Despite the recent acquisition of a broken ankle and loss of a broken bouzouki, folk and Celtic musician Roger Landes is on somewhat of a roll. From the accidental casting of him and his music in Ride With the Devil to the near completion of an as-yet-untitled duets album with friend and musical colleague Gerald Trimble, through rave reviews of performances with fellow Weston, Mo., native and friend Connie Dover to a recent move to Taos, N.M., nearly everything seems to be going Landes' way.
"It's been an interesting year, to say the least," says Landes across the telephone lines from his new Southwest home. "What with all of the activity, I'm having the time of my life. I've been nothing but busy in the last few months. Even this broken foot can't seem to slow me down."
According to Landes, the broken ankle came soon after he arrived in his new hometown. In fact, he'd been in Taos for only a day.
"I slipped and fell down in a friend's driveway," he says. "I just sort of crumbled to the ground, and my ankle snapped. I've been laid up on crutches for over three weeks now, and I have another three more to go. To be honest, it helped me keep still over the past few weeks. I've gotten quite a lot of composing done. My bum foot has helped me slow down and start writing more, which, in my opinion isn't so bad a tradeoff."
The recent loss in his life, the demise of his favorite instrument, coincidentally built in Taos, is something Landes hasn't quite recovered from, however. The dragon bouzouki was his prized possession, having been a major component of his highly acclaimed solo record Dragon Reels. The instrument was traveling with him on a recent plane flight when things went horribly wrong.
"(Continental) somehow managed to totally destroy my instrument," Landes says. "Gerald (Trimble) and I were on the way to New York to perform on an Indian satellite TV network. It's the largest television network in the world, called ZTV. The two of us were invited to perform on one of their highest-rated programs -- it has an audience of 170 million people worldwide. And as luck would have it, my instrument was damaged. Luckily, Steven (Smith, the luthier who made Landes' original) had lent his instrument to Gerald, and it was back home in Weston. I had it shipped to New York, and we were able to do the show. But since then, I've been kind of in a running skirmish with Continental to fully reimburse me for my losses. Suffice to say, I'm suing Continental."
Despite these bad breaks, Landes is still standing tall when it comes to his career. Last month saw the release of Ride With the Devil, a major motion picture starring Tobey Maguire, Jewel, and Skeet Ulrich. It's an account of the border wars between Kansas and Missouri during the Civil War, and it was filmed in both states in 1998. Almost by coincidence, Landes and several of his friends were hand-picked at the last minute to perform in a hastily added scene.
"It's all sort of a coincidence really. We had made friends with Jim Caviezel (the gaunt lead from The Thin Red Line), who plays Black John in (Ride With the Devil). He had come to one of mine and Connie's shows at Unity Temple on the Plaza. He invited us out to the film set in late May of last year (1998) because he thought our music would be perfect for the soundtrack. We took a band: Connie and I; John Whelan; Zan McLeod; and the drummer we play with, Paddy Lee; Kirk Lynch, a piper who played in Scartaglen -- basically a lot of the usual suspects -- and went out to the film site and played for a little over an hour while they were at lunch. They really all seemed to like it.
Comments (0)