The tightly-packed, and questionably sticky, dancefloor at Sancho’s Broken Arrow was a flurry of moving feet, as hippies scooted sideways with beers raised high towards the painted ceiling. We’d already stomped Monday down into bar dust, and now Tuesday was coming on strong, the clock creeping up to 1am. I thought about what the bouncer said as he took our dollar cover charge for this show, the last of three gigs The Henhouse Prowlers had played here this summer. “This is probably going to be the last time they play somewhere this small in Denver,” he said, as he waved his hand towards the cozy, steal-your-face-emblazoned cavern of Sancho’s.
With a Chicago music award and first place at the RockyGrass band competition under their belts, 2010 has certainly been good to The Prowlers. I had spoken to bassist John Goldfine before the show about the RockyGrass win. “Something like RockyGrass kind of gives a band instant credibility,” he said. “We’ve definitely gotten more booking inquiries and more press inquiries since winning. [But] we’re also doing a lot more, like we’ve increased our publicity, to try and make the most of it while we can.”
HHP at Sancho's
Awards and accolades certainly help on the rocky road that is a musician’s life, but those things will only carry you so far. It’s the work you put in that ultimately matters, and on this front, HHP are definitely punching the clock, both in the studio – where they are currently working on their third album, with Sally Van Meter producing – and the stage. At Sancho’s they came out hungry and ready to win over the room, even if this particular stage was simply speakers and monitors set up on the bar room floor, and the crowd was on the loud and spongy side. They drew the crowd in with a slow burning “California Cotton Fields” opener (from their 2007 self-title album), then took off with a raging “Bringing in the Georgia Mail,” eliciting excited whoops from the pool table hangers-on. It was this mix of can’t-argue-with covers and compelling originals that kept the crowd moving all night.
When it comes to their songwriting, HHP has a ear towards the classic in instrumentation, but holds a refreshingly modern lens to their lyrics. Take the dryly-delivered “Syracuse,” about a spoiled “mama’s boy” with a drug habit who’d rather be partying in his SUV than settling down with wife and baby in the suburbs. It’s a damning character study that’s rooted in the problems and privileges of the here-and-now, rather than nostalgia for an imagined simpler time. It’s a relief when a bluegrass band living in this day and age doesn’t try to pretend they are from rural Appalachia and it’s still the 1940s. Instead HHP’s songs travel into shadowy, wry territory that comes from a decidedly urban – and urbane – point of view.
This keeps their music true to their experience. As Goldfine explained, describing the bluegrass scene in Chicago, “It’s there, but it’s small. You gotta look for it if you want to find it. But it’s there. Everyone who plays bluegrass in Chicago knows everyone else. And as far as how [an urban environment] affects our songwriting, and song selection - we can sing all we want about living in the country, and a lot of bluegrass songs are about that, but that’s not the world we really know. Our original material is definitely a little edgier. We really like singing those dark songs.”
HHP at Sancho's
The songwriting and dark suits may spell serious business, but you come to an HHP show ready to move, not to sit down and clap all polite-like. There’s flesh and blood moving in those shadows, unafraid to show their rough edges to the light and let their limbs stretch. Things got sweaty and loose in the second set, especially during “Midnight Moonlight,” which was met with cheers from the crowd, and feedback from the speakers. HHP pushed on through the technical hiccups, and then let the jam out of the song breathe, fiddle player Ryan Hinshaw unraveling the outro with some ribbony notes, leaving the door open for Eric Lambert‘s leggy guitar to come casually strolling in, then Ben Wright‘s banjo to charge forward with gusto.
The four wove in and out around the single mic, the enthused dancers in the front encroaching ever-closer towards the monitors. At one point a fuzzy kid spun sideways in his enthusiasm, bumping the mic with his shoulder. It noticeably tottered, threatening to head floor-wards, but Hinshaw quickly nudged it back with a laugh. As the Prowlers played on, nudging the curfew, I had no doubt that the bouncer was right on. I also see great destinations in this band’s future. But no matter where they find themselves, one thing’s for sure – they are sure going to have a hell of a lot of fun on the trip.
