can’t count on what kind of crowd response you’re going to have,” said Smith. He also warns that if you are a stickler for fine musical nuances, they can easily get lost in the clutter of sounds from a busy dinner hour. “Playing music to a noisy room can be hard on the brain.”

He says the people-watching can be fun. You can see who is listening and who isn’t. And if someone turns around, you know who you are playing for. Sometimes it feels like you are playing for only one table. And if that one table starts to clap, the whole dining room might join in.

“But for me, there doesn’t have to be anybody there,” said Smith. No matter what is going on, “I’m going to play my music.”

• Jordan Essoe is a Waldport-based freelance writer who can be reached at alseajournal@gmail.com