Outdoor Art Festival headliner has played with Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs http://www.beacononlinenews.com/news/daily/1577
By Jeff Shepherd SPECIAL TO THE BEACON posted Mar 24, 2009 "It's my life experience that comes out in my music," Bob Rafkin said. That experience cuts a wide swath of places and times, collaborators and audiences, including a performance on one of the most famous of stages. "Very prestigious," is how Rafkin recalls his appearance at New York's Carnegie Hall. For him, though, it all boils down to his guitar and the music. "Once you're up there and the lights are on, you can't see anything. It's kind of like, 'This is it, huh?'" Rafkin said during a phone interview. "It's the life that I've chosen." If experience stirs his music, then his music is a rich brew. Born in New York City, Rafkin grew up in Washington D.C., Cleveland and Philadelphia, according to his Web site www.bobrafkin.com. It was mid-1960s Greenwich Village when he met folk singers Phil Ochs and Eric Andersen, and Eric Jacobsen. Jacobsen was the producer for the Lovin' Spoonful. Rafkin's Web site also says he played guitar on, and contributed musical arrangements to, Eric Andersen's 1968 album More Hits From Tin Can Alley on Vanguard Records. Andersen and Ochs (who died in 1976) are internationally renowned artists, each contributing his own pages to the anthology of American music. From the hotbed of underground folk/rock culture of Greenwich Village during the late 1960s, Rafkin moved along with some of his contemporaries to San Francisco. It was the center of the universe for the new music and culture of the day. "I was at Haight-Ashbury during the hippie days," Rafkin said. "We used to go to the ballrooms and listen to Janis Joplin, Jimi [Hendrix], and Jefferson Airplane." In the ensuing years, Rafkin plied his trade primarily as a session guitarist for the likes of Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman in Los Angeles. Then, in the 1990s, he moved to Central Florida to accommodate a step in his wife's career as a TV producer. She went to work for Nickelodeon in Orlando. West Volusians will soon get a chance to experience the Rafkin experience! He will perform his original brand of finger-style guitar, blues-laced, Latin-flavored, rock and folk vocal music at the DeLand Outdoor Art Festival. Be there to see his show on the stage at Earl Brown Park at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 29. "I am looking forward to it," Rafkin said. ... . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