The Henhouse Prowlers are on tour now, check the dates here.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Maybe it’s because I just moved from Austin to Denver, but I’ve had road songs on the brain lately. There’s certainly no lack of choice there, as songs about journeys fill the Americana canon. Lady Asphalt has been a consistent muse for songwriters; she provides excitement and freedom’s promise, danger and jittery glances back over the shoulder, and sometimes just exhaustion and longing for home. It’s no wonder that the Cohen brothers took a look at The Odyssey and traditional American music and put two-and-two together.
The road’s also a timeless, and yes, overused to the point of being cliched, metaphor for the internal journey. But it’s always worth revisiting. After all, this nation of immigrants is fed on a cultural diet of manifest destiny, pushing westward, starting over. But reality is usually less than gold paved streets, and real change is hard to come by. At the risk of sounding cliched myself, the ultimate trip is often less about geography and more about just figuring out ourselves in the whole durned human comedy.
So here are three songs that are about the road as a metaphor rather than literal place. They’re also all covers, musicians on fresh explorations of another artist’s work. Here’s hoping this finds you taking some trips of your own as we wind through these lazy dog days of summer.
Let’s kick off the series with John Hartford. Here he is at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1987, performing “Goin’ Down That Wrong Road Again.” This song was written by Alan Reynolds (who is best known for producing all of Garth Brooks albums, but don’t hold that against him) and made famous by Crystal Gayle. Featuring some tight guitar and foot work (that’s the scratchy, shuffling noises you can hear) by Hartford, it’s a classic tune about why you keep going back, even when you should know better.
Here’s Wimberley, Texas’ own Sarah Jarosz joining The Deadly Gentleman on stage for a bad ass cover of Monroe’s “Rocky Road Blues.” There’s even some rapping here courtesy of Greg Liszt, as the tune looks to brighter skies ahead beyond the heartbreak. This was shot at Rice Fest 2008 by Mike Abb, who also runs the SPPS youtube channel.
Finally, one of the most exciting bands to watch on the scene right now, Greensky Bluegrass, tears it up at Rothbury ’08 with a slamming cover of The Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” There’s a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/It’s alright, baby, it’s alright…
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
I’ve been careless I’ve been clumsy I’ve been cavalier I’ve been clutching at something Like there is something here And there’s one thing to be sure of Nothing is cast in stone And even stone must go down to the earth To find a home - “Heart Broken Open”
Life is a series of fluctuations, but we’re pretty darn good at fooling ourselves into thinking otherwise. Sometimes though, the universe likes to give us a not-so-friendly reminder, as the ground crumbles beneath our feet, the reins we confidently held suddenly snap, the rug that tied the room together is miterated upon. We’re left dazed and confused, searching for answers. But sometimes, as we sift through the rubble, we can find inspiration.
In May 2008, singer/songwriter Raina Rose had moved out of the house where she was living and broken up with her boyfriend. Needing to clear her head, she and her dog Hopi drove to the dunes of South Padre Island to camp out in her VW bus for a couple weeks. It was, as she described, “a bad idea”:
“Everything was kind of shifting then. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing. Then John [Elliott] and I embarked on this tour opening up for Green Mountain Grass that was a total disaster. It was when gas was five dollars a gallon. There weren’t enough shows to feed and pay everybody. It was one of those tours where, it’s beautiful sometimes, but there was just no money in it. We had two vehicles, we had a 15 passenger van, and John and I were in a VW Passat wagon. At one point we were so broke, that somebody had given us a jar of almond butter, a really big one, and we were so thrilled to have been given this gift. We lived on that almond butter for a week, three of us pretty much only ate almond butter sandwiches.”
