From ‘Ron’s Point of View’ dreams come true

From his Willow Hatcher Pass log cabin home, Ron Wise can look out over two mountain ranges and see not only a raging Willow Creek and towering Mount McKinley, but also a dream realized.

Wise, who at 61 looks like a man half his age, is living out a boyhood dream every day. He recently cut his first CD, a Chet Atkins-style guitar instrumental, which contains original songs he wrote in his log cabin home he built himself in the mountains „ another boyhood dream he realized.”

I have had this dream since I was a little kid, but I never realized it would be this great,” Wise said Thursday morning. “It’s better than I ever could have expected.”

While “Ron’s Point of View” is his first solo CD, it is hardly his first venture into music. Wise has a long and distinguished career as a guitar player, dating back to when he was a kid.”

My dad played, not as a professional, and I was always interested in it. My sister and I would run around the house with Lincoln logs when he’d play,” Wise said. “I was never allowed to touch it, though. He kept it in a case behind the couch, and when he’d leave, I’d open it a crack and strum my fingers across the strings.”

From those first strums came a finger-pluckin’ fascination that has been a part of Wise’s life ever since. When he was 16, Wise met another young man, Frank Walden, who played the guitar just like Atkins, Wise’s hero, and they immediately formed a bond. A short time later, however, Walden moved to Nashville and Wise was left “pulling the arm across my Chet Atkins records trying to figure out how Chet was doing it.”

A while later, Wise met Les Sneed, which proved to be a turning point in Wise’s musical career. Wise joined the Sneed Family, traveling and playing from January 1961 to December 1963, including stops at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas and the rest of the Nevada circuit.” Everything kind of evolved. I was meeting the right people at the right time,” Wise said. “I remember riding down to the Nugget in a 1962 White Cadillac with Roy Clark.” In the summer of 1961, the Sneed Family came to Alaska, and Wise fell in love with the area after his first visit. His dream had always been to build a cabin up in the mountains, and in December of 1963, he left the Sneed Family to pursue it.

For the next several years, Wise went back and forth between Oregon, Montana and Alaska. He still played his guitar, and music was still in his blood. In 1984, Sneed called him and asked if he wanted to head back on the road.

“I said, ‘you bet,’” Wise said.

They played Nashville and the Opryland Hotel another one of Wise’s dreams, but after that, it was time for Wise to get down to business in Alaska and build his log cabin home he had thought about all those years. The evolution of his cabin has gone from one room to a three-story log home with a nice deck, a huge garage and some of the best views you’ll ever see in your life. Mountains surround him, and the only noise he hears is of Willow Creek, far down in the ravine beside his home.” It’s pretty inspirational,” he said.

Another inspiration for Wise is Buster B. Jones. At the 2001 Nokie Edwards Music Festival in Oregon, Wise had a chance to meet Jones, one of the best-known country-style guitar players around. They struck up an immediate friendship. Last April, Jones asked Wise and Walden if they would like to come to Philadelphia with him and be involved with a recording Jones was making. They jumped at the opportunity. On Jones’ “Just Us” CD, Wise was listed as a musical and technical adviser.

During that project, the television station VH1 was recording video for a piece about the project. Wise appears throughout the video, which has yet to air. As their friendship grew, so did Jones’ influence on Wise and his music. Jones introduced new styles to Wise, including playing with more than one capo on the neck of the guitar. Jones also showed him what a guitar synthesizer could do. The guitar Wise plays now was previously Jones’ guitar, complete with Jones’ signature on it. All of that influence eventually got Wise thinking about a recording of his own.”

Buster told me that he planted the seed, now I needed to see what I could do with it,’” Wise said. “I thought, ‘Man, I should do a CD.’”

He wrote music all last winter and went down to Cut Bank, Mont., to record with Les Sneed in Sneeds’ studio there.

Jones wrote one song for the album and played on two others.

“Here’s my guitar hero, who is one of my best friends, playing on my CD,” Wise said. “My knees were knocking the whole time. I was so inspired by him.”

Three of the songs were written for three of the brightest stars in Wise’s life — his granddaughters. While dedicating the CD to his three sons „ Ron, Nathan and Bryan „ he wrote three songs for his granddaughters — Elena Rose, Carriahanna Lyn and Breanna Marie.

For now, Wise is content as a retired gold miner, getting to play music, enjoy his life up in the mountains and squeezing a few rounds of golf now and then. In the future, though, he wants to record a gospel CD as well as a Christmas album. As his past shows, most of his dreams are realized, giving credence to the two future projects.

“This is more or less a hobby for me. I’m not trying to get rich,” Wise said.