Malibu Music Man : Quadriplegic Finds Freedom in Giving Struggling Folk Singers a Voice

In the quiet subculture that is folk music, a special kind of reverence is reserved for Brian May.

This is not because of the way he plays the guitar. He can’t play guitar. He can’t move his arms. Or his legs.

May is a 43-year-old quadriplegic who contracted polio through a faulty vaccine as a child, has long outlived his insurance settlement and needs around-the-clock care, including four hours for a bath. He breathes through a respirator, is constantly short of money and in danger of being evicted.

All he has is his music.

From his rented home in Malibu, surrounded by masses of donated tape-recording equipment, he engineers and records performances by struggling, guitar-playing singer-songwriters, most of them searching for a record contract, anonymously pure among loud, sour-faced, publicity-obsessed musicians.

Every week May produces a two-hour cassette tape of songs and interviews called “Malibu Folk” and mails it to a handful of public radio stations across the nation. Every week many of the stations broadcast the program, and letters from fans in places such as Quincy, Ill., trickle back through the mail to Malibu. And May, a college-educated man with a sly wit, feels connected to the world.

“It liberates me,” he said in his raspy, enthusiastic voice, sitting in his living room, where pictures of musicians who have played for him line the walls. “It takes me away from the pain and the worries. Plus, it gives artists a voice.”

If you are an artist who has driven up Pacific Coast Highway to the far edge of Malibu to record a few of your songs for May while he sits inert; if you have watched his wife, Lupe, arrange the microphones and knobs and monitors in response to May’s instructions; if you have heard his effusive gratitude when you are finished playing--once you have experienced this, the musicians say, you have a tough time feeling sorry for yourself, no matter how your career is breaking.

“Playing for him, it’s a different vibe than what you experience anywhere,” said David Pless, a Mississippi-born singer who lives in Sherman Oaks and writes songs such as “Lines in Leather,” about the Midwest floods of 1993. Pless was unaware that May is disabled until he arrived at his house. “Just having the experience of working with him has made me look at things a little differently.”

May became different in 1955, at age 5, when he was growing up in Pacific Palisades. He was one of 79 children in the United States who that year received a polio shot from a batch of improperly manufactured vaccine--shots that spread the poliomyelitis virus.

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He was almost completely paralyzed. Doctors put him in an iron lung for a year and a half to keep him alive. Soon after, his father died. His family sued the lab that manufactured the vaccine, won in court, then settled for about $350,000 in 1962, an amount predicated on a doctor’s prediction that May would live only 15 more years.

Around that time May got interested in folk music. Then the Beatles hit, and the melodies captured him. His mother hired tutors to instruct him at home. He learned German and Spanish. He attended high school through a telephone hookup and--at a time when there were few facilities for the disabled--began attending classes at UCLA in 1968. It took him seven years to earn degrees in Spanish and Italian. By then he was 27 and the settlement money had run out.

How would he earn a living? He had always liked radio. It was a lifeline. In the late 1970s he developed the idea of taping musicians and interviewing them. He worked some part-time radio jobs. He became a close friend of singer Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary in 1976, interviewing him for a college radio station. Yarrow contributed for a time to keep May solvent.

May was surviving, but he was not thriving. He had this dream of doing a weekly folk music show and there were two things wrong with the dream. One was that he could not crack the local radio Establishment; he was able to do fill-in shows on Los Angeles FM station KPFK, but only occasionally. The other problem was folk music itself. It wasn’t trendy. It wasn’t popular. There were, as there have always been, new generations of singer-songwriters probing new themes with their guitars, but radio tended to ignore them and most record companies branded folk music a non-category. Pete Seeger is old and Phil Ochs is dead.

So May did two things that made a difference. In 1990, surviving as he had for years on charity and monthly checks from the county and Social Security, he married Lupe Mariscal, who had been his full-time caretaker since 1978. And in 1992, lacking any encouragement from the radio Establishment, he syndicated his own show.

He mailed off tapes to stations in Illinois, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota and Northern California. Some started to run it regularly, others irregularly. It was costing him money in tapes and postage that he did not have--he says his monthly benefits are $1,800, far less than the cost of rent and home care--but that did not matter.

Now he was on a mission. He was a minister for folk music, often referred to by its devotees as acoustic music, to distinguish it from the moldy days of the hootenanny and civil rights march. By last month, Acoustic Guitar magazine was praising him as “one of acoustic music’s true angels,” never mentioning his disability.

May is so focused on his mission that he has to ask his visitor what “gangsta rap” means. It is a sad irony: Gangsta rap, etched in crude braggadocio, is often hailed by music critics for touching societal nerves the way folk music did in the 1960s.

The people May touches are like singer-songwriter Jeff Gold of Hollywood, who teaches clarinet and saxophone while trying to make it on the club circuit. “I don’t think I’ve ever run into anybody who’s more dedicated to what he’s doing than Brian. I wish I had a lot of money to give him,” Gold said.

Peter Yarrow, who has money, has given some of it to May but is reluctant to talk about it. This is about friendship, not money, he said. One night years back, when Yarrow was performing at the Greek Theatre, he had May come onstage and they sang a piece Yarrow had written for a friend fighting cancer, “With Your Face To The Wind.” ( I see you smiling again, spirits moving again, I know you’re going to win. )

In 1990, May won a national Victory award, known as the Academy Awards for the disabled. May describes himself as a man “always stuck in between tragedy and success.” He has maneuvered through life and gained a respectable professional identity through sheer will and a remarkable temperament. Yet he is paying the price for never having mastered personal finance, and is always worried about paying tomorrow’s bills.

On this day, the sky and ocean are bursting brilliantly into his hardwood-floored living room as he plays a tape of a recent “Malibu Folk” show through two large speakers. The guests were members of an Orange County quartet, the Woodbys, who performed and were interviewed by May. May complimented them about a song they had just sung, “Waltzing on the Deck of the Titanic,” and asked them to describe it.

“Well,” one of the musicians explained, “it’s the idea that if you don’t pay attention to the things around you, the ship’s going down.”

“That’s like my life,” May rasps as loud as he can over the tape, over the hum of his respirator.

Then, with his face to the wind, he laughs.