[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGES courtesy Bob Dyer Photography][/title]
For a guy who never wanted to be huge in music, Gary Hutchison of Fort Smith has had one hell of a run. A musician of fifty-five years, he’s played with countless artists across thousands of gigs, squeezing multiple marriages in between millions of notes. Emerging with his health and sanity intact – to say nothing of his marrow-deep love of music – his has been a career of his own making.
“I got into the music business when I was twenty-one,” he says. “Growing up, I didn’t know you could make a living at it. I thought you were either a rock star or you played at home in your bedroom. I didn’t know there was a middle ground there, you know? When I got a little older and moved to a bigger city, I realized you could make a living playing guitar. That’s what I’ve always done.”
“I never wanted to be a rock star. That wasn’t a dream of mine. I’m not sitting at home going, ‘I could have been a contender,’ you know? I just wanted to play guitar in a group and I think I’ve succeeded at that. I’ve made a living doing it since 1974. I’ve not had a day job or anything.”
The pride of Anderson, Missouri, Gary’s life in music has been something out of a lyric: small-town kid turns on, tunes in and drops out, takes along a guitar and the rest is history.
Or, something like that.
“Anderson is a little town straight up Highway 71,” he says. “It’s one of the first little towns you hit as you’re going to Joplin from Arkansas. I always said I grew up in Mayberry. It was idyllic. You didn’t lock your doors, you didn’t worry about stuff, there was no crime. It was just a great time to be alive.”
Eventually, the quaint charm began to constrict and by the time he was in his teens, Gary and his pals were into a scene that felt a universe away from rural Missouri.
“There were just a few of us that were hippies in that era. Well, we thought we were hippies, you know? There were about five of us in high school,” he says, chuckling. “We listened to different music than the mainstream. I was really into the psychedelic stuff. I was into Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service and that kind of stuff.”
Gary’s fondness for the genre inadvertently snagged him into the blues when he chose a record album for its trippy cover art.
“I saw this album by a band called Ten Years After. It had this real psychedelic-looking cover on it. I thought, well this is cool. It looks like something I’m going to like,” Gary remembers. “I took it home and put it on the turntable and went, eww, yuck. It’s blues.”
“My older brother came home from college and he was listening to it and he said, ‘You need to check that out. That guy is all over the guitar.’ So, I listened to it a second time, as a guitar player, and went oh my gosh, this is amazing.”
The album opened the first of several new musical doors in Gary’s mind, whereby he’d discover a new genre, soak up as much as he could then find something else in which to immerse himself.
“You know, I say I’m self-taught, but that’s not really true. I learned from everybody I could,” he says. “Early on, I got into all styles of guitar. I worked at a music store and the owner was a jazz player, so I learned all those cool chords. I learned how to play solo guitar where I could just sit and play by myself. I got into country bands just so I could work.”
“I learned from every record I put on; from anybody I saw playing guitar to ask a question. I had thousands of teachers.”
This not only kept things interesting as a musician, it became absolutely essential while paying his dues in clubs.
“I got in the musician’s union and it was the kind of deal where they’d go, ‘Be at The Wagon Wheel at 8:30 p.m. Bob will be on bass, Frank on drums and Larry will be the singer. You just show up.’ You better have it together, you know?”
“A lot of it, like I said, was watching how the pros handled things. I’ve been in those situations where we were the wrong band for the venue, where you’re just trying your best to make them happy. One thing that always helped was having that wide repertoire. I can go from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Ted Nugent to Jimi Hendrix to Creedence Clearwater. If you can’t find somebody that likes at least one of those, you’re in trouble.”
Gary’s brush with greatness came as a guitar player in Southern Fried, a Joplin band Billboard ranked as one of the top three unsigned acts of 1979. It was a heady period, even though the group itself was on borrowed time.
“Being in a band is kind of like being married. I’ve been married four times and I’ve been in a band longer than I’ve been in any of my marriages,” he says. “Over the years, I’ve chosen a band member on his personality over one that was a better player but who I knew would be trouble to work with.”
“When you’re spending that much time with someone, especially if you’re doing any kind of roadwork, you better like who you’re with. You’re going to be stuck in a van for eight hours and then onstage four hours and in a hotel room with them.”
By the time Southern Fried collapsed, Gary figured he’d learned enough to be a frontman. But first, he needed a break and a change of scenery.
“Southern Fried, we’d been on the road and travelled for 300 days a year,” he says. “Right about that time I moved down here, to Fort Smith, from Joplin. I had just gone through a divorce and I just wanted to get a fresh start. A friend of mine was working in a music store and he said, ‘We need a guitar teacher. I’ve got a band for you. Just move down here.’ That was in 1984 and I thought, well, I’ll stay in Fort Smith a couple years and move onto something else.”
Instead, he’d land with Oreo Blue, a group that observed its thirtieth year in music last year. Over that time, he’s worked steadily, if you can call something he loves as much as music work. On any given night, he can be the standard-bearer for those who came before or he can draw from his own considerable original catalog.
Most of all, he’s happy, having earned the hard-won perspective that comes with a lifetime at his craft.
“I was in bands in the past where it was all about sex, drugs and rock and roll. Heavy on the drugs,” he says. “One thing about Oreo Blue is that nobody does drugs in the band. We don’t even have an alcohol problem. I couldn’t have said that about myself thirty years ago and a lot of that comes with maturity, you know?”
“That’s the big thing; you’ve got professional musicians that are there for the music. They’re not there to chase girls, they’re not there to get high or to get drunk. When you’ve got that kind of professionalism and a common drive, you want to make the same kind of music for people and you want to make people happy. And I’ve been able to do that.”
Find Gary on Facebook at either Oreo Blue or the official Gary Hutchison Facebook Fan Page.
