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

If you haven’t read Part 1, click on the following link. Part 1 - Early Career, Blue Bird, and Joining Cat Mother

We continue with Charlie Chin and his group “Cat Mother” being added to the stable of performers that toured with Jimi Hendrix.

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So when you have concerts, at the time, the number of rock concerts happens almost every weekend because it was a fast way to make money for the people who put them on.

We did a couple here in the States, Detroit, Baton Rouge, up in Canada, all these different gigs. So one up in Canada, in Toronto, we were invited to do that because we already were in Canada working at another place.

And somebody said, all right, it was a good idea. And the management office said, we'll do this, we'll hitch you on to this, piggyback you on to this, because you're going to be there anyway. So it's a savings in flight.

You don't have to buy tickets or pay freight. It's another issue people forget. You see a rock and roll band – they have those amplifiers behind them and all that equipment. Well, how does it get from place to place?

Roadies. How do the roadies do it? One or two ways. Either they have to ship the whole thing onto a plane and drive it on a truck onto a plane. I'm talking about load it in and fly it to someplace else… 

Or they have a truck and it drives to wherever the next gig is, right? So this is a lot of money. It's a lot of outlay. So in many cases, if the house doesn't guarantee paying for freight, you can't take the job because if it comes out of your portion of the money, it's astounding how much it's gonna cost.

People don't realize because they don't see it. It's all hidden behind the scenes, right? So yeah, sometimes in a case like this, it was a savings for our management office just to send us over in the same city since we were there already, rather than have to make a separate trip, shipping everything up to Canada, getting all of us plane tickets.

You know, interestingly enough, a lot of decisions are made not for artistic reasons, but just very simple, basic economic reasons.

LC: At what point did you know you were on the bill for Toronto?

I didn't know until about a day or two before.

LC: did you get to meet any of the headliners? How much interaction is there between the various performers?

I did get a chance to speak to Chuck Berry. We shook hands, but I couldn't speak to Jerry Lee Lewis or to Little Richard because we were in the second corral.

This is backstage at a big concert or a big festival. There are certain sections and you can get from one section to another through security, only if you have clearance. Sometimes what they do now is they give you a special badge, right?

The outer badge section is this closed off area and that's for the techies, for the guys who do the lights, the sound, all this other stuff. There's an inner one where it's the first level or the first group of bands and their roadies who are gonna do the opening or the middle section. And then there's a final enclosure where all the top stars are.

So you can often meet and talk to everybody below you or those heading towards the outside. But you really don't get a chance to speak to the guys with the headliners because they're in a whole separate section. They get their own separate bus sometimes. They don't have to deal with anybody else.

I saw Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, a half a dozen other people.

Bo Diddley, I did not have to shake hands with him. I've worked with him before… I had met Bo Diddley in Detroit when we did a concert over there. But you know, the same thing. We weren't pals.

“Hey, how you doing? My name’s Charlie.” “My name's Bo.”

But there wasn't too much interaction. It doesn't happen like that. It's not people sitting around smoking cigars in the back and drinking cognac and telling jokes. No, you're in a separate section.

LC: So I guess in some ways, Toronto has maybe been exaggerated as to its significance.

Oh, I think it's very exaggerated.

I'm going to give you an example. You mentioned to me the piece about the Canadian gig in Toronto and that they have now a documentary about it, right?

I saw it (Revival69: The Concert That Rocked the World) the other day because I was at home and they ran it during the day… so then it's Canadian and the Canadians think a great deal of that concert because it was a very important concert in Canada…

you have to take a look... not what they're telling you, it's who's telling it too. Who's telling you that the second most important concert of that era was in Canada? The Canadians are telling you.

I don't think that concert [Toronto] drew more than 25,000 people. Right?

… At the same time in the United States I played a place in Southern, California, Devonshire Downs, it drew 80,000 people…

back then, even then, 10, 20, 30,000 was more common, right? But you could get up to like 100,000 people sometimes.

LC: Oh, I didn’t know you played at Devonshire Downs. I just looked up that concert and it didn’t list “Cat Mother” on the bill, but I did finally find something that said you were there. Tell us about it?

I remember playing at Devonshire Downs because the audience was 80,000 people. When I stood on stage a strong moist wind blew across the stage and made my hair fly back and my shirt tails flapped. The wind was caused by 80,000 people all shouting at once.

It was one of several gigs that month. I don't remember anything else clearly.

LC: Admittedly though, the lineup for the concert in Toronto, where all these people from the 50s were performing was something special. Did it happen anywhere else where all these people from the 50s were...

No, it was the beginning, but you have to remember it was just turning over, that people started to look back. What had happened was the British invasion, the English guys came over, and for a lot of people, myself included, said in the beginning… It's just a bunch of British guys playing American blues.

