The Carpenter Ants with John Ellison. They play a free show in Silver Bay tonight, a house concert Saturday and then play the West Theatre Thursday, Sept. 5.

Michael Lipton has led an amazing life – founded a trash collecting business in West Virginia in the early 1970s (“Our motto was, cleanliness is next to godliness); alternative newspaper publisher and editor (“Fifteen miserable years of not getting paid.”); founder of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame (“Another stupid idea that I'm enslaved to, that I can't seem to get loose from.”); playing guitar in the house band for NPR’s Mountain Stage for four decades (“I was completely not qualified to do this.”); and guitarist for The Carpenter Arts, a band that has been wowing audiences for 40 years (“We realized we've been playing together for more than half our lives, which is crazy, you know, especially when you're 70.”).  

While The Carpenter Arts call West Virginia home, they have a strong Minnesota connection that brings them each year for a late-summer concert in northern Minnesota (happening this evening, Aug. 30, in Silver Bay, followed by a Silver Bay house concert on Saturday).  

That connection began, Lipton said, with original Mountain Stage host Larry Groce, who brought Mountain Stage on the road to Grand Marais, Minn. The Minnesota connection grew even stronger when Kathy Mattea took over as Mountain Stage host in 2021. Her husband, Jon Vesner, is a Minnesota native (he can be seen at the West Theatre on Sept. 25, supporting folk legend Tom Paxton as a member of the due The Don Juans).  

This year’s Minnesota visit by The Carpenter Ants includes a Thursday, Sept. 5, show at the West Theatre in Duluth, and traveling with them is singer/songwriter John Ellison, a fellow West Virginian who in 1967 wrote the song “Some Kind of Wonderful” for his Rochester, N.Y.-based band Soul Brothers Six.  

“To date, my song has been covered by 75 artists,” Ellison said in a recent telephone interview. “It's one of the most recorded songs in music history, and I was just recently honored on June 25 by BMI. I received two lifetime achievement awards for writing and recording one of the most recorded songs in music history. It's been on the radio over 6 million times.”  

So, it has to be asked, does he have a favorite version?  

“A favorite out of all, other than Soul Brother Six, I would say was by Huey Lewis and The News,” Ellison said. “And the worst version is by a group called Viva (a German hard rock band from the early 1980s). If you go on YouTube and type in Viva, ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’ you will hear the worst recording of ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’ that's ever been recorded. And, oh, my God, it is horrible.”  

Lipton first met Ellison when Ellison called Lipton as director of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.   “I get a call from John saying, ‘Hey, you know, my name is John Ellison. I wrote the song ‘Some Kind of Wonderful.’ When are you gonna induct me?’“ Lipton said. “Initially I was thinking, this guy’s a one-trick pony with this ‘Some Kind of Wonderful Thing’.”

But then Lipton got to see Ellison in action.  

“He is far, far, far from a one-trick pony,” Lipton said. “His performances are incredible. He’s an incredible singer, incredible songwriter. He can sit down and write a song in five minutes, and his stuff is just amazing. As a human being, he’s an amazing guy in every way. We ended up inducting him in the hall of fame in 2015 and we started doing shows with him.”  

“I love Minnesota,” Ellison said about his visits with The Carpenter Ants.   In addition to music, Ellison is also a cook with his own line of spices.  

“I love cooking,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I cook for my wife. She does not cook at all. I do all the cooking. It’s just that's another part of my life that I really enjoy doing, cooking and creating foods.”   The idea for his own spice line came about because Ellison likes to eat healthy.  

“I like to eat food that has some oomph to it, you know, nice flavor,” he said. “I found that most of the seasonings in stores, they're overloaded with salt and a lot of other things that's not natural. So I decided one day, I was going to start making my own spice. I started buying different herbs and mixing them all together, and I came up with this flavor profile. And I noticed that whenever I cooked with it, everybody was always raving about how great my food tasted.”  

But it was a friend who owns a restaurant that turned Ellison’s homemade spice into a business venture.   “About 15 years ago I was invited to the grand opening of a restaurant by a friend of mine in Canada. She was giving away chicken wings,” Ellison said. “She came over to me and asked how I liked the wings. So I smiled and said, ‘Well, they're good, but they're not as good as mine.’” When he explained that he used his own special seasoning, she asked him to come by the next day with his seasoning to create some wings.  

“She let her some of her customers taste them, and they told her that she had the best wings in town,” he said.   His friend asked if she could have Ellison’s recipe, but he refused, upon which she asked if he would season up some wings for her, to which he readily agreed.  

“A few days later, I get this phone call, and she said, the wings are in. I didn't know how many wings she had ordered, so I mixed up a couple of gallon pails of my spice and brought them to the restaurant,” he said. “When I walked into her walk-in refrigerator, she had boxes of wings stacked all the way to the ceiling. It took me three days to season all these wings, not cook them, just prep them. She paid me $5,800, so I came back with the check and told my wife, I’m gonna, start marketing my spice.”  

Despite his wife not much liking the idea, Ellison formed a company called Some Kind of Wonderful Foods.   Today Some Kind of Wonderful Gourmet Seasoning is in 634 stores. The motto: “If foods could talk, ours would sing.”  

“And I'm just creating a Some Kind of Wonderful potato chip,” he said.  

Also playing at the Sept. 5 West Theatre show, my friend and mazing musician pat mAcdonald. It should be a very spicy evening.