Ben Harper

In 2006, I flew to LA to interview Ben Harper for The Times.

Didgeridoo player Frank Heinkel recently performed here, and the “dynamic double bill” of Woody Guthrie enthusiasts Joel Rafael Band and ‘60s-tinted The Kennedys are next on the calendar. But the most famous, and frankly thrilling, visitor to Claremont’s Folk Music Center & Museum this year has to be Ben Harper, that maestro of freewheeling roots-rock fusion. Not that you expect a multi-million-seller like Harper to turn up in sunny California suburbia, especially as he strides through the door and makes a beeline for the till, before kissing the woman behind it. For the current manager is his mother, Ellen, and the store is not only owned by Ben, it’s where he grew up.

“There’s not an instrument in this store I haven’t had my hands on,” he announces, settling into Ellen’s tiny office at the rear. The walls are lined with many Harper artefacts;

a framed gold disc for his 1995 album Fight For Your Mind; a photo of Ben with his arm around blues legend John Lee Hooker; on stage playing his beloved Weissenborn lap slide guitar alongside country superstar Willie Nelson, and in his best Nudie suit clutching two Grammies from 2004 (for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album and Best Pop Instrumental Performance for There Will Be A Light, his collaboration with gospel troupe The Blind Boys Of Alabama). Ellen’s room neatly encapsulates almost every tributary that feeds Harper’s music, including his new, sixth solo album Both Sides Of The Gun – folk, blues, soul, gospel and world. If rock’n’roll is unrepresented, you only need turn the corner to clock the Rolling Stones and Jethro Tull posters in the repair shop.

“After school,” Harper recalls, “this is where I’d come. I’d tool around with friends; we’d make our own guitars out of string and bits, just like the original blues cats made theirs with rubber bands and nails. I was taught how to make guitars, and fix them. I know their inner workings intimately.” There’s a Dyson around the corner; did he do the vacuuming back in the day? “Just because my grandparents owned the place doesn’t mean I haven’t split many a fingernail working my ass off here! I’d clean the bathroom, get the gum off the rug, tar the roof, oh man…”

Gazing around at the hundreds of guitar cases filling every available inch of floor space, he guffaws. “This is nothing compared to our house! You know how BB King’s house resembles a hotel room in order for him to feel comfortable? For me to feel comfortable, my house has to look like this. But my other half makes sure it’s not too cluttered.”

The tagline on the FMC website reads “We pluck dulcimers, not chickens.” Though this was farmland once, Claremont was prospering as a university town, 30 miles outside Los Angeles, by the time Ben’s grandparents Charles and Dorothy Chase opened a musical repair shop in 1958 in the back of Boots Beer’s Real Estate Office. It’s since moved to bigger premises, to add a retail arm and then a museum archive, beginning with a Stauffer guitar and Theorbo (lute) from the 1880s, which a second hand store was selling for five dollars.

It’s the kind of heaven-sent environment for a boy to grow up, especially one who never considered any other future. “In my late teens, I heard a Mississippi John Hurt song, called Baby Right Away and it hit me, like deep lightening, that anything I did was going to support myself making music.” But this was the Folk Music Center, a crossroads of white and black music. “I was hearing a different voice screaming to get out besides the blues,” he remembers. “There was all this other information encoded into my DNA.”

Harper bought the store off his grandparents five years ago, to secure its future, but also it’s clear he needed to tether his own roots. “I have a heightened level of appreciation for what this store has brought to me,” he nods. “Musically, spiritually, culturally and politically.” Harper calls it “the centre in Claremont for where music, social and cultural awareness and consciousness meet. My family’s heritage is based in revolt and rebellion; my great-great-grandparents fought alongside Stalin in the Russian revolution, and my grandfather was a liberal teacher in the McCarthy era, who wouldn’t drop names to get off the hook, so he couldn’t teach for a while. My family were musical revolutionaries too, which was the one thing that made them confident about me going out into the music business. You see, I’m from folk music, and folk is only meant to look ambitious.”

In terms of scaling the upper echelons of celebrity fame, Harper has stayed true to his grandparents’ friend, folk icon Pete Seeger, who saw music only as a tool for social change. Despite living in the Hollywood Hills, you never see Harper at Hollywood functions or cuddling up to Beyonce on a TV special. He’s not been labelled “The Invisible Superstar” for nothing; a Grammy winner who’s sold millions and yet stays unrecognised through the whole day in his own store. Who would have known that “the other half” he refers to is Hollywood actress Laura Dern (they have two children together; Harper has two with his first wife)? Nevertheless, he’s well connected, going by who rings his mobile during lunch: “Hi, Heath!” Harper answers. Indeed, it is his good pal, actor Heath Ledger, who has conceived a treatment (and wants to direct) the video for Harper’s new single ‘Better Ways’. “How much?” the conversation runs. “I’ve spent money on worse things, believe me.”

As this post-Grammy stage of Harper’s life, he says, money is not an issue. Both Sides Of The Gun has a stripped down, raw pulse that goes right against the grain of what multi-platinum artists typically do. “On this record more than any other,” he muses, “I could have afforded any producer – and there were some highly reputable names interested, but I went it alone and finished everything in three months. How’s another producer going to produce ‘Better Way’? With its mix of tablas and Motown funk base and the blues slide guitar solo? That’s not production, that’s lunacy! And I don’t want to lose that feeling right now.”

It turns out that he’s a huge fan of ‘60s/‘70s production values and attitudes, “the evasive musical quality of imperfection,” as he calls it. “It’s human, and you’re unsure what’s going to happen next. It’s like skateboarding. You know the fall might be hard, but you have to be good enough to pull the trick. That’s what defines a brave record for me. As I sing in ‘The Way You Found Me’, “take me the way that I am, or leave me be”.

Both Sides Of The Gun is Harper’s first double CD, split between ‘hard’ (eclectic, febrile grooves) and ‘soft’ (he’s clearly a Cat Stevens fan). “My extremes are more polarised than they’ve ever been,” he reasons. The Both Sides of the title, he elaborates, doesn’t simply refer to his musical duality but to everything that presently infiltrates his and our lives: “it’s black and white, Israel and Palestine, pre- 9/11 and post-9/11, it’s the worst fight you’ve ever had with your wife, it’s love, it’s day and night.”

Walking back into the shop, past the sign that says “please ask for proper mallets,” and the little boy charging around (“touch with your eyes and not your hands, please!” his mum yells), Harper slips back into conversation with mum. A rare Martin acoustic guitar, with its intricate mother-of-pearl inlay, has found its way back into Ellen’s hands, the very guitar she learnt with, 44 years after her father sold it. The Folk Music Center has been a family business for almost fifty years, and you wouldn’t bet against it staying so for the next hundred and fifty.

Both Sides Of The Gun is released by Virgin on March

The Folk Music Center & Museum – www.folkmusiccenter.org