“Foxhunting isn’t about the catch, really. It’s about the chase. From the stoic huntsman atop his bay mount in subtle rapport with his hounds, horn in one hand, reins clutched in the other, to the moment the hounds find their line and the huntsman disappears into the wood as the field gallops behind in pursuit.”
— Greg ‘Chip’ Anderson
Chip Anderson, most commonly known as professional Huntsman for the Tryon Hounds, knows the aesthetic of the art of hunting, and not just foxhunting.
Anderson, whose passion for the chase has taken him on a worldwide exploration from Nicaragua to Ireland, explains it plainly:
“I always tell everybody I’ve never gone anywhere as a tourist because as long as I’m carrying a fishing rod or a rifle, I’m not a tourist. Then I’m a hunter or a fisherman and I’m searching the backwaters or the backwoods of the jungles or the plains – I’m searching for something else. They say, well, what are you searching for? Are you searching for that elephant or that buffalo or that salmon? And I say no. You have to understand, I’m an adventurer of the heart. I’m searching for something deep inside myself.”
Anderson has made life a great pursuit, taking full advantage of the unpredictable nature of it. He’s been a punk rock star in New York City, hanging at the CBGB club with the Ramones, a published writer whose adventure article graced the cover of this month’s “Sporting Classics,” a seasoned hunter of beast and fowl and even a salesman.
“I always said that I’m going to write a book, my book, which is always in the works because I have tons of material, and it’s going to be called ‘How the Hell Did I Get Here?,’” he says seriously. “I’ve had this bizarre life. If you would have asked me as a kid if I was going to be a professional huntsman, I didn’t even know what that was.”
Anderson grew up as a “water rat on the salt marshes” on the Atlantic tidewaters of Connecticut, born the only boy in a family of five girls. His grandfather, the only real male role model in his childhood, was the first huntsman he knew and also his first mentor.
“When I was a little kid, I remember beagles being all around,” Anderson recalls. “Of course, I was too young to go hunting, but my granddad and his brothers would come back and they’d have all of their guns and their beagles and big piles of rabbits. I’d be in the backyard cleaning all of the rabbits.”
After a juvenile ambition to become a “fur mogul” as a muskrat trapper in his early teens, Anderson was given a gift – his first insight into the relationship of the hunter and the hunted. He was caught catching snakes and turtles in the sanctuary by one of the assistant directors at the Audubon Society.
“Instead of busting me and turning me in, he made me into a junior ranger,” Anderson recalls. “He wanted to take me duck hunting, which kind of surprised me, because even though he’s a big bird guy, he’s also a bird hunter.” The experience allowed the young naturalist to see the connection between the two. “Love for the environment and the outdoors didn’t have to not include being a hunter. We’re all animals and we’re all part of the environment and one species preys on the other,” Anderson reflects. “It all fit into place for me.”
But in the late 70s, Ander-son’s established passion for hunting soon took backstage to a calling of another kind. “I left Housatonic college in Connecticut to become a rock star,” says Anderson. “The company that represented my first band called me and said I was going to be a millionaire in six months.”
The first band was called Epitome and included the 19-year-old Anderson on bass, whose stage persona was named Chipper, or Chip for short. They were underground, leather-clad rockers who drew inspiration (and makeup tips) from the likes of glam rockers David Bowie and T-Rex’s Marc Bolan, and were regulars at New York City clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. “Max’s Kansas City was my home,” says Chip. “In that film Almost Famous when they show up in New York outside Max‘s Kansas City there’s that sign that everybody remembers – ‘Steak, Lobsters, and Chick Peas.’ The band even met Andy Warhol at the Mud Club one night. They were upstairs watching old Hercules movies, of all things.”
Keeping company with the locals, including the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and rock critics Legs McNeil and Lester Bangs, the young punk band helped to develop the three-chord, hard-core sound and style of the impending commercial Punk Movement.
“We were more like Roxy music meets David Bowie or something. We had sort of this glam trash sound, which fit us right in,” says Chip. “Of course we were wildly hated. The clubs hated us and people hated us. We had police protection to get offstage sometimes and we weren’t a rabid punk group at all! We were nothing like The (Sex) Pistols or anything….”
