Bernie Zimmerman interviews Paul Emery to document Nevada County's history through Emery's life in music and the arts. Emery, born in 1944 to Greek truck-farm roots, grew up itinerant due to military moves, discovered folk music in the early 1960s, and became a full-time performer in the mid-1970s. He formed the Carmichael Traveling Street Band in 1972, helped save and shape the Nevada Theater in Nevada City, and built a career that included European tours, work with Annie McCann, Bennett Street Studios, and leadership roles at KVMR and the Center for the Arts, plus the Nevada City Live series and a Leonard Cohen tribute. He recalls performing for the Queen of England in 1983 (with the Sacramento Symphony Quartet for the royal event) and notes Nevada City's Renaissance in the 60s–70s under Sally Lewis, along with the era's local economy, which included illicit marijuana cultivation.

Full Transcript of the Video:

Good afternoon.

I'm Bernie Zimmerman.

I'm the chair of the Nevada County Historical Landmarks
Commission, which was created by the Board of Supervisors in 1969 to help promote and preserve
Nevada County history.

And one of the ways we do this is conduct interviews of people who are
involved contemporaneously in making Nevada County history.

We're doing this at the Lyman-Gilmore
School.

They have a program run by Scott Mills and our production crew today.

Our producer is
Dahlia and these are all students and the cameras are being run by Milo and Aiden and Jesus is
controlling the sound.

So thank you all for contributing and when the editing is done,
the final video will be publicly available.

You can see it on our YouTube channel.

You can access it from our website, NevadaCountyLandmarks.

com and the final version will be
placed with the Searle's Library so it will be available to the broader public.

So with that introduction, today I'll be interviewing Paul Emery, a key figure in the
contemporary Nevada County music scene.

If you live in Nevada County and you enjoy his music,
you probably know who Paul Emery is and if you don't know, you're about to find out.

So Paul, let's start with some basics.

Where were you born?
I was born in Bakersfield, California and which would give me great credentials if
Country Westroom was my genre but according to my parents, we only lived there for two weeks.

Oh my gosh.

It was in 1944 when I was born and my dad was in the Army Air Corps and we were
stationed there for training.

And then mostly up until I was in first grade, I lived in Yolo
County.

My grandparents were Greek and they had a farm, a truck farm in the Cape Valley,
which is nowadays a very famous organic food valley.

And that's the first place I remember
living there with my parents until the first grade and first and second grade.

My dad then
was in the reserves and he was called back into duty during the Korean War.

And from there on out, we live the military family life, which is two and three year assignments.

You don't know where you're going to go.

You're around, I'm guessing, much of the world.

Yeah, very unusual.

We went to Newfoundland.

We're stationed in Newfoundland after we left
California.

That's quite a shift in weather.

Well, yeah.

And then we did two years there and then
we got transferred to Oklahoma.

I'm one of the few people I think in history that ever migrated
from Newfoundland to Oklahoma.

It's just no logical reason people would ever do that.

And then we went to England and then we went to Washington State to come to Washington and
then eventually I was old enough and it was all my own.

So that's my physical history.

And you wound up in Sacramento at some point.

Yeah, see Sacramento was where my parents started.

That's where they were when my dad was activated into military as a reservist in 52.

So we ended
back there.

And when I got off on my own, I lived in Faroaks.

That was kind of my home
for about eight years was in Faroaks.

And what got you into music? Oh my gosh.

Yeah, it was the early 60s and I really got into enjoying folk music.

I was really attracted by
old music like The Kingston Trio and Peter Paul and Mary and all those Pete Seeger, all of that.

And I got involved in playing guitar and I got to be pretty good.

So I was doing that music.

And then
I ended up teaching guitar for quite a few years at a music store.

And it was a very good time to
be a guitar teacher because folk masses were very popular, which means churches have gatherings that
people sit around to sing folk music and they'll have about 15 people singing and all playing guitar
at the same time.

Kumbaya and all those things.

Now at some point, I understand you toured Europe.

Yeah, that was a little bit later on.

Just in between the time that I was a teacher,
I started performing.

And by the mid-70s, I was really ready to be a full-time performer and not
a music teacher.

And so I kind of lived on the road for many years, which is ultimately what
brought me to Nevada City.

But then about 1979, I had a musical partner and she was very good
singer.

She played guitar too.

And we were playing around all the different places.

And
one day we said, let's go to Europe.

We said, okay, so we packed up our stuff and went to Europe.

