The Heart of Mountain Music: Will Frank’s Story

By Marie Kennedy, The Mountain Times

The cavern was dark, lit only by flickering candles. Will Frank plucked his guitar, and the sound echoed through the underground café in medieval Caen, France. Nobody spoke his language – and he didn’t speak French – but by the time he reached the “la-la-la” part of Paul Simon’s The Boxer, everyone was singing along.

It was 1972. Will had set out across Europe with a backpack and guitar, hitchhiking from country to country for four and a half months, never quite sure what would happen next. On a ferry between England and France, he met a student who invited him to stay in Caen, leading to that unforgettable evening.

“That moment was magical,” he said. “That guitar opened doors for me. You’re never alone if you’ve got that pal with you.”

Later that summer, nearly out of money in Madrid while waiting for $50 from his parents so he could reach the city where his flight home departed, Will slipped quietly into a youth hostel and stayed for a week.

On his last night, travelers gathered around as he pulled out his guitar. “We were sitting in a circle, people from all over the world,” he recalled. “Nobody really spoke the same language.”

He played and sang late into the night. Someone passed a hat. “Nobody had any money,” he said, smiling. “But they gave what they could.”

Before dawn, he slipped through the woods to meet a cab that would take him to the airport and home again. Soon he would return to the United States and begin graduate school. The guitar came with him.

“My parents gave me a ukulele when I was 16,” he said. “Then that Christmas they gave me a nylon-string guitar.”

It was the era of Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Kingston Trio, and television sing-alongs like Mitch Miller, where families gathered around the TV to follow the bouncing ball – like karaoke, but in the living room.

“A lot of people were picking up guitars then,” he said. “But sometimes a bug just bites you. It got me good.”

He learned songs from records and various songbooks and began developing the fingerpicking style he still uses today. 

Will grew up in the San Francisco Bay area but fell in love with the Pacific Northwest after attending UCLA and graduate school in eastern Washington.

He eventually moved to Oregon and took a job with the Reynolds School District as a child development specialist. He first rented a place in Brightwood and then moved to Sandy for a few years. Music soon connected him with others on the mountain.

Will met musician Julia McCarl, who was performing regularly at Timberline Lodge. She suggested forming a band. They recruited other mountain residents: Doug Kouri on bass and Howard Friedman on flute and saxophone. They played an eclectic mix of folk, pop, and jazz. 

The group practiced in Will’s small basement and eventually named themselves Patent Pending. “We found the name painted on the bow of a canoe that was sitting in the garage where we rehearsed,” Will said. “It just sorta fit.”

The band played mostly weekends at Timberline, along with occasional gigs in Portland and even a live appearance on KBOO radio.

One night after a performance at the lodge became a memory he never forgot. “We all squeezed into Doug’s old VW bus and started down the mountain,” he said. “The moon was full, and the snow made it feel like daylight.”

To savor the moment, they shut off the headlights and silenced the engine. “We coasted all the way down the mountain,” he said. “Through Government Camp, past Silent Rock and the S-curves. We finally turned the engine back on at Zigzag. It was silent and glorious.”

Will would go on to perform solo regularly at Timberline’s Ram’s Head Bar for more than a decade. “Those years were wonderful,” he said. “There was magic up there.”

Late nights sometimes brought unexpected moments. One evening after midnight, he heard a violin echoing through the lodge. “It was just beautiful and you couldn’t tell where it was coming from,” he said. “Finally I realized a waitress named Kenna was sitting in the stairwell, playing an aire on her violin. Like a lot of people who work at Timberline, that was just a temporary job. Most younger employees were there for skiing and snowboarding, or headed somewhere else.”

Will even wrote a song about the place, Boogie Woogie Bartender, in the Ram’s Head Bar, whipping through a list of some of the bartenders and friends who worked there:

There’s Judy and Harley, Dee and Camille, Brian and Jerry and Mo, 

Gary, Bill, Dieter and Kay. They all boogied drinks the Ram’s Head way.