But this revolt and rebellion would prove to be an essential prerequisite for legendary punk acts. As Chip recalls, “When I first saw the Ramones, they played the first song and everybody went nuts, second song and people were like ‘Oh that’s pretty good,’ third song and people were throwing stuff! You could not hear for two days after seeing the Ramones. I thought, these guys got something, man, just because people hate ‘em! Sort of like the New York Dolls – everybody hated them but now they’re legendary.”
Thirty years later and Epi-tome albums are being reissued by Incas Records, who first signed the fledgling punk act back in 1977. At a reunion concert in New Haven, Conn., last summer, Chip was surprised to meet young fans who weren’t even born when Epitome was haunting underground dives in the punk capitol of NYC.
“We’re considered one of the forefathers of the original punk movement. We dragged all of these other bands out of the garage,” says Chip. “Back then we were just who we were, and now we’re ‘retro.’ Some of us made it really big and some of us never did. It was just fun.”
After some international tours, a stint in another band called TV Neats, and working on CBS’s 1982 movie “Makers of the Platinum Disc,” Chip left the music scene, reserving it only for personal pleasure and now, the occasional gig at the local pub with his Tryon band Nite Shift.
So what happened?
“What happens to all rock n’ roll bands?” Chip says. “It’s fun knowing that at one time in my life, all the effort, sweat, and work we put into it paid off in the sense that we did inspire some people. And like Lester Bangs said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to meet them all again on the way to the middle.’”
The glam years of leather, makeup, and three-chord hard hitters had been shelved, but the chase continued. In 1985, Chip started up his own travel adventure business called Wild Wing Adventures. The company took him to England, and also led him to foxhunting.
“I’d never even really ridden a horse except for summer camp. I always say that in the greatest stories in the world, there’s always a girl,” says Chip. “I met a girl who I was trying to impress. She took me out foxhunting and I had to learn how to ride if I was going to impress her, right? That’s how I became interested in that.”
After five years in the hunting travel business, Chip decided to take up foxhunting professionally. “I sold the farm in Connecticut and took it up. I got a job in the ‘Chronicle of the Horse’ magazine and started whipping-in and learning my way through the country,” Chip recalls.
He kept a few gigs going in New York with various bands during this time, and he began to realize the bizarre similarities between his nighttime rocker persona and the huntsman he turned into by day.
“I started analyzing a little bit – here I am, a Sagittarius who needs to be on stage all the time because it’s just part of my nature,” Chip says. “I love people, I love celebration, and foxhunt-ing is not that far removed from being a rock star, if you think about it. Rock star, fox hunter: I get to wear funny clothes in public, I can wear eccentric things and nobody cares, and I get to be the center of attention.”
Anderson’s dual personas were melding within reason, but not without a few humorous clashes. “I would get home and change out of my rock ‘n’ roll clothes and I would put on my riding clothes, like boots and spurs and everything,” he explains. “I remember laying in bed, completely stiff, trying not to wrinkle my hunting coat, and thinking, ‘Oh, I have one hour to close my eyes before I have to jump up and get to the barn and get my horse.’ A couple of times I would forget to take my makeup off, and I’d get up to hunt with people who were completely different from the world I was just in, and I thought, this is the ultimate dichotomy or paradox. They’d look at me and say, Do you have makeup on? And I’d say, Oh, I forgot to take my makeup off. They must have thought I was living the life of a drag queen in my other life.”
Chip came to Tryon in 1993, and has led the Tryon Hounds as Huntsman ever since. Yet the hunt continues far past prime Polk County hunting spots like Jackson Grove and Thanksgiving Hill.
“These people here at Tryon Hounds have been so great allowing me to travel all over the world. This past year alone, I started off in Costa Rica, then I went up to the San Juan in the jungle,” says Chip of his hunting endeavors. “I rented a little boat with this guy Ramón and went all the way through the rain forest on the San Juan. We ended up at the mouth of the Lake Nicaragua. It’s one of the few places in the world where there are fresh water sharks. I got back and went to Honduras and went fishing.”