It was you and her? That's it? Two of us, yeah.

That was in 79.

Okay, so we'll go back a little
bit.

But who was she? Annie McCann.

She's still my good friend to this day.

We still play once in a
while together.

So you have a long history of involvement with the Nevada Theater.

So maybe
you can tell us when you first performed here and how that connection came to be.

Yeah.

Well,
the very first performance at the Nevada Theater was in 1972.

And the situation was I had a band
called the Carmichael Traveling Street Band, which was sort of a vaudeville band.

We did a lot of
really old jazz.

We did a lot of humor.

And we were playing in Sacramento and a fellow by the
name of Alan Rogers liked us because he liked that type of music.

He was into that type of music.

And he said, why don't you guys come up to Nevada City and play? I go, sure.

So I knew where it was
and I'd been through here before.

So we, I had, he says, you need to talk to Sally Lewis.

She is
the person who runs the Nevada Theater.

I said, okay, so I go up there and I meet Sally Lewis
and I tell her, I tell her what we do in this combination of theater and music and satire and
all sorts of different things.

And she says, okay, I like you.

I like what you're doing.

She didn't
say that to everybody, but no, she has a reputation.

She did.

But she was really good to us and she
really liked this.

And she says, okay, I'll rent you the theater for Friday and Saturday night for
$100 a night.

Okay.

That was quite a bit of money in those days.

And, and then this is what I
couldn't talk about for years.

She says, and the bank can sleep here.

Just don't tell anybody.

So that, oh, that really did it.

So that was it.

That was our first gig.

I have a poster for that.

So let's just get it up there.

The Carmichael Caravan.

Yep.

Greater Carmichael Traveling
Street Band.

And this was, posters were big in those days, as you can see.

And if you look down
here, the admission for the, for the band was $2.

And I see, I see you had some very prominent
musicians, Patty Melt.

Patty Melt was our lead singer.

And you had Brother Lee Love.

Brother Lee
Love.

He was, he was a preacher that preached environmentalism and the great growth here.

And that's too difficult and weird to explain how he got that name.

So I'll pass on that one.

And then Lynn Leith, who was an electronic tap dancer.

Oh, my.

And she would move around.

And then she would have lights like on her shoes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Electronic tap dancers.

Those were
our featured performers.

And then this was the band, the Greater Carmichael Traveling Street Band.

And this fellow here with the beard was? Me.

Okay.

Back in the days, I had the ball of hair
look.

So how did that weekend work out for you? It was great.

It was great.

To make back your
hundred dollars.

We made back, we made back our money.

And we had a great time.

As soon as we
finished playing, we'd head over to the Crazy Horse Saloon.

And that was the place back then.

Just look just like it is today.

Just like it is today.

And that introduced me to Nevada City.

So we did about three concerts after that at various times.

And then the way that I ended up kind
of moving up here was more like about 1975, 76.

I was ready for a change.

And I was doing living
my van with me and my dog.

And we were going to travel all around and play music.

And this is as
far as I got in those days.

And so then I moved up here in 76.

Okay.

So you came up here a little
by the time you got up here, Sally Lewis and others had already saved the theater.

Yes.

You weren't involved in those efforts.

No, I wasn't.

But I was there.

You know, the story
goes, it was a movie theater.

It was, okay, this basic story of the Nevada Theater was, it was built
in 1865.

Right.

And it became Mark Twain performed at that theater several times.

And it was a
theater theater for many, many years.

Then in the late teens, early 20s, it became a movie theater,
which was very common for you.

It was a movie theater until the mid 60s.

And my dates may not
be 100%.

Right.

But and then it was actually owned by a movie, you know, a movie.

It was the Cedar
Cinema, if I remember, something like that.

And then it closed down at a certain point.

It closed
down and the movie theaters went elsewhere.

And it was closed for quite a while.

And then some
local people, Sally Lewis being pretty much acknowledged as being the leader of the,
leader of the crowd, so to speak.

So we got to restore this theater and make it part of the
cultural scene of Nevada City.

So that was in the late 60s, 68s, 69s, something like that.

And that's how it came into being.

There was also some talk about demolishing it even because it
didn't run down.

Yeah.

But you said Sally Lewis and others saved it.

Did you know that she was
from Bakersfield? I didn't know that.

And did she know that you were born in Bakersfield? I don't
think so.

I wouldn't have had the reason to tell her.

You might have gotten there for less than
$100.

No kidding.

Well, that's okay.

That's something new.