But they had recognized the influence of rock and roll, and blues, and rhythm and blues, and they were doing it, and then they influenced Americans…

And so that revival started. I have to be perfectly clear about that. The revival starts at Monterey Pop… All these people realize, oh wait, yeah it's a lot more involved than just folk music and light jazz. There's all this rock and roll and there's all this other stuff.

At the same time you have the entire Baby Boomer bulge reaching 17, 18, 19. They're in college or they got their own job, now they got their own money, whether they're becoming adults, and they're not stifled by the old prejudices and customs of the generation that happened before them…

It turned around and part of that was like at the Toronto Festival – that the Toronto Festival took advantage of the fact that these guys were still sitting around, still working juke joints and honky tonks and whatnot.

And then all of a sudden this revival of interest in the older African American men and women who sang the blues, it started to happen. And it happened so fast that it happened on college campuses. 

It's a classic story from B. B. King. B. B. King and his guys used to have a touring bus, and they would play the chipmunk circuit, the honky tonks, the road houses, etc.

And they were just skimming by because he said they used to have, for two purposes, a cardboard box in the front of the bus filled with like cans of tuna fish and crackers and stuff like that, so they wouldn't have to stop and eat at a restaurant if they didn't have the money. And also in certain places it wasn't safe for the black guys to leave the bus.

So they get this gig in San Francisco. They drive to the address that they were told and they're looking at these crowds of white college kids in front of the place.

“So what is this? Is this the right address?” they’re saying to each other. So they sent somebody in and he says, “Yeah, this is the right address. They want us here.” That's to point out that the older African American guys had gotten used to just playing the circuit, but they didn't realize they were becoming famous in the college-level crew and in the young emerging rock and rollers who were looking back to see where their roots were.

LC: Getting back to the Toronto concert, when did you perform and how much of the concert did you get to catch?

Not much.

We weren't headliners, so we opened up in the late afternoon, early evening.

LC: Who went on before you and after you?

There's some other local bands. Well, you know, Canadian bands. A lot of people weren't that well known yet.

Alice Cooper, as an example. I think they tried to show that in the documentary. I met him in a place called Sudbury up there in Canada while we were doing a show there.

And I saw him do the chicken thing. And I also noticed, that there was a chicken, and what he did was he threw the chicken out in the audience and then he ripped open a pillow, right, and he was going ahhh, doing all his stuff.

When I saw his show, the guys in his band were wearing summer frocks, like a teenage girl's summer frock, right, and these guys are like, you know, got tattoos and beards and smoking cigars, and going arrr arrr and playing the drum.

And I said to him when he came off, I said, I called him Al because I didn't know what else to call him, I said, “Al, what's the deal here? You guys have some act.” He says, “Oh well, you know, we're not really musicians.”

He looked at me and he says, “But rock and roll is the fastest way to make big money man.” That's it. I’ve known him for years after that, and every time I saw him, he’s a nice guy. He was in the business, you know. He was not some, what, dilettante or wacko, but he's a really nice guy. He was very practical. Fastest way to make a lot of money.

LC: So what happens after you perform? Do you just leave?

No you're back and talking with other people. This is an opportunity to see guys you haven't seen in a while. That's the other strange thing, when you're on a working circuit, you might be separated by time and distance.

But occasionally, you run into guys that you just worked with two months ago. “Hey, how you doing, blah, blah, blah.”

And then there's all this green room stuff. Green room is like where they hold you until you go on. So, there's stuff that goes on in there. People were eating, talking, telling jokes, road stories, complaining, or learning.

A lot of stuff that I learned, you learn by seeing some guy. You say, “Hey, I saw you do this in the show earlier. How do you do that?” And they'll say, “oh yeah, let me show you.” You know, that's part of that whole teaching. But you're in a contained space and people are not allowed to wander in and out.

LC: Did you get to catch John Lennon?

No… The problem is Yoko Ono… In Toronto, I think she was just screaming or something. That's what I heard and I believe it, because I heard some of her things and she just got up and started screaming at the top of her lungs. I'm like, “what the heck is this?”…

It's anti-rock and roll. It's anti-music. I'm not on that level. To me, the music still has a viable purpose…

The visual artists have a whole different take on what's going on. They'll run up to a wall, urinate on it, and say, “Look, see, it's my latest piece.”

No thanks.

