 Welcome to Moments with Melinda, and I'm your host, Melinda Moulton, and my guest today is Bob Stannard. Hey, Bob, how you doing? I'm Melinda. I'm having a moment with Melinda. Yes, you are having a moment with Melinda. I'm really excited about the next 30 minutes, because I have known you for most of my adult life, and so I wanted to have you on my show because you've had an illustrious career. We're still friends. Yes, we are. I think we're closer than ever, quite frankly. Yes, I think so. I think we've grown up together, and it's been wonderful. So let's get going, because I only have a half an hour, and you have a lot of life to talk about. I have a lot of life. Yes, you do. So let's talk about who are you? I don't have much left, but I have a lot behind me. Yes, you do. But I want to know who are you? Where do you come from? What was your childhood like? Who was your inspiration? Tell us a little bit about Bob Stannard and Bob Stannard's life. So I was born in South Dorset to a plumber, Jim Stannard, who had the musical ability of a ray candle. My mother, Tara Cecilia Maria Urk Jr., was born in New York City. Her father died when she was four. She was an only child raised by a single mom. They had to move to New Jersey where it was cheaper to live. Short story is my grandmother was a nanny mostly and would do odd jobs and whatever she could do to support her daughter, and ended up coming to a summer camp in Dorset Hollow where she coincidentally met my grandmother on my father's side. And one thing led to another. It turns out my grandmother, my mother's mother, couldn't really afford to keep her. So the Stannard family brought my mom into their house when she was like nine, 10 years old. As a result, my father, who was one of five kids, had quite an eye for my mom and the short story is they got married. But when my mom was a teenager, she was an opera singer and she's a classically trained or was, I should say, classically trained pianist. She auditioned at Carnegie Hall at the age of 14 years old. And she was very talented. She had the voice of an angel. The only regret that I'll take to my grave is that nobody ever got it on tape. They didn't have that back then. And she used to sing in the church choir when she married this plumber from Dorset. Her life was ruined, of course. She had no choice but to live in Vermont, and there's not a lot of, you know, piano playing opportunities and singing opportunities. So she sang in the church. She was a ticket. She was half Swedish, half German, big flaming red hair, which is where my old red beard came from. And she was a hoot. She was an absolute freaking pistol, as was my dad. My dad was a very outspoken person. He was on the select board in Dorset. And my dad and I had a funny relationship. We would argue about everything. We never fought about anything, but we would argue. I mean, if he said the sun came up, I'd say, no, it's going down. And we would argue about everything. And I had no idea, as a child growing up, that arguing with my dad would have paid off in later life, because I argued with everybody about everything. And so when I ended up in the lecture... You never argued with me. Well, there's some people... Well, we'll have to do... I learned to pick my battles, honey. Well, I don't know. I think maybe you and I should have... We should think about that and have a... Oh, we could have an argument. We could have an argument sometime. Pick a subject and pick a side, and I'll argue the other side. All right. We'll do this after the recording. So continue on about your extraordinary family. I'm so... I've got a wonderful family. I've got a daughter and a son and a sort of a half person in my life. A man by the name of Marlon Hennet, who's now 40 years old and lives in Maine, but we took him in when he was 14. Long story, but let's just say we took in this kid. He's from Newark, New Jersey, and he's an African-American, and it was always fun to go out for dinner. People would stare at us, and I would actually walk over to a table that would be staring at us, and I'd say, I know what you're thinking. He looks just like his mom. Anyway, so he's happily living in Maine. He has a little boy who's incredibly bright, and my son, Wes, married a wonderful woman from Burma of all places, and they have two absolutely adorable children, just the most precious things in the world. My son and daughter-in-law started a restaurant in Manchester called Moonwink, which has received great notoriety around the state and around the region. It's the only authentic Burmese restaurant in New England because, hello, she's from Burma, and she happens to be a phenomenal cook, so they're doing great. My daughter was a Meredith, was a preschool teacher. She went down to Corillier's preschool in New York City, and her second day on the job was 9-11, and the school was on 14th Street, which if you were watching the news that night, that's where the yellow ribbon was cordoned off. I insisted she get out and come back home, and she said to me, I signed a contract. What would you do if you signed a contract? Would you walk out on a contract? And I said, I would if I was you, get home. And she said, I've signed the contract. I'm here for the year, and she stayed. She stayed. Bless her heart. At the end of that year, came back to Vermont, worked at the little preschool up by Vermont Teddy Bear for a year, and then went back to work at the Trinity Church preschool, and then ended up at the Episcopal School on the Upper East Side, topped there for 10 or 11 years, and moved to Beacon, New York, and she bought a preschool for no money. The lady that had it for 25 years just gave it to my daughter, and she's now expanded that program. She's