And just for old times sake, he “just booked a big castle in Ireland and took a group of 30 people there about a month ago for foxhunting and stag hunting – like Keith Richards partying in his English countryside manor.” Chip sums it up, simply: “I’ve been around this year pretty good.”
His life story reads like some off-kilter fusion of a Heming-way adventure and Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and some of his insights have even made it into print, in his own words. “I’ve written for a lot of magazines and I won the 2002 Writer of the Year Award for the American Horse Publications for a story about one of the hunting dogs,” Chip says, but that “‘Sporting Classics’ was a Holy Grail.”
“Sporting Classics” magazine, whose pitch line reads “America’s finest hunting and fishing magazine,” had been the object of his literary goals since he was a youngster. This month, Chip’s first story for the magazine, about hunting the bull elephant from a philosophical viewpoint, is on the cover.
“The magazine reprints Hemingway and other great adventure writers, like Archibald Rutledge. For years I’ve always wanted to be in it and of course, Hemingway being one of my heroes I thought, Oh my God, what if they put my story right next to a reprint of a Hemingway story?”
The aesthetic of the hunt is universal – it applies to the arts of music and hunting, and to life, essentially. “There’s this feeling, you’re flushed. The most beautiful moment is when there are green veils and velvet grass and forests around me, and there’s this intoxicating music rising from the hounds and then to see this grand rush when all the hounds are so tight you could throw a blanket over them. It’s that brief beautiful moment when things come together and it’s the same thing with playing music,” says Chip. “It’s that ‘hum.’”
It would seem that Chip’s story would be near its conclusive chapters – well past the climax, at least, and resolving to the stability of that final chapter that leaves the reader satisfied that the protagonist is satisfied, too.
For Chip, however, the metaphorical hunt continues. “It’s part of that whole thing about searching the world for something that you’re always searching for, looking for something inside of yourself,” he claims. “And maybe I search outside, but the real adventure is inside. When you get the quality of experiences that you‘re looking for, you only want more. I could live six lifetimes and never be fulfilled.”
Chip says his epitaph will read “Who has lived better?” And he’s still out to prove it. Besides, it’s not really about the catch. It’s about the chase.
— Greg ‘Chip’ Anderson
Chip Anderson, most commonly known as professional Huntsman for the Tryon Hounds, knows the aesthetic of the art of hunting, and not just foxhunting.
Anderson, whose passion for the chase has taken him on a worldwide exploration from Nicaragua to Ireland, explains it plainly:
“I always tell everybody I’ve never gone anywhere as a tourist because as long as I’m carrying a fishing rod or a rifle, I’m not a tourist. Then I’m a hunter or a fisherman and I’m searching the backwaters or the backwoods of the jungles or the plains – I’m searching for something else. They say, well, what are you searching for? Are you searching for that elephant or that buffalo or that salmon? And I say no. You have to understand, I’m an adventurer of the heart. I’m searching for something deep inside myself.”
Anderson has made life a great pursuit, taking full advantage of the unpredictable nature of it. He’s been a punk rock star in New York City, hanging at the CBGB club with the Ramones, a published writer whose adventure article graced the cover of this month’s “Sporting Classics,” a seasoned hunter of beast and fowl and even a salesman.
“I always said that I’m going to write a book, my book, which is always in the works because I have tons of material, and it’s going to be called ‘How the Hell Did I Get Here?,’” he says seriously. “I’ve had this bizarre life. If you would have asked me as a kid if I was going to be a professional huntsman, I didn’t even know what that was.”
Anderson grew up as a “water rat on the salt marshes” on the Atlantic tidewaters of Connecticut, born the only boy in a family of five girls. His grandfather, the only real male role model in his childhood, was the first huntsman he knew and also his first mentor.
“When I was a little kid, I remember beagles being all around,” Anderson recalls. “Of course, I was too young to go hunting, but my granddad and his brothers would come back and they’d have all of their guns and their beagles and big piles of rabbits. I’d be in the backyard cleaning all of the rabbits.”