All right.

So you came up to Nevada
City and did you continue to perform at this year? Oh, yeah.

I would do shows up there back in those
days, maybe one a year, maybe two a year, because really from, you know, from 1979 on until the
mid 90s, really, I was pretty much a touring musician.

I was pretty much on the road a great
deal of time.

With the same Carmichael Caravan or? No, no, no.

What were you doing then? It was small.

It was usually a duo or Annie McCann and I, we went to Europe two times.

Then I played
two other times with other people.

So I did four tours of Europe in those days.

What was touring in Europe like? Well, you know, it was a good time.

And I'll explain.

Annie was very interested in Irish music, traditional Irish music.

So the first stop we
made was Ireland after we flew into London.

And we were, we could just go and we were really good.

We could just go to a bar or restaurant say, can we play some music for you this afternoon?
And we'll just play for tips.

And if you don't like it, just tell us and we'll move on.

And so they did.

And we were always really good.

And we were playing at a pub in the west coast
of Ireland in County Claire.

And there were these four guys sitting at a table.

This was only,
we were only in Ireland for about two weeks at that time.

They were sitting at a table talking
business.

And then they started kind of jabbing each other, pointing a finger towards us.

Listen
to this, listen to this, listen to this.

So we took a break and they said, can we talk to you
for a minute? I go, sure.

Come to find out if they were the producers of the Lisztnoen Barna
Folk Festival, which was the biggest folk festival in Ireland.

And they said, would you like to be
an opening act in our festival? So that's a great example of being at the right place at the right
time.

Speaking of being at the right place, I understand that you also performed once for
the Queen of England.

I did.

And what was that like? Well, did you have to curtsy or kneel or
any of that stuff? No, no, it was a, that was in 1983.

And Duke Major was the governor.

And we
ended up playing for a wedding for one of his higher up staff people.

And when they were,
when they found out the Queen of England was coming, they brought on the quartet from the
Sacramento Symphony.

And they kind of wanted something a little different, a little, a little
jazzier.

So we were kind of known and they hired us to play.

And that's how, that's how it happened.

So that's how we played for the Queen of England.

And we were given instructions by the
Secret Service and all these people about what we could do and what we couldn't do.

And we were told, do not touch the Queen.

You don't go patty, patty on the back.

You don't do
anything like that.

You don't touch it.

Do not touch the Queen.

The second thing we were told was,
also don't play any Irish music.

Well, they must have checked our background and found out that
we'd spent time in Ireland.

Okay.

Because in those days, he had the times of troubles and
everything else that was going on.

Oh, it was, yeah, it was pretty rough.

And they, the Queen and
the Duke of Edinburgh, they, you know, they just walked by.

We were in the second floor.

We were
on the ground floor of the Capitol.

They walked by and we were playing, we were playing Ellington
Tunes, Satin Doll.

And they, Queen Bygd, and she, she quickly looked right at me.

And guess what
happened? I broke a string.

And the instant she was looking at me, by g-string, like,
so the power of the Queen.

And that was it.

And we played that.

And that got us a lot of good gigs,
like in weddings.

And I told people, well, if we're good enough for the Queen of England,
we're good enough for your wedding.

And they go, okay, well, hurry up.

It's just a music business.

Well, so let's get back to Nevada County and tell us about some of the things you've done in
Nevada County that you're sort of most proud of.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, my goodness, I've been here,
I've been here for a long, long time.

It was my home base during those years when I was touring,
when I was touring around.

And I always came back, came back here, came back to, and then in the,
in the early 80s, I started a recording studio in Glass Valley called,
that called the Bennett Street Studios off of Bennett Street.

And I did a lot of, a lot of
recording of local artists and put out actual record albums, which we, that's all there was in
those days, was that.

And then I just kept, kept the whole thing going for playing music until,
I guess about 93 or 94.

And then it just kind of faded out, you know, it kind of faded out.

That was
almost 20 years that I played full time.

And at that point in time, I actually got my first job
that I ever had in my life.

I was program director of KVMR radio for a bunch of years.

And this is
making it all real quick.

And then, then I became the artistic director and the station manager
of the Center for the Arts for a bunch of years when it was in, where it is now, but it was the
old Center for the Arts.

And then, then, then I went back to being news director of KVMR and then,
to write it.

But all the time I was playing and performing music a lot and producing lots of
shows, lots and lots of shows.

So you've produced a lot of things that are going on at the Nevada
Theater.