a girl's on the move. She is a hustler, and she's going to be starting another school in Newburgh. And anyways, it's great to grow old and watch your kids actually amount to something way more than you ever did. Well, let's talk about what you've accomplished. No, God, I got out of bed. Because this is about you, Bob, standard. I got out of bed. And you're an icon in this state, and you have a lot of people who love you for so many reasons. But let's talk a little bit about your legislative work. And I know that you and I knew each other and met each other over rail. It was a rail day that I think it was down in, I think it was down Manchester Way, was it? And your band played for rail day. And that was the rail day. Remember when the train didn't run and they had to bring the buses in to move everybody? I mean, it was one of those days where Brian Searles was like, oh my God, and Charlie Miller and they brought, but you played at the tracks and it was down in the Manchester area. I forgot all about that. I'll never forget that day because that was the day that I met you. You can't play, you know, I mean, I got to meet you. So talk a little bit about your work in the legislature. You were there in the Vermont legislative from 82 to 88. Talk a little bit about your work, your governmental work. Well, briefly, I started off two years on the House Judiciary Committee in four years on the House Appropriations Committee where I really got to learn a lot about state government being on that committee, as you might imagine. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn't that much fun. I was a struggling Republican at the time and I ended up changing parties after my election on my third term. I was always on the ballot as an R and a D and I just changed it the other way, which didn't make some people very happy. And not by design, I had no idea that this was happening, but when I did change, I created the first Democratic majority in the history of the state of Vermont, the Vermont House. So it turned out to be slightly more significant than I had anticipated, but it was what it was and it was something I felt I had to do. I was having a great deal of difficulty relating to the party that I found myself in, so I left. And that actually cost me my seat, so and that was fine. I left the legislature and I actually went to work for a garbage company, East Mountain Transport. I started the first recycling facility in Bennington County. I did find it rather amusing that I went from politics to garbage and saw it as a step off. I got paid more, so that was kind of the running joke of my life. And I did that for a number of years, about five years. And then I was actually asked to attend a meeting on a Sunday morning where I heard about H517, which was a statewide property tax on so-called gold towns for education. And I'm from what's known as the Gold Town and my beef with that bill was that it was still relying on property taxes. If you had a lot of property, you were deemed to be rich and could pay more taxes. And that is fundamentally not true. So I coalesced the gold towns and went to work as a lobbyist. I had no desire, intentions or knowledge of being a lobbyist, but I was and from there I launched a bit of a career. I've got many years in that building. I got 30-some ideas in the State House. And after working for the gold towns, I represented a citizens group in Charlotte that was fighting a developer who made a promise and broke his promise and about a large farm idea. And so I did that. And the last bill I helped to get past with a team of people was the patient's choice bill, the death with dignity, right to die, whatever you want to call it. I'm probably more noted for having agreed to work for Citizens Awareness Network and shutting down the Vernon nuclear power plant. And when they came to me, I just said, you people are crazy. You can't shut down a nuclear power plant. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And seven years later, we shut down Vermont's only nuclear power plant. It was time for that plant to close anyways, but it didn't, it made me feel good to actually push it over the cliff. That was mammoth. It was absolutely mammoth. Yeah, it was a lot of work, you know, I mean, it was a deviant life. I'm a one-man band. I never had a secretary. I never had anybody doing research for me. I had to do all my own work, write all my own briefs, do all my own stuff. And I'm up against Entergy, which is one of the hugest companies around. And there was some sort of satisfaction of, you know, being Davey and the Davey and Goliath relationship. So yeah, that was fun. I retired in 2013. I got very fortunate and I was able to retire. I've been retired for nine years. I have relegated myself to writing political column, which I've done for the Bennington banner. I think this is going into my 19th year of writing a bi-monthly column. Can you imagine having so much trash in your head that you can spew out a column twice a month? My heavens. Well, I've been doing this TV show for 12, 22 years. I've been doing my TV show. So we can find all that trash. Well, I did that too. I actually hosted Q&A Live on G&A TV for eight years. And when I retired in 2013, I quit that show. The only thing I didn't quit was writing my column because I actually enjoy writing. I've written two Vermont humor books. One was called How to Survive the Recession of Vermont Perspectives. And three years later, I wrote a sequel, How to Survive the Recovery of Vermont Perspectives. And my dear friend and just amazing human being, Jeff Danezinger, helped me with the artwork on that book. And I'll never be able to say enough cool stuff about Jeff Danezinger, just a champion of a