I wasn’t surprised, then, to learn that Sorbye cut his teeth on the likes of Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and other Greenwich Village types who have made their way into the most Parnassus-like echelons of recorded music.

True to his roots, the Norwegian-born Sorbye is a great storyteller not only on record but also in conversation; a certain unmistakable warmth permeates his speech as he weaves fascinating tales about life and music. What follows is from an interview conducted with Sorbye, via phone, in mid-January, 2002.

JB: One of the things that’s struck me [as I’ve read about you] is that you have quite a varied background. You made your way from [Norway] down to the U.K. as a street musician.

LS: I spent a few years in the 70s, before I came to the states, as a busker, as a street performer, among other things. I did live for a while in Ireland and I took a number of trips to various places in the British Isles during the 70s.

JB: What did that busker life do for you as a musician?

LS: I was always interested in traditional folk music and really the best way to learn that type of music is by going to places where people play it and learning it directly from the players and singers in those areas. So, it gave me a really good opportunity to collect traditional folk material, more than anything [else]. And also, I had the chance to play in front of a lot of different people and so it had an enormous impact on me on that level. So what it did [was] confirm my two passions in life which are playing music and travelling. Years later I feel privileged that I never had any other job than exactly that. Obviously, these days it’s a little more organized than it was back then, but it’s still part of the same lifestyle.

JB: And I imagine that in addition to the chance to collect different kinds of music, you had the chance to collect different kinds of stories: either the kind that people told you or the kind that you experienced first hand.

LS: Absolutely. I did quite a bit of experiments in my lifestyle department during my youth and a lot of it got manifested in songs. I released a solo record in the early-mid 90s that had mostly traveling songs and stories based on my travels, so I kind of got them out in one concept record. So, it’s true: you discover a lot and you experience a lot and you have a lot of different interactions with different people.

JB: I read that Bob Dylan was somebody who was important to you very early on. People always talk about Dylan, about his genius and so on, but I’m always curious about how people discovered him. How was it in your case?

LS: It goes back to when I was a kid in Norway. I was an enormous Beatles fan. I always had to look at the kids in school who were a little older than me, a little hipper, who were able to grow their hair long. They became my source material. I remember distinctly, that one of these kids had Bob Dylan’s name written on the back of a jeans jacket and I figured that if I wanted to be really hip [I’d have to] forget about The Beatles because Dylan was the real thing. So just based on that recommendation I just started digging into Dylan’s stuff before I was even a teenager. I remember getting Dylan records and just getting totally blown away by the whole sound of things. I remember getting hold of Blonde On Blonde. That was before my knowledge of English was very good, so obviously I wasn’t drawn to Dylan because of his lyrics as much as to the sound and the whole idea of it being all that different. And then when I started getting involved in his music I found that I could play those things based on three chords, which was a big relief to me. It wasn’t that difficult to figure out a Dylan song. But pretty soon [there was more]. I think I learned a lot of my English from just basically religiously studying The Bob Dylan Songbook when it came out: memorizing every word and so to me he had a huge impact because he showed me that I could learn these songs.

I really got into the idea that this guy was painting these pictures that were so far-out that they gave me an idea that there was a totally different reality there than just what I was experiencing on a daily basis. So, I think that probably the early Dylan influence caused enough damage that I never got a regular job.

JB: [laughs] Yeah, it’s interesting too that he’s come around again. Ten or twelve years ago if someone would have told me that he’d be making records as good as the last few he’s made, I wouldn’t have believed it, but there he is.

LS: Another thing that made Dylan so important was that it became a passion of mine that I didn’t share with anybody in the beginning [was that] nobody I knew could handle Dylan records. But slowly I discovered that across the street there was another kid a few years older than me who shared that passion. We used to hang out in his room just listening to Dylan records endlessly. And I remember when The Beatles’ White Album came out it was Dylan’s 28th birthday and we suffered through listening to the song "Birthday" twenty-eight times while we were glaring at the Dylan posters.

One day we got a knock on the door and this guy was standing there—this older guy from up the street, an American guy—saying, ‘I see you guys have got all these Dylan posters and stuff, why don’t you come over to my house some time?’ So we went up and visited with this guy on a Sunday afternoon. It turned out he was one of Dylan’s friends from Greenwich Village. So he told us all these stories about what it was like and experiences with that time period. He’d just left the U.S. and he gave us the latest letter he’d gotten from Bob Dylan which to us was a huge treasure and it had a lot of drawings that Dylan had made on the envelope and I remember that it was just this personal letter between this guy and Dylan, so my friend and I were going to share this letter, as I recall, as a treasure but he wound up selling it for 2,000 kroners! I remember being really pissed off at the guy.

JB: The other one is Phil Ochs. You do a Phil Ochs song ["The Iron Lady"] on this record [Balance]. I have to confess that I’ve read a lot about him but that was the first time I’d actually heard one of his songs.

