Interviewed by Leonard Chan (LC) and Philip Chin (PC)

This September 13, 2024 will mark the 55th anniversary of the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival concert. Some time after the concert, someone would describe this concert as being the second most important event in rock and roll history.

This description may seem like hyperbole today when performers like Taylor Swift regularly pack stadiums with cheering fans, but in 1969, less than a month after the famed concert at Woodstock, legendary performers that were at the forefront of Rock and Roll music in the 1950s, came together for one last big revival concert in Toronto.

The Rock legends that were present included Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, and Little Richard. Some of the others that would perform that day were contemporary 60s acts such as Chicago, Junior Walker and the All Stars, Alice Cooper, and surprise guest performers John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band. One lesser known group that would perform that day was “Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys.” Charlie Chin, a now local San Mateo entertainer, historian, and writer was a member of “Cat Mother.”

Charlie Chin would later join in the 1970s with Nobuko (Joanne) Miyamoto and Chris Iijima to produce and perform the first Asian American folk album “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America.”

Philip and I first interviewed Charlie Chin in June of 1998 regarding his children’s book “China’s Bravest Girl” for AACP’s new website. We didn’t yet have an email newsletter, but this interview became the model for what we hoped to do with our Internet presence.

At that time, we learned of Charlie’s extensive music career and had always wanted to interview him about it. Now, 26 years later, we finally got around to doing it.

Thank you Charlie for this chance to do this interview.

Charlie Chin's Early Days in the Folk Music Scene

LC: From your first interview with us, you said you were born in New York City. Did you grow up in New York’s Chinatown? How close were you to Greenwich Village? What were your musical influences – mentors, teachers, friends, and or in the media? How did you get into learning and playing music? I hope this doesn’t come off sounding a bit racist to our readers, but help explain how a Chinese boy ends up playing American folk music and rock.

No… I didn't grow up in Chinatown, I grew up in Queens. We used to come to Chinatown on the weekends occasionally.

Greenwich Village, West Village, Tribeca, Chinatown, Lower East Side – you can walk from one to the other in a matter of minutes.

How I got my start is pretty simple – it's traditional. My family on my mother's side is West Indian Chinese from Trinidad and Tobago.

People tend to forget because this is America. They think American history is the only history that counts. We came with the British as Chinese laborers to Trinidad in 1805 to cut sugar cane and harvest cocoa beans and that went on for a generation or two, but as it had inevitably happened, they became slowly but surely part of the middle class of the islands. That being the case the personality profile of West Indian Chinese is completely different than American Chinese who spend so much time being oppressed that there's an unconscious habit of constantly keeping yourself contained and reserved because it's dangerous to do otherwise.

Whereas the West Indian Chinese are totally open, dance, carry-on, are loud. It's a completely opposite different situation. So people party too. When you have a house party everybody comes over to bring food and usually in the kitchen the boys start singing and what they end up doing is playing just some improvised instruments, maybe a pot or something and using what we call the cuatro. A cuatro is a four string guitar – it is the first cousin of the ukulele.

If you can play the cuatro, you can play the ukulele. If you can play the ukulele, you can play the cuatro. And it came from Venezuela, which is spitting distance from Trinidad.

So when I grew up, I played the cuatro. Then in high school, what happened was some of the people who I liked, usually the people who were better read and less ignorant, who were interested in culture, intellectual, who read, were at that time playing music, folk music, American folk music, guitars, and banjos, etc.

Well, it's a very small step from playing the cuatro to a guitar. It's tuned like the upper four strings and are very similar. So if you can play the cuatro, you can play some guitar. So I ended up doing that, and then following the general thing, which was that people were heading down to Greenwich Village, which was the happening place in the turn of 1960, 61, 62, and there was a folk music movement, so I got into that because I could play a little, I could sing a little.

Many people have difficulty singing because they're afraid they'll embarrass themselves, but in the background I had, everybody sang, so it doesn't matter. So singing and playing allowed me to integrate myself with some of these other people who I admired.

When I turned 18, my father said, “You’re 18. You know, I can't feed you anymore. If you want, we can try to help you get through college, or you can join the army.”