After a juvenile ambition to become a “fur mogul” as a muskrat trapper in his early teens, Anderson was given a gift – his first insight into the relationship of the hunter and the hunted. He was caught catching snakes and turtles in the sanctuary by one of the assistant directors at the Audubon Society.
“Instead of busting me and turning me in, he made me into a junior ranger,” Anderson recalls. “He wanted to take me duck hunting, which kind of surprised me, because even though he’s a big bird guy, he’s also a bird hunter.” The experience allowed the young naturalist to see the connection between the two. “Love for the environment and the outdoors didn’t have to not include being a hunter. We’re all animals and we’re all part of the environment and one species preys on the other,” Anderson reflects. “It all fit into place for me.”
But in the late 70s, Ander-son’s established passion for hunting soon took backstage to a calling of another kind. “I left Housatonic college in Connecticut to become a rock star,” says Anderson. “The company that represented my first band called me and said I was going to be a millionaire in six months.”
The first band was called Epitome and included the 19-year-old Anderson on bass, whose stage persona was named Chipper, or Chip for short. They were underground, leather-clad rockers who drew inspiration (and makeup tips) from the likes of glam rockers David Bowie and T-Rex’s Marc Bolan, and were regulars at New York City clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. “Max’s Kansas City was my home,” says Chip. “In that film Almost Famous when they show up in New York outside Max‘s Kansas City there’s that sign that everybody remembers – ‘Steak, Lobsters, and Chick Peas.’ The band even met Andy Warhol at the Mud Club one night. They were upstairs watching old Hercules movies, of all things.”
Keeping company with the locals, including the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and rock critics Legs McNeil and Lester Bangs, the young punk band helped to develop the three-chord, hard-core sound and style of the impending commercial Punk Movement.
“We were more like Roxy music meets David Bowie or something. We had sort of this glam trash sound, which fit us right in,” says Chip. “Of course we were wildly hated. The clubs hated us and people hated us. We had police protection to get offstage sometimes and we weren’t a rabid punk group at all! We were nothing like The (Sex) Pistols or anything….”
But this revolt and rebellion would prove to be an essential prerequisite for legendary punk acts. As Chip recalls, “When I first saw the Ramones, they played the first song and everybody went nuts, second song and people were like ‘Oh that’s pretty good,’ third song and people were throwing stuff! You could not hear for two days after seeing the Ramones. I thought, these guys got something, man, just because people hate ‘em! Sort of like the New York Dolls – everybody hated them but now they’re legendary.”
Thirty years later and Epi-tome albums are being reissued by Incas Records, who first signed the fledgling punk act back in 1977. At a reunion concert in New Haven, Conn., last summer, Chip was surprised to meet young fans who weren’t even born when Epitome was haunting underground dives in the punk capitol of NYC.
“We’re considered one of the forefathers of the original punk movement. We dragged all of these other bands out of the garage,” says Chip. “Back then we were just who we were, and now we’re ‘retro.’ Some of us made it really big and some of us never did. It was just fun.”
After some international tours, a stint in another band called TV Neats, and working on CBS’s 1982 movie “Makers of the Platinum Disc,” Chip left the music scene, reserving it only for personal pleasure and now, the occasional gig at the local pub with his Tryon band Nite Shift.
So what happened?
“What happens to all rock n’ roll bands?” Chip says. “It’s fun knowing that at one time in my life, all the effort, sweat, and work we put into it paid off in the sense that we did inspire some people. And like Lester Bangs said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to meet them all again on the way to the middle.’”
The glam years of leather, makeup, and three-chord hard hitters had been shelved, but the chase continued. In 1985, Chip started up his own travel adventure business called Wild Wing Adventures. The company took him to England, and also led him to foxhunting.
“I’d never even really ridden a horse except for summer camp. I always say that in the greatest stories in the world, there’s always a girl,” says Chip. “I met a girl who I was trying to impress. She took me out foxhunting and I had to learn how to ride if I was going to impress her, right? That’s how I became interested in that.”
After five years in the hunting travel business, Chip decided to take up foxhunting professionally. “I sold the farm in Connecticut and took it up. I got a job in the ‘Chronicle of the Horse’ magazine and started whipping-in and learning my way through the country,” Chip recalls.
