Bruce Eugene Hoppe

Bruce was my uncle, but he was not exactly a “family man.” I didn't really meet him until I was probably around twelve, and the last time I saw him was at least twenty-five years ago. But when I was a teenager in the 1980s, I spent several summers on his ranch. Because of that time, Bruce exerted a profound influence on me: not only then but ever since. Many of these impacts were nothing more than the stylistic preferences imbibed by an impressionable teenager: for forty years, the only jeans that I have worn are Levi’s 501s and the only acoustic guitars I have played onstage were made by Ovation. Those are the brands that Bruce swore by forty years ago. I don’t know if he kept using them, but I did because of him. Other effects were more important. To the extent that I know how to ride a horse, it is because he taught me. One of those summers at the ranch, he gave me riding lessons for a week or so with varying degrees of success. After that, I got to go out on horseback with him and some of his hands to actually move a herd of cattle. I was excited, but also quite nervous. He told me that I just needed to be positioned in the right place and wouldn’t have to do very much. But of course one of the cows in my section of the herd got away. I had to chase it down, and that was the first time I stopped thinking about everything I was supposed to be doing on a horse and just rode. My brain only had room for one thought, and that was, “If I don’t get this cow back to the herd, Bruce is going to be so pissed." Kate (the horse) and I got it done, and I was exhilarated to have accomplished something so unlike anything in my experience up to that time. Another important influence that Bruce had on me was through music. I was in a high school garage band that played what was popular at the time—a lot of New Wave music. But Bruce turned me on to a lot of singer-songwriters in the folk-country tradition, people like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He taught me a lot about playing the guitar when I had been primarily a keyboardist up to that point. I still remember the feeling of a new world opening up when he showed me the descending riff on “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” when I was just learning about Bob Dylan. Bruce was full of observations, insights and strong, idiosyncratic opinions about music. Dylan, he told me, tells you everything you need to know about working at Maggie’s farm in the way he sings the word “I” at the end of the verse. The essence of a song, he insisted, is not its arrangement but the chords and the writing. The original recording of “Already Gone” by Robb Strandlund is better than the better-known Eagles version because of the backup singers at the end. The guy in the Human League who sings “And then the conversation turned…” sounds like he is auditioning for the high school choir. The Rolling Stones are shitty musicians but they write fantastic songs. I did not always understand his insights, and definitely did not always agree with them, but they always gave me a lot to think about. Though I rarely got to see my uncle Bruce, he was still one of the more important people in my life. The world is undoubtedly less rich for his passing.