There was always music around when I was a kid. I grew up in Rhinelander and lived there for most of my life, but I also lived on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation when I was younger.
Paco Fralick | Rhinelander, WI
I went to UW-Eau Claire after high school, then graduated from dental school in 1993 from Marquette University before moving right back home to Rhinelander. But no matter where I was, music was always a big part of my life.
I think I was even absorbing songs in my mom’s belly because my dad would play them around the house. He worked for Wisconsin Public Service and had a ‘normal’ job, but then he would play music semi-professionally five nights a week. He didn’t have a lot of formal training, but had a strong voice, knew a lot of songs, and entertained a lot of people.
My parents owned two different bars throughout their lifetime, when I was young we owned the Candlewick Inn, which was attached to our house behind the bar. At night, I would sneak out and crawl under the pool table and watch my dad’s band play. They were called the Country-Aire Band, and they played old country music. It was an easy setup in those days, just an amp and a mic. I wanted to grow up to be like my dad.
He had a great memory for songs. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anybody that knows more songs than he does. I remember listening to him practicing all night in the house. He would set up in the small home we had on Bruner Street. Back then, there weren’t so many ways to learn music like we have now with all the apps and different things on the internet. He subscribed to country music magazines. He would cut out the Hank Williams songs that he liked and make scrapbooks of songs. He’d write all those songs down in notebooks, which he still has and wants to pass on to me. He would also record the radio with the old reel-to-reel recorder. I remember those reels being around the house and sitting all over the table. He stayed up all night practicing those songs.
He encouraged music for me and my sister. When I was five, he brought home an old piano. He started taking piano lessons and would teach me what he was learning. That’s when I discovered that I could play by ear. After he taught me three chords, I could play all these songs. All of a sudden, I was playing Rhinestone Cowboy at five years old. He gave me the opportunities he didn’t have as far as formal music training goes. So, I had eight years of piano and four years of Suzuki violin with the same teacher, Phyllis Rheume. Then when I turned 13, I wanted to play sports and get involved in other hobbies. So, I quit piano and music and violin, but I still continued to watch the band play.
When I was about 16 I decided I wanted to re-engage and be part of the band. Years ago, someone had hocked a case of beer for this bass guitar, which had been sitting behind the bar for a long time. So, I picked it up and knew enough about music to figure out how to play. It wasn’t a great instrument, a red and white Cort, but it was enough to get me started, and I used it for a long time.
It was a great group of players. Our drummer, Gene Ciszek, was a fantastic jazz drummer. He has passed away now, but he played with Frank Sinatra and the band Chicago. Then we had Maury Big John. He was from Lac du Flambeau and was kind of a local legend, a guitar and fiddle player. I used to watch him play, and I guess I was subconsciously absorbing what he was doing. Then there was my dad.
We never had weekly rehearsals or anything because everybody could play by ear. The stage was the rehearsal. I see other bands that are really tight, and they don’t just play things off the cuff. They’ve got everything geared for every set. Our band was the opposite. Somebody would just come up and say, ‘Hey, you guys know this song?’ And we would do our best. After playing together for so many years, we just knew what everybody was going to do. My dad would just start going and we’d just have to figure out, ‘Oh, that’s this song.’
I really loved it, and I wanted to do music. But when I got to college, dentistry seemed more secure financially to raise a family. So, I just put most of my eggs in that basket and focused on dentistry, making money, and being successful. I set music aside for a while, but now I’m excited to be finding my way back to it.
When I was in college at Eau Claire, I played the guitar quite a lot. At first, I was kind of homesick and didn’t know anybody in the dorms, so I relied on my guitar.
I could pass the time that way and it was a really good way to meet people. If my door was open and I was playing guitar, somebody would pop their head in and join me. I started branching out, learning other styles of music, and had fun playing at house parties or college clubs.
The first song I wrote was Daddy, When Are You Coming Home? about my grandpa, who died when I was 14. He had struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. He was mostly clean by the time I was around, but it had taken its effect on him physically. I played that song at the Eau Claire talent show my freshman year. When I got off the stage these two girls came up and they were telling me their dad was an alcoholic, and they asked if I could get that song to them, and I did, and they later told me it helped their dad. So that was pretty cool for a freshman in college. After that, I got some notices in the mail from California about sending my songs out there, but I wasn’t sure how to do that and if somebody was going to steal the songs, so I just tabled it.
I married Heidi Beyer and we started having kids while going to dental school, so there wasn’t as much playing anymore. After school, I moved back home and started to figure out my dental career. Within a year, I was building my dental office. Life shifted and I had to just go with it. Still, I tried to keep music around. Our band continued to play a lot of music, and there was always a guitar out at my house or the piano. All three of my kids had lessons and were surrounded by music, just like I was.
During that time, I found that if I left the guitar out of the case, it got used more. As for songwriting, I learned that early in the morning is best for me. If the first thing I do is pick up the guitar before my mind fills up with work or stress, that’s when the coolest stuff just pops through. I tried to keep the music going, but I was trying to figure out how to raise a family and be a dad and everything.
