Special Guests

Special Guests
Saturday, June 8, 1996

A decade ago, Ian Frazier received a warm welcome for his debut book, Dating Your Mom, when Newsweek magazine estimated that Frazier might be "the best master of gentle laid-back befuddlement since [Robert] Benchley." The next year, his second book, Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody, received rave reviews that compared Frazier to some of humor's heavyhitters: Twain, Thurber, and Waugh. Then in 1989, Frazier made his nonfiction debut with Great Plains, which became a bestseller. The New York Times Book Review said that Frazier, "with wit and style, writes about tumbleweeds, Bonnie and Clyde, the weather, cafe conversation, tepees, [and] MX missiles." As research for Great Plains, he drove 25,000 miles, spanning and crisscrossing the region between Montana and Texas. Not a Montana native, Frazier was born in the Midwest, outside of Cleveland, Ohio. He moved east to attend Harvard, where he wrote for the Lampoon and earned the attention of national television with the Lampoon's parody of Cosmo, featuring Henry Kissinger as centerfold. Frazier was graduated from Harvard in 1973 and within a year became a staffer at The New Yorker, where his pieces appeared for two decades. Recently, Frazier was seen on film: he played a Brooklyn resident in Smoke and in Blue in the Face, Wayne Wang's and Paul Auster's offbeat movies about a neighborhood cigar store. His latest book is Coyote v. Acme (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a collection of humorous essays.

Wallace McRae began writing poetry more than 25 years ago. At that time, he had just returned to Montana after serving in the U.S. Navy, which he entered right after college. While in uniform, McRae traveled around the world, but he began to long for the culture and traditions of Montana. So, he and his wife moved back, and soon the muse struck. McRae says, "I was just sitting in the house waiting for a heifer to calve, so I wrote a poem." McRae continued to write, and his first volume of poetry, It's Just Grass and Water, was published in 1979. He is now considered among the finest writers of ballad-style verse: in 1990, McRae became the first cowboy poet to be given a National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. However, fame has not separated McRae from the Montana land he grew up on. Like four generations of his family before him, McRae ranches on land overlooking Rosebud Creek, south of Colstrip.

The Jo miller/Laura Love Connection is a melding of two wonderful singers: Jo Miller and Laura Love. Singer/guitarist Jo Miller is best known as the leader of the now disbanded group, Ranch Romance. At age 17, Miller began performing in a folkstyle lounge act; three years later, she moved to Seattle to perform bluegrass. While there, she was inspired by the All-Star Cowgirl Revue, a casual gathering of local female acoustic players. As a result, Miller formed Ranch Romance in 1987-before folding this past year, the band had become a favorite of country-pop star k.d. lang, who described them as "the Roches meet Sons of the Pioneers." Laura Love and her band combine African/Caribbean rhythms with traditional acoustic music and wind up with a style that they call "Afro/Celtic." At age 16, Love sang pop and jazz standards with a local band in Nebraska, she then moved to Seattle and played grunge-blues for a few years, before changing her musical direction. In October 1994, Love was one of 30 performers invited to the first New York Singer-Songwriter Festival held at Carnegie Hall-her singing and her electric-bass playing thrilled the crowd and critics from The New York Times, Billboard, and others. Joining Miller and Love tonight are: Oliver Johnson (mandolin, dobro), and Nancy Katz (bass).