In concert, Saturday night

ALAMOSA — If singer-songwriters are measured by praise from critics, accolades they’ve received, the fame of those they’ve collaborated with, or where their music lands on charts, Dana Cooper will fulfill all expectations and more. But those familiar with his music don’t need such affirmations.

They know the nature of the man by the music Cooper has created for the last fifty years. It’s honest and courageous. Vulnerable and confident. Tender and haunting one moment and uplifting the next. And it’s performed with the artistry of a master yet the passion of someone just starting out. Those who have traveled down that road to learn more about the music of Dana Cooper have found the reward at the end well worth the effort.

Dana Cooper will perform this Saturday with special guests, The Mitguards at Society Hall in Alamosa.

Born in Missouri in 1951, Cooper’s story starts where the music started, when he was barely two years old and hung around with his father, a veteran of World War II who served in the 10th Mountain Infantry. “He was a decorated war hero who saw all kinds of terrible things,” he says.

“My dad was also a frustrated musician with a beautiful singing voice, and he’d take me to bars sometimes. He’d play the jukebox. I’d sing along and he’d get a kick out of that.”

But the education his father gave him in music went far beyond jukeboxes in bars.

When he was four, he and his father rode the caboose on a freight train to see his first concert – Ernest Tubbs - in Kansas City. That was followed by seeing Bill Haley and His Comets who did music for the film “Blackboard Jungle”. Then he took Cooper to see Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront” with its soundtrack by Leonard Bernstein. That music can still make him cry.

 “All that stuff triggered something in me early on.”

Cooper’s parents were “poor, depression era farm kids from Missouri who never finished high school”, but that barely defines who they were. While Cooper’s father introduced him to music, his mother was a painter, writer and storyteller who wrote and illustrated fairy tales for him to read when he was just three or four years old.

Cooper recalls a time when she was walking him to kindergarten, about six miles away. “It was a very cold morning, very bright, and I was looking down at the ground and kinda kickin’ stones. My mother asked what I was looking at down there. She said, ‘Raise your head. Look at the world around you. Look at the way the light is hitting the trees and the shadows on the buildings across the road.’ She literally opened my eyes. My parents were a big influence on me.”

That “something” that was triggered in Cooper never let go. He taught himself to play the guitar and to harmonize by listening to records.  By the age of thirteen, he was writing his own songs. By sixteen, he was singing in coffee houses in Kansas City.

“You could say I had a real affinity for music.  It transported me, and inspired me, and it formed me.”

When he was barely 20 years old, Cooper headed to Los Angeles, where he knocked on a lot of doors, encountered his fair share of rejections but ultimately landed a contract with Elektra records. He recorded his first album, Dana Cooper, which was a success.

That was when Cooper got an education of a different nature.

“In Los Angeles, there was a time when I was lauded as…” - he laughs a bit – “…the second coming. ‘Greatest vocalist on the label.’ There were great hopes for me. And then I was dropped.” He laughs again.

“So, I went back to knocking on doors. One day I went to a publisher who said, ‘your songs aren’t repetitive enough.’ I had another appointment that afternoon and the publisher said, ‘your songs are too repetitive.’ I tried to write songs and it wasn’t working. I just couldn’t do it. So, I left Los Angeles. That was the second time when I just had to remove myself and go work at a job somewhere. After a while, the music started coming back.”

But he never thought about walking away for good. “Having the support of an audience that’s really moved by what you do...that makes a huge difference,” he says. “It’s gotten me through the tough times, the financial times when things were kinda low. Even now, there will be nights when there may not be that many people there, but, if the people who are there are transported by the piece of music, that’s really just...that’s enough for me.”

And, of course, there’s the music itself.

“Not to sound too hokey, but to me it’s like a religious experience. In those times when I was just destitute in LA and I was getting rejected by labels left and right, I could sit down somewhere and pull out my guitar and create something beautiful. At that point, nothing else mattered. That was enough for me. That was enough. That kept me going.”

Yet, still, where that music comes from remains a mystery.  “The ideas come from so many places. Sometimes an idea will just come to me. I still marvel at that.”

He goes on to describe how “The Ghost of Tucumcari," title cut from the album to be released May 17, was created. “A couple of months ago, I saw this poor, pitiful alley cat who was old and whose ears were chewed off. He wanted to jump into this dumpster and couldn’t do it. He just skulked off - I tried to follow him with some food but he just disappeared.

“That haunted me. That poor creature. It was cold out there. He was injured. He was sleeping under an old, abandoned building and no one cared for him. I started thinking about people in that same situation, and the song just came to me, all as a piece. I started with the lyrics, and I thought, what is the music for this song? But the song really does tell you what it is. I had all this complicated music, but it wasn’t right. About a week later I got the guitar out and I thought, ‘I want a minor chord’ and…it just happened.”

Now, on the eve of releasing his 32nd album, featuring Lyle Lovett and others, those days of destitution are gone, yet the wondrous mystery remains.

“It’s beautiful and humbling and I still don’t understand it. But it’s the mystery that keeps me going. And that’s true to this whole thing of doing it for 50 years, it just seems like the blink of an eye to me. It’s funny how quickly it’s here and gone. I feel the same way about playing music now as I did when I started out.”

Starting with parents who defy preconceptions and treasured moments that come at unexpected times, it seems the path Dana Cooper has followed his whole life is the one he was destined to follow. And it also seems like he has no plans to stop anytime soon.

Dana Cooper will be performing with The Mitguards at Society Hall on March 30. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the performance is at 7:30. Tickets available at www.societyhall.org or at the Green Spot.