Pete Thelen Turns Life Into Song

Photo by Jim Lundstrom.

For a reason I still cannot fathom, I started what turned out to be a four-hour-plus interview in two different sessions by asking Pete Thelen the idiot interviewer’s question:  Which comes first for you, poetry or song?

Pete did not guffaw at the inanity of the question. Instead, he answered without hesitation.

“To me they’re one and the same,” he said. “It’s not every poem that I write becomes a song, but I truly believe the poem and the song are the same. For me as a writer, it starts with a poem. I feel a little melody here, so then I go another step with it. It sort of evolves that way.”

Might as well follow with the idiot interviewer’s follow-up question:  What inspires the poem?

“Whatever grabs me, I guess. Things that I find really interesting, these people, these circumstances, Julie Christie’s work in a scene,” he says, the last reference to his song “Alameda,” based on Julie Christie’s opium den scene in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

“I guess maybe I’m a voyeur,” he says, and quickly adds, “I like to think of myself as an observer.”

Thelen has deep roots in Door County but really only set his own firmly down here when he and his wife Roberta built their home on a chunk of family property off of Red Cherry Road in Baileys Harbor in 2001-02. Before that they spent 10 years in the Phoenix area, happy and entrenched, Thelen says. But Door County beckoned.

“It’s a place I always looked for, and it was here all along,” Thelen said. “We could have easily stayed in Arizona. The only smart place to go was back here. It was always there for us, and a pretty nice place to boot.”

Performing blues music had become an important part of Thelen’s life while living in Arizona, but when he moved his family here, he wanted to just be “the guy in the background.”

“The first year, I was just listening to the people I enjoyed – Jay Whitney, Mark Raddatz, Jeanne Kuhns, pat mAcdonald – but I kept an extremely low profile. I didn’t play out much. It was never my intention to perform. I just wanted to be the guy in the background.”

Then the bug hit him to do a recording of his songs performed by some of his favorite Door County musicians. He pitched the idea to musician/studio owner Hans Christian.

“I wanted to do a blues CD,” he said. “But after many conversations with Hans, the blues thing wasn’t going to work because most of the people I was thinking of performed folk. So I asked Julian Hagen, Jeanne Kuhns, Mark Raddatz, Kim Waters, people I really enjoy. Over the course of a year or year and a half, kind of a slow pace, we put together the CD. It was fun.”

The CD, released in 2005, is called Kaleidoscope:  Musicians of Door County, Pete Thelen, executive producer.

Thelen’s pal, the late Norbert Blei, liked the CD, but he had a pointed question for Thelen:  “Ever consider doing your own music?”

“It was the furthest thing from my mind,” Thelen said. “I fell into that place where all I wanted is to write songs and pitch my stuff to other musicians. I was comfortable with that and taken by all these great people who said yes to the last project.”

But Blei had planted a seed in Thelen’s mind.

“If I’m going to do it, I’m going to let out that sail on this one,” Thelen said. “I decided to factor in the influences over the years. So I wanted to incorporate psychedelic, because that was huge for me. Blues, of course. And then I have been so taken for years by electronica. I wanted to incorporate those three. So I went ahead and did, to the best of my ability, what I thought was a blues, psychedelic, electronica album.”

The result was the 2010 release Travels to the Edge, which features the multi-instrumental talents of Hans Christian, and pat mAcdonald on two tunes, playing harmonica on the first (“Alameda”) and cigar box guitar and stompbox on the second (“Move On”). Jay Whitney contributes guitar and background vocals on one song (“Where Now”). All Pete’s songs and all his vocals.

What did Norb think? “I don’t think he liked it,” Pete said, explaining that Blei was a fan of traditional blues and Thelen had chosen not to go in that direction.

“Norb said, ‘What are you going to do next?’ I told him I’d like to do this thing, Poems Inspiration Songs Stuff, PISS. He just started laughing. And said, ‘That sounds interesting.’”

