Garden

Sweethearts of South Dakota ca. 1976

Garden - the band photo - Colleen, Marilyn, Susan

Thank you for your kind comments on my birthday post. You ask, “will there be more poems”? Maybe, Bill found the missing recordings from the New York and Torrington concerts. But I might have to crank up my own substack. For now another deep dive into the archives … and another birthday!

6/12/25

Today is the birthday of Colleen Williams who was in the avant-garde, improv, three woman, South Dakota trio with Susan, and Marilyn Castilaw - Garden. Colleen wrote the poem that became "Lay Down Your Burden" which may have been how many of you first heard Susan's voice on the “Common Ground” album. Colleen Crangle, Henjem, then Williams (after marrying Tony Williams, drummer with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock) and Marilyn Wetzler, aka Redfield, then Castilaw (when she married her rodeo star, Tim) joined their quite different voices with the intention of letting it rip. We’re talking 1976. Going back in the archives I found three gigs by the wild women recorded at several live venues. I'll intersperse a few of the tracks with Susan's version of how they met.

This is after Susan was getting tired of being the chick singer in rock and roll bar bands (and getting fired repeatedly). Hey, the girls got inducted into the South Dakota Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! Come on!

“The Dolphin’s” by Fred Neil, interpreted by Garden at the Firehouse.

Here's Susan-

I have just come from a ten day mid-Winter trip to California to visit old friends. Two of these friends have been in my life now for 30 years. Of course, we can't really fathom this, as we are still in our 20's in our heads.

We came together far from here in the small college town of Vermillion South Dakota, perched on the banks of the winding and deep Missouri river. I was living in my '59 brown VW microbus with my dog Ami. She was a mix of lab and St. Bernard, in other words very large, and had kind of a hound dog look, golden brown, with one ear longer than another. We had just left the rock and roll band l'd been singing in in Sioux Falls, Blueberry Buckle, and rolled down 1-29 to park on a friend's farm outside town. Every nite I drove the 10 miles into Vermillion to Leo's Lounge to listen to area bands that came through, while Ami would wait outside in the Vdub. I attended some music classes at the University during the week and once a month would drive 250 miles to Ames IA where a friend had a small Ashram and taught Kundalini Yoga. I had adopted the appropriate attire of white clothes and a white turban. You got the picture?

“New Song” by Susan Osborn, Garden at Dugan’s

One of the guys in a three piece Cream-like area band, Stevie McClune, said that I had to meet another girl musician he knew. She sang and played piano and vibraphone and he thought we'd hit it off. Marilyn was 17, just over 5 ft and had startling blue green eyes, a beautiful clear soprano voice, and was in her last year of high school in Aberdeen SD. She'd drive down on the weekends to hear the music. We liked each other immediately, and before we even made a note together, we had formed a band, me on guitar and Marilyn, piano and vibes, both of us singing. First thing we did was to have our picture taken. This was to be part of an emerging pattern for our band which was to be later named Garden.

Anyway, one day, I ran into an acquaintance, who was to become our band's third member. We had first met a year earlier when Blueberry Buckle was playing at Grease City, another cultural hub in Vermilion. At the time, Colleen was 8 months pregnant with her daughter Shannon. She told me that she was sitting in with a friend's band at Leo's singing that night, and would I come by and give a listen. So, I showed up turban and all.

What a voice! Tall, slender, black haired Colleen sounded other worldly, wild and soaring. At one point she asked if I would like to come up and join her in an old Billy Ed Wheeler blues tune about coal miners called High Flyin' Bird. Our two strong voices, supported by the driving power of the Dry Mustard band, swooped and swirled around each other, spiraling up and up, and then diving down. At the end, I felt as if I had for the first time in my life, found someone else who understood what it was like to really sing.

“Wilderness” by Colleen Crangle, Garden at Soaper’s Mill in the rain.

A few weeks later, I drove out with Ami to visit Colleen on her farm East of town. where she lived with Denny and Shannon. There in the old farmhouse kitchen was an equally old upright piano. While Shannon slept nearby, I sat down and plunked out some notes while Colleen made the tea.

Beside the piano was a stack of notebooks on the floor that almost reached the keyboard. When asked what they were, Colleen replied, oh they are just my writing. I boldly asked if I could read some and took the one off the top and opened to an entry dated August 17, 1974. The writing was a poem. It began " Oh lay down your burden. Lay it all down. Pass the glass between you. Drink it up." So lyrical and haunting. I asked if she had ever put any of her words to music and when she replied no, l asked if she'd mind if I did. As I was leaving that day, she said "I wrote that later the night you and I sang together at Leo's"

I took the words home with me. By that time, Ami and I had broken down and decided to pay rent for a partly remodled ground floor apartment in Tom Mc Cue's house in town. It came with it's own old upright in the bedroom, and I immediately sat down and composed a chorus using Colleen's moving lyrics. I told Marilyn about Colleen, and we decided to invite her to join our then nameless band. At our first rehearsal, we gathered around the upright and together composed the verses for " Lay Down Your Burden", a song that was to later carry me far away from Vermillion SD and around the world.

(Sorry, I don’t have Garden performing “Lay Down Your Burden”, you will have to get out your “Common Ground” LP).

“Woodstock” by Joanie Michell and “Row, row, row your boat” by Eliphalet Oram Lyte, Garden at the Firehouse.

I have just come from visiting Marilyn on the ranch near Sacramento, where her husband trains cutting horses, and Colleen in San Francisco, who after a 7 year grieving period for the loss of her beloved husband, Tony, is facing Spring. Somehow we have all come to roost on the West Coast. I treasure these times when we gather and confer on the state of the universe. If we had known that our lives would continue to weave in and out of each others through boyfriends and husbands, losses and wins for the next 30 years, in the end, I don't think we would have done anything differently. I think somehow we knew, even in our wildly impractical, dreamy youth, that these friendships were for keeps. And they are.

“Lakota Lullabye” by Tom Peterson (who died Nov. 4 last year, salute!) Garden at Soaper’s Mill.

Side note - for a sense of the humor involved, when in Minneapolis Colleen would write wise cracks for “Mystery Theatre 3000” - dD

Bonus track - “Geronimo’s Cadillac” by Michael Martin Murphy, Garden at Soaper’s Mill

Susan and Marilyn get their just deserts.

If any of you have memories of seeing Garden consider leaving a comment.

Thanks, dD