So why don't you tell us about some of those? Yeah, yeah.

I was in the, in the 00 years,
oh, from my time at the Center for the Arts ended in about 008.

And then I was just became an
independent producer.

I was producing theater at the Nevada Theater.

And I did a series of,
of, I would just say, famous plays, plays that everybody needed to see.

Cyrano de Bergiak was
one of, we did, Streetcar Named Desire, of course, that was a classic.

And The Tempest, Shakespeare,
The Tempest, and also Artown.

And I did a whole bunch of plays like that.

And that, that was a big
deal, producing big theater.

So I did that for about five or six years.

And in the meantime,
producing lots and lots of music.

And really kind of since then, since roughly since,
let's just say year 2000 till now, I do a series at the theater called Nevada City Live.

And, and
what that is, is I rent the theater for five weeks in the fall, and for four weeks in January and
February, three weeks January free.

And I, I do a whole concert series with, you know, probably
about 25 concerts, totally with, so it's kind of like, at that point, I had my own Center for the
Arts.

And I ran up for that amount of time.

It was about, and then do it the next year.

So I did
hundreds, you know, several hundred shows through the years.

And I still do that.

That's what I
still do.

And do you play in those? Yeah, sometimes.

Yeah, sometimes I, I put together a
really big Leonard Cohen show, tribute to Leonard Cohen.

We have 14 musicians and five singers,
and it's a big, big, you know, and I play in that.

And I'm also the producer of it.

We've been doing
that for about 12 years, just once or twice a year.

But, yeah.

What are some of the acts that,
that you've had perform at, at the theater? Oh, my goodness.

Pretty much everybody that plays locally,
Paul Cann, Eleanor McDonnell, Peter Wilson, who's there.

I could, I could go on and on with that.

The, I got some shows coming up with Dahl Wimple, Macalprin, who is, does rock and roll puppetry
while stuck.

Okay.

And that's, if you say so.

That's come up.

A lot of comedy, a lot of comedy
through the years, lots of, quite a few touring acts, you know, Jesse Winchester, Richie Havens,
I had Richie Havens here one time, you know, things like that.

Well, Nevada City has benefited
an awful lot from what you've done.

Yeah.

Having lived here for, on and off for well,
about 50 years, what are some of the significant changes you've seen in the Nevada City area?
That's a really good question.

Give me a good answer.

Well, one answer is not a whole lot.

Okay.

Now, the, the scene is the same.

The play, the characters are different.

I mean, it's obviously, okay, back in, back in the, let's just say,
oh, let's just say mid 70s, because that's when I kind of worked my way up here.

That was the Renaissance, in my opinion, of Nevada City.

Yeah.

And Grass Valley came a little bit
later.

But it was the Renaissance, because Nevada City was economically very, very depressed
in the 60s and the 70s.

It boomed during the Depression, oddly enough.

I've been reading
that book about, no depression here.

Yeah, it's quite, but then in the 60s and 70s, it really,
and Nevada City was largely shut down and it hadn't discovered tourism yet.

That's where Sally Lewis
and her group came in.

Yeah.

And now the 70s is when the Nevada Theater became restored.

It's when the miners foundry, which was the Victorian Museum, American Victorian Museum,
in those days.

That's when that started, and that was an industrial site that was converted into,
into being, you know, performing arts center.

That's when KVMR radio started.

KVMR radio started
from the American Victorian Museum.

That's the KVMR, K Victorian Museum radio.

And that's when that started.

That's when the theater companies started.

Oh, but
that was the Renaissance, wasn't it? In my opinion.

This is my opinion.

No, I agree with you.

And also when all the stores and shops in Nevada City and then later Grass Valley reopened and
you can give a lot of credit to the hippies in those days that made these acute little shops and
also the gay community that was really, really strong.

And from there on, Nevada County became
more of a cultural center and it goes on to this day.

I agree with you.

We moved up here in the late
70s and it was precisely because we found a lot of the things you were talking about, like the
Nevada Theater and, you know, the various performance venues, fairly sophisticated food, and we, we
sealed the deal to move up here at the crazy horse salute.

And, you know, in those days, of course,
marijuana cultivation, which was illegal, was also a big part of our economy.

So there was a lot of
money around, actually.

And it's just, you know, it was a great time and the, it kind of watched,
that was the launching in my opinion.

Let's end on that uplifting note.

Thank you very much for
agreeing to do this.

Thank you very much for asking me.

Thanks for the school for doing this work.