Meet William Baumgartner

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Will Baumgartner.

Hi Will, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I was born on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and this was the inspiration for naming my band The Pamlico Sound, after one of the lagoons that separate the beach from the mainland. Shortly before my birth, my family suffered a tragedy in the death of my brother Mark, my parents’ first born child–and I’m sure being born into a grieving family played a huge part in the formation of my psyche and emotional makeup.

Growing up, I spent school years in Binghamton, NY where my father was a professor of English Literature, and summers in the cottage in Nag’s Head, which my mother had inherited from her aunt. Our cottage was directly across the street from what was at that time the #1 night spot on the Outer Banks, a place called The Casino. At night, two sounds fed my dreams. On the front side of the house–we called the beach the front and the street side the back–was the ocean: always singing, always mysterious and familiar. Down the driveway and across the beach road, the music of the bands that played at the Casino: at that time (the early 1970s), the two biggest styles were Psychedelic and Soul. Within the Soul genre was a sound that would soon dominate, and people started calling that sound Funk. Psychedelic music stirred my brain; Funk and Soul lit a fire in my heart.

I wouldn’t be allowed upstairs at the Casino until I was sixteen (downstairs was pinball and pool, upstairs was where the dancing and drinking–and most of the shouting–happened), but no rules applied to my childhood imagination. I could dream of not only being upstairs dancing, but singing and playing on the bandstand, and dream I did. I had never been a real happy kid; for most of my childhood, I’d felt alone, not liked (probably unlikeable), not favored by fortune. But here was a thing. Here was a possibility.

I began playing music at the age of five, wrote my first poem when I was eleven, and my first song at sixteen. Somewhere in that sixteenth (or more accurately, seventeenth) year, I found myself in love for the first time, wrote a short novel, and began to see myself as more of an artist with vision(s) than just someone who played instruments, sang, and wrote stuff. I was now a Musician, a Singer, and a Writer.

At eighteen, I added saxophone to the flute and guitar I’d been playing for a handful of years and moved to New York City. My first intention was to play with as many Jazz people as possible, but pretty quickly I was playing in bands that were more Rock than anything else. The problem, as I saw it, was that the people who fronted these groups weren’t as interesting as the musicians playing behind them. Before long, a day came when I thought, “Why keep being a sideman for people I don’t see going anywhere when I can write and perform stuff I actually like?” And there I was in my early twenties, a bandleader in New York, suddenly playing at places like Max’s Kansas City and Folk City (we were all a little surprised they wanted us, considering their name), and heading for bigger stages like Irving Plaza and the Peppermint Lounge–or so I thought. What happened? A lot of drugs–too many and too often–combined with too much drinking.

A series of failures-to-disasters in music and love. A pretty big cocaine thing that got pretty hard to hide. I had friends in Los Angeles. I could start over and stay away from the coke and you could starve in either city but you could only freeze to death in one. L.A. was warm, exciting enough despite my distaste for some of the musical trends being milked to death at the time, and the beaches were better than New York’s (if not North Carolina’s). The band I formed played at legendary clubs: The Roxy; The Whiskey; The Troubadour; and Madame Wong’s. I did stay away from cocaine for a good few years. Until I didn’t. Things got weird again somehow; I hadn’t learned something I apparently still needed to; my girlfriend went away and my band broke up and the thing called freebase which I’d seen ruin people and swore I’d never come anywhere near somehow ended up in my lungs. A night came when I sat on the stoop of the East Hollywood bungalow and saw a very dark cloud coming down. I had no real picture of how heavy it would get or how long it would last, but I definitely didn’t see it for the decade-long heartbreaker of a storm it became.

A flight to Denver didn’t lift the cloud. An apparent escape route after six months in Denver back to New York City, where I again thought I would just start over, didn’t change a thing. Everything got worse, exponentially worse, and in the last few years of that decade I lived under a highway in the South Bronx. I sang on the trains, and when I wasn’t doing that I was smoking crack and drinking and feeling loneliness smother me and death chasing me down.

A morning did come, though, when I finally said yes to my sister’s long-standing plea that I move to Boulder. From the day I got on that bus to today, I haven’t let any form of cocaine within arm’s reach of me. Shortly after moving to Colorado, I realized I was as much of an alcoholic as I’d ever been a crackhead, and found a program of recovery that works for me.

After seven years I relapsed on alcohol, weed, and psychedelics for longer than I would’ve liked, but I found my way back, have been completely clean and sober for coming up on nine years, and The Pamlico Sound is doing some pretty groovy things that make a lot of people feel pretty good. Leading an 11-piece band playing original songs mostly inspired by Black American music forms, now in its 13th year, is not where I would’ve guessed I’d be now if asked twenty years ago, but I’m doing an alright job of pretending I know how to make it work.

I’ve written two novels and a bunch of stories and am currently editing the novel I think is more likely to get published first. I have no lack of self-doubt, fears, and worries. Fortunately, my program of recovery is designed to handle a lifetime of days–and anyway, most of my days and hours are pretty cheerful and full of love and big ideas. It helps a lot to have a lot of people to love and share these ideas with.

Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
In case it isn’t already obvious, I’ve never found anything even close to “easy”. The music business is wildly competitive and getting more so by the minute. Not everyone in the scene is supportive, or sometimes even kind–though the Denver/Front Range music community is for the most part overwhelmingly wonderful. As a musician and writer, I’ll be fortunate to get to a place where I feel financially comfortable, and I can’t even imagine what “rich” feels like.

Though the last two or three years have been extremely encouraging for the band, and each of those years has been bigger and better than the one before it, 2023 was actually very difficult for me on a personal level–for the most part. Again, I have to say that my program of recovery, and the mental/emotional/spiritual/behavioral habits it has engendered in me, have been my saving graces–combined with the exceedingly kind and loving people I’ve been lucky enough to place myself amongst.

There are a few things I’ve found that never fail to make a less-than-great situation infinitely better: a willingness to be honest with myself and others; a neutral stance on emotionally charged issues; a heartfelt desire to add to the general well-being and happiness of the world I find myself in.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Bandleader at The Pamlico Sound. Freelance saxophone, flute, and harmonica player and singer. A writer with aspirations to publish. Self-imagined comedian, actor, exotic dancer, and erotic hipster model.

Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
My first music teacher, on violin at the age of five or six, was a very mean man: I mean abusively so. I was not, by any stretch, a very self-assured child–and there were zero musicians in my family and I didn’t have any friends who played music, so there wasn’t some big safety net of second opinions, consolation, or encouragement for me to bounce back with. I’ve always thought the fact that this jerk didn’t stop me, or even cause me to pause in my musical journey, was excellent evidence that I was born to do this.

Pricing:

• The Pamlico Sound club date: Minimum $1200
• The Pamlico Sound wedding/corporate event: Minimum $3000
• Sideman (saxophones. flute, harmonica, vocals): Minimum $100-$150

Contact Info:

• Website: thepamlicosound.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/thepamlicosound and www.instagram.com/willbaumgartner
• Facebook: facebook.com/thepamlicosound  and  ww.facebook.com/will.baumgartner
• Twitter: x.com/tenor112 and  www.x.com/thepamlicosound
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC96Ek3v_fwX0EbKfByzxvPA
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-392227439
• Other: https://thepamlicosound.bandcamp.com  and https://open.spotify.com/artist/3AamHcWLNYbMLCrRJyivCk

Image Credits
Lisa Siciliano, Jason Reschka, and Andrew Wyatt