human being. And it was just a thrill of my life to be able to partner with him on two books. I also co-wrote a book with Bobby Zappa called Frankie and Bobby Growing Up Zappa. It's about the early life of Frank Zappa. And that probably threw me into the more of a national realm as a writer. And that was fun. And it's a good book. It's about Frank Zappa from the time he was seven to 18, a story that only his brother could tell. And I helped the brother co-write that book and get that story out. It was a lot of fun. It was really interesting. I was not much of a Zappa fan, but I did get to be one when I wrote this book. Music. So my mom insisted I play piano at the age of six. She just, one of her three boys had to play the damn piano. And as the middle child, I was chosen. And I learned to hate the piano because all my friends were out playing softball and doing cool stuff. And I'm sitting there doing do-re-mi, which is tragic that I hated it because I'd like to play the piano today, but I'm not very good at it. After playing piano from six to 11, I said I've had enough of that. And I got a set of drums. I said, if you want me to play an instrument, let's play one that the entire damn neighborhood can hear. And so I banged on drums until I was 18, heavily influenced by the Beatles. I was, and still am today, a worshiper of four guys from England who just wrote the most amazing music of my lifetime. And that's what I listened to as an early kid, mostly Beatles and rock and roll and all that stuff. I was into Led Zeppelin, all that great music. There was just so much amazing music when I was growing up. It's an embarrassment of riches. Anyways, I brought my drums to Castleton College, set them up in the dorm and played once, and the dorm parent raced upstairs and asked me what I was doing, and I thought it was self-evident. I'm playing drums for God's sakes. I can't believe you couldn't hear them. And he said, if you play them one more time, you and your drums are going to Vietnam. Now, this was 1969 and I didn't really want to go to Vietnam. That's why I was at Castleton College. So I brought my drums home and I said, well, I got to play something. And I went to Reeves Music Store in Rutland, Vermont, where I bought all my drums here, and I'm looking around. I didn't know what to play. And I cooked up a marine band, which this is not, in the key of C. Now, in 1969, there were no harmonica teachers. There was no YouTube. There was no nothing. So I'm walking around trying to figure out how to play this stupid thing. And it took me a lot longer than it should have to learn how to play. I would meet, I literally, I met a bum in the street who played a note that I didn't know how to play and I grabbed this poor drunken person and I said, show me how to do that. And he's like, whatever. And so I would pick up little pieces along the way. And it wasn't till I'd been playing for 35 years. And I actually thought it was pretty good that I met Jerry Portnoy in a bar down in Hyannis. And Jerry Portnoy, for those of you who don't know, was Muddy Waters' last harmonica player. He followed James Cotton. And we'll go down in the blues history as one of the top 10 finest harmonica players who ever lived. And I talked to him into giving me lessons. And I got to go to his house. He was born on Maxwell Street in Chicago and he's a very tough guy. And lessons with him were very tough. He's a very, very tough guy. But Jerry Portnoy just changed my life, changed my life. He made me the harmonica player I am today, which is unfortunate because if he actually hears me play, he'll go, oh my god, that guy still sucks. No, you don't. And Bob, we're coming. We're coming to the end of the show. We only have a few more minutes left. And before I want my viewers to know that you just retired yourself and your band down at the Virgin's Opera House back in Oxford for your last show, which just so you know, you did walk up the other night with Gina Carrera and you were playing on her album, which I guess in the first day of downloads, downloaded half a million downloads. So you're playing with her and you'll never retire because we all want to hear you. I would love it if you could play a little ditty, a quick little ditty. We have about maybe 10 minutes left, a little lesson at a show if you could let me just let me just correct you a little bit. I retired on November 6, which would have been my father's 100th birthday. I was planning on retiring last year, but COVID screwed me out of all my gigs. So I went on a farewell tour of this in last year. And Gina Coleman, when I saw that she was playing at my retirement house, said, Hey, you're there with me. So I was a surprise guest. I wasn't out in the audience. Nobody knew I was there. And I walked out and did four songs with her at the end of her gig. And it was really nice. Nice to be back on that stage. Before I do anything, though, I do want to say that I have come out of retirement after nine years to represent a group of people who are extremely upset at the Lake Balmousine Association's efforts to spray the Vermont's number one fishery and Vermont's cleanest lake with a toxic chemical to kill milk oil, which of course destroys the fish habitat. And so that's my I had no intentions of coming out of retirement. I'm happy just to fish in my my own business. But now I am back in the throes of things fighting what I think to be an important issue. And it's not just about Lake Balmousine. I've decided that this really needs to be a statewide issue. We need to stop trying to poison our way out of things that we perceive to be a problem that may not really be a problem. I don't think anybody I've ever known has died from milk oil, but I know people who