A RADIO SHOW WITH VERVE

Musician Jeff Minnick brings his country cred to the airwaves

story by DON CAMPBELL | photos by RENATA KOSINA and provided

Renata Kosina

The golden age of radio, from roughly 1930 to 1940, wove itself tightly into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives, broadcasting the comfort of diverse entertainment and vital news to a nation aching to work their weary bones through economic woes and a burgeoning world war. From small local stations to the likes of the mighty WSM, the Nashville home of country music’s Grand Ole Opry, radio was a strong and sinuous tie that bound communities together with music, talk and advertising touting the services of local businesses — our friends and neighbors, really.

Here in a post-pandemic and seemingly tenuous world, from the cramped and stuffy Studio B of a small radio station in downtown The Dalles, not much has really changed. Deejay Jeff Minnick, headphones perched on a baseball-capped head, his gentle, sonorous voice inches from a microphone, back-announces to a grateful community a country hit that hasn’t seen a radio music chart in well over 50 or 60 years.

Minnick is an encyclopedia of country music, citing chapter-and-verse about the artist, the producer, the song, the side musicians, their careers, their road stories, their trials and tribulations. It’s a powerful tonic.

Minnick’s lightning in a bottle is his two-hour weekly show, “The Country Side,” where every Sunday from noon to 2 p.m. he distills the essence of authentic country music, the kind played in honky-tonks and on radio stations and juke boxes, from well back in the day. It’s music for the working class, simple yet poignant, classic storytelling in three chords and a guitar.

From Fiddlin’ John Carson and DeFord Bailey, to Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Webb Pierce, Bill Monroe, Patsy Cline, Ferlin Husky, Faron Young, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and on and on and on — Minnick offers a 120-minute blue streak of this foundational music born of Appalachian folk and the Black blues of Africa, Irish and Celtic fiddles and various European spices and variations.

Minnick is himself something of a classic. A hometown The Dalles boy, born and raised along the mighty Columbia River, he’s been writing a personal extended country opus since he left this little burg shortly after

Sierra Renard Photography

Jeff Minnick in the studio, opposite top and right, and in a photo for the Reddy Black Trio, opposite bottom.

high school graduation. Enamored of Cuban singer, drummer and bandleader Desi Arnaz, co-star along with Lucille Ball of the I Love Lucy show, Minnick lived for any episode that showed Arnaz’s character Ricky Ricardo slapping a conga drum in a nightclub.

“I was terri ed of Lucille Ball,” he says, “but maybe I’d get to see Ricky play at the Copa [the show’s ctional nightclub on TV].” Where is this magical Copa, he wondered?

When the Beatles stormed our beaches, it was all over. Music put him on a path to nd that Copa dream. He headed downriver to Portland and got a job as a bellhop at a Sheraton hotel near the airport. ere he was lucky enough to shuttle famous musical artists including Buck Owens, Maynard Ferguson, even Ted Nugent.

He eventually procured a set of drums and learned his rudiments. He, as he puts it, “washed back up on the shores of the Columbia” for a spell before hitting the road to play

Renata Kosina (both photos)

music on the Intermountain Circuit, throughout the greater West, including Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming and Eastern Oregon.

Ironically, at that stage, he says, “I hated country music,” before hearing a version of Merle Haggard’s “Ramblin’ Fever”: My hat don’t hang on the same nail too long My ears can’t stand to hear the same old song An’ I don’t leave the highway long enough to bog down in the mud ‘Cause I’ve got ramblin’ fever in my blood

“ at hit a di erent pleasure center,” he o ers with a smile.

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Jeff Minnick on drums with the Gary Primich Band at a venue called Memphis Smoke in Detroit, Mich., in the early 1990s.

Ramblin’ fever brought him back to Portland in 1980 where he attended Mt. Hood Community College to study music. “It really helped me,” he says. “I learned basic music theory.” That core knowledge would enable him to not only develop his personal musical philosophy — “Let the song play you” — but enabled him, when he finally returned to The Dalles for good, to be an influential drum and music teacher, one who could tell his own tales of the road.

But musical wanderlust would first take him to Austin, Texas. A regional band called the Channel Cats, which included Minnick and stellar players Chris Miller and Albert Reda, got jazzed about heading to the Lone Star music mecca. Miller transplanted, and Minnick soon followed, hooking up with blues powerhouse Gary Primich and country star Junior Brown.

“It was a great experience,” he says. He tells the tale of cold-calling Junior Brown, whose name was in the Austin phonebook, to see if he needed a drummer. “You own a suit?” Brown asked him. Minnick procured one and got the gig.

For a variety of personal reasons, Minnick made the call to move home permanently to The Dalles and its small-town values. Having just turned 65 this past August, he has over the last few years carved out a solid niche playing music here — for several years with Portland blues harmonica legend Paul deLay, and now with his main band, the Wasco Bros. (with whom your writer plays bass), the Reddy Black Trio that holds court on Sundays at the Bargeway Pub and Tuesdays at Zim’s (the classiest, old-school honky-tonk in the region), and a solo slot on Thursdays at the Last Stop (he also plays guitar and is an accomplished singer/songwriter).

But it’s his radio show that scratches a particular itch. “When you’re traveling around with musicians,” he says, “you’re always doing music trivia, entertaining ourselves. You know the stuff we geek out on. I missed that after getting off the road. With radio, I got it back. And I keep educating myself.”

Minnick found his way to the family-owned Gorge Country Media, home to four local stations: Y102 Gorge Country (where Minnick’s show lives), 95.9 Star FM, Radio Lazer and KLCK 1400. The group is owned and operated through sheer grit by Shannon Milburn and Cody Carpenter, with help from their two sons. Milburn has been forced to miss an on-air shift at the last minute because the stations’ Stacker Butte tower needs attention, and Carpenter has been known to lend her helping hand at the food-bank operation across the street at the Salvation Army.

Minnick began with four sponsors and is now up to seven. He produces his own essentially “live” advertising spots, visiting the sponsors in person and recording folksy conversations that don’t necessarily strictly pertain to a sponsor’s particular service. Dennis Morgan at Copper West Real Estate can be heard waxing rhapsodic about arcane history of The Dalles. Ears the Answer’s Keith Howe will debate Minnick about NBA trade deals and the woes and successes of the Portland Trailblazers. And Brenna Campbell and James Johnson at Brenna’s Mosier Market might debate the best barbecue in Austin and the relative merits, or lack thereof, of drinking kombucha.

It’s community radio wrapped around a solid-gold slice of classic American music, all from a small town where he’s finally washed ashore for good. “You’re not gonna find that anywhere,” he says. “I’m pretty happy. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Courtesy of Jeff Minnick

You can listen to “The Country Side,” with host Jeff Minnick, Sundays from noon — 2 p.m., broadcast on Y102 Gorge Country, 102.3 FM. Don Campbell is a writer and musician. He hides out at a secret fortress on a hilltop in Mosier and is a frequent contributor to The Gorge Magazine.

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