Artist Profile: Larry Abbott Interviews Musician Vince Gabriel

INTRO: Vince Gabriel has been making music since his high school days in New Jersey.  Born in South Amboy on September 16, 1947, he learned the guitar after his father brought one home. Influenced by the rock music of the early and mid-1960’s, The Rolling Stones in particular, Gabriel played in rock bands in and after graduating high school. He was drafted in 1967, completed basic training, and deployed as an infantry man, 11 Bravo Vietnam, in January 1968, arriving just before the start of the Tet Offensive. He soon found himself in the jungle, engaging in his first firefight after only a few weeks in country. He bought a beat-up guitar, and a photo from 1968 shows him in his helmet, cradling it, M60 style. He notes, though, that he never took the guitar on patrol but that it traveled with him to base camps, where he would play with some other guitarists when he was out of the bush.

Gabriel kept playing music when he returned stateside in 1969. He lived for a time in Connecticut, California, and Massachusetts, playing in clubs, working with “name” artists, and becoming more serious about his music. After moving permanently to Maine in the 1990’s he rejuvenated his Blind Albert persona and formed the Blind Albert Band.

In 2000, he released the CD 11 Bravo Vietnam, which chronicles his war and post-war experiences. Liner notes dedicate the CD to his brothers in arms Howard Spitzer, Richard Gibson (“Spitzer and The Winemaker”) 1, Nicholas Saunders, Robert Caplan  and “all those who gave the ultimate sacrifice and to all veterans who served.” The album served as the foundation for a documentary he created a few years later, 11 Bravo Vietnam—A Soldier’s Story, which he calls “’a virtual scrapbook of one young man’s experience in combat from the day he receives word of his induction to his homecoming.’”  2   The song “Draft Card” is emblematic of his irrevocable life change, happening virtually overnight, from playing music in California after high school to receiving his induction notice and going to basic and infantry training. “Spitzer and the Winemaker” is a first-person recounting of an episode in which Gabriel is rotated off point with Spitzer taking the lead with Gibson. As the patrol moves out, with Spitzer and Gibson a hundred or so yards ahead, they hear an explosion. They learn that Spitzer and Gibson walked into a minefield, with Spitzer killed and Gibson wounded. “Homeward Flight” is an instrumental; words aren’t needed to express the relief of riding home on the “freedom bird.” The album concludes with the plaintive feel of “Beneath the Shelter” and the relentless bass line of “Shellshock—PTSD” (included on CD 13 of  . . . Next Stop is Vietnam). In the former, Gabriel takes on the persona of a homeless vet telling his story. He says that “I died inside but kept on living.”  He realizes that there will be “no more parades with ticker tape or marching bands” and that in society’s eyes “I’m just a wino.” In the latter Gabriel describes the personal effects of the war: his divorce, the inner demons, the reliance on “weed and whiskey” in order to get through the day. He sings in the refrain that “the war never ends for the soldier, you come home and it all just begins.”

In 2002 he released an eight-cut CD entitled Boyish Man (playing off Muddy Waters’ 1955 song “Mannish Boy”), on which he played guitar, harmonica, and percussion, as well as doing the back-up vocals. The album is more straight-ahead rock and blues with no ostensible references to his military service. Gabriel, at 72, continues to write songs, and perform solo and with his band. He has his own recording studio with which he produces the albums of other musicians.

Larry Abbott:  In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Bradley and Werner write, “music is a path to healing. Music can help heal psychological wounds.”  1 Does your music have a therapeutic or a healing dimension?

Vince Gabriel: Well, my music was written about my experiences in Vietnam, so I don’t know how therapeutic that would be. The concept for the CD (11 Bravo Vietnam) was to give someone an idea of what it was like without actually being there. I mean, that was the only way I could pass that information along. When I give someone the CD, I say, “You don’t want to play that at a party, if you’re trying to get the party going.” [laughs] Because it’s not party music. It’s about being in combat, and it’s basically about from the time I got my draft card until the time I came home. Each song is attached to whatever I was going through at the time.  I do believe that music is a soothing method of dealing with stuff, but I wouldn’t consider this soothing. It’s more of an audio documentary, I would say. You can put it that way.

LA: Your songs tell stories, as you mentioned. Do you consider yourself a storyteller?

VG: In this regard, I do. I’ve written a lot of songs from experiences, not only Vietnam, but just life experiences. Some would tell a story, but I’m basically writing about feelings, and I don’t know that that tells a story or not, you know? But the Vietnam CD is definitely a story. A true story.

LA: One thread or dimension in your songs is social commentary, like “Land of Dreams,” “The Common People,” and “Hey, You,” which seem to reference more of what’s happening in the world today, like global warming or government lies.