LC: So fill in the gap between what happened in Toronto and when you start performing as part of a trio with JoAnne Miyamoto and Chris Iijima (sometimes referred to as “Yellow Pearl”)

Okay. During the summer, one of the things that used to happen, for work, is I used to teach banjo at folk music camps in the Northeast. One of the most famous was a place, still there, called Pinewoods. And Pinewoods, there was a lot of classic folk music stuff going on there. I had a roommate, guy who was a British guy, who came from the seaport side of the British Isles and his name was Lou Killen. You can look this up. Lou Killen. He sang sea shanties. He used to wear these Irish sweaters. He had a full beard and he was a cabinet maker and a merchant marine. I said this guy is cool. We got to be roommates. This is cool.

So because it was a very friendly, very small scene, this famous woman folk singer, Jeanie Ritchie, she was the woman who introduced the dulcimer to the American public. Her people played in the Kentucky mountains. They brought it with them I suspect. She had two sons and one of them was at the camp. One day I get this knock on the cabin door where me and Lou were. It was John. I said, “what's up?” “My mom asked if you would teach me how to do frailing on the banjo.” I said “Sure. Come on, sit down. I'll show you.” So it's a certain kind of strum, that you do, that was developed in the banjo playing people down there in the Kentucky Mountains. So he got it, he learned it and he said, “okay,” and I said, “I'll check with you tomorrow.”

Lou Killen, who's sitting in the other room overhearing all of this, he comes out and says, “you know what just happened?” he said. “No, what?” He said, “Her people, his people. Those people have been in the Kentucky Mountains for five generations. But when he wants to learn how to play the music of his people, he had to go to a Chinese guy from New York City.” I said, “Yeah.” And I'm thinking to myself, well, wait a minute, I know all about his music. I know all about it. I'm an expert in the stuff that his people do. What do I know about Chinese or Asian and yellow? I mean, I don't know anything. I'm a big expert on that stuff, but I couldn't tell you the first thing (about mine).

So I said, “Well, I got to deal with this.” And then not too terribly long after, I work in the bar and it's a bar where a lot of musicians hang out, and this Asian American guy comes in with some flyers and said, “Is this place where a lot of musicians hang out?” I said, “Yeah.”

“Any Asian musicians?” I'm going (Charlie does some facial expression). “Asian? Oh yeah, oh yeah, okay, yeah.” He says, “Well here, show him this flyer.” And the flyer said there was going to be an Asian American conference the following Saturday, and the conference is being held at a college in downtown… So I said, “Oh, maybe I'll go.” I'll go, because I got nothing, because I'm thinking there's going to be girls there, so it's going to be fun, right. I get there, and it's the first time…

LC: What year was this?

1970.

I'll take the time off from the bar, finish, and walk over there with my guitar to hang out.

1970. I'm looking and go, “What the heck's going on here?” All these people, these different groups, writers groups, and they had a theater group, and this or that, and I'm going, “wow,” political group. And then everybody was supposed to play. There's different people doing poetry and acting stuff.

At the end, there was supposed to be this couple, Chris and JoAnne, and I was supposed to go on last, right. So of course, the show ran late, all shows do. And so it comes... it's only like, everybody got 15 minutes left. It comes to the end, and there's like no more time. It's only 15, 12 minutes left, right. So I said, “You guys go ahead. I don't, it doesn't bother me. I'm not here to show up or anything.”

So the woman says to me, “No, no, no, we'll all go on together. Don't worry.” I said, “all right.” So, of course, I've been working for eight years already as a sideman. So I knew whatever they were doing, the guy had a guitar and she was to sing, whatever they were doing I could cover. So they start singing and talking and I'm covering and I'm thinking, this is interesting. What are they singing about? They're singing about us. “Ah!”

Well we finished the gig and the woman says to me, “Listen, next week we're going to be at this place called The Dot, D -O -T, up in Harlem. Why don't you come and join us?” And I say, “Okay, I'm open.”

So that led to about three years of playing together, played all over the country. And if you take a look online, you can find more of the story, how it happened and how one thing led to another. Eventually we ended up, our separate course.

The deal was she changed her name back to Nobuko at one point when she retook her Asian name, but she was JoAnne (Miyamoto) and then Chris, Chris Iijima. We formed this little trio, because of convenience. There's only two guitars and three people that could go anywhere. Take a train or just drive, some people used to drive us from one city to another to go do a concert for an emerging Asian students group.

People forget, before the Asian American groups were starting, there were only maybe two kinds of places where you could meet other Asians in the college, you know. The Hong Kong ski club, right? Or the Japanese cultural group where they did, you know, playing koto or something. Of course, there was nothing Asian American. As a matter of fact, the phrase Asian American was still brand spanking new.

(Note: Charlie mentioned an additional thing about the connection with John Lennon and Chris and JoAnne. I’m including it here instead of at the earlier part of this interview.)

LC: Did you get to catch John Lennon?

No, but that happened, something happened later.