have become sick and died from chemicals. So we got to change our focus statewide. We got to live differently. We got to do different things. So that's the latest effort I'm doing. There's just no end to me as I'm on it really. You know, I agree with you and I feel that same way about Roundup and all the stuff that people put on their lawns to kill dandelions. It's like dandelions, you have to kill dandelions with poison. You and I agree on so many things when it comes to these issues. And I love your commentaries. I mean, Digger picks up your work, your writing. Well, I'm going to call you. You really are an activist. And so at the end of the day, thank you for that. And I would love it if you could play just a little bit of your heart music, and then we'll come back. And then we're going to have to close the show. So to my viewer. Take your pick. You want something slow and depressing? Oh, I don't know. Whatever you want to do. But to my viewers, this is Bob Standard, activist, lobbyist, columnist, writer, musician, and a Vermont icon. He's going to play a little ditty for you on his harmonica. So here you go. All right. Because you didn't answer my question, I'll do both. We're going to see you back on stage. I do. I just know I know you're going to be back. I know you're retired. But at the end of the day, you know, basically just just for the record, I retired my band. And for anybody who ever saw my band, Jeff Salisbury on drums, Kenny V on bass, Brad Morgan on keyboards, Johnny Falk on guitar, and the great Joe Moron saxophone. Those are five men that I will go to my grave, loving dearly for the rest of my life. There was no anger split or any of that. I decided at 70 years old that it's a good time to quit. I didn't want to be Willie Nelson or John Mayo out there at 105 years old looking like some old geezer stumbling around on stage. I didn't want that to happen. Tell people the name of your band. Bob Standard and those dangerous blues men. And boy, those guys are dangerous. But I got to tell you when you walked out on stage Saturday night with Gina Coleman. Yeah, Gina Coleman, you were, you, you were, there was, you were ageless. There was, there was no old man out there, my friend. You were, you were moving with the best. And well, there's very few people that can actually drag me out of retirement. Gina Coleman and I met years ago when we were doing a reenactment of the band, The Last Waltz in Dorset, Vermont. And she's saying, I am woman ahead of me at the soundcheck. And I remember sitting in the wings going, man, Bobby, you've got to pick up your game. This girl is amazing. So I've known her now for, oh God, 10, 12 years. And I've always brought her on my show. When she heard that I was retiring at the Virginia soccer house, she called me from William Soundmask and said, I'm coming up to that show and I'm singing. And I said, sweetie, that's two and a half. I'm not two and a half hour drive for you. She said, I don't care. And she came up to that show, as you know, we were there and, and blew the doors off the place. And I told her, I said, you've got to get yourself booked here. She did. And then I called her, I said, hey, good for you. And she said, yeah, you're joining. Yes, it wasn't, it wasn't a request. It was a demand. So tell my viewers the name of the, the, it's a CD that she had, but they can download it on, tell them the name of. Oh, please. Yeah. It's called One Louder. And if you ever saw the movie Spinal Tap, there's a dialogue in there where the guy is talking about increasing the volume on the amp. And he says, they only go to 10, but this one goes to 11. And they said, why 11? And he goes, I might as one louder. So one louder is the name of this album. Now on this album, I should say she has big Lou Johnson, who was the voice of B.D. King's Bluesville Radio, who was on my last album on my 65th birthday, my 65th birthday. She has Joe Lewis Walker on this album. And on the song that I did, how the blues feels, which is a tremendous song she wrote. Big Lou was on singing it with her. So I'm back on a, on a recording with Big Lou, who I just talked to yesterday. I'm sending in some maple syrup because he's a good guy. Anyway, so I'm very fortunate. Listen, I'm the luckiest person you'll ever meet. I've had, I've had a great life. I've had some tragedies in my life. I lost both brothers. I've lost my parents. I'm the last man standing in my family. Every life has tragedies. You got to get through it. And I will assure you that this little Mississippi saxophone has helped me, you know, when I'm sitting here watching the news of people being blown up and bombed and, and hospitals been and being destroyed in Ukraine. I sit down and play this while I'm watching TV at the misery that I'm seeing around the world. And it just lifts my spirits to be able to make noise out of this stupid little contraption. It's carried me through since 1969. And if, if I would encourage your viewers to ever do anything, pick up a harmonica and see if you can figure out how to play it. It's good for your soul. Thank you, Bob. It's also good for your lungs. Thank you, Bob. Well, to my viewers and to you, you know, how much I adore you. And I really treasure our friendship. And to my viewers, I want to thank you for joining us today for what was way too short, an interview with the extraordinary Bob. This is the least amount I've ever talked to anybody. I know, but you said a lot, my friend, in a half an hour. And I'm going to say goodbye to my viewers. And I'm going to ask you, Bob, to stay on because I want to just say goodbye to you privately. So thank you, my viewers, for being with us moments with Melinda and Bob Stanner. And we will, we will see you soon.