When he’s vacationing in Woodstock, Val McCallum spends a lot of time padding around his house in bare feet.

On Friday morning, a couple of weeks after finishing a European tour with Jackson Browne, for whom he has played lead guitar for 20 years, McCallum eased his 6-foot-4 frame into an Adirondack chair overlooking a pond below his hillside house and talked shop.

Vermont, especially the foothills around Woodstock, is the perfect spot for McCallum, 54, to look back on his life in music. Although he’s taking a break, McCallum and his Los Angeles country-western trio will play a couple of gigs in the Upper Valley, Friday and Saturday nights, where it all began.

Without prompting, he started with his late stepfather, movie tough-guy Charles Bronson.

“I grew up watching Hee Haw with him after dinner,” McCallum recalled. “Aside from the skits and the corny jokes, what caught my ear was the guitar playing of guys like (co-hosts) Buck Owens and Roy Clark and the guests they had on, like Jerry Reed. It occurred to me, ‘That’s how I want to play guitar.’”

Bronson was married to McCallum’s mother, Jill Ireland, following her divorce from actor David McCallum (The Man from U.N.C.L.E) in the mid-1960s. Not long after Bronson bought his stepson a guitar in the early 1970s, the blended family started spending summers and school vacations in Brownsville. For two years, they lived in the area full-time, and McCallum attended fifth and sixth grades at Albert Bridge School, where he somehow survived a day-one incident in which “a kid came at me with scissors, yelling, ‘I’m gonna cut your hair, flatlander!’ ”

In the mid-1970s, at one of the family’s favorite Brownsville hangouts, Jeremiah’s Pub, Val found musical mentors in Rick and Davey Davis of the Davis Brothers Garage Band.

“We had a four-track studio over the garage, and the boys used to come over and jam,” Rick Davis, of Ascutney, recalled this week. “We did a lot of recording, working on songs, including original songs. … What stood out about Val was his complete dedication to music, and how fast he could play lead guitar, how fast he could solo. He had an incredible ear for music.”

He inherited some of that gift from his grandfather David McCallum Sr., first violinist for the Royal Philharmonic and the man credited with showing Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page how to play the electric guitar with a bow.

“He also played on the Beatles’ A Day in the Life,” McCallum said.

At first, the younger McCallum balked at Bronson’s taste for the country music of Marty Robbins, Slim Whitman “and even older stuff,” McCallum said. “I’d be begging him to put on the Beatles, Ray Charles, anything else.”

Over time, even while he studied pop, rock and the British invasion at school in Los Angeles, McCallum started incorporating those and other genres and styles into his repertoire, from British R&B guitarist Albert Lee to the likes of Johnny Cash, Reed and country picker-composer Rodney Crowell. That versatility earned McCallum work in recording-studio sessions and on tour with performers ranging from Loretta Lynn to Jackson Browne and to Bonnie Raitt.

Early on, McCallum also found work playing on and sometimes composing music for TV and movies, including Bronson’s 1980s action pics Murphy’s Law, Assassination and Death Wish 4. More recently, he’s been composing for the Country Music Television cable series Sun Records, based on the stage musical Million Dollar Quartet, which imagines a 1950s recording session with rockabilly icons Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.

“What’s funny in my coming to this side of the business is that I’m not a technical-type musician,” McCallum said. “I’m more of a ‘feel’ musician. I never thought I could be that guy to write music for TV and film from my house, by myself.”

TV, the medium in which his father, now 84, continues to act in the CBS police procedural NCIS, steered the younger McCallum in a couple of other directions he hadn’t imagine taking. On the mid-1990s Fox series Ally McBeal, McCallum played in the band backing singer Vonda Shepard in her recurring scenes in the bar to which the series’ lawyers often retreated.

“Within weeks of the show catching on, Jackson called and asked me to play on The Naked Ride Home,” McCallum recalled. “We toured for three years behind the record, all over the world.”

Other musicians in those scenes with Shepard included veteran studio musicians Pete Thomas, a drummer who continues to tour with Elvis Costello & The Imposters, and bassist Davey Faragher.

“The job mostly required sitting in a trailer for 14 hours until we were finally called to the set,” McCallum recalled. Those idle hours gave birth to a band with a two-syllable name unprintable in a family newspaper, but that commonly ends the phrase, “You don’t know ....”

From those discussions evolved a trio of personas that flirts with stereotypes of maverick/lounge-lizard musicians. “We wanted a band that was casual and fun but also musical, one where we don't tell each other what to do or how to play and most importantly that we don't  take ourselves too seriously,” McCallum wrote in a follow-up email this week. “I think that's why we're still going strong after nearly 20 years.”

The trio started playing small venues around Los Angeles, and over the years attracted unannounced guests such as Browne, Lucinda Williams and folk-rock guitar hero Richard Thompson.

“Jackson’s just our older brother,” McCallum said with a smile. “We’ve got a novelty song that we do when he joins us, The King Is Gone. He does it deadpan, like Charlie Pride or something.

“It’s been a gift,” McCallum added. “We probably play once a month or so, when we’re all in L.A., between tours. Because of that, (the band) hasn’t ventured past L.A. too many times. The opportunity to play here just developed because Pete is finishing Elvis’ North American tour in Providence, R.I., I was on vacation, so it all sort of aligned.”

McCallum and Rick Davis originally explored bringing the band to White River Junction, either the Briggs Opera House or the Engine Room — where McCallum played last December with singer-songwriter Brooks Hubbard, an Enfield native, in support of the new album McCallum was producing for Hubbard.

In the end, they settled on a Friday night show at Skunk Hollow Tavern in Hartland Four Corners and a Saturday performance at Bob’s Place, a small venue at the end of Depot Street in Windsor.

“It’s a little more backwoods, which is fine,” McCallum said. “Our act is more like a barn dance than a highbrow gig. Plus I liked the idea of doing Skunk Hollow. It was one of our family dinner places when I was a kid, and Shelli and I had our wedding reception there.”

McCallum had cut back on visits to the Upper Valley after the death of his mother from cancer in 1990s, and more so after Bronson’s death in 2003, at the end of a decline into Alzheimer’s disease. But the memory of green, quiet Julys started tugging at him around 2007 or 2008, and soon he and his wife Shelli started hunting for properties.

Not even Tropical Storm Irene, which swamped the Upper Valley the weekend that he played Rick Davis’ Brownstock festival in late August 2011, could deter him. A couple years later, the McCallums found the relatively simple house up a dirt road where they and their daughter now flee the California heat for several weeks at a shot.

“As soon as I got here,” McCallum said, “it felt more like home than L.A.”

David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.

 

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