Dirty Jack's

The musical spirit of Dirty Jack’s Theater lives on in the performances of the people who once worked there; the talented young entertainers I had the pleasure of sharing a stage with as we all honed our craft. My new band is doing well. We are recording our first album, due out soon from No Hit Records. Our music is Hard Blues and Full Tilt Boogie. It ain’t much like the music I played at DJ’s 30 years ago, but the musical DNA is there. When I listen to our newest recordings I can hear the same sounds I played back then. Lordy, I wish I had some recordings from DJ’s in 1976… The bands website is www.davisbluesproject.com . There are some songs you can listen to, with more due to be posted within the next couple of weeks. Let me know what you think.

My memories of Dirty Jack’s are all sunny and warm, since the theater ran only in the summer. But I spent a few winters in Jackson Hole, and the they can be brutal. It is 6,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains, after all, and it can get COLD. I sometimes click on the link to the Jackson Town Square Webcam over in the right-hand column on this page. It looks pretty damn cold lately. Gray and chilly. The sidewalks look slippery, too. I don’t miss that part of it. After the 1979 season at Dirty Jack’s, Prudy and I moved to Michigan for a year. She was a school social worker and I caught on selling hifi equipment in a shop across from the campus of MSU. Nine months of that was enough, and we moved back to Jackson Hole. I got a job as the manager of the Pink Garter Lounge in Jackson. They wanted to start featuring live bands and I had some experience in the music entertainment biz, so there we were. I hired all kinds of acts and the joint was eventually jumpin’. Anyway, this story is about WI...

A very merry Christmas to everyone.

As promised, here is a poster from Dirty Jack's Theater production of "Paint Your Wagon" in 1976. Click on the poster for a larger image. Front row seated - Nancy Stainbrook, Jon Stainbrook, John Dorish, John Eagle Second row - Paul Fox, Melanie Jane Morris, Bob Houghtaling, Molly Sinclair, Gary Farrell, Bill Moore, Jeannie Howell, Richard Tierce, Kathy Fitzgerald Back row - Scott Graham, Randy Houghtaling, Lester Bake Too many years and too much debauchery have dimmed my memory a touch. There are a couple names I am unsure of. If you can help, please send me a note. The actors are standing in front of the orchestra pit. As I've written elsewhere, the band was right in the middle of the show. Now, if I could just find a picture of the band ... [Image courtesy of Rhonda Willford Eberst]

This is Nancy Stainbrook's obituary, published in the Jackson Hole News & Guide on April 30, 2003. It was touchingly written by her sister, Kathy. Click on the article for a larger image. Hover over the lower right corner of the image to enlarge even more. [Image courtesy of Rhonda Willford Eberst]

Tim went by his full name at Dirty Jack’s Theater… The full Irishness of it. He had dark hair and a close-cropped beard, and wore round wire-framed glasses. He played guitar and tenor banjo, singing Celtic songs and oozing Irishness. But to the guys in the band he was Tim, a young, soft-spoken, rather shy fellow. In our nightly dinner show at the Chuck Wagon Restaurant next to the theater, Tim adopted a charming Irish brogue and sang ballads of love and honor. He was very good. One night Tim seemed quite distracted, opening his set by announcing, “They’ve bombed Belfast again!” and charging ahead into some kind of Irish protest song. Word came down after the show that politics were strictly prohibited in the content of the entertainment at Dirty Jack’s. I am unaware if Belfast suffered more bombings that summer, but we heard no more about it from the stage. It seems every band member had something he got teased for… Something we ragged on each other about that was embarrassing or goofy...

The band at Dirty Jack’s in 1976 had a horn section, the first I’d ever worked with. I had never been one of those rock ‘n roll bigots who sniffed at horn sections, but brass did not fit into my Led Zeppelin-to-Waylon Jennings musical worldview. I thought the bands Chicago and Earth Wind and Fire sounded cool, in a Playboy Club sort of way. Well, I had never been within a thousand miles of a Playboy Club, but I imagined their bands had horns. Sean played trumpet. He was way before his time because he grew that little clump of whiskers right below his lower lip that is now popularly worn by most musicians and is known as a soul patch. I think he adopted it from Doc Severinson. Even I have one now. Sean was very dedicated to his craft, practicing a lot more than any of the other musicians in the band. I could often hear him working his scales in a room upstairs over the lobby of the theater. Sean was a music student at the University of Idaho. He must have been a person of exceptional pa...