Music In Her Veins - Meridian Green Comes To Door County

By Roger Kuhns

Meridian Green has gone solo. It has been a long time coming. Her innovative musical style bespeaks of familial and experiential influences feeding an innate sense of song and story telling. Green’s music is her beautiful voice. Her music is a merging of genres - folk, country, pop, and jazz with ethnic spices. Even though the waters here run deep, the surface is not still. Meridian Green will be performing at 7pm on Tuesday July 13th at the Town Hall Bakery on Highway 57 in Jacksonport ($5 at the door).

I caught up with Meridian Green by phone last month while she was in Nashville: a small room at the Comfort Inn on Music Row. She has been trying to get her arms around the Nashville music scene.

Nashville Stopover. “They twang you a lot and god bless you a lot. They mean very well with that,” Green said. Green was in the music capital doing some studio work and learning more about the southern side of the business. “Song writing - that’s kind of why I’m hanging out here on Music Row, I have no idea how I write songs - they pop out, and there they are. I’d love to figure out how to write songs on purpose.” Green is rediscovering the business of songwriting in Nashville. “I come into Nashville seeing people writing well-crafted brilliant songs, and I figure if I put a short story in there I’m doing well - but these guys can put War and Peace into a 3-minute and 4-seconds song. It is really formula writing.”

But the songwriting is just the tip of the iceberg. “There are these people that polish the artists and feed the machines that drive the songs into the world,” Green said. “But never the less there is part of me that is really fascinated by this. There’s a lot of people that get up every day and go to work in the music business.” Green’s sojourn to Nashville is something of a flight, “I’ve lived for 30 years perched on that western horizon on the Mendocino coast.” But Green is not committed to resettling in Nashville, or any place else just yet. The road is calling her, and she’s answering. We can expect some good songs to be born from her later in life adventure.

A New Sense Of Mission. In years past Green regularly toured England, Europe, and the West Coast. She was part of the duo with former Byrds musician Gene Parsons. Green and Parsons also spun an early faltering business of building custom guitar accessories into a major going concern called Stringbinder.com during the 1980s-1990s, and have since sealed a production deal with Fender Guitars. But with the conclusion of the twenty five-year partnership with Parsons, Green has stepped out to her own tune. “It feels like being on the road is brand new and playing solo is brand new,” she said.

But Green wanted to face a solo career with a mission. “I thought, this is just what the world needs - another singer songwriter,” she said, and laughed. “But I decided that I’m out building community through music.”

An Emerging Discography. Green’s last album, “Live From Caspar”, took several years to release and was her final collaboration with Parsons. The album, released in 2002, has experienced welcome success. “We put the CD on the guitar accessory website, and we had big orders coming in.”

Green’s 1999 release “In The Heart of This Town” features the strength of her original material, and takes you into her world of realizing dreams, of moving on and the precarious balancing act we experience in relationships. Before the 1999 album Green merged her talents with Gene Parsons in 1986 in an effort seen as a folk fusion with blended undertones of Brazilian jazz, Celtic jigs, Motown sounds, and contemporary country.

A Father’s Legacy. Meridian Green was the Greenwich Village daughter of folk legend Bob Gibson. “My dad cruised in at the end of vaudeville - so he was influenced by that idea when you would really entertain the audience. He always had showmanship, he was a very charismatic performer,” Green said.

“He was a radical on some levels, but in the 50s he was politics free - he wasn’t touching that with a 10-ft pole. I don’t know if he was uninformed or informed. Dad was young, and was out to entertain and have a very good time. And that was part of his problem,” Green said. From her father’s experiences she learned how difficult it is to find balance on the road and under the lights of fame. “I understand how it was to do these shows,” she said. “He was so incandescent and sparkling. There was always excitement going with the audience, and when he finished a show like that - he left them screaming and he was all jazzed and would go back to his hotel to do what? I don’t think people should be famous at 20; you need to have some life experience. But Bob was awesome. He helped create listening rooms for folk music in the late 50s with Albert Grossman (who managed Peter, Paul and Mary). This was a novel concept, a shift from the drinking vaudeville rigor,” Green said. But even at Grossman’s insistence, Gibson chose not to be part of a music trio. “Puff the magic dragon wouldn’t have happened if it was up to my dad,” she said.

Rediscovering Her Father. “We didn’t do music together for a long, long time. Unfortunately my child hood and his insane period in life happened to coincide, and I was cynical for a while. But he did get clean and sober in 1978, and I did indeed figure out he was indeed dad, and it shifted for us and I’m really grateful for that. I didn’t need to keep track of his mistakes for him, somewhere along the way I realized that.”

Bob Gibson died in 1996. He hadn’t been playing for three years; he had progressive super-nuclear palsy, related to Parkinson’s. “One of my projects is to get my dad’s stuff out,”

Touring. Like a second wind, Meridian Green is finding the personable venues around the country where she can draw an audience into her world. “I’m in an interesting situation now,” Green said. “One thing has come to an end, but here I am connecting with what’s next. I’m doing shows with almost all new material and original material. I am blown away by the response to my shows. It’s an experiment right now.”