So I said, I don't want to join the army. I'm not interested in going to college. I don't want to get a job. Thanks. I'll see you later. So what happens is I left home and headed for Greenwich Village.

LC: Approximately what year was that?

1961, going into 1962.

LC: I’ve seen you play guitar, banjo, ukulele, some sort of flute, and even an erhu (Chinese single string folk instrument). You also led a taiko group. I don’t think I’ve actually seen you playing a taiko drum, but I assume you play that too. Which instrument are you best at? Did you learn all of these instruments when you were growing up or did you pick them up over time? Were you self taught, learned some of it in school, or had private or family tutors? Oh, how old were you when you started to play the cuatro?

Oh, 10, 11, something around there.

All right, so now the deal with the different instruments is this. I show up in Greenwich Village and I'm playing. What we used to do is work basket houses. A basket house was a small cafe, not much bigger than this room we're in now. And it was fly-by-night.

They didn't really have a license to have a cafe and certainly did not have a license for having entertainment or music. But what they used to do was say, “Well we don't hire these people, the musicians, the comedians, whatever, they come in and then they pass a hat. They pass a little basket.” So…these were called basket houses and they were very common. I played a bunch of them because I ran out of money by the time I'm 19… 

Now the deal is this, you get hired sometimes when you're working in bands because you have to have a structured band. So one of the things that happens is in order to make a profit, you can't hire too many people because especially if you go on the road you have to provide everybody with per diem, three meals a day and a place to sleep, right?

So what would happen is let's say we have these four guys and what we want to do is we want to have this one song where there's a harmonica solo or banjo solo. Is it worth it to hire one more guy just to do this one song?

No, it's easier to hire one guy who can play three or four instruments and pay him a little more than having to pay two to three times more, right? That's the logic. Okay so what I learned to do was double on a lot of instruments.

Now doubling on an instrument is not terribly difficult if it's exactly that, if you're not the lead. If you're just providing what we call color or flavor, right? One tune on a banjo, one tune on an autoharp or something, that's fine and that heightens your chances of getting hired.

I'm sorry to sound so mercenary, but when you're living close to the edge every little bit helps. So that was the emphasis, that was the push to make sure that I was competent on at least a dozen instruments. Not an expert, not a virtuoso, but enough to cover and in many cases not so terribly difficult. There are, again, things where there's a related situation. If you understand one, you understand the basis of the other.

So the instruments I learned to play include cuatro, ukulele, guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, electric bass, accordion, erhu, Chinese flutes (Ti Zi and Xiao), Japanese flutes (fue and Shakuhachi), Western flute, and taiko.

For a while I was thinking… I'm going to become a classical guitarist because I realized number one, you know all these guitar players and banjo players and I thought to myself, the world does not need another Chinese banjo player.

What I need to do is use, since I didn't have any education, I didn't go to college, use this time to study someplace and become proficient at classical guitar because that's respected and also you can get hired like in certain places…

So I started to look around and I found out that there was this place in Roslyn, Long Island, called the Guitar Workshop. They needed a banjo teacher. I could teach banjo. And I went in to check it out and I realized, hey this is interesting. It was a very early very innovative thing where five days a week they were teaching guitar classes preparing people for a classical guitar career. I said this is for me but I don't have any money. How am I going to pay for this?

I talked to the director, and I said, I'm interested in studying, but I don't have any money. So he said, “I'll tell you what I'll do… you work here during the week. You clean the yard.” Later I was to do the cooking, too. “Help us with drilling.” Drilling is a very important part of a new musical education. “And handle some of the beginning students. And you can study here for free.”

So I said, ta-da. OK, I'm in. And so about two years I did that. I worked with a really intense situation. We had an offer where if you studied with us for six weeks under a certain contract, we guaranteed your money back if you weren't able to play the guitar at the end of six weeks… We were there like two or three hours a day.

So this is a lot of my early training until something happened around 1966. One day I looked around and I realized, you know, I watched concerts of other classical guitar players. And I go, “This is really boring. These guys are just sitting there like statues… And the guitar player comes out and says, thank you, thank you. He goes through all of this like he's Franz Liszt or something.” And then the crowd for the audience is so small.

