Reading about Joni's first encounters with the folk singers of the old Flick Coffee House, near the Univ. of Miami, brought me all the way back there. I came as a freshman to the U of M music school in 1963, the year the Flick opened. I had no money at all, and lived on coconuts and discarded rolls I salvaged from the turned-in cafeteria trays. Later, I got a job singing at the Ale House on Wed, nights: three sets for ten bucks and all the beer you could drink. I talked the manager into substituting all the hamburgers I could eat instead of the beer, a decision he made reluctantly, and lived to regret.
I saw all the greats at the Flick, including Fred Neil, Vince Martin, Mike Smith, and Bob Ingrahm. However, the part about Ms. Mitchell's recollections of the Flick that most touched me was her vivid and touching remembrances of Ron Kickasola, a surpassing musician/folk singer, much less known than those other performers.
Because I was stone broke all the time, and a struggling music student at the U, I was often allowed to sneak through the kitchen to avoid the cover charge. Once inside, I could sit anywhere I could find a seat, but since the patron area was always crowded with small tables and the place packed to the walls, I usually watched the stage from the edge of the kitchen.
I began to take private guitar lessons from Ron Kickasola, who started out charging me a very nominal fee, $5. a lesson, (I have no idea how I scraped that money up!...maybe from singing in church and temples choirs), but he soon told me to come on by once a week for a lesson whether I had money or not. Over a year's time, I took about thirty lessons from him, and he changed my musical life thereby.
One of the reasons Ron agreed to teach me (he had few or no private students)was that I was a theory/composition major, played several other instruments, and was a singer (as "declared instrument" at the school). Ron's musicianship was so advanced, compared to the rank and file of folk singers, that he appreciated the fact that he did not have to teach me remedial theory and harmony. We were alike in many ways musically: we both wrote, orchestrated and arranged music, easily sight-read any music, and both played several other instruments, for ex. he, the cello, and I, the double bass. I also played flute and recorders.
I think Ron enjoyed our lessons, in that I came to him already theoretically prepared, and he could then concentrate solely on guitar techniques, picking styles, progressions, and folk song interpretation. Ron first taught me the Travis pick, from which basic starting point I branched out far and wide in finger-picking styles. I remember him teaching me "The Cuckoo," as he performed it with many double-hammering moves. I am not now a folk singer and never was one, however, Ron began my serious training in acoustic guitar, and most everything I do today can be clearly traced back to his lessons, which were stuffed with high musicality. I have great and fond memories of his gentle, unselfish and willing spirit, as well as his towering musicianship.
Today, guitar is still my main instrument (after voice), and I play some twenty medieval, Renaissance, and baroque instruments, along with a dozen modern ones. Above all my teachers at the U of M music school, Ron, some three blocks away at the Flick, was most influential to my musical career.
I thank Ms. Mitchell for her poignant reflection of her early young days at the Flick, and her fine recollections of Ron Kickasola, my fondest-remembered teacher in my own halcyon days of youth.
Michael Roy Eaton
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