BOB DARCH
MY ADVENTURES WITH THE GREAT MAN
(as published in the Rag Times, January, 2003)

by Ian Whitcomb

Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and Songbooks by clicking here.

 
You can find Ian's main website at ianwhitcomb.com

   I first came across Bob in 1960 when I was working as an assistant film editor in London. I was helping to cut a documentary about the joys of Canada. The chief editor took a break and told me to have a go at assembling a Toronto sequence featuring an ebullient gentleman in straw hat, red vest, and sleeve garters, pounding away at an enormous upright piano and thoroughly enjoying himself. There was a sign on the side of this piano:" Ragtime" Bob Darch. I worked for hours on the sequence because I never tired of it. In fact, I became bewitched by the music: Bob was playing his energetic,
stress-free version of "Maple Leaf Rag". I ran the sequence over and over, emerging a fanatic for (a) Maple Leaf Rag and (b) Ragtime Bob. I was hooked. I was a born-again Christian who'd never been properly born.
    I mean, during the Fifties, I'd heard plenty of tinny piano honkytonk and raggy songs but I'd never heard them sound so pure, so bright, so jolly, so solid. I had become a Ragtimer--from the Branch Darch.
     In 1964 I was in Seattle, having established myself as an entertainer in a local coffee house and having parlayed my way into a recording contract as a future rock star with a local label. My recording manager and I were sitting in a swell hotel talking turkey over Jack Daniel's when my attention was deflected from royalty points and how I was to become bigger than Jagger by that certain sound of "Maple Leaf Rag" -- the documentary soundtrack.
    I rushed into the room from whence came the glorious music and there he was! Straw hat and everything, pounding out the good news. To the consternation of my manager I spent the next few days in the company of Ragtime Bob. Songs, stories, jokes came pouring out of this avuncular genius as I followed him around like Boswell followed Dr Johnson in 18th century
London. I hung on every gravelly word, I vowed to remember the lyric of every song gem that kept falling from him as we walked and talked and drank and drank. One afternoon I found myself sitting in the home of Joe Jordan, the great black rag composer, as Bob interviewed him about his days in vaudeville and how he wrote "That Teasin' Rag". One evening we, together with my local girl friend, were having dinner in the home of a wealthy local couple when in came their young son to say goodnight. Later Bob trapped me in the wet bar to inform me that the boy was really his son. Even later my girl friend emerged from the powder room to tell me that Bob had proposed to her. I put the whole matter aside because I so admired the man's art.
    We went our separate ways--Bob to peregrinate the country as the last of the great itinerant ragtime entertainers; me as a member of The British Invasion (I hit the Top Ten in 1965) . But though I was supposed to be a teen idol I still yearned for the solid music of Bob and when I got the chance I'd drop off a rock tour to catch Bob in his act: the most notable was in
Colorado at The Cherry Creek Inn.
    Luckily I had a tape recorder with me and managed to capture one night of Bob at his very best, in the environment that suited him: an upright piano in a saloon full of merry folk. He presided like the king he was -- "The tender bartenders will satisfy your every need, won't you dears?" -- and I got a record of the variety of entertainment provided by this great man: songs like "They're Wearing 'Em Higher In Hawaii" and "A Lemon In The Garden Of Love"; classic rags played with vigor and fire (unlike the effete, careful "classicism" that was to be the hallmark of certain players in the unfortunate 1970s revival); and a constant commentary on the writers of the music and the attributes of certain females who happened to be in the bar.
The evening ended at 2 am, with a bang. After 13 martinis Bob toppled off the piano stool and hit the floor but suffered no injuries.
    Next day he was right as rain and off we went to "The Denver Post" where they interviewed us as "Ragtimer Meets Rocker" and pictured us together at a piano. Later Bob set fire to the piano as a stunt in order to get more coverage. The subsequent headline read: "Man Plays Hot Piano". After that Bob took me for a tour of the old gold mining towns--we didn't see much mining but we saw an awful lot of saloons and we played every kind of piano, in-tune, out-of-tune, no keys. Until finally Bob just stood in the middle of the floor and sang a capella, snapping his fingers and sometimes clapping.  Everywhere we went we collected disciples, converts, evangelical ragtimers. Old-fashioned Americans who smoked cigars and chewed steaks. And all the while I was getting a priceless education as an entertainer.
    Back in my Hollywood digs I played the Cherry Creek tapes over and over, learning every song. And when I got a booking at the prestigious Troubadour club in West Hollywood I virtually reproduced Bob's act, but as a young British whelp. Stars came and gaped. The rockers and the hippies were amazed and entranced. They would come in and drop LSD as I sang such Darch memorables as "Silver Sardines In Your Hair". Wow, was I hip!  And this was Before Tiny Tim. I got everything from Darch.
    Over the years we kept in touch. I mean, I'd get postcards in that  familiar block letter printing: "Dear Friend..." He was in Alaska one moment and Russia the next, the whole world was being exposed to his enlightening virus. And then we met up again at the Scott Joplin Festival in Sedalia. He looked the same but now he tended to wear Jungle Jim outfits. Some of the
newer, more serious ragtime people, were puzzled by Bob. He didn't act like a scholar, he was having too much fun, he didn't go to bed at 9 o'clock.
    Actually, he was truly living the ragtime life. He was the Real Thing In Color. And, after they turned their back on him so that they could look at the backs of po-faced pianists plodding sedately through yet another classic rag as if they were to be about to be executed, Bob decided he'd regain the attention of these "scholars" by stating that he had the score of the lost
Scott Joplin opera and that it lay safe and sound somewhere in the Midwest. Where exactly he never divulged. But I guessed it was probably over the rainbow with Dorothy. Bob was the real entertainer right till the last.
     I heard from him a few months before his death. Another of those postcards: he and I and Regina and a whole slew of like-minded performers were going to put on a grand minstrel show in the White House and George Bush would be so dancing mad he'd forget about declaring any wars. Bin Laden would be there too, possibly on tambourine.
    My most enduring image of Ragtime Bob is of him in a Sedalia motel room at dawn. Dressed in his bush outfit, complete with broad jungle hat, his legs are placed squarely apart, his arms are akimbo, his head is looking straight up towards the ceiling, and he's singing--without any accompaniment -- "Goodnight Little Girl Goodnight". As he finishes the last line - "And if I couldn't win ya with all the booze I put in ya -- Goodnight, little girl, goodnight!" - I realize that his gaze, his reach, his power, goes beyond the motel ceiling and up into the sky to radiate forever for all us poor souls who need a little spice, a little exaggeration for elevation, to see us through this gray earthly trek.
    Bob Darch is my inspiration. I will continue trying to travel in the footsteps he made for me.

Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and Songbooks by clicking here.

 
You can find Ian's main website at ianwhitcomb.com