Then I went to a rock concert later and I look. I said, “Look at this. These guys have got guitars and they're just like playing three chords. Anybody can learn to play three chords. They've got shoulder length hair. They're wearing tight jeans. And the girls are following them everywhere. I'm going to become a rock and roll player.” There it is.

LC: I just read this short article about you on the Steve Hoffman Music Forums written by someone going by the name of Lukpac. Lukpac asks you about your banjo playing on the song Bluebird by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group “Buffalo Springfield.” I had always wanted to ask you about this and here was the answer already posted online. Could you retell this story for our readers, but maybe give more details about your early days in Greenwich Village playing at small clubs and cafes with Stephen Stills (song writer of “Bluebird” who went on to form the super group “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young”).

Steve used to work the folk music scene. We worked some of the same coffee houses. He used to play a big, blonde, I think it was a blonde Epiphone. Good singer. He was still doing folk, you know, straight ahead folks. He wasn't into writing too much yet.

And every… set was roughly 20 minutes long and they often had four people in the house. So that means that every… hour and something, you got back on. So you went out two or three times a night. Maybe more, depending, because sometimes places didn't close until two or three o 'clock in the morning. So sooner or later, because it's so intense, you meet everybody who's working on the same level that you're working on. Everybody knows everybody else because it's just proximity.

Steve's a nice guy. We got friendly. And I crashed at his place a few times when my girlfriend screwed me up. And we kept in touch. Over the years, his work took him further and further out in another area. But that's a whole other series of stories.

But we stayed in touch in part because what happens is, and this is a very important issue when it comes to some of these rock stars, the higher up you go, the lonelier it is. There's fewer and fewer people you can trust. 

Because when you get the fame and when you get the money, there are people who want fame just by proximity, just by standing next to you, just by having talked to you. And they'll chase you down the street because they want to say, well, I talked to him…

The thing is, progressively, the bigger you get, the more difficult it is to have relationships of any kind, because everybody has an agenda. So this is why, in some other cases, people don't realize that this veneration, it can be absolutely frightening.

I was home. I got a phone call. Steve was back from the West Coast working on an album. He said, “Come on up, and we'll talk in between takes.” Which was very nice of him. See that's the whole point. He was in town, he wanted to say hello, but he couldn't get away from the recording studio, but he said, “Well you can come up, we can sit and we'll talk in between takes…”

So I said, sure. Then as an afterthought he said, “You still play the banjo?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Bring a banjo.”

I get off of the elevator in the building and he's in the hallway playing. He says, “Can you play this?” So I listened, “Yeah I can play it.” He said, “I want to take a tape.” I said, “okay.” So we walk into a studio.

He goes, “All right, when you hear this, that's the cue.” I said, “Okay.” He's behind the glasses. And he's goes, “Play it.” And he says, “Let's do two just to make sure.” I said, “Okay.” Then we went back in, we were talking, I was going to explain what was going on in my life.

He was saying what it was like in L .A. and how things were. And then I said, “Well I've got to go, you know, it getting late.” He said, “Okay, I'm going to be gone by tomorrow. I have to take a plane back to L.A.”

That was it.

LC: Did you know exactly what this was going to be used for?

No, I had no idea. But on the other hand, this is a very large part of life.

Some particular thing that you might have said or done, unconsciously, or just because there were circumstances as you understand or understood that were different, you do it, you say it or whatever, and suddenly it… gets a life of its own.

Now I've worked on productions, like theater productions and stuff, where we were involved six months of work, worked on something else for like seven months, right? Nobody remembers any of it.

35 seconds of playing the banjo, once, everybody remembers it, right? Nobody ever comes up to me and says, well, how many years did you work at the Chinese Historical Society as a historian? And if I turn and say, “Oh, about 14.” You go, “Oh, but did you play the banjo on Bluebird?” I say, “What about this…” Well, you understand what I'm saying.

LC: Yeah. But the interesting thing is that it is such a memorable thing and it was so small. It was the perfect coda to the song.