He kept a few gigs going in New York with various bands during this time, and he began to realize the bizarre similarities between his nighttime rocker persona and the huntsman he turned into by day.
“I started analyzing a little bit – here I am, a Sagittarius who needs to be on stage all the time because it’s just part of my nature,” Chip says. “I love people, I love celebration, and foxhunt-ing is not that far removed from being a rock star, if you think about it. Rock star, fox hunter: I get to wear funny clothes in public, I can wear eccentric things and nobody cares, and I get to be the center of attention.”
Anderson’s dual personas were melding within reason, but not without a few humorous clashes. “I would get home and change out of my rock ‘n’ roll clothes and I would put on my riding clothes, like boots and spurs and everything,” he explains. “I remember laying in bed, completely stiff, trying not to wrinkle my hunting coat, and thinking, ‘Oh, I have one hour to close my eyes before I have to jump up and get to the barn and get my horse.’ A couple of times I would forget to take my makeup off, and I’d get up to hunt with people who were completely different from the world I was just in, and I thought, this is the ultimate dichotomy or paradox. They’d look at me and say, Do you have makeup on? And I’d say, Oh, I forgot to take my makeup off. They must have thought I was living the life of a drag queen in my other life.”
Chip came to Tryon in 1993, and has led the Tryon Hounds as Huntsman ever since. Yet the hunt continues far past prime Polk County hunting spots like Jackson Grove and Thanksgiving Hill.
“These people here at Tryon Hounds have been so great allowing me to travel all over the world. This past year alone, I started off in Costa Rica, then I went up to the San Juan in the jungle,” says Chip of his hunting endeavors. “I rented a little boat with this guy Ramón and went all the way through the rain forest on the San Juan. We ended up at the mouth of the Lake Nicaragua. It’s one of the few places in the world where there are fresh water sharks. I got back and went to Honduras and went fishing.”
And just for old times sake, he “just booked a big castle in Ireland and took a group of 30 people there about a month ago for foxhunting and stag hunting – like Keith Richards partying in his English countryside manor.” Chip sums it up, simply: “I’ve been around this year pretty good.”
His life story reads like some off-kilter fusion of a Heming-way adventure and Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and some of his insights have even made it into print, in his own words. “I’ve written for a lot of magazines and I won the 2002 Writer of the Year Award for the American Horse Publications for a story about one of the hunting dogs,” Chip says, but that “‘Sporting Classics’ was a Holy Grail.”
“Sporting Classics” magazine, whose pitch line reads “America’s finest hunting and fishing magazine,” had been the object of his literary goals since he was a youngster. This month, Chip’s first story for the magazine, about hunting the bull elephant from a philosophical viewpoint, is on the cover.
“The magazine reprints Hemingway and other great adventure writers, like Archibald Rutledge. For years I’ve always wanted to be in it and of course, Hemingway being one of my heroes I thought, Oh my God, what if they put my story right next to a reprint of a Hemingway story?”
The aesthetic of the hunt is universal – it applies to the arts of music and hunting, and to life, essentially. “There’s this feeling, you’re flushed. The most beautiful moment is when there are green veils and velvet grass and forests around me, and there’s this intoxicating music rising from the hounds and then to see this grand rush when all the hounds are so tight you could throw a blanket over them. It’s that brief beautiful moment when things come together and it’s the same thing with playing music,” says Chip. “It’s that ‘hum.’”
It would seem that Chip’s story would be near its conclusive chapters – well past the climax, at least, and resolving to the stability of that final chapter that leaves the reader satisfied that the protagonist is satisfied, too.
For Chip, however, the metaphorical hunt continues. “It’s part of that whole thing about searching the world for something that you’re always searching for, looking for something inside of yourself,” he claims. “And maybe I search outside, but the real adventure is inside. When you get the quality of experiences that you‘re looking for, you only want more. I could live six lifetimes and never be fulfilled.”
Chip says his epitaph will read “Who has lived better?” And he’s still out to prove it. Besides, it’s not really about the catch. It’s about the chase.