LS: Ochs was the same thing as Dylan because he came from the same time as when Dylan was in that whole Greenwich Village singer-songwriter mode. There were all these people like Ritchie Havens and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot and also Phil Ochs and so I got turned onto Phil Ochs at the same time and studied his songbook as well. Phil Ochs was one of those guys who, after the peace movement died out and Dylan moved on, was never able to do that and he became really depressed. He became a depressed alcoholic and ended his life in 1978.

[But] the way this whole thing came about of recording a Phil Ochs song is another rather long-winded story. In the fall of 2000 right before we started recording Balance we were doing a national tour and I was actually reading Phil Ochs’ biography. We have some friends in Philadelphia who we stayed with for a few days during our shows on the east coast and it turns out Diane (the woman we were staying with—we stayed with Diane and Bob, a neurosurgeon in Philly) and these people are really involved in the folk scene on the east coast and it turns out that Diane’s best friend is Sonny Ochs, Phil’s sister who now looks after his estate. We started talking about Phil and [someone said], ‘You know, ever year we do a tribute to Phil Ochs at Carnegie Hall with Peter, Paul, and Mary and Joan Baez, Arlo Gutherie, [etc.]. But it’d be cool if you [we] had some contemporary or younger artists, so maybe Tempest [should get involved].’ So that’s how that all came about; Phil Ochs became really real to me again.

So, the whole idea of recording one of his songs came about because we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be part of the tribute concert at Carnegie Hall?’ So I went home and dug out that old Phil Ochs songbook from the 60s and "The Iron Lady" is one of the songs I remember learning when I was a kid. Shortly after that we played in Texas, during the time of the elections, so I found it really timely to do a song about the electric chair.

JB: Tempest is a self-managed band. Is it hard for you to let go of the business end and dive into the creative?

LS: It is pretty hard and we haven’t always been a self-managed or cottage industry type of band. But we sort of found our own place in the world: what we do is fairly unique and we tend to work with people who we’ve developed a working relationship with over the years. So, we found that having direct communication with the various promoters and the people we’re working with is a lot easier. We still work with various agencies when it comes to booking and stuff but it’s not an exclusive deal anymore so that we’re tied down to one agency, it’s a situation where most of the stuff gets booked out of the band’s office. And I look after most of the business myself and I’ve found that of two evils it’s the lesser evil because . . .. You know, if I’m going to be on the road with the band, if I’m one of the musicians, I’m going to route us according to what I think is best. An agent would route us according to how big of a commission he can get.

Having established a working relationship with so many people—since the band has been around for thirteen years and has been touring since day one—whenever we work through an agency, a lot of times they prefer to talk to the band directly because they’re used to it. So, I’m trying to keep it in-house for as long as I can. In the mid-90s we did sign a lot of things over to other people and it just didn’t work as well because nobody’s going to look after your baby better than yourself. So, at this point, you’re right: it’s difficult because it takes up a lot of time, it takes a lot of time away from the creative process, but the plus point is that you have absolute control, so you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do and when you do something you make damn sure you do it right.

JB: "Captain Ward" [the lead-off track on Balance] is a traditional tune. Do you remember how you first came across it?

LS: "Captain Ward" is a traditional lyric, though the music is pretty much our own, though it didn’t get credited that way on the record. But that song came about because we did a lot of talking about pirates at one point; I’d written a song called "Captain Morgan" that was really popular with our fans, so we always thought, ‘We should get another pirate song since people can really identify buccaneering with Tempest.’ I started reading about this pirate called Captain Ward and what fascinated me was that this guy was the only pirate in Scotland's history and the fact that Scotland is surrounded by water you would think that there’d be a more active scene for pirates. But he was the only one, so he didn’t have much competition and he did really well.

I’m trying to think about where I first heard any songs about Captain Ward because he shows up in a fair amount of British Isles songs, especially Scottish ballads which tell the story of the Royal Rainbow, which was his ship. So, there are a few songs out there called "The Royal Rainbow" or "Captain Ward and The Royal Rainbow." But I can’t think for the life of me where I first heard the song [we do on this record]. Because it’s one of those things: I’ve heard thousands and thousands of traditional songs over the last 30 years. I mean, I’ve got filing cabinets full of them. But it’s not taken from anybody else’s arrangement or anything. It’s our own.

JB: What’s going on with Caliban?

LS: Usually Caliban is myself and whoever the current fiddle player in Tempest is. Sue Draheim, our current fiddle player, has actually been playing with me in [Caliban] since before she joined Tempest, so we’ve been playing together for quite some time. And, actually, even going further back, when I was still living in Europe and living in Norway during the 70s, I was a great fan of Sue’s. She used to live in England back then and she played with a lot of my heroes: John Renbourn Group, Richard Thompson, and was one of the founding members of the Albion Band. She played with all the people that I grew up listening to, so I was a big fan of Sue’s. When I discovered that she lives in my neighborhood, we started playing together as a duo and then later she joined Tempest when the situation was right. So, we’re going really strong, actually.

We’re thinking about putting together material for another record and it’s great for me to be able to do both: play electric with Tempest and then acoustic with Caliban, it’s the perfect thing.