By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

Thank Jimi Hendrix and his impossible-to-duplicate guitar wizardry. If Dave Keller had come even close to copying Hendrix's acid-rock riffs, he would not be here in Montpelier, covering the state's musical landscape with its patches of blues and brass.

Legend has it Keller (who was born during the Summer of Love, the same year The Jimi Hendrix Experience made its U.S. debut, at 1967's The Monterey International Pop Music Festival) went straight to Hendrix's sources.

As a sophomore at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., Keller says, "All I listened to was Jimi Hendrix. I tried to play along with Hendrix, but it was fruitless. I read this great bio about how he had gone to Chicago to meet his heroes like Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. I thought: 'If it's good enough for Hendrix to learn from, the blues has to be good enough for me.'"

For Keller there is no music other than blues and soul, which may seem an unlikely choice for a Jewish kid who grew up in a completely white neighborhood and whose parents listened to opera and classical. "I didn't know anyone of color in Worcester (Mass.) until I was 11," Keller says from the music room of his Montpelier home that he shares with wife, Emily, and their two daughters.

Yet, African-Americans and Jews share an understanding of what it means being an outsider, says Keller. And their music shares similarities, too. "If you listen to Jewish music from the synagogue, and to gospel music, there are a lot of minor chords."

Keller sits sandwiched between a vintage Farfisa organ (this same model was used on the 1966 recording of "When A Man Loves A Woman" by Percy Sledge, he says, tossing out a bone from his encyclopedic knowledge of all things pertaining to blues and soul music and musicians) and an old upright piano.

The two keyboards are symbolic: Guitarist Keller's foray into the musical world began in the seventh grade with piano lessons.

"I had a completely evil piano teacher. I'd come home in tears begging my parents to let me quit. I was learning songs like the 'Song of the Volga Boatman' and old folk ballads that I'd never heard of. It wasn't an enjoyable experience."

It was around this same time that Keller attended his first rock concert with his parents and got a taste of the musician's life.

"My first rock concert, in 1979, was Styx's Grand Illusion Tour at Boston Garden. We were the only people who weren't high," he recalls with a laugh. "I got the idea that being onstage, in the spotlight, would be kind of cool. (After seeing Styx in concert) I would pretend to play air guitar."

At 16 he started playing a real guitar, a Sears acoustic, borrowed from his friend's mother. His instructor, coincidentally, also taught former Phish bassist Mike Gordon. "God bless him; he was very patient and kind, and he showed me the blues scale." Showing Keller the blues scale would prove auspicious.

He bought his own guitar, a frost-blue Peavey electric (his father pitched in for the amp; Keller still has both and plans to pass them on to his daughters), with money saved up from a summer job sorting bottles at a liquor store.

His first band in college was called Cup O' Pizza. Keller says he was asked to join the group "because I had a guitar." The group, he says, did covers of Sex Pistols tunes as jazz tunes and punk versions of jazz tunes. "We all sucked, basically. We were all awful. But it was good chance to get out there and play."

A year later he started a full-blown blues band, the Rhythm Method ("our posters showed a calendar with our gig's date circled"), which did covers of Carole King, The Neville Brothers, B.B. King, Freddy King, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells.

Following graduation from Wesleyan and armed with a degree in English, Keller moved to Somerville, Mass., where he worked in environmental consulting, writing EPA reports. Being cramped in a cubicle, he says, didn't suit his style; a few years later he drove across country to Kettle Falls, Wash., where he served as a VISTA volunteer.

It was there, he says, that he began working on his singing – on a deserted road. "I would sit on the hood of my car and crank up Ray Charles or Son House or The Soul Stirrers and sing along, where no one could hear me."

After his VISTA gig ended, Keller says, he drove around the Northeast looking for a "cool place to live." He discovered Montpelier, and for the next several years, but keeping his day jobs, Keller began performing solo and with other musicians in Montpelier and Burlington, building a large repertoire, reputation and following.

His attraction to soul music, he says, evolved naturally from the blues. The addition of brass – at minimum a sax and a trumpet – adds a distinctive "soul" sound to the music.

Keller's repertoire is exhaustive, but there is one song he refuses to play: Mustang Sally. Not that he doesn't like the song or its singer, Wilson Pickett. "I have never played Mustang Sally because it's overdone," he says. In fact, he says, one night at Nectars in Burlington, during an IDX party, the head of ICX, Rich Tarrant, offered to pay him to play it. But he turned him down.

These days time is a precious commodity for Keller. In addition to gigs around Central Vermont and Burlington, he teaches guitar to some 35 students from his home and takes care of his daughters, Havvah, 4, and Idalee, 2.

The latter, Keller says, obviously delighted, shares some of her father's musical tastes.

Riding in the car, Keller was about to pop in a CD, when Ida Lee demanded, "play Wilson Pickett."



Patrick Timothy Mullikin, an editor at the Times Argus, writes regularly for the Vermont Sunday Magazine.