Elizabeth Anderson
I am from Springfield, went to grade school and high school here. Before I left to go to college, I really got into ballet, classical dance. I just had a passion for it. So, I worked really, really hard but starting a little late in life. It was really hard for me but I did get accepted into TCU, Texas Christian University, where they have a big dance program. I did that for two years but then I pulled both Achilles tendons, both of ‘em, and the doctor said you just can’t keep doing that. It was the toe work.
So, I came back home to Missouri. I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, what am I gonna do? Luckily, some friends of my parents were living in Japan; they were with the British consul. They needed a governess to take care of their two little boys and help with the cooking because they entertained a lot. They said why don’t you come for six months and you’ll get paid and have an interesting time in Japan and so that’s what I did. [1964/5].
I went over there and got to see all the Japanese paintings in the temples. I lived in Kyoto. I lived in the British consul. It was a very modern facility, three-story building. One floor, just a total library; the top floor was the living quarters; the other floor was liquor, wine, I mean lots of it, all kinds of stuff because they entertained. I lived there and I just kept going and seeing these paintings in the temples. I was so fascinated. I had never seen anything like it. The temples of Japan are massive. We get pictures of Japan as delicate, little …. but when you go into the temples there are beams and woodwork that you just can’t imagine. There was one painting I’ll never forget of a big dragon that was up in the ceiling and it was huge. I thought I would like to study this and so I searched for some teachers. I found one; it didn’t work out, there were too many people in the class and I didn’t speak Japanese.
So finally, an artist friend of mine found this teacher, Toriumi Nirakushi, who said he would teach me one-on-one because I didn’t speak the language. So that’s what I did, I started studying with him. He was wonderful. He didn’t speak English; I didn’t speak Japanese. He would get behind me with his hand on mine and guide my hand and show me exactly how the brush works. He said you really need to study calligraphy along with the painting because all the brush strokes in the painting are in calligraphy. So, he would guide my hand and do that, and he said you really have a knack for that. I said, well, I studied dance. He said, it’s all about rhythm. I think that’s why it came pretty natural to me.
I moved out of the British consul because that was just for six months and found my own apartment and lived there and started teaching English-Japanese conversation. That’s how I made a living. I would go to Osaka. I taught at the Matsushita newspaper, Mitsubishi electric company. I’d take the bullet train down there and teach in big classrooms. I supported myself really well. I spent it all – spent it all on art material, every bit of it. I lived in a little bitty place and it was freezing cold. The only heat I had was a little kerosene heater. Snow was coming in through the cracks because they had no central heat. I moved up to a really cool place that was at the foothills of the mountains. They still had grass thatched roofs on a lot of the old farmhouses up there.
So, I ended up staying three years. I had a cultural visa, which is a six-month visa, and because I had connections with the British consul, I could get him to sign papers to have an extension. So, every six months, I’d get another extension. So finally, after many extensions, I had a lot and they said we can’t do this anymore. You’re going to have to either leave the country or marry a Japanese. Well, I almost married a Japanese. Came close to it.
I hadn’t seen my family in a long time, you know, maybe I should come back and I did. I came back to the states and it was culture shock. I landed in San Francisco in ’69, all the hippie thing was going on. When I left, there was nothing like that. Everybody was very straight.
I found out that Steve Cash was living in Berkeley. He was my best friend in high school [Parkview]. I’ve known Steve probably longer than anybody. Steve was really into the Zen thing because he was taking poetry with Gary Snyder. Actually, Gary Snyder lived in Kyoto while I was there. He lived in a little place there and so did the poet, Philip Whalen. I saw them both [in Kyoto]. Gary Snyder was a bit elusive. But Philip Whalen wasn’t. I can remember talking to him on a corner somewhere and having a great conversation.
So anyway, I came back, thought well, you know, I really don’t really like the United States very much. This is just too … too different for me. I’ll go back pretty soon. Then, when I was back in Springfield, I went to a club called The Warehouse downtown with a friend and Granny’s Bathwater was playing. Well, I went to school with Mike Bunge; I guess maybe Lloyd Hicks was playing with them then. I thought this is interesting. Of course, they’d always played music. When I was in high school Mike Bunge was in bands and Larry Lee was playing in bands. But this band was really good. The singer, I don’t know if you’d call it the lead singer but he did a lot of the singing, was John [Dillon].
I was dancing with some other guy that I’d gone with and John tripped over a mike cord and fell off the stage. He fell off the stage right in front of me and I went, ‘Oh my god are you all right?’ … Thinking back on it, maybe he did that on purpose, I don’t know, but anyway, later on we got to talking out in the parking lot about things. He invited me out to his little place where he lived. He lived in a little smokehouse [about 6’x9’ in size]. Lloyd Hicks was living in the main house, just a little farm house. I was living with my parents. I think I had said something to John like, ‘oh can you show me some barre chords?’ Maybe he showed me a few barre chords, I guess he did, but we got to seeing each other on and on. This smokehouse, he had an American flag for a bedspread; I thought that was interesting…
Later on, Lloyd and his wife moved somewhere else and we eventually moved in the main house. We lived there just us two for a while and then Steve Cash and his wife (but I don’t think they were married yet) moved in, and so it was us living there.
The house eventually burned down but it was out by Lake Springfield on Evans Road. I had a big garden there. It was a really neat place, heated with a wood stove. That’s where we first started writing songs. I remember writing ‘Out on the Sea’ in the back yard, two chairs. Nobody wrote things down because we had good memories then. [She laughs.] I think he wrote the music to that but I wrote some of the lyrics. And then ‘You Made It Right,’ I can remember sitting on the stairway inside the house working on that song. I remember one … “a clear blue windswept sky,” I know that was my line. I don’t remember all that were but I do remember that one.
__________________Michael Kuelker is a teacher and writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. He is finishing a book titled The Ozark Mountain Daredevils On Record: A Narrative Discography and this article is the first appearance of the manuscript’s previously unpublished interview material.