Steve Arkin

• Born: 1944
• Active: '60s, '70s
• Genres: Country
• Instrument: Banjo

Biography

This member of the thriving New York acoustic music scene is the cousin of Alan Arkin, and it was the famous actor himself who helped provide the climate of music which eventually helped turn Steve Arkin into an accomplished banjo player in several styles. Before he was an actor, Alan Arkin played in the hit late-'50s folk group the Tarriers. Steve was also a fan of other folk acts of this era, such as the Weavers and Pete Seeger. Alan was responsible for passing along the mastery of a few basic strums when the young cousin was about 13. The next year, Steve tried out his first five-string banjo, becoming even more attracted to Pete Seeger's recordings of Appalachian ballads. He also discovered the recordings of the archival revival band the New Lost City Ramblers. He studied a banjo style known as drop thumb frailing with Ricky Brandt, a New York musician who became a member of the Left Banke, basically the one-hit wonder behind the song "Don't Walk Away Renee." Arkin hit onto bluegrass the way quite a few others did in the '60s, mainly Flatt and Scruggs and "Foggy Mountain Breakdown." Area players who influenced him included Eric Weissberg, the session musician famous for coming up with the "Dueling Banjos" track, and Bob Yellin. Arkin formed his first band in 1960 out of jam session players who gathered in Washington Square Park, including Frank Benedetto, Greg Levasseur, and Jody Stecher. He kept practicing, and these workout sessions must have had some effect because the next year, at the ripe age of 17, Arkin managed to come in second against none other than major banjo player Bill Keith at the Philadelphia Folk Festival banjo contest. In 1962, Arkin played with the Down State Rebels, again with mandolinist Stecher, and also featuring Gene Lowinger on fiddle and Peter Szego on Dobro. This combination received the surprising backing of hit pop singer and icon Bobby Darin, and wound up playing Carnegie Hall several times. The Darin contact came about as a result of the declining public interest in the sort of smooth, Tin Pan Alley pop the singer had made his name with. Seeking to branch out, Darin became an A&R man as well as a singer, recording and producing an album of the Down State Rebels.

In 1963, Arkin became a member of the Hudson Tubes. Again he was teaming up with Stecher, this time on guitar, plus David Grisman on mandolin, Gene Lowinger on fiddle, and Fred Weiss on bass. This band evolved into the New York Ramblers, a spin-off of which was the delightful sounding Maria & the Washington Square Ramblers, featuring bandmembers such as Grisman and Arkin backing up up and coming vocalist Maria Muldaur.

Arkin left the full-time music scene in order to go to college, but kept up the bluegrass action through jam sessions with the likes of Don Stover and the Lilly Brothers. He also kept up his contacts with Bill Keith, who had been playing in Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys for the last few years but was planning on moving on. The Keith tenure in the Bluegrass Boys had been vital to creating a resurgence in Monroe's career. With a banjo player at his side who had all the power of Earl Scruggs, it was said that Monroe was back in the money, and there was much concern about who would possibly fill Keith's shoes when he rambled on. Keith, however, remembered the fellow who had come in second place in a banjo contest a few years back. This led to Arkin, now only 19 years old, heading for a meeting with Monroe himself in Nashville. Despite feeling that the first audition had gone awkwardly, Arkin wound up being summoned to a waiting bus and a tour that he later described in mysterious terms. "Nobody answered me when I asked where we were going and I never got a straight answer about what was going to happen next." It was a tour of North and South Carolina with gigs in church basements, drive-in movie theaters, and country music parks.

Arkin left Monroe's band following the summer of 1964 and moved back to New York. The next year he actually won first place in a Philadelphia banjo contest, a triumph that made him decide to stop playing completely, as if there were no more possible challenges. He moved to Cleveland and worked for a university press through 1973, when he returned to one of his first loves, old-time music. He collaborated with clawhammer banjoist Peter Hoover and fiddler Lisa Ornstein. In the early '80s, it was back to bluegrass again, including several years in Northern Lights, a top Boston progressive bluegrass or "newgrass" band. But he once again became re-baptized into the waters of old-time music with the New York-based Reel to Reel String Band featuring fiddler Harry Bolick and guitarist Tim Pitt. In 1999, Arkin performed at the Big Apple Bluegrass Festival. On records, he seems to be in need of a new pipeline of available material. The album produced by Bobby Darin is something of an ark of the covenant for used record collectors. Much live material has been released by various versions of Bill Monroe's bands, yet somehow Arkin seems to have remained off the microphone. One can hope that live tapes of the Washington Square with Grisman, Stecher, Muldaur et al might surface someday. As for the Northern Lights newgrass band, the marginally distributed recordings became further obscured by the output of three other bands with the same name, one new age, one heavy metal, and an all-star charity relief organization. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide