It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Snopek

Snopek, left, will be joined by Denice Goetsh on oboe, multi-instrumentalist Michael Woods and vocalist Emily Wolersberger at The Holiday Music Motel. Photo by James Crnkovich.

Back when there were Nordic ski trails in Fish Creek and the Omnibus ski lodge was rocking, Sigmund Snopek III helped welcome 10 consecutive new years playing at the Omnibus.

“Before that, my first performance was at The Rock (now Alexander’s), the summer of 1967. I was 16,” Snopek said recently by telephone from his Milwaukee home. “Door County is certainly one of my favorite spots in the world.”

In fact, he names a 1980 show he did with his band Snopek in a Washington Island barn as one of his Top 10 gigs, along with doing a solo show with Muddy Waters and performing alongside the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar at the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival.

Snopek returns to Door County on Dec. 11 for what has become a new tradition of performing a Christmas show at the Holiday Music Motel in Sturgeon Bay. This will be his third holiday show at the Holiday.

Among the rock and classical compositions and recordings (Snopek has composed eight symphonies), Snopek has also recorded three Christmas CDs.

“One is simply titled Christmas,” he said. “The second one is called Ornaments. And the third one is called The Easter Bunny’s Christmas. That one comes with a greeting card you can send out that says ‘Merry Christmas from the Easter Bunny’.”

Snopek said his compositional instincts honed in on the holidays through a combination of his daughter’s birth and his mother, a ceramicist, creating ceramic Santa Clauses.

“I didn’t really have the Christmas thing a lot until I had my daughter. She’s 21 now,” he said. “My mom started making these 11-inch Santas. That kind of got me in the mood. Then I started collecting Dept. 56 Christmas buildings, so I had this huge Christmas display I put up. I thought, I better make some Christmas CDs, since that’s what I do for a living. It started out to be a really fun break from other music I do. Christmas music is a whole other world.”

For this year’s concert, Snopek will be joined by multi-instrumentalist Michael Woods (who is celebrating his new CD Burning Trees), vocalist Emily Wolersberger (“She’s got a tremendous voice,” Snopek says), and oboist Denise Goetsh (“Denise plays a mean oboe,” he says).

“Besides Christmas music, we’ll be doing some of our own original music and some German stuff,” Snopek said.

The concert will also celebrate the release of a new book that contends that Snopek has a body of work that puts him among the ranks of other great musical eccentrics such as James Brown, Sun Ra, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Frank Zappa and Yoko Ono. The only difference, says Michael Bielke in his Adventures in Avant-Pop (Naciketas Press), between Snopek and the other six musicians is that he is a victim of location, location, location. Yet, Bielke points out, Snopek repeatedly embraces his location musically.

In the Snopek chapter, titled “Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Snopek III?”, Bielke writes, “to hear him is to like him. There’s some value for everybody in his complex and beguiling compositions….

“What’s so beguiling about Snopek’s music is that it has its own individual sound, as unmistakable a sonic fingerprint as any of the other six artists I have been discussing. Perhaps the closest family resemblance is to Frank Zappa. Snopek shares with Zappa a wicked sense of humor (evident in the musical jokes as well as the lyrics) and a love of complex time signatures and rich musical textures…He balances romantic beauty, compositional rigor and improvisation in a delicate three-way equilibrium: Frank Zappa with a sunnier disposition!”

Snopek first learned of the book’s existence about a year and a half ago.

“This manuscript came in the mail. The cover letter said, ‘You better sit down because this is going to throw ya,’ and he was right,” Snopek said. “He goes through my entire recording career. I was crying when I read it. This guy really has been paying attention to what I’ve been doing. His writing is really interesting and the premise of the book is quite interesting. There actually is a connection between the seven musicians in the book.”

Mielke describes Snopek as “an avant-pop artist of the first order that few have heard of.” He goes on to point out that Snopek’s career is as long as the other artists in the book. “His first recording was released in 1969 (on Page Records) and he’s still writing, playing and recording. So why haven’t you heard of him?”

Well, the musical cognoscenti has heard of Sigmund Snopek, but that is a relatively small demographic. So the question had to be asked of Snopek himself: Why isn’t a guy who has been on several major labels, toured the world with the Violent Femmes and performed in nearly every major concert hall, including Carnegie Hall, more well known?

“Because of the path I chose, I kind of blew off, for aesthetic reasons, the potential people who could have helped me,” he said. “The gift I got from that was my own musical voice. Now it’s time to get it out to as many people as possible.”

The Holiday Music Motel is located at 30 N 1st Ave in Sturgeon Bay. Tickets to “Christmas and Beyond,” which begins at 7 pm on Dec. 11, are $10 and may be purchased at the motel, by calling 920.743.5571 or visiting holidaymusicmotel.com, sigmundsnopek.com.