Musician Seeks Cure to Alcoholism : Researcher Traces His Roots to Folk Movement of the ‘60s

LA JOLLA —  George Robert Siggins may never be a household name. He may never discover the cure for cancer or alcoholism. He may never write a hit tune, the kind that sails to the top of the Billboard charts. But it won’t be for lack of trying.

Siggins, 47, has spent much of his life immersed in two worlds--medicine and music. As a student at Harvard University in the early 1960s, he emerged as a pivotal figure in the area’s folk music scene. He sang with Joan Baez and Tom Rush, and was a founding member of the Charles River Valley Boys.

He currently works at Scripps Clinic as part of a research team exploring the workings of the human mind and the effects of various drugs on the nerve cells of the brain. Siggins is especially concerned with alcoholism. He dreams of finding a cure. Alcoholism has marred the life of more than one musical friend, so much so that it’s now a motivator.

Medical research is, however, no picnic. Deadlines for funding are absolute, the work tedious and difficult. When stresses become too great, Siggins has a means of escape.

He tunes up.

“I can exercise that take-this-job-and-shove-it feeling (with music),” he said, “and it keeps me from getting crazed. The science business is high pressure, most of the time, and is so mainly because of funding.”

The science business, in Siggins’ words, has “a lot of show biz in it,” and in that sense holds remarkable parallels to music. “In both cases,” he said, munching a noontime sandwich, “you’ve got to present your case before an audience. In both, you’re being judged and reviewed.”

Siggins gets nothing but good reviews for the work he has done in science. He has worked in San Diego nine years now, eight of those at Salk Institute. Some call Siggins a research psychopharmacologist, others an electrophysiologist. Whatever, he’s a member of the division of preclinical neuroscience and endocrinology, in its second year at Scripps.

Floyd Bloom, director of the group, has known Siggins since 1968. Before coming here they worked together at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, for the National Institute of Mental Health. Much of the work there involved schizophrenia.

Today, the division does research into Parkinson’s Disease, depression, sleep, epilepsy, opiate addiction (heroin) and the endorphins of the brain.

“If I may beat our drum a little bit, I would say we do some of the best endorphin research anywhere in the country,” Siggins said.

Bloom considers Siggins one of his most valuable people--and in that sense, a valuable researcher on a national scale.

“Bob is one of the few people,” Bloom said, “in science or the day-to-day personal life that I can always count on to do the right thing.”

Siggins, a tall, easygoing man with straw-colored hair and the youthful good looks of an avid surfer (which he is) generates the same kind of feeling from colleagues in the music business. When singer Tom Rush recently assembled a list of talents to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Club 47 in Boston, Siggins’ was one of the first numbers he called.

Siggins was one of the first singers to grace Club 47 when it opened in 1959. Joan Baez and Rush were among the others. Later, the club gave a forum to such singers as Jonathan Edwards, Maria Muldaur, Mimi Farina and a youngster from Minnesota named Dylan. Tim Hardin, who later died of a heroin overdose, was among Siggins’ closest friends and an early 47 alumnus.

‘Amazingly Versatile’ “Obviously,” Rush said from his farm in Hillsboro, N.H., “Bob is a very engaging fellow. But he was a studious type even in those days. Bob always set his sights high, it seemed, and always on medicine. He was and is one hell of a fine musician. He could have been a pro, if he had chosen to.

“The man is amazingly versatile. He used to be mainly a banjo player, but has now shifted to pedal steel (guitar), a diabolically difficult thing to play. I wouldn’t attempt to master it. He, however, is great at it.”

Siggins is bright, with gifted hands, and remains, Rush said, a prominent name in the history of the Cambridge folk scene, which in those days rivaled Berkeley and Greenwich Village as the center of a new revolution. Siggins and dozens of others made beautiful music in the smoky environs of the club, which seated 83 people in the shadow of Harvard Square. The best music, Rush said, often came not at the club but in after-hours jam sessions in singers’ homes. More often than not, the setting was the student apartment of Siggins and his wife at the time, Betsy.

At the reunion, which drew sell-out crowds three nights in a row (Dec. 27-29) to Boston’s Symphony Hall, Siggins shared a spotlight once again with Rush, Baez, Edwards, Muldaur, Farina and a flock of newcomers. Rush and Siggins--and the Boston Globe, which raved about everyone’s performance, including the doctor’s--were loaded with superlatives. (Rush said a live album is forthcoming.)

