Fiddler Papa John Creach Still Rocking at 74

By phone, about the only thing that betrays Papa John Creach’s age is his hearing. With his appliance cranked up, the 74-year-old violinist gives an update on a career busy enough to burn out a man half his age.

Creach, who plays the Jazz Note in Pacific Beach Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, has just returned from a road trip with the Jefferson Starship, the veteran rock band he first teamed with during the early 1970s, when the group was known as the Jefferson Airplane.

Creach hadn’t played with the Starship in more than 10 years, but was recently invited along by Paul Kantner, one of the group’s founders.

At one point in the show, the band leaves the stage except for an organist and Creach. Then, Creach said, he brings the hushed crowd to tears with his signature rendition of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” Standing ovations are the norm.

“I like (touring with the Starship) because I like rock,” Creach said in his warm, well-seasoned voice. “But I play my blues with them, too, and I play their songs.”

Creach said he may play a part in a new Starship recording later this year, but more importantly, he is getting ready to make a new solo blues recording of his own. It will be his first as a leader since the 1978 “Inphasion,” which featured rock musicians such as Charlie Daniels.

Also, Creach will head out on the road to Hawaii next week with the Starship, and later this year plans to tour with San Francisco Bay Area rock bands the Dinosaurs and Kingfish.

Creach developed his sound--which he calls “fonky, bluesy fiddle”--during the 1930s. Throughout his career, he has preferred making his own music to playing along with others.

But the rock ‘n’ roll forays of the 1970s, with the Starship, Airplane and Hot Tuna, gave him a taste of a kind of financial security he had never known before.

“I like the money, and once you get into that, you’re caught,” he said. “My first year with the Jefferson Airplane, I came up with $275,000. I never earned that much before.”

Creach still enjoys royalty payments from his rock recordings. He also receives occasional royalties from airings of “The Gathering of Old Men,” a 1987 television movie in which he acted alongside Richard Widmark and Lou Gossett Jr. (Creach also composed the music).

But he’s looking ahead now to the recording he plans to make this spring, backed by Los Angeles bluesman Bernie Pearl and his band.

There won’t be any rock, or any pop tear-jerkers like “Over The Rainbow.”

“We’re just going to do a plain old straight blues album,” Creach said.

This will be a return to roots for Creach. His earliest musical memories are of blues on the radio, great singers like Mamie Smith and songs like “St. Louis Blues.”

Creach grew up in Beaver Falls, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where an uncle--a sailor and violinist himself--gave Creach his first violin. Creach was 14 when the Depression hit and his family moved to a farm near Benton Harbor, Mich., where they could grow food and earn a living farming.

Known then as Johnny Creach (the Jefferson Airplane dubbed him “Papa John”), the violinist and his family moved to Chicago, where Creach attended high school and the Chicago Conservatory of Music. He spent three years as a violinist in a Chicago symphony orchestra.

“But there was no money or future in that,” Creach said. “I moved into jazz and popular tunes and started working little clubs in Chicago, making money. I had to eat.

“By 1938, I was a pro, playing a lot of nice places, hotels, cocktail lounges. I even did some of the swanky ‘key’ clubs, run by gangsters.”

They were called key clubs because you needed a special key to get in, Creach explained. He had one, and was never afraid of the Mafia-types that ran the joints.

“Are you kidding? They were my friends. They gave me anything I wanted. And nobody better not say anything to me bad,” he laughed.

Through the 1930s, Creach’s violin, played into early microphones, was hard to hear in his own trios and in other groups he played with. But in 1943, National Steel introduced an electric violin.

“I made ‘em fix me up a real good one with a special amplifier,” Creach said. Electricity allowed Creach’s idiosyncratic style, with its rapid-fire, be-bop burst of notes and high, graceful slides through the upper registers, to stand out in any music setting.

Other violinists were coming of age in the 1940s, but Creach claims he was not influenced by them, although he heard them.

“I didn’t hear the greats too much. Later I listened to Stuff Smith, but by then, I could play, too. I knew him, he was my friend. And I heard Joe Venuti and Eddie South, the ‘Dark Angel of the Violin.’

“But mostly, I listened to horns. I hung out with horn players.”

As wind instruments go, the violin is closest in range to a flute or clarinet, Creach said, but his idols were always great alto and tenor saxophonists like Ben Webster and Eddie (Cleanhead) Vinson.

Creach has made only six albums as a leader, beginning with the 1971 “Papa John and Friends,” the friends being such adoring fans as rock musicians Jerry Garcia and Carlos Santana. That album remains Creach’s personal favorite, he said.

Long before his rock excursions, though, Creach laid down several no-longer-available 78s. The first came out in 1947 and featured Creach’s trio on blues and jazz tunes including “Indian Love Call.”

Creach has lived in Los Angeles since 1945. He moved from Chicago to play dates his manager had booked at several area restaurants and ended up staying. For five years during the late 1950s, he also played aboard the S.S. Catalina, which ferried passengers between Los Angeles and Catalina Island.

Through his association with rock, Creach has enjoyed periods of prosperity, but that’s not what keeps him playing at an age when some folks think of going fishing.

“What keeps me playing? The people, the great audiences, everyone’s so happy to see you.”

Including, it should be mentioned, the women who regularly give daughterly hugs and kisses to Creach at his shows.

“That’s nice, but I don’t go overboard with it,” said Creach, who has been married for 27 years to his wife and manager, Gretchen Creach. “It’s just happy people, and I love people. Maybe you get a few you might want to try something with, but I don’t want to be bothered with that.”

Papa John Creach plays the Jazz Note, 860 Garnet Ave., Pacific Beach, at 8 and 10 p.m. Friday-Saturday; 7 and 9 p.m. Sunday. Creach will be backed by drummer Ken Sara and pianist Leon Blue, both from Los Angeles, and an as-yet-to-be-named bassist. Also, guitarist/vocalist Pearl will be a special guest on Saturday night only. Call 272-1832 for information.