Kicking up a Tempest in folk music
By TOM CONWAY
Tribune Correspondent

When the Celtic rock band Tempest formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1988, not many bands were 
combining traditional folk elements with rock ’n’ roll.

“I am not saying we were groundbreaking, per se,” Tempest founding member and lead singer/electric 
mandolinist Lief Sorbye says. “I am just saying the niche was so small that you had to really educate 
people to bring awareness towards what you were doing.”

Twenty years later, the band’s fusion of folk, Irish reels, Scottish ballads and other world music 
elements with rock ’n’ roll has proven popular enough to afford Tempest the opportunity to tour the 
world, from Sorbye’s homeland of Norway to — on Sunday — The Acorn Theater, for a yearlong celebration 
of the group’s anniversary.

“Things have changed over the last 20 years,” he says. “There has been so much cultural exchange. 
The world has changed tremendously over that time, especially when it comes to understanding other 
cultures. Now, the whole idea of world music or anything ethnic fused with modern rock ’n’ roll has 
been charted out and done a lot.”

Growing up, Sorbye made a living playing on street corners throughout Europe.

“You are playing pass-the-hat, playing for tips,” he says. “In the ’70s, there was a real flourishing 
rtist scene in the cities of Europe. It was very common that you could get a permit to go out to 
perform in public on the street corners and actually make a living at it. It was quite exciting. 
If you are a teenager, it beats going to school. It beats having a 9-to-5, I can tell you that. As a 
result of that, I never really got a straight job.”

Suffering from a case of wanderlust, Sorbye moved to America in 1978 “to see what it looks like to 
support myself as a busker in the U.S.”

He found street performing in the States was very different from Europe and instead had to join an 
acoustic folk music band to make a living. That didn’t last long because Sorbye says he “got tired 
of people knitting in the front row” and he “wanted to infuse some of the folk music experience with 
rock ’n’ roll energy and turn up the volume and party hard.”

Sorbye says the folk music scene “is a subculture existing within the culture. It never really gets 
beyond that little niche market, but if you fuse it with rock ’n’ roll, you have the ability to take 
it other places. You can play everything from Celtic festivals, in our case, to the corn-dog crowd at 
the county fair. You can play the rock festivals, motorcycle events and the folk festivals.”

Tempest keeps “one foot in rock ’n’ roll, and one foot in folk music,” Sorbye says, because his roots 
are deep in the folk music tradition.

“What attracts me to folk music has always been that folk music tells a story,” he says. “I think a 
lot of mainstream pop music is shallow in that sense. There is not a lot to learn from a run-of-the-mill 
pop song, but a folk song might have a story that can survive a couple hundred of years because it 
reflects the human condition.”

Blending folk music with rock ’n’ roll is the result of “of overindulging myself in so much traditional 
folk music for the last 30 years, it comes out that way,” Sorbye says.

“Had they had electric guitar, bass and drums 200 years ago, you know they would have used them,” he 
says. “It totally makes sense. We are playing folk-style music. We just happen to be an electric band. 
We happen to rock with the best of them.”