It was during that summer and into the fall that Rose wrote the majority of the songs that would comprise her latest album, the simply stunning When May Came(Constant Clip Records). Pulled from these moments of flux, the songs reflect the hope and heartbreak that can be gleaned from moments where all we can do is pick up the pieces. It strikes listeners as a wrenchingly raw and honest piece of work, the product of someone unafraid to examine their own bruises (and those they’ve inflicted on others). It’s also fantastically artful, with vivid details and images that burrow in your brain. Simply put, Rose knows how to tell a story, whether it’s about her own life or the lives of the characters she’s picked up while staring out of car windows, notebook in lap and eyes turns to the passing scenery.
Rose certainly spends a lot of time staring out of car windows. A relentlessly hard worker, for whom the descriptor “road warrior” seems like a vast understatement, she’s spent the last five years more or less living on the road, playing gigs to everyone from festival crowds to noisy open mic night bar patrons. She’ll take the odd week or so off to catch her breath in her adopted hometown of Austin, Texas, but she’s soon packing up her guitar and hitting that highway again. It’s a way of life for the 28-year-old, with all it’s hardships and beauty, but she certainly isn’t quitting any time soon.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Portland, Oregon, Rose grew up in a family that loved language. Her grandmother was one of the first female newspaper editors in Los Angeles County. Her mother was a poet, her father a songwriter, and her sister, who holds a degree in creative writing, is a food writer working on a book about potlucks. “My Dad, when when we were growing up, pretended not to hear us if we spoke incorrectly, like if we used bad grammar. So words were really important in my house,” Rose describes.
This carries over in her approach to songwriting. Although many songwriters will write the melody first, Rose puts the words down before anything else.
“The words are the part for me that take the most time, and have the most of myself in them,” she explains. “I have just recently started realizing how important melody is because I am such a word freak … but the words for me are the key to my self-expression and the melody and the chords tend to be, not secondary in importance, but just secondary in the writing process. It’s funny because most of the songwriters I know do the exact opposite of that. They find a progression and then sit down and write words to it. I think it’s just whatever discipline means the most to you. For me, it’s the words, and I try to make every word count. I try not to use rhyme traps. Like ‘fire’ and ‘desire.’ Or ‘baby’ and ‘maybe.’ But sometimes that works. Sometimes all those words count and it works.”
Although she’s deliberate with her words, Rose isn’t possessive of them. A lot of songwriters get annoyed if you misinterpret their lyrics. Although she describes most of her work as personal (“therapeutic,” she says with a hearty laugh), she doesn’t worry about inevitable reinterpretations.
“I don’t think it’s misinterpretation,” she says. “I mean, songs that saved my life so many times in my personal experience with them have nothing to do with what the person writing it experienced. Folk music is all about human interaction and human connection. Any time anybody wants to misinterpret, or I guess reinterpret, or even rewrite, and put their own experience into a song – that’s beautiful. That is totally one of the reasons I do it.”
Like the best songwriters, Rose knows how to leave things open. She has an uncanny knack for making her stories your stories.
“I think music is one of those things which is a universal language,” she muses. “It’s one of the things that connects people so strongly. And I really think it does save lives. I mean you’ve got the vibration of the music and the vibration of the words. I’m getting a little new agey [laughs]. It’s a really powerful human experience. I would hate to box my songs in as just being mine. They’re as much for some random person in Kansas as they are for me. I don’t think you ever own them, you know? You’re just a conduit. It’s definitely selfish, I definitely love doing it for me, but it doesnt have to be selfish. It’s for everybody as much as just for me.”
Interlude 1: “Neighbor’s Trampoline”
Filmed at the Cactus Cafe in Austin, Texas. Rose is joined by Andrew Pressman on bass and Trevor Smith on banjo.
“I wrote it in Telluride. I tend to write songs there because it’s so beautiful. I’ve never played the festival, I’m just there hanging out and watching music. So in that way it’s incredibly inspiring. That one I wrote last summer about something that happened the summer before. I had slept on a friend’s trampoline in Montana. and it was one of those nights you remember really clearly. The stars were out, it’s beautiful, there were three of us sleeping in sleeping bags on the trampoline and it was such a good nights sleep. We had stayed up watching stars until 2 in the morning after a crazy show with Green Mountain Grass. That was actually a really fun show in this dive bar in Bozeman. I don’t remember what it was called, but there was a stuffed moose on the wall, a jukebox and everybody got pretty tight, tying one on you know?
I didn’t even really think about it, but the night stayed with me, I was in Telluride and just thinking about that last summer. That song is actually a love song for a friend. Because it was just at that point where I had had this friendship that was really close and was starting to get really cubersome and really awkward. Not even for any reason, just sometimes you spend a lot of time with someone and you need to take a break. Then I was out there the next summer without them and it felt like, ‘Ug, I miss this person so much,’ remembering all these things from that summer. That night was really particular.
And that last verse is totally true most of the time. I am worn out. It’s a hard job, it’s a wonderful amazing fufilling job, but it’s also really exhausting. Sometimes you put so much into it and you don’t get back as much, so that can be really rough.”
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
So do your roaming in the springtime And you’ll find your love in the summer sun The frost will come and bring the harvest And you can sleep when day is done
- “There is a Time”
On August 2, Mitch Jayne passed away from cancer, reportedly only two weeks after his diagnosis. Jayne is best known for the wit and warmth he brought to the stage as the bassist for Salem, Missouri’s The Dillards. Initially rising to fame playing The Darlings on The Andy Griffith Show, The Dillards would prove to be supremely influential not only on progressive bluegrass, but also on folk and country rock acts like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and even The Eagles.
Upon their induction into the IBMA Hall of Fame last year, Jayne had this to say in a interview with KSMU Ozark Public Radio:
We appreciate so much the fact that somebody has finally told us that we matter. That we made a difference. And mattering? [laughs] Most bluegrass groups don’t worry about whether they can matter, they worry about whether they’re going to get fed that night. But after all these years it’s nice to find out that you really did matter in the big scheme of things.
As a member of The Dillards, Jayne’s storytelling skills were as crucial as his bass playing, his irreverent and hilarious banter an essential part of the shows. This gift of gab and love of language wove throughout his work, whether he was hosting radio shows, writing songs, or penning novels and a weekly newspaper column.
Jayne leaves us with a legacy that speaks to the power of regional storytelling. Born in Indiana and raised in Northern Missouri, Jayne fell in love with the Ozarks when he was in college. It was from this landscape, with it’s distinct linguistic color, that he drew inspiration. Underneath his affectionate riffs on regional foibles was a deep sense of connection to the land and the people that populated it, as well as a concern that the ever-creeping forces of homogenization would sweep this culture aside. During his lifetime, Jayne used the best weapons at his disposal – humor and storytelling – as part of the good fight to prevent that from happening.
If nothing else, Jayne’s own deep-rooted sense of place should invite us all to dig a little deeper in our own backyards. So let’s celebrate the man and the music with a few choice selections, just to scratch the surface of his joyous career.
Jayne talks Ozarkian linguistics with Rodney Dillard, from the documentary “A Night in the Ozarks.”
Kicking it old school on The Andy Griffith Show
Covered by everyone from J.D. Crowe to Phish, chances are you’ve heard The Dillards’ “The Old Home Place” more than a few times. Here’s the original line-up throwing down on their much-loved tune, at a festival appearance in Denmark in 1999.
“Dooley,” from the same festival, complete with a light-hearted Jayne intro.
“The Whole World Round” from the documentary “A Night in the Ozarks.”
Finally, The Rodney Dillard Band’s moving performance of “There is a Time,” featuring Maggie Peterson (aka Charlene Darling), dedicated to Jayne.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Do you love bluegrass, folk and old time music? Do you have a passion for writing, photography or taping shows? Then the Steam Powered Preservation Society needs you!
At the heart of the SPPS mission is the preservation of live Americana music. We couldn’t accomplish this without our hardworking and generous tapers. If you are a taper who would be willing to contribute live shows to our archive, please contact info@thespps.org for details.