That's all right. That's what I'm trying to tell you. That's how life happens. Things happen. You don't think about it. You weren't concerned about it. Things happen.

Cat Mother, Woodstock, and Jimi Hendrix

LC: Please tell us about when and how you joined up with “Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys.” 

Well, as I mentioned to you, everybody knew everybody else. Walking down the street… I see a guy I know, another banjo player, the name is Roy Michaels. All the banjo players knew each other… And he was back with a little guy called Bob Smith, and he was all excited about what's going on. 

“So we just got back from California… We attended this thing called Monterey Pop.” He says, “We're gonna start a rock and roll band.” And I said, “Rock and roll's dead. Folk music is in now.” They said, “No, it's coming back… do you want to join our band?” I said, “OK.” So I did.

PC: I've always wanted to ask you about how and why Jimi Hendrix ended up producing Cat Mother’s first album “The Street Giveth.. And The Street Taketh Away.”

LC: Yes, tell us about your friendship with guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. I read that Cat Mother was Hendrix’s opening act on a tour in part of 1968 and 69. How did this happen and what was he like?

OK, number one, “Cat Mother,” as it was known later, actually had several personnel changes to solidify it, right? And it had several names. We used to work on the different names almost every different gig in the beginning because of different personnel. Until finally, we had this one job. And none of us could agree on the name.

And one of the people hanging out with us, a younger woman, said, why don't you call yourselves “Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys?” And we said, “Ha, ha, ha, please.” But we couldn't agree on any other names.

So I said, “We'll play under that name this weekend. But next weekend, we've got to choose another name.” We played that weekend. And apparently, the crowds liked us so much so, people said, “Oh, yeah, Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys,” uh-oh, were stuck with the name. That's it…

Now, what happens is at that time in the 60s, a lot of bands were moving up country. The idea was to return to nature, Woodstock, peace, love, natural. And the guys in the band decided they wanted to move to this place in what was then Saugerties… You can walk from Saugerties into Woodstock. So what happens is people say, “Oh well, you know they went up to Woodstock,” because that's the biggest town nearby. Nobody knows Shady or Saugerties or whatever. They don't know. Woodstock, which was an artist's colony, that's up there.

Okay. So we go up there, we move into this house… In the back of this farmhouse was a big field that sloped up towards a hill, which made it a natural amphitheater…

So then we said, “You know what we should do is we should have like a concert here”…

So that happened, and then one night… we wrapped the set and as we're breaking down, someone says, “There's somebody who wants to talk to you back in the house.”

“Who?”

“He's a manager, he wants to talk to you.” So, all right… we walk in and somebody says, “This is Michael Jeffries. He handles the Animals, he handles Jimi Hendrix…” we all looked at each other and said, “Yeah, what can we do for you?”

“I'd like to include you in my stable.” So, we looked at each other and we said, “Well, we have to have a meeting,” first because, unbeknownst to him, we were planning to break up. That was going to be our last show maybe, right?

And we've been together for almost two years. We had a little meeting and a side moment decided, well, you know, we worked hard for two, almost two years. We invested all this time and energy. He's offering us a record deal and management.

So, let's do it for another year, okay? And then we'll take our portions and leave. So, we agreed to do it, so that's what happened…

It's going into 1968. And it turns out that Jimi Hendrix heard us. We didn't see him. He usually had to hide in the back or something cause... he could cause a riot. And he said, “I like that band.” So, he liked us… And we got along. I think he enjoyed our style. And he thought that it could be interesting so that's why he wanted to produce us.

So we were added on to the stable and to the show. When you have a management office the big job is you've got to have one or two headliners, maybe three or four headliners if you can, but at the same time because of the nature of the music business which is a business about popularity, you have to have other people ready to take their place if somebody's numbers start to fall down. So they often have one or two warm-up bands that they're culturing that they're grooming for the headliners when the headliners time is over, which could be quite brief…

Anyway, so we joined the stable and now we're attached to the show.

End of Part 1

Next month. Part 2: Cat Mother Performs at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival and Charlie Chin moves on to performing with Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima.