Accordions, Hot rods and Hippies

Photo: Aimee Edwards

Al Mallory

WEST PARIS — Al Mallory grew up in South Portland and moved to West Paris in the 1970s. He now own Tucker's Pub in Norway.

He recently took the time to tell us about his life.

Q: When were you born and where were you brought up?

A: I was born in 1951 in Portland and I was brought up in South Portland. I lived there until my early 20s and then I left for a couple years and went to Cape Cod. I've been in West Paris for the last 35 years.

Q: Did you have any siblings?

A: I have four brothers and a sister. I'm the oldest and my sister is 16 years younger than me; she's the youngest sibling, so there's quite a span between my age and my sister's age. My mother had her when she was 47. My youngest brother is only eight years younger than me.

Q: What did your parents do?

A: My father was a lobsterman and my mother worked as a bookkeeper for an insurance company.

Q: What was it like growing up?

A: South Portland was kind of like going from Norway to Waterford, going from Portland to South Portland. There was no Maine Mall. There were none of the interchanges around there, no turnpike. It was way out in the woods, where the Maine Mall is, when I was a kid. We could ride there on our bicycles from the other side of the city.

I was very close with my family. My father died about two years ago. He was 84. I was real close to him. In fact, I wrote a song about him that's on the Internet, on Youtube, about his life as a lobsterman.

Q: What did you want to be when you were young?

A: Well, until I was, say, 17, I didn't care about being anything. I spent most of my time in art class when I was in school. The last two years of high school I managed to finagle not being there most of the time by being on work study, so I went to work half the day and got credit for it. I really didn't have much of a desire to be anything.

Come about 1968, I had friends come back from California and tell me about the hippies and everything going on and I became one of the first hippies in Portland.

Then the Vietnam draft came up. I wasn't worried until the draft came up, but that made me worry. I didn't have good enough grades to get into college. My SATs, I wouldn't have even dared submit them, but I had a good enough art portfolio to get into the University of Southern Maine solely on that and managed to stay out of the Vietnam War for the three years that I was there until they stopped taking people anymore.

Q: What have you had for jobs?

A: I've been a carpenter and an auto-rebuilder, building hot-rods and four-wheel drives my whole life. That's what I've basically done for money.  In 1973 I opened an art gallery and craft shop in North Windham on Route 302.

Well, 1973 was the year of the big gas crunch when nobody could get gas and no tourists came. So my first business that I started out of college, my art gallery, I just had to skimp by and I bailed at the end of the season. ...

So I went to Cape Cod at that point for a couple years to work as a carpenter. I was drawn to Cape Cod because I was sick of the snow. ... I went to Cape Cod, there wasn't any snow. There was all kinds of carpentry work. There was no carpentry work here when I left.

Being brought up on a farm and the son of a lobsterman, I knew how to do carpentry by the time I could walk because everything we did was something that we did ourselves. That's my whole life.

I'm the person who can take an absolute piece of garbage and make it into a beautiful shiny thing. Our house is that way, everything in it, just about, I've built from used and recycled materials.

Q: When and how did you meet your spouse?

A: It's a strange thing. I had come back from Cape Cod and Anne had come to live with her brother at North Paris Store – which isn't even there anymore, you couldn't even tell it was there – I was just up there with my friend. I saw her walking from the main part of the store to the grain room and I asked my friend, “Who's that?” and he said, “That's Doug's sister.”

I just couldn't get her out of my mind, so I brought my dog with me – I had this beautiful dog – as a conversation piece, something to break the ice. She fell in love with my dog. Some things are just meant to be. We got married after two and a half years and lived where we've been right now for 33 years. 

Q: Do you have children?

A: We have one son, Jacob, he works with my wife here at Creative Media. ... He does website design and networking. He actually keeps us running. Without him it'd be really hard because everything is computer-oriented.

Q: Do you collect anything or have a hobby?

A: I build things. I've got two four-by-fours that are partly built right now – one is a 1939 Chevy pickup on an early Bronco frame, I've been working on that for a while.

Music is basically everything that we've been doing now for the last 10 years. I've been playing music all my life. When I was kid, I played accordion from the time I was nine years old until I was a sophomore in high school.

At one point I actually went on a national audition for a national show and made audition. This is when I was 11. I got to play a place called Frye Hall in Portland, it's not there anymore, but it was near the children's museum.

By the time I was a sophomore in high school, playing accordion wasn't that cool in 1967. I quit playing then and didn't play music again until I was 38 years old.

I play six string guitar now and sing with my band Bunch of Old Hippies. There's seven of us in the band, we're all seasoned musicians. I played bass for about 20 years. I played with one of the legendary performers around here, Shawn McCole, I played with him for about 10 years just him and I. I've played for the last 10 years with Nate Towne, Rusty Wiltjer, Bob Wallace, Tommy Zicarelli, and Paul Dube. We're the house band here, at Tucker's.

Q: What would you like people to know about you?

A: I'd like them to know that it's a great thing to be able to come back to something that you enjoyed as a kid and blew off because you were stubborn about it. I was sort of forced into it by my mother.

By high school I felt that I was too old to learn guitar and I took all the accordion music and ripped it up and threw it away because I was stubborn and upset about it.

When I decided I wanted to start playing music again, I had arthritis in my hand. My friend told me to start playing bass and it would loosen up my hand. It was so messed up from pounding nails so long, and music absolutely saved my hand. Since then, it's been the number one driving thing in my life. And I want people to know that if they come to Tucker's Pub on a Saturday night, any bit of music they'll hear they'll love.