If you are a writer with an interest in music, the SPPS also needs feature articles and interviews (especially with our partner bands and musicians), live show or album reviews, historical pieces, and essays for our blog. If you’re a photographer or a videographer, we may also be interested in featuring your work on the blog. We are looking for a wide variety of work that explores and celebrates this music’s past, present and future. Besides being a stellar opportunity to build your resume and portfolio, you may receive concert tickets or CDs for your efforts. Please contact sarah.hagerman@thespps.org with all blog-related pitches and inquiries.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Stella Fleming, with the help of String Summit MC Pastor Tim Christiansen, presents Chip Russell with a donation made in the memory of Sandy Alexander. Sandy was a long time supporter of the SPPS, one of the very first donors, and one of the original tape transferrers. Sandy was the tapers’ taper. He knew the band, he knew the room, he knew the sound. More than all else, he knew the people. Not many have walked the earth who could count more admirers and friends than Sandy.
Thanks Sandy and Stella. We here at the SPPS are truly honored.
Paul's been the SPPS's server slave since the get-go. He's the CIO at Earthnet in Boulder, Colorado and is a die hard Linux freak. He's also an avid live bluegrass archivist.
“I think he was both living in the past and living in the present you know?” Bob Carlin says as he remembers friend and former band leader John Hartford. “To make music with real depth you have to understand the form you’re working in, or at least you’re working out of. You have to have listened to the old masters, and you have to have a deep understanding of what people have done before you to have depth to your music. To have that immediacy, you have to also be aware of what’s going on now, and you have to be excited about playing music.”
“A lot of people get bored with music and just get – you fall into this kind of road show, you know what I mean?” he reflects further. “There’s a lot of acts, when they have to reproduce their hits every night, they get real stale, it’s real mechanical. [But] even though John played a lot of pieces that were old and that were from his catalog, he was always reinventing them and keeping them fresh. They were familiar enough so people recognized them, but new enough so he kept being excited about doing them. After all, he understood that you had to play that stuff. You’re an entertainer, you’re playing for the audience, you have to keep the audience happy. But he also pushed the envelope. When I was with him, he was constantly trying to come up with new ways to play old music to make it interesting to current audiences. That was his big thing. He involved all of us in that. He used us as a laboratory.”
That “laboratory” Carlin is referring to is the group of musicians who accompanied Hartford on stage and on his studio albums for Rounder Records during the last years of his life. Memories of John (released May 2010 on Compass Records) brings Carlin and his bandmates –Matt Combs (fiddle), Mike Compton (mandolin), and Mark Schatz (bass), and Chris Sharp (guitar) - back together as The John Hartford String Band to honor his music with a 15-song collection. Produced by Sharp, who also spear-headed the project, it’s a beautifully-captured, lovingly-rendered tribute that will excite die-hard geeks and new converts to the good gospel of Hartford alike. The album features old favorites (such as “Lorena” and “Delta Queen Waltz”) as well as previously unrecorded material (“You Don’t Notice Me Ignoring You,” “She’s Gone and Bob’s Gone With Her,” “Homer the Roamer” and more). Many of the unreleased songs were intended to be on the album Hartford was working on when he passed away, so it’s a genuine treat to have them captured here with such joy and care. The SPPS had the fortune of speaking to both Carlin and Sharp to get the back story on the album, some of their own memories of John, and their thoughts on Hartford’s enduring legacy.
Making Memories
It all began last April, when Sharp returned from a trip to Japan and decided to call the band members with a proposal to do a Hartford album.
“We all wanted to do it, we all thought it was a great idea,” Carlin says. “In fact, I’d been thinking about something similar for the past nine years, but this was just the right time and Chris was the right person to do it. He managed to get everybody on board, and I guess the stars were in alignment. Just generally there was a synergy, because things did fall into place fairly easily. And on top of that, people that I wouldn’t have expected got really excited about it and bent over backwards to help.”