“Jonathan Edwards has gotten so much better, I couldn’t believe how good he was,” Siggins said. “He wrote a song, some of the most moving stuff I’ve heard, about being divorced and seeing his daughter again for the first time in ages. It really hit home. (Siggins was joined at the reunion by his ex-wife and their daughter.)

“I was really impressed with Tom Rush. Tom’s an old friend, and I used to like to hear him sing, but frankly he never blew me away. He and his band now are great--really, really good.

“Another group--I want to call ‘em Baskin and Robbins--was (David) Buskin and (Robin) Batteau. They were great! Those guys are clever; songwriters and musicians extraordinaire. They tour with Tom, who’s undergoing this incredible renaissance. I think he’s finally found his audience, which tends to be a bit older. Like more around my age.”

Nationwide Turnabout Siggins sees folk music as caught in the midst of a nationwide turnabout, based more on new material fueled by new artists and less on sentimental nostalgia. Voices such as Buskin’s and Batteau’s meld nicely, it seems, with those of Rush, Baez and even Siggins, who’s playing now whenever and wherever he can. (Saturday night, he’s one of several holding court at McCabe’s, a folk club in Santa Monica.) He occasionally plays the Belly-Up Tavern in Solana Beach and hopes to tour soon with old friend Jeff Muldaur.

Many of Siggins’ friends from Club 47 days have gone on to hold jobs linked in common by diversity. In one photograph of the Charles River Valley Boys, he’s posed (on the banks of the Charles River) with John Cooke, son of Alistair Cooke of “Masterpiece Theater” fame and a writer whose first novel, “The Snowblind Moon,” is scheduled for February publication; Joe Val, a typewriter repairman and head of a top New England bluegrass band, and Everett Allen Lilly, a refugee from the hills of Appalachia, who now heads one of the largest welfare programs in Massachusetts. Cooke and Muldaur, along with ex-wife Maria, will join Siggins in Saturday night’s celebration at McCabe’s. The old days--the memories and the photographs--also include Bob Dylan, who credits his and Siggins’ mutual friend, Eric Von Schmidt, with being a major influence.

These days, Siggins, like his friends, often finds himself vacillating between his two different realms. The show biz parallels are, however, numerous.

The difficulty in music is pleasing the crowd. (No two are ever the same, he said.) In medicine, it’s writing grant proposals with rigid deadlines and for critics who are often competitors. Siggins spends much of his time jetting from town to town, giving lectures to fellow scientists, carting slides that depict the secrets of the mind.

Siggins loves his work and can’t say he would ever leave it for the stage. Like any scientist, he dreams of cures, maybe for alcoholism, a passion of his and the target of years of study.

Thinking back to a friend whose life is a tragic motivator, Siggins said, “He’s my favorite guitar player in the whole world, but he’s a cripple. He can climb onstage but has to get loaded first. I don’t think he’s reached his potential by any means. He’s certainly not in the public eye now, and it’s mainly because of alcoholism. He could have played in anybody’s band. He could have had his own band and has. But alcohol did him in. It’s sad.”

The good side is that dozens of Siggins’ friends--many who showed up in Boston for the 47’s reunion--are teetotalers, having renounced booze completely. Many have joined Alcoholics Anonymous, which Siggins supports wholeheartedly, albeit without first-hand knowledge. He is hardly a problem drinker; he is, in fact, a connoisseur of fine wines. (Wine is one of two things he savors most about California, the other being surf.)

“The nice thing about the reunion,” he said with a touch of enthusiasm, “was that the parties (held after hours in the Copley Plaza Hotel) tended to be very dry--in terms of alcohol. There was hardly any marijuana, which was really a change from the old days. In the population as a whole, there is that maturing out (marked by lower-alcohol beers and a new consciousness of drunk driving ), which I think is wonderful.”

Siggins the scientist concedes, however, the occasional benefits of drugs, even booze. He’s fascinated by the ways in which marijuana and heroin lessen the suffering of chemotherapy patients and thinks the United States’ system--in contrast to Britain’s--is blindly intolerant of such drugs, if only for the stigma they provoke. The stigma, based solely on the street, serves, he said, to mar the benefits of such opiates that can and do relieve pain.

Siggins has found nothing, though, that takes away pain--or the stress of research--like music. In the end it was music that brought dozens of old friends together in common voice and sweet harmony, and bridged the gulf between 1959 and 1984 quicker than anything could. He would reunite all over again, Siggins said, and welcome the chance.