Dirty Jack's

Life in Powell, Wyoming in the winter of 1976 was a bit dreary. Tired of working in a gas station, I got some student loan money together and enrolled full-time in Northwest Community College to break the monotony. I wanted to get better – a lot better – at harmonica so I became a music major. One day I saw a flyer tacked to a board in the halls of the music/theater department announcing a casting call for the summer stock show “Paint Your Wagon” at Dirty Jack’s Theater in Jackson Hole. I was transfixed. I borrowed a microphone from the music department and carried it to my little house near campus on 8th street. Having no car, I walked downtown to a store and bought a 15-minute TDK cassette. I was ready to record my audition tape. Sitting on my couch and holding the old, heavy vocal mic between my knees, I plugged it into the cassette deck of my stereo system and carefully played some riffs, all hunched over like a monkey trying to fuck a football. I recorded a couple of melodies I’d ...

I played country and blues harmonica at Dirty Jack’s Theater in the summers of 1976 and 1979. Not much has changed: I still play harp, but it is mostly blues music now. As I was reading through this blog I realized that I hadn’t written anything about the harp and what it is like to play. The harmonica is just about the only instrument that is played by inhaling. All the cool notes on a harp are draw notes because you can bend – or slightly flatten – them to create a bluesy tone. But the sound of the bend is only half of it. The feeling of bending a note just right is awesome. To get good tone on a harp you must draw air from your diaphragm, not suck it in with your mouth and throat like drinking through a straw. The killer tone comes from allowing the column of air extending from your lungs, throat, mouth and nasal cavity to vibrate and resonate as you inhale air across the reed. The feeling of hitting a good growling tone is indescribable. Your guts become part of the music. My philo...

Pat “Doc” Holt was the bandleader/musical director at Dirty Jack’s Theater in the years I worked there. He was a very interesting guy. Doc was older than the rest of us, maybe in his forties, a bit portly, with long brown hair slicked back behind his ears and a ruddy complexion. He had a raspy voice and a backslapping demeanor. I suspected he was a heavy drinker. Every night during the curtain call Jon Stainbrook would introduce Doc as “the doctor of musicology, Pat Holt!” I never knew what he meant by that, except that Doc was good at rinky-tink barrel-house piano, and he managed the music side of the show pretty well. Doc had it goin’ on. Every night he dressed in a black gunfighter’s outfit, complete with vest, boots, hat, a black two-gun belt, and two loaded Ruger revolvers that looked like either .38s or 357s. I could see the butt ends of the bullets shining from the revolver as he sat at his piano to my right, the gold color of the brass and the silver of the center-fire primer g...

Lots of cool stuff happened in the lobby of Dirty Jack’s theater when I worked there as an actor/musician in 1976 and 1979. By day it was the ticket office, and a place where the crowds of tourists walking by could get an old west sassparilla at the snack bar. [Note: That shit is nasty – Rick] Jon Stainbrook, the head honcho of Dirty Jack's, encouraged the cast to sometimes hang out in the lobby during the day to liven up the place, talk to the tourists, and generate interest in the show. I would take a harmonica and play either in the lobby or out on the benches that lined the covered wooden sidewalk out front. It always caused a small crowd to gather. Sometimes I would play a Jaw Harp , an acoustic wind instrument that makes that buzzing “boing boing” sound you hear in cartoons and old traditional music. Kids loved it, but that sometimes led to problems. More than once a perturbed dad would later walk up to me frowning and thumbing his money roll, asking how much for the toy. As ...

Do you know what is now standing in the space that was once Dirty Jack's Theater in Jackson? Just tacky... (For this the landlords crudely ousted the Stainbrooks and ended Dirty Jack's. It just makes me ill.)

After the show on June 11, 1979, a gaggle of us headed out of Dirty Jack’s Theater in the direction of the town square in search of a drink. Just to the south of Dirty Jack’s along Cache Street was the local cinema, where we saw the guy who ran the cinema up on a ladder spelling out a message on the marquee… at 11:30 on a Tuesday night. He was weeping. He told us John Wayne had died. We were a group of professional actors, by God, and we instantly sensed our vocational obligation to show proper reverence to the Duke’s passing. After a respectful few seconds of throat-clearing and foot-shuffling, an actor blurted out, “Awwww, I never liked him anyway.” Neither did I. Still don’t, but that is beside the point. The point was that we were in search of a drink after sweating all evening under hot lights providing giggles for the touristi. The death of a cultural icon could not stand in our way. We made our way to the Pink Garter Bar and from there to the other rowdy clubs on the square. I c...

Several readers wrote to me about something I alluded to in my last post: Somebody shot at me in Tempe one night. What was up with that, they asked. Well, here’s the story: In early 1979 my friend Mark and I went to a fraternity party at Arizona State University and stole a keg of beer. Neither of us were students, but we were drunk as hell. I remember later climbing the fire escape stairs of Manzanita Hall, then the freshman girls dormitory, and getting caught by a stern middle-aged woman at about the 8th floor. I don’t know what we were thinking. Later still we were driving around in neighborhoods near the university in Mark’s little MGB convertible. The streets were narrow – one lane each way – with parked cars lining the curb on each side. We came upon a pickup truck stopped in the road, in our lane facing the wrong way. Its lights were on and the engine was running. The truck was in our way, so we did what made the most sense to us at the time: We pulled as close to the truck as p...

By the spring of 1979 I’d pretty much run out my string in Phoenix. I got shot at by a stranger one night in Tempe, I had a nasty breakup with my girlfriend, and in a fit of pique I quit a good paying job I liked. It was time to leave town. In April I called up Jon Stainbrook at Dirty Jack’s Theater in Jackson Hole and asked if there was room in the orchestra for me. I needed a place to land for the summer, and Jackson sounded like just the ticket. At the end of the summer, who knows? I decided to worry about that when the time came. I pulled into Jackson in mid-May, and the theater was a mess. The lobby was piled with junk, and the only person I could find was a surly fat guy busy moving things. He bristled when I asked for Jon. Things had changed. I could feel it. When I was a member of the cast in 1976 it had been known that Jon had MS, and three years later it had progressed. He seemed weak and short-tempered. He was pale, thin, cranky. He had married a younger blond woman who seem...