The album was recorded live in a classroom at a school in Nashville where Combs teaches. Over the course of a couple days, with desks pushed to the side and blinds drawn across the huge glass windows, the band set to work. It was often an emotional environment, as Carlin describes:
The John Hartford String Band
“During the whole sessions, [John] was there, we were talking about him. As Tim O’Brien said in the notes, we were constantly thinking WWJD, which is ‘What would John do?’ Constantly thinking about him and trying to figure, ‘Were we being true to his spirit and true to his music and true to what he would have done?’ He was constantly in the room with us. There were some teary moments, and some funny moments. It was a good spirit and definitely, he was there.”
Hartford is also literally present on the album. There are snippets of him talking worked into the tracks, which Sharp pulled from the Good Old Boys album session outtakes. Seamlessly blended in, they create the impression of Hartford’s presence in the studio. What adds to this effect is, as Sharp explains, “Aside from one person, everyone on this record was on those sessions. So you can hear Bob talking, you can hear me talking, you can hear Mark Schatz talking. I think you can even hear Mike talking, or at least tuning his instrument. I finally decided it was going to be nicer [to use these particular outtakes] because it was an illusion. Like there’s ‘She’s Gone and Bob’s Gone With Her,’ and right at the end John starts talking. But it works itself out so whenyou listen to it you’re thinking, ‘Hey that’s weird.’ “
Besides these samples, Sharp went through hundreds of 46-year-old-demos to find the right musical tracks to incorporate. Out of 900 demo tracks, ten were ultimately taken into the studio, and the band picked four to work with from there (excluding “Fadeout,” which was clearly the standalone album closer). Working with the demos proved to be challenging, and didn’t always produce work that Sharp felt would do Hartford justice.
In the studio
“We tried to record to them, but only one of them I felt John would be happy with,” he explains. “It’s kind of hard to record along with him because they were just demos. He didn’t think they’d see any light, really. Since I had narrowed it down to ten, when we picked the four [in the recording sessions], I didn’t really have time to go and edit John before the next session started the next morning. So I couldn’t really get the tracks in good enough shape so that we could do a really good job playing with him. He might rush a little bit here and he might drag a little bit here, normal things a musician would do, but when you’ve got five musicians and each of them are trying to anticipate what he’s going to do and each of them are trying to anticipate it differently, and you’re cutting it live, it starts to become fairly impossible. I spent a month and a half trying to work on one song, trying to make it work and it didn’t, so finally I just gave up. The one that we did use [“You Don’t Notice Me Ignoring You”] features Mark. Since it was just Mark trying to anticipate what John was going to do, it was much easier. I think I only edited one note, maybe two notes, [but] Mark was able to go over it a lot of times and get real familiar with the track before he recorded it.”
After “You Don’t Notice Me” was edited and ready to mix, Sharp decided to add a bonus touch – the dancing of Schatz’s wife, Eileen Carson Schatz. The founding director of Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, she was also an old friend of Hartford’s and was happy to lend her feet to the song.
“I was trying to find a place to put feet on, and we were talking about different fiddle tunes and it struck me that that song was already real sparse and it was done so why not put the feet there?” Sharp says. “Once I decided to put feet on that track, I wanted it to be an illusion like it was John doing the feet. So I wanted to make sure Eileen did John’s step exactly like John did it. She’s a wonderful dancer. I just told her what I was looking for; I didn’t need to coach her. In fact, I think she helped John develop that stuff to begin with.”
The album features several other noteworthy guests like Alison Brown (banjo on “MISIP”), George Buckner (banjo on “Lorena”), Bela Fleck (banjo on “Girl I Left Behind”), Alan O’Bryant (vocals on “Delta Queen Waltz”) and O’Brien (vocals on “Lorena” and “MISIP”). Bringing these heavy hitters on board was a somewhat nerve-wracking experience for Sharp.