VG: Yeah, I guess I could call them protest songs, about what was going on at that particular time, the early 90’s. It’s just my way of putting out how I feel without actually getting on Facebook and ranting and raving. [laughs] ‘Cause that doesn’t work sometimes. I would say I’ve got five or six songs that are similar to that.

LA: How did those songs come about?

VG: There was a period of time I was writing when I wrote those types of songs because I figured, I got to get some stuff out because it’s really bugging the hell out of me. They were just a commentary on what was going on at the time. “One Way Street” took in a couple of subjects: veterans, the oil, fighting for oil. Every one of those, my protest songs, came from a need to get those feelings out. The best way I know how to do that is to write a song about it. That’s how that stuff came about. I don’t know if anybody liked what they heard, or how many people listened, but it was important that I put it out. If somebody got something from it, then that’s good.

LA: In some of those songs you have a female chorus, “We need hope . . . we need the promise that things will change.”

VG: Well, actually, the female chorus was me. [laughs] I just sang in a really high falsetto voice. I didn’t have time to go looking for a female singer. I don’t think I knew too many at the time, so I figured well, I’ll just do it. And so, it’s kind of a joke because I go by the name of Blind Albert. I call them the Blindettes. That’s my backup singing group.

LA: On that note, how did Blind Albert come about?

VG: Well, this isn’t a really long story, which is good. I used to live in Cape Cod before I moved up here and I had a studio in my apartment. I was working on a blues project. I was writing blues songs, and I needed to come up with a fictitious blues name for it. My middle name’s Albert and I needed something in front of that. I didn’t want to be Deaf Albert or Fat Albert, or any of these others. I figured Blind Albert. That sounds like a blues guy. I used it for that project, but then I didn’t use it anymore.

Not too long after that, in ’89, I moved up to Maine because a good buddy of mine who I had played with back in the ’70s was living up here. I moved out to Islesboro, and kind of aired out for about a year ’cause I had just gotten a divorce, and I needed to regroup.

I didn’t play music for about a year. I didn’t play in clubs for that year. I started to gradually book stuff, and realized I couldn’t stay on the island anymore ’cause I was off the island more than I was on the island, playing. I put a band together and needed a name for it. Blind Albert was in mothballs and I figured, hmm, Blind Albert. I had already come up with that. I might as well use it.

And so I started to use that. And the funny thing about it is, because of the name, everybody pegged me as a blues artist. That’s still the case now. But I do play some blues, but I wasn’t originally a blues artist; I was a rock guitar player and singer, which I still am.

LA: I think you’re known more as Blind Albert than Vince Gabriel.

VG: Oh, that’s true, because I’ll be talking with people and mention that I play in a band. And they’ll say, “What band do you play with?” I’ll say, “Blind Albert.” “Oh, I saw you guys in Bar Harbor a couple of years ago, yeah.” And if I told them my real name, they wouldn’t know who the hell I was. So, I’m kind of stuck with it. I’ve been stuck with it for 25 or 30 years now.

LA: What led you to making the 11 Bravo Vietnam documentary? You intersperse your songs with narration and images.

VG: I was actually asked by a friend of mine, who was in college at the time, if I would mind if she interviewed me about playing music in Maine. I said sure, ’cause this was a project for her and I figured I could help her out.  2  During the course of the interview, the subject matter turned to Vietnam, and it was eventually called “Vietnam Blues.” I didn’t really give it much thought. She told me that she had sent the interview to a couple of radio stations. I just said, okay.

And then, about two weeks later, she contacted me and said that there was a public radio station in Idaho or somewhere that wanted to broadcast it, and I said well, that’s good.  I still didn’t take it seriously. Then about a week later, she said, “We hit the motherlode.” I said, “What do you mean?” “NPR picked it up on the Sound Print program. It will be broadcast all over the United States.” And that’s when I started taking it seriously.

I began to get emails from people I didn’t even know about that piece. I was overwhelmed by the response. I just thought, this is her college project, no big deal. But because of the broadcast I put a live performance together based on the songs on the Vietnam CD and then I decided to put together a documentary

The band rehearsed, I don’t know, for two or three months. A buddy of mine who’s a drama teacher took snippets of notes that I had written about everything I could remember about Vietnam. I had notebooks full of notes. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, I just wrote it. I just kept writing until I couldn’t remember anything else.

When I started to put this performance together, I figured, well, now I know what I’m going to do with all that stuff I wrote. I’ll take parts of what I wrote that are kind of connected to the songs and we’ll get a narrator and have him narrate each portion. They were only about three or four minutes long, and we’ll play the songs that are related to the narration. Then we’d go onto the next song and he narrates that. The performance continued through all of the songs.

