BELLOWS FALLS-When singer/songwriter Michael Veitch returns to his hometown of Bellows Falls as part of the Saturday, July 18, Folk, Roots & Americana Music Festival held outdoors at in the Robertson Paper Company field on Island Street, the location will have a very special meaning for him.
“When I heard that’s where the concert would be, I had to adjust the set list to make sure it was also tailored to the event!” Veitch said. “My father managed Robertson Paper Mill for many years, and I grew up running around that place. [It holds] many memories, and of course some of those have ended up in my music.”
Veitch, now of Woodstock, New York, will perform with a full band, including “two stellar Woodstock musicians to join me, Kyle Esposito on bass and Paul Duffy on keyboards.”
Part of the Next Stage Art’s Bandwagon Summer Series, the festival will include Doozy Jane and headliners The Mammals.
The ‘Robbie Paper’ location
After years of trying to rehabilitate the old mill building, the Robertson Mill was finally torn down in 2019, and the highly polluted brownfields site was successfully restored, with 18 inches of clean topsoil covering any polluted earth that might remain.
The restored 1.67-acre site is available for commercial development. In the meantime, the open field has been maintained and used for outdoor concerts for the last few years.
Part of a local family well-known for contributing over several generations to the region’s arts and music scene, Veitch grew up in Bellows Falls and graduated from high school there in 1973.
“BF was a great place growing up as a kid,” Veitch said, remembering the sound of steam trains in the background and how he held down both morning and afternoon paper routes. “We had full run of the streets on our bikes. We walked to school and the town pool. Today it would be considered idyllic, I think.”
When asked why his family has been so involved with the arts, Veitch laughs.
“It must have been that Bellows Falls air and water!” he said. “My father was an artist who almost went to work for Walt Disney before he met our mother in BF.”
His brother Rick Veitch, who now lives in West Townshend, has had a long, international career in comics and graphic novels, including working for Marvel’s Epic Comics line, illustrating DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, and being named Vermont’s Cartoon Laureate in 2020.
Oldest brother Tom Veitch was a novelist, poet, and underground “comix” writer, and he “worked with George Lucas on Star Wars.”
“My brother Pete is a local master builder specializing in historic renovations,” Veitch said. “My daughter Madeline has art hanging in the Fleming Museum [of Art in Burlington]. My youngest, Flora, is a lifelong horse jumper and a successful Realtor in the Hamptons. [Son] Ollie Veitch and [nephew] Ezra Veitch have held down the Veitch fort here at home. It’s quite a crew and a blessing.”
Veitch himself, in addition to his work in music, is also an accomplished painter and photographer. All of these interests and skills came early in his life. He remembers the first local musicians he began playing with were Bernie Moss, Bob Huntoon, and Michael Joy, among others.
“I was always a few years younger than the other band members it seems,” Veitch said. “We had bands coming to town to play Meatland [a local bar and club], and high school proms.”
He said he remembers when band kids played in local bars that he “would talk my way into and sit at the back watching the bands when I was 14 or 15 years old. Bands like Fidgety Feet, Gene Struthers, Better Days — too many to list. Plus, all the big acts that would play Windham College, Franklin Pierce, UVM. It was great fun!”
Veitch said he played the local club circuit for a while in cover bands like Teaser, Spanks, and Empire. Then he and Moss joined John Lynch and Gary Spaulding to start The Secrets, “to ride the New Wave fad and started writing our own songs then,” he said.
It was after Secrets and the experience of writing his own material that Veitch said he started playing mostly acoustic guitar and got in on the singer-songwriter trend, adding, with a laugh, “once I had written some decent material. It took awhile.”
The Greenwich Village folk scene
Veitch moved to Brooklyn, New York, for five years and said that “part of that adventure included getting to know Jack Hardy and the Fast Folk crowd in Greenwich Village.”
Hardy was a central figure in the post-Bob Dylan folk revival, mentoring a whole new generation of singer-songwriters. He edited the Fast Folk Musical Magazine.
Veitch said he honed his songwriting craftsmanship as part of Hardy’s legendary Monday night songwriting workshops in the village.
Among the talented songwriters nurtured through that workshop and magazine were Suzanne Vega, Lyle Lovett, Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, Christine Lavin, Richard Shindell, and Lucy Kaplansky.
The gatherings “really helped me evolve as a songwriter,” Veitch said.
He also went to college in New York City, and one of his professors knew Murray Krugman, who, ironically, had a small record label in Vermont.
“Murray believed in me at a time I really needed believing in,” Veitch said. “He produced my first two official releases on his Silver Wolf label. I haven’t stopped since.”
One of the most important connections Veitch made through the songwriting workshops was with Shawn Colvin. She would encourage him in his songwriting, and eventually he developed as a writer and performer to the point where Veitch has toured with her many times over the years.
Touring with Colvin and his solo performances allowed Veitch to meet many of his musical heroes, including Ed Sanders, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Lucinda Williams, David Crosby, Richard Thompson, John Sebastian, Happy and Artie Traum, Jules Shear, and Leo Kottke.
“I’ve been honored truly to have spent time with all of them,” Veitch continued. “I even got to be a bit actor in a Ringo [Starr] music video.”
He also does not want to forget Saxtons River’s Chris Whitley, who died in 2005. “We were talking about doing a show together in BF before he passed,” Veitch said.
He has also collaborated with “the great Judy Collins, who I got to open for here in BF.” Collins would record a Veitch song, “Veteran’s Day,” on her Bohemian album, and Colvin has provided vocals for some of Veitch’s recordings.
From music to politics
Music has opened some other unusual doors as well.
While performing with Colvin at a well-known venue in Washington, D.C., in 1994, George Stephanopoulos, senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, attended the show and invited the two musicians to a special tour of the White House, where they got to meet the president in the Oval Office.
Veitch said he always had an interest in participating in civic life, beginning when he lived in Bellows Falls. With Westminster’s Waldo and Alma Beals, he helped start the first town recycling committee and helped create the Rockingham-Westminster recycling center.
Later he became the Southern Office director for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), the state’s largest consumer and environmental organization, and he ran for state Senate.
“I’ve stayed politically active all through the years,” says Veitch, who now chairs his town’s Tree Committee.
In recent years, Veitch has also been creating videos for his YouTube channel about budget guitars in a series he calls “Woodstock Guitar Guy.”
“It started during Covid when my luthier stopped seeing customers,” he said. “She told me ‘You can do it yourself.’
“So I went on YouTube and started teaching myself,” Veitch said. “It’s been very rewarding and therapeutic. I’ve saved a lot of money too!”
Germany and a Holocaust project
Veitch lived in Munich, Germany, for two years and studied the Holocaust from the German side while he was there.
“In Munich, I went looking for where the local songwriters hung out and found them at a real bagel shop run by a German and an American. The first question they asked was, “Did I know Jack Hardy from Fast Folk?”
When Veitch helped them start a songwriters weekly meeting at the bagel place, “it was the beginning of many lifelong friendships,” he said.
Veitch would also become involved with a program that paired Hudson Valley songwriters writing music with Holocaust survivors. That project became a PBS documentary, We Remember: Songs of Survivors, which is still available for viewing via the PBS Video Portal.
Looking back at six decades of playing and writing music, Veitch said that he most appreciates “those long-lasting friendships.”
He credits “people who have given their talents to helping me achieve what I had started with a concept, an acoustic guitar, and a pad and pen,” he said. “It’s been a group effort all these years even though I am mostly a solo act. Mentors, partners, kids. Life is a group effort, after all.”
Veitch said he’s “very excited” to offer Discovered, a brand-new 13th CD at his Bellows Falls performance: “all cover songs by people I know or have known.”
“Bellows Falls is in my DNA and coming around to sing my songs here is always a thrill for me,” he said. “I’m looking forward to standing on that hallowed ground of Robertsons and the Island House that I’ve known so well.”
This Arts item by Robert F. Smith was written for The Commons.