John Coster & The Medicine Band

SONG WRITER/BAND ORIGINATOR, VOCALS, ACOUSTIC GUITARS & HARMONICAS

John Coster was born and raised in Katonah, NY. His first musical influences were a local folksinger who was part of the early Greenwich Village scene and a neighbor from Tennessee who played bluegrass banjo and collected recordings of traditional and country music. John started playing guitar as an eighth grader. In his early teens he occasionally made his way into Manhattan to check out the street scene and hear some of the new singer songwriters like Dylan and recently discovered older artists like Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson. These were times of wild expectation and awakening, when songs like Dylan?s "Blowing in the Wind" were stirring up trouble for the establishment. The summer after he finished high school at the Loomis School in Connecticut, John traveled to Nova Scotia with a friend, fiddler George Dorian; he and George roamed about the Island of Cape Breton, learning and recording some of the powerful Gaelic music there and sometimes playing at house parties. He returned to Cape Breton to visit a Nova Scotian girlfriend after his first year at Harvard, spent more time with some of the area musicians and played rhythm guitar and harmonica at local dance parties that summer.

Over the next couple of years John and George started doing shows with some colorful musicians from the Cornell/ Ithaca area, banjo wizard Walt Koken, harmonica player Marty Lebenson, superior picker Doug Dorschug and others. Out of this matrix a group called The Busted Toe Mudthumpers evolved. Sometimes they teamed up with magician Ricky Jay, recently known for his sell out Broadway performances and acting roles in movies like Boogie Nights and The Heist. Mudthumper history culminated in a tour across Canada and down the West Coast in the summer of ?68.

"The war was raging and the sixties were peaking like an out of control acid trip, opposing forces gathering. We were driving through the wheat fields of Canada, a band of hippie country musicians with a fiddler who was a student of Mandarin Chinese and a long haired character named Ricky Jay who had recently been unfairly characterized by a New Jersey Newspaper Headline as a "Berserk Youth" but who was in fact one of the world?s greatest close up magicians. We were headed for San Francisco, taking the Northern Route, busking in bowling alley parking lots to natives from the Sioux Reservation who had no more idea what to make of us than did the local wheat farmers. The only reason we got into Canada in the first place was because Ricky had made all the keys of the customs office manager back at the St Lawrence disappear. The poor fellow had not believed Ricky when he claimed to be a magician who was simply going on a camping trip in Ontario. He leaned back in his chair with a skeptical look on his face and said ?If you?re really a magician, why don?t you make something disappear?!? His key chain was sitting on the front of his desk. Ricky picked it up and clapped his hands together and "Poof" it was gone. Needless to say in return for his keys he agreed to let us in to Canada. Anyhow at one point the Bus went North to Alaska while Ricky, George, Walt and I hitchhiked to an Old Anarchist hangout/commune in a Canyon just east of Spokane, Washington. There we hooked up with a young couple in a camper truck who drove us all to the fabled City by the Bay. We lived in Berkley. The Grateful Dead were around the corner, there was music in the streets, the police and the Black Panthers were going at it, R. Crumb came to one of our shows. Someday I?ll write a book, but I probably won?t be able to separate fact from fiction."

John left the Mudthumpers in San Francisco went back and finished up his degree at Harvard. That spring George and Bob Pine, the guitar player who had replaced John, were killed in a car accident in Nova Scotia. "They tried to talk me into going with them; I?d finished all my exams and I could have gone, but it just didn?t feel right. I didn?t get to know Bob that well but George was an amazing character, the instigator of numerous adventures including our journey west the year before. When he died, an era ended."

Coster did some graduate studies in Hartford, CT in the seventies, then began playing his original songs and traditional music with Bill Walach and Will Welling. Coster, Welling and Walach toured regularly throughout the Northeast, bringing a kind of wild Celtic influenced folk rock to clubs and concerts. When the Band split up John formed a group called Jacob?s Reunion, which also combined Coster?s songwriting with traditional music. The sound now was heavily influenced by the more formally trained Barbara Hyde on piano and Yo Oxenhandler on violin. Vocalist Sandy Sayers and bassist Richard Block rounded out the group. Jacob?s Reunion did some great harmony singing and produced innovative arrangements of songs like "Will the Circle be Unbroken". Their album, Jacob