So, I booked the theater in Waldoboro [Maine] and told them I got this thing that I want to do. I don’t know how it’ll turn out or if anybody will even care. We did some advertising and while we were at the theater getting ready, I’m thinking nobody’s showing up ’cause it’s about Vietnam. I said, who’s gonna care? And before I knew it, the whole place was full of people. [laughs] So, I said man, there’s like a lot of people here. I hope we don’t screw it up.

We went out and played. It went off pretty good. I got such an overwhelming response from the audience that it was like an emotional moment. I had thought, nobody’s really going to give a shit about this. As it turned out I had veterans coming up to me who were in the audience who said you got to keep telling this story.

So I thought, okay. I don’t know how long it was after that, I got this brainstorm about bringing the show into the high schools. But because the performance was so long, it was over an hour and a half, the live performance didn’t really work in that setting. What I decided to do was shorten it and make a documentary that was about an hour long.

I started to contact some high schools, and wound up going into four or five.  I went to a school in Thorndike [Maine] like five years in a row and showed the documentary, and then I would open it up to questions.  I said, you guys can ask me anything you want about Vietnam, I don’t care what it is. You want to ask me about the drugs, I’ll tell you about the drugs. I said, there’s nothing that you can’t ask me. That was the best part of the whole thing because we were all interacting with the story. It was great. I loved it.

So that’s how the documentary came about, the DVD version. I did the live version maybe four or five other times in different places. After I put the documentary together, I kind of slackened off with the live performance.  I might still do one, but right now I’m not. But I do have the documentary. The documentary is still available to do something with.  2

And that’s how it all came about. It’s kind of a roundabout story.

LA: It was a long story short, or a short long story.

VG:  Yeah. A long story long, or something. [laughs] But, yeah.

LA: In “Spitzer and the Winemaker,” you ask, “Why am I here and his name is on the wall?”

VG: Right.

LA: And you pose some reasons: luck, skill, karma, God. But then say, “nah.” Have you answered that question, or is that an unanswerable question?

VG: I guess it was all of those. I don’t know. I mean, it could have been any one of the guys or all of them but I still don’t know. Usually I tell people I’m just happy to be here.

That’s how I answer the question because I’m just happy to be here, man. ‘Cause I could not be here. A split second could make a difference, you know? I think it must have been all of those reasons ’cause I don’t think just one of them would have got me back home. I guess something was working for me. And I don’t know what it was, but I’m glad that it did. I’m glad to be here.

LA: You see that frequently not only in the writing of the Vietnam era but also today’s wars, the idea of randomness, pure chance. You step here and you’re okay, but your buddy steps there and he gets blown up.

VG: Yeah. I guess that’s why I ask the question why I’m here and he’s not? There you go back to the luck thing ’cause it had nothing to do really with skill. Well, some of it. A little bit of skill was involved because the guys who were there longer than I was would tell you, for example, don’t walk on the path. You want to listen to what the hell they’re telling you.

A small amount of skill and a large amount of luck, because my buddy, Spitzer, was killed when he was walking point. There were occasions when I also walked point, but not that day. You question why, why that happened. I don’t know why that happened. It’s just the way it worked out. It’s a matter of stepping in one spot or not stepping in another spot. Or being told to walk point that day but not being told to walk point another day.

I don’t know what you call that. That’s a random act, I guess, or happening, event, or something. But you’re going to stop and wonder why it was Spitzer and it wasn’t you, you know what I mean? That’s just the way it was.

LA: Do you see your songs as having relevance or connection to vets returning today?

VG: The wars are different, but I think all the veterans and those involved in the wars now are going through the same thing. You might be fighting house to house, like they do in Iraq. When we were fighting, we were in the jungle, going through hooches. It was different but it was the same. You still didn’t know if you were going to get injured or if you were going to get killed from one second to the next.  You were still in combat. It doesn’t matter the place; it was combat. You play it, no matter how you look at it.

And the other thing is the problems that you suffered after you came home were the same. PTSD, suicides from PTSD, whatever. If you compare everything, they’re pretty similar.

The wars were different, but I think some of the things that occurred to each veteran who was in these different wars were really the same thing.  A bullet can still kill you. That isn’t any different.

LA: To me, one of your most moving songs is “Beneath the Shelter.” It seems to be more generalized about homeless vets, but you sing from the “I” point of view. And one of your lines is, “Yes, I am a veteran. I died inside, but I kept on living.” In the documentary you connect the song to the art of Derek Gundy. Can you talk about that connection and how that song came about?

VG: Well, that had to do with the homeless veteran situation, and it was a while back when I wrote that song. The situation is still going on today. I mean, it’s a major problem. I’ve never really been homeless. There were some times when I didn’t have a place to live for a little while, but basically I was trying to put the information out that there are veterans who are homeless, that don’t have a place. It’s a long-lasting problem. I wanted to put that information out in a song. Maybe it will have more impact than just presenting statistics.