Thelen put a PISS package together for Blei and left it for him at Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant before Thelen headed to Key West.

“Things happened,” Thelen said. “It never got to him. His health failed terribly.”

Blei died in April 2013 without seeing Thelen’s PISS, which consists of lyrics connected to biographical material behind the song/poems. It is now dedicated to Thelen’s “dear friend Norb Blei.”

Thelen played out a lot the summer after Blei’s death, including at a memorial service held for Blei at Peninsula Players Theatre.

In September he and many of the musicians from Kaleidoscope and many other Door County musicians gathered at the Door Community Auditorium (DCA) for a concert they called Play It Forward, a tribute to the late Bo Johnson, the 13-year-old Sister Bay boy who inspired the entire county in his outlook while fighting a losing battle against cancer.

Thelen had obtained permission from the DCA Board and the Johnson family to hold the concert with Bo in attendance. Bo’s health slipped quickly and he died on Sept. 28, 2012.

“I would have loved to have done it while he was still alive so we could have him on stage because he was such a guiding light for this community,” Thelen said. “I think [Pastor Michael] Brecke [late of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Juddville] stated it best at the services, ‘I met a man once…’ To me, that summed it all up.”

When Bo died, the concert was put on hold until September 2013. It raised more than $5,000 for the Go Bo! Foundation. It was such a success that Play It Forward will continue, with the participating artists choosing the charity to benefit each year.

“And that’s a lovely thing,” Thelen said.

Deep Roots

Pete Thelen has called many places home in his 65 years, but his Door County roots go back to 1882 when his great-grandparents moved their family from Germany to America.

“My great-grandparents moved here from Germany, settled right here on this property,” Thelen said, from the home he and his wife, Roberta built just off Red Cherry Road in Baileys Harbor shortly after the turn of this century.

“My great-grandfather owned, I believe it was 300 acres, from [County] E up the hill toward double E. He was a dirt farmer. He had a wife and five children, who all happened to be girls. Here was this poor fellow with all this farm work to do. They wound up getting off the boat in New York, found their way to Milwaukee, and, from what I understand, there was a real opportunity for farmers up here with an incredible price for the land.

“My great-grandfather helped clear the land for the [town] cemetery. The town paid him in plots. They gave him a plot for each daughter and he and his wife, and we still have the paperwork. So most of my family – my mom, dad, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles – are buried here. That’s why it’s always been a refuge.”

The family still calls a large part of his great-grandfather’s property home.

“The homestead is about 40 acres, where my sister Carol lives, in the original house. My brother has property. My cousins are neighbors. We still own a large area. I’m guessing it’s probably 100 acres, something like that.”

Thelen grew up Wheaton, Illinois, but spent summers in Baileys Harbor.

“It was always a great time,” he said, fondly recalling working alongside migrant workers, pumping gas and changing oil at Kienhau’s, and hanging out with Verlin Kiehnau and the Kwaterski twins, Joe and Jerry.

When he and Roberta lived elsewhere, Thelen would bring their kids to Baileys Harbor for the summer.

“They love to come back,” he said. “Ben went to school here. Kath went to school here in the early years, so did Jackie. She graduated from Gibraltar, my youngest. So I think it will always be very special to them. We seem to hand this down generation to generation, which is cool.”

It just took this dedicated bluesman a while to recognize the importance of his own roots.

“Traveling so much throughout my life, I was always looking for a place that really nurtured the arts and that type of thing,” Thelen said. “It was always a place that I had looked for, and it was here all along.”

Pete Thelen’s Discography

Pete & Mike:  Blues Today

Pete & Mike & The Off-Center Band:  Live in Door County

Blues Today:  Vol. II (1999)

Blues Today:  Vol. III (2002)

Kaleidoscope:  Musicians of Door County (2005)

Travels to the Edge (2010)

WEB: pete-thelen.com

Photography by Jim Lundstrom.