“I was responsible for making sure I didn’t destroy any of [their music],” he says. “That was quite a load to bear with all their music, and keeping in mind who they were and what they’d done, and how much of an honor it was for them to have enough faith in me to allow me to work on their music.”
In turn, Sharp received nothing but enthusiasm and support from these musicians.
Bela Fleck recording for "Girl I Left Behind"
“Pretty much when I called all of them and told them what I was working on, they were all very responsive,” he describes. “‘Yeah, sure whatever you need, come down and get it! Yeah I’ll play on record, anything you need!’ A lot of the humbling stuff was that they didn’t care if they got paid or not, and in some cases, they refused to be paid. Everybody had that kind of a spirit you know? ‘Whatever. Pay me or not. I just want to do it!’ And they didn’t do it for me, they did it for John. I mean, they might have done it for me, but I want to believe they did it for John, and I’m sure they did.”
Producer, engineer and musician Mark Howard, who worked with Hartford on several projects, also played an integral role in the album by loaning Sharp Hartford’s banjo.
“He was exceptional,” Sharp says gratefully. “As soon as I called and asked him about using John’s banjo he was like, ‘Sure, come get it!’ He actually let me borrow the banjo and bring it back to Asheville, and let George Buckner get used to the neck on it, because it’s got a completely different inlay than a Gibson banjo, for example. He trusted me with that banjo enough to loan it to me, to let me carry it 200 or 300 miles away and keep it for two to three weeks.”
Carlin describes how this supportive attitude continued once the recording process was over. Compass came on board as the label for the record, and radio and Internet word-of-mouth has been gradually and organically building momentum from there. Now, folks are “falling over themselves,” as Carlin says, at the prospect of joining the group on stage or at IBMA showcases.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Carlin says. “I know that John has lots of fans out there. But I think if we had tried this five or six or eight years ago, it just wouldn’t have happened the same way… I mean I can try to analyze it, it’s all speculation, but I think that some of it is inevitable. Who knows why the cosmos align the way they do? [laughs]. But I think that before, it was too close to his death. People were still processing, and it was just too soon.”
With the tenth anniversary of Hartford’s passing coming up next year, the time seems right for Memories of John.
“We’re going to be doing some things at Americana [Music Association Conference] and hopefully at IBMA,” Carlin says. “And there’s some other events that are going to be very John-centric in the year 2011, so really we didn’t expect to be going out and touring this summer, were really looking at 2011, which is the anniversary year [of his death] as the time that we want to be out and in front of people. So that’s what we’re looking forward to. I think that my main goal is that this record is the catalyst for The Year of John 2011. We want to make 2011 The Year of John Hartford, the year we all celebrate him, the year he gets recognized, he wins more awards and people start to talk about him. And a bunch of new people that don’t know about him get inspired to play his music. Just go out there and sort of reinvigorate that memory.”
Continue reading for more on the John Hartford String Band…
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
You drive that rhythm like a ball-peen hammer mama
You make John Henry want to wake up and fly.
Those lines from “Big Buck in the Road,” the opening track from Honey Don’t‘s self-titled debut album (released September 2009), pull you in from the get-go, an exciting call to arms to start flying down the pavement with a devil-may-care attitude and a dog-eared road map flapping on your dashboard. It’s the latest project from Bill Powers, whose best known as the mandolin player, guitarist and principle songwriter of Paonia, Colorado’s Sweet Sunny South, as well as a DJ on public radio KVNF. With his musical partner-in-crime and wife Shelley Gray (bass and harmony vocals, Sweet Sunny South), and with Greg Schochet(mandolin and guitar, Halden Wofford and the Hi-Beams and Swing State) and Ryan Drickey (fiddle, Expedition Quartet and recent Rockygrass fiddle contest winner) along for the ride, it’s a group whose musicianship is nothing short of stellar. But, although the album draws on old-time and bluegrass for some tracks (instrumental “Ol #1,” “Ellia Jewel” and “Cuckoo,” which features Gray on lead vocals), the main focus is more on a folk and Americana roots sound, with a potent rockabilly swing in the heart. Powers’ writing, which is influenced by the likes of Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, and Texas singer-songwriters like Robert Earl Keen, positively shines on the originals. This is a thoroughly satisfying batch of songs, that lingers in your head well after it’s spun.