With time, my dental career really took off. In 2004 I built my office Timber Drive Dental. Later I built the Peter Christensen Dental Campus for my tribe in Lac du Flambeau. I had 76 employees and 11 dentists, and it was a huge effort. And when I say I built the clinic, I mean I designed it, I hired all those people, and I was working there in addition to working at my own office. I was only sleeping five hours a night for five years straight, seven days a week. So naturally, my music got put on the back burner.
At some point, somebody brought a guitar to a Christmas party and handed it to me to play. I realized how rusty I was, and it surprised me. Then around that same time, Bobby Bullet St. Germaine, who is a pretty well-known artist from Lac du Flambeau, approached me. He had some funding to help native people who wanted to be songwriters and encouraged me to try. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ Then, he gave me a cassette player, cassette tapes, and this rhyming dictionary.
He became a mentor to me and would come to my dental office, and we would sit and have our weekly sessions. I tried to write, I just couldn’t seem to make it go because my mind was so busy with everything. However, from those efforts, my song I Still Wonder started to evolve. That song ultimately made it onto my first album along with Daddy, When Are You Coming Home? So, I really give him credit for reigniting the spark in me. I realized, yeah, I could still write.
I ended up stepping out of the dental program in Lac du Flambeau a little while later but continued to work in my private practice. I had worked there for the tribe for eight years already. Then suddenly, I had the time to play again. That’s when I thought, okay, I’m going to go try to record my music. So, I started going to the studio. The first album was recorded at Clear Blue Studios in Tomahawk with Mark Wayne, though I ended up finishing it at Whitehouse Productions in Wausau.
When I first started recording, I went in to do a song called Penokee Hills, about the proposed mine near the Bad River Reservation. Eventually, I finished that album with 14 songs.
One of them, Homeless Man, I wrote after visiting my daughter in Seattle. I was taken aback by how many homeless people were on the sidewalks and just being ignored. They’d have their signs up and people wouldn’t make eye contact. One man climbed this four-story tree as a protest. All the fire trucks and cops came out and surrounded him with ladders and everything. They closed all the city blocks trying to get him down, but he stayed up there for over 24 hours. He was trying to bring awareness to the issue of homelessness. I was just walking on the streets and this guy had a sign that said, ‘I feel invisible.’ I could see why.
The song I got the most recognition for from that first album was Women and Water. It even won the Song of the Year for the Native American Music Awards. I co-wrote with my friend Michael Bucher. The song is about how in my culture, the women take care of the water, the men take care of the fire, and they work collectively in ceremony. It was already written and recorded before the Standing Rock protests in 2016, so I got to play it here in Rhinelander at a local Standing Rock event we held.
My musical sound and influences are all over the map. I don’t do any rap or real hard rock, but I describe myself as eclectic because some of my songs come out with a lot of energy and some are just acoustic. I even have one song I recorded with a band called Switchback, which is a high-energy Celtic band. Some people tell me I sound like Cat Stevens. I’ve also heard Willie Nelson, maybe because I’m a bit nasal. Of course, I grew up listening to Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, George Jones, and even Farron Young. But that isn’t really what comes out when I write. I love listening to those guys, but the stuff that comes out is unique to me. I guess it’s what the Spirit wants to bring through.
I don’t usually sit down and decide to write songs about anything specific. I just get my instrument and let it come. Everybody probably has their own processes, but I describe it as trying to get my mind out of the way. The way I see it, we’re not just the mind, we’re not just the body, and we’re not just the heart or the soul. We’re the collective of all of it. So, when I’m writing, I try to quiet my mind and let it all come through. Then I can start filtering it, applying logic to it. But if I filter too heavily with my mind, trying to rhyme everything or whatever, it can shut my creativity down. So it’s a balance between letting it out, and not being too critical.
These days, as I’m beginning to reach the end of my dental career, I have started working on my second and third albums. I am recording them with Marty Cheyka at Whitehouse Productions. We are a good team and are co-producing it together. He’s better at hearing things sonically as far as creating the evenness of the mix. And then I seem to notice other things he doesn’t hear.
I am very proud of the new material, the lyrics and the arrangements. I think these songs are some of the best we have done and reflect my growth as a singer, songwriter, and producer. There are some very talented musicians accompanying us and I feel we are closer to developing what “my sound” is.
I’ve been taking my time with these new albums. I’m not quite ready to say I’m retiring from dentistry, but I want to have all my music ready to go when I do retire. That way, I have them to use as a launching pad so I can really take a swing at having a music career. It’s very exciting to be starting something new at 57. But it’s also a little bit scary to end my dental career to jump into a new adventure. I’ve been doing my best to financially take care of what I need to, so I don’t have to worry about that and can focus on whatever journey music takes me on.
Ultimately, I think this is what I’m supposed to be doing. It has always been my dream, and it’s never too late to follow your dreams. I don’t think that success needs to be measured by money. It’s more about the experiences you get. It’s about touching people and having that reciprocation with them. Music has its own energy. It holds its own space. I never know who is going to hear the song or how they’re going to take it, but it’s always good when people come up and share that one of my songs was good for them in some way. I just put it out there and let the Spirit take it.
Paco’s story was produced by Alexandria Delcourt.
Paco Fralick was featured in an episode of Wisconsin Life. In this clip he discusses how he made his mark in the Native American music scene with his contemporary country and folk songs.