He heard Nobuko and Chris playing some place, so Yoko Ono and he sponsored them on a TV show. (Here’s a link to that performance)

(You can find additional information about their album “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America” at this link

Listen to the album on YouTube 

Watch a documentary about Chris Iijima called “A Song for Ourselves”)

LC: So how did you get out of the music business and into writing and storytelling?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out if you want to have a real life, you can't be on the road all the time. So I thought, well, what do I know? What do I really know? Well, I was in the restaurant business for a long time. I was a busboy, waiter, bartender, food and beverage manager, hospitality, I took wine classes, I took classes in hotel management. I was figuring eventually what I was going to do is segue into working in the hotel hospitality industry… primarily because number one, you don't have to travel, and number two, they have a health plan and insurance. You can't get that as a musician, right? So you work at like a Hilton or something and you join the health plan and you join, you know, retirement (plan), whatever. It doesn't work like that for a musician. So that's what I was planning to do.

But I ended up getting married. When we had a kid, we had to decide where he was going to be raised for the first ten, fifteen years. It was a very important issue…

Every holiday, Christmas, we used to come out and visit my in-laws here in San Mateo. And what we would do is ask around, “What are the schools like? What are the elementary schools like?”

They said, “Well, you know, public school is so good, people don't bother to go to a private school.”

At that time I was writing. I know I can keep writing, so I can stay home and be the house father and work from home. I used a fax to fax things back to New York, articles and stories. My wife knew she could get a job, probably either Berkeley or Stanford, and it ended up being Stanford. If she could get a job at Stanford and I could stay at home and be the house father and could make sure that my son went to school and then work with him to do his homework, then we're okay. So we ended up staying.

One thing led to another, of course. When we got out here, people found out we were here and I started getting requests from people. One of them was right after we arrived. The California Council for the Humanities was putting together a program for the sesquicentennial of California. And they needed a Chinese character from history to be in it and they couldn't find anybody. They asked around in Chinatown, San Francisco, and some people said, “Call Charlie Chin. He could do it.” They called me. I did it. So for three years I worked for the California Council for the Humanities, playing Dr. Yee, gold rush pioneer.

One thing leads to another. I ended up… working with the Chinese Historical Society (of America in San Francisco).

(April 2006 AACP Newsletter interview with Charlie Chin about his one man play performances for Chinese Historical Society of America)

LC: Regarding your writing, you were last telling me about working on a short story collection. How's that going?

It's all right. Well, when I get the time. The thing is, I'm writing right now, and you can go and check it out on East Wind ezine, usually one short story for the magazine a month, and now it's been more since the pandemic.

So now it's more than a couple years, and learning the style of short story writing, in which I follow O. Henry, the American writer. I like his work very much, so I try to have the same thing, a little hook or twist at the end of every story.

And now as time has progressed, I look back and I've got all these short stories which I can put together, and the issue here is because of East Wind, the stories all have to take place in an AAPI world. Which is not so terribly difficult to do. So it's consistent. And what I haven't done yet is I haven't entered another area of study for story writing.

See, I've worked as a storyteller since we came out here too. People are totally unconscious of this world. There's a commercial storytelling world that takes place. Most people here don't know about it because it takes place in the South and the Midwest. Storytelling festivals, which I got invited to become involved in and I did that until again, until the pandemic.

Storytelling festivals are major. It's not uncommon for them to draw 10,000 to 60,000 people. That's a lot of people. You might say, who's this? The vast portion of the middle of the country and the south and the upper Midwest have groups of people who don't participate in mainstream commercial entertainment.

They don't go to movies. They don't watch TV. They don't even listen to radio unless it's like the weather or something, right? They don't go on the Internet. Who are these people? Well, often they belong to religious groups like the Amish or the Mennonites or the Mormons.

The Mormons are very iffy on both sides of the, to be or not to be involved in new technology. The result is that you have large groups of people who don't have a TV or a radio in a house and they don't use the Internet. Though more of them are using it now, but they don't use the Internet.

So they go to these storytelling festivals. The storytelling festivals are huge. But most of the audiences are people who stand outside of the conventional interpretation of the history of the world and of science in general.

So what's there to say? When I was strong enough and young enough, I said all right sure. You know it's like a Chinese restaurant. You want extra mushroom I give you extra mushroom, you want sweet and sour polar bear I give you sweet and sour polar... you know whatever you want, I can do. So once I reach a certain point, I didn't have to do it anymore, I dropped out of it. But it reminded me constantly when you leave the coast, east coast, west coast, you're entering another part of the world and you know this because you read the papers and ask “how could these people believe this?” They're over there.

LC: Right, I guess that wraps it up. There’s more that I wish we had the time to cover, but that’s all for now.

Thank you very much Charlie.