And Derek, who is a great artist, asked me if he could do a visual rendering of the song and I said, yeah, you can do that. He did a great job.

I didn’t have any statistics when I wrote the song. But I knew there were homeless veterans out there. I placed the song in a scene, under a bridge. There are all kinds of reasons for people to be homeless. And they’re not all alcoholics.

The plight of homeless vets was something that bothered me and I decided to write about it. I guess that’s what it boils down to.

LA: What’s your general process of writing a song? Do you have a rough idea and then keep honing it until you get to a finished product?

VG: Well, for me, I need to write the music first. Some people write lyrics and then put music to it, but I can’t do it that way. I need to come up with an emotional connection with the music. The music is what connects me to song.

Even before the lyrics, I need to come up with the music. Then, I’ll write how I feel. I need to feel the emotion first and it’s the music that I get that from.

LA: Another song that I thought was one of your best had a bit of a reggae beat, “A Camera and A Curious Mind,” where you write, “Once Vietnam gets in your soul, it keeps you coming back for more. The sounds you hear, the smell of death, the images you can recall.” And you retrace the steps in your mind, and toward the end of the song, there is the sound of a helicopter.

VG: A gentleman asked me if I could write a song for this short documentary that somebody did about him. He was a Vietnam vet and a photographer. I watched the video and took it from there. I wrote the music first and then I wrote the words.

It’s something that, after you write it, you’re not really sure how you came up with it. That’s always a mystery to me how that happens. I don’t know where it comes from. He liked the song. I wrote it and recorded it in one day, and I gave it back to him.

He asked me, “How long did it take you to write this?”  “It took me a day.” And he says, “You’re kidding me?” I said, “No, it took me a day.” I said, “There’s the song. Do you like it or not?” [laughs] And he did.  I did it to see if I could do it.  That’s how that song came about.

 LA: You have a song, “Shellshock – PTSD,” with the idea of the war lasts forever. Could you talk about how that one came about?

VG: I think what triggered that was not necessarily my experiences, but the experiences of the veterans who were in Iraq and Afghanistan. It definitely has to do with Vietnam, too.

It was probably the last song I wrote for the CD.  It came a long time after I got back from Vietnam. Having PTSD, but not suffering as much as some Vietnam vets do, I mean, mine was bad enough, and it’s still bad enough ’cause I’m taking medication for it, but it was a subject that I had to write about because I hadn’t written about it.

I needed to write something, I needed to write my feelings about that subject because I hadn’t done that. Until I had, the CD really wasn’t complete.

Before I wrote this song, I thought, oh, it’s missing one thing. It’s missing the residuals that come from war and that we’re all, you know, all of us who were in combat, are going through right now. The residuals are part of the whole tour.

A buddy of mine made a comment, “We had no idea that our tour was gonna last a lifetime.” And I said, “Yeah,” and asked him, “Can I use that?” [laughs] And he said, “Sure.” So I did. It opens the documentary.

But it’s true. There’s the coming home part which, believe me, I was overwhelmed and overjoyed to be back alive. But then, there’s all the other stuff that starts coming up after you’ve been home.

And you deal with it every day, and that’s like still being on tour. You’re not getting shot at or anything, but mentally you have a lot to deal with. You’ve been affected by it. You know, we’re all taking medication for it. Some have it worse than others. Some of them have committed suicide because of it.

So it’s really an ongoing tour, mentally, and maybe even physically, too. Not in the true sense of being over in a combat situation, but you’re fighting, you’re fighting this stuff every day.

LA: One of the other threads I see seems to be about relationships and love/lust. “There’s Always Someone Out There,” “You Started Something,” or “Four Alarm Fire.”

VG: What’s really funny about that is, I don’t know what happened. My voice somehow changed. I have no idea what caused it. Well, I might have an idea about what caused it. I might have been smoking weed at the time. I don’t know if I should say that, but, uh, that’s what happened. And it changed my voice.

All of a sudden, I could start hitting these higher notes that I couldn’t before.  That’s where that group of songs came from. And I can’t duplicate the vocals on them now because I don’t smoke weed anymore. My voice is back to where it should be.

It was just a period of time where I used that voice change and took advantage of it, and wrote some songs that I could sing in that way. It was the weirdest thing. I don’t know where that came from, but I can’t duplicate it anymore. [laughs]

I don’t know that those songs were written about anything I had been through, but they were just, you know, thoughts.

I put those thoughts to music.  I don’t even know where this stuff comes from, you know? It’s better not to try and come up with an answer to that. [laughs]