“What I realized was that I was more of a songwriter,” Powers reflects. “If I just played to what the song was asking for, it didn’t really turn out to be bluegrass. [The album] has that feel, but I don’t even play guitar in the bluegrass style. I play banjo and mandolin in Sweet Sunny South, but guitar was my first instrument, and I was writing songs and spending more time with the guitar. And as my wife had gotten better and better on the bass, and we played more together, we realized that we had a different kind of groove when we played together and wanted to explore it..”
Sweet Sunny South itself had evolved from bluegrass into more of an old-time realm. The band had found it’s musical feet (Gray herself played bass only a handful of months before formerly joining the group in 2003), and a fan base, over the past decade, but Powers felt like they were never going to quite make it as a strict bluegrass band.
“Our fiddle player [Corey Obert] realized that old time fiddling came more naturally to him than bluegrass fiddling; that was what he really loved. We really loved it because we didn’t have to try to be bluegrass players then. We could just play with the rhythm. We’ll tease ya sometimes on stage and say old-time music is lazy man’s bluegrass [laughs]. But there’s really a much bigger difference. Rhythmically, you can be as intricate as you try to make it, but at the same time it can be the kind of music where you just don’t have to be on your game so much all the time. You can just have a good time with it. It’s like dance music, and groove music. We would fit in our original stuff along with the old time, and that became Sweet Sunny South. I think we eventually got comfortable with what we were doing, and for me, I just wanted to stretch out further.”
Honey Don't by JT Thomas
When Powers was first hatching the idea for the band that was going to become Honey Don’t, however, Gray was unsure if she wanted to be involved with the project.
“There was also a time when Shelley was about to back out of playing music. [She said] ‘Alright, I want you to go get a group together, I think I’m holding you back from what you want to do.’ That’s what she thought. I said, ‘Ok, if you want to do that, that’s cool.’ I mean, I argued with her a bit, but I also didn’t want to drag her into something else if I’d already been dragging her into something that she didn’t necessarily want to do. So I started to put together a band, and I talked to Greg and I talked to Ryan, and the bass player was going to be Eric Thorin. He’s a fabulous bass player of all kinds of styles, and a great singer. I was thrilled about him singing backup, if I couldn’t have Shelley. I talked to him about doing it and he agreed, and somewhere in the interim Shelley got cold feet about not playing music. I think the more she thought about it, the more she was like, ‘Oh, maybe I do want to play music.’ So I was like, ‘Ok cool! You’re the bass player!’”
With the line-up in place, the four went into the studio with producer Aaron Youngberg at his Swingfingers Studios in Fort Collins, Colorado. Schochet and Drickey had been given demos and some ideas from Powers beforehand, but their skills at arranging proved invaluable when it came time to lay the songs down.
“I wanted guys playing on this record that were better than me basically,” Powers says with a self-effacing laugh. “The record ended up being a little time capsule of the four of us. We ran through [the songs] for like twenty or thirty minutes and worked out the arrangements. Those guys are great about arrangements. They had experience in all of this, with arranging and being in the studio, doing it all on the spot – hearing when something had gone on too long, how you want to get out of that break, how to approach the kick-off to a different tune. I was interested in hearing people that could play really, really well, and just play to the songs and give them all the sweetness and honey they could have.”
Honey Don’t is definitely an appropriate name for the group. Their sound is warm and glowing, but it’s substantial, not light and sugary. The group was originally going to be called Silvertone Devils but, “We looked at the songs, and it was just me and Shelley singing, and there’s this obvious kind of sweetness about it. The songs, not just the material, the words to the songs, the delivery, her kind of nice, sweet-sounding voice – Silvertone Devils just didn’t ring true to the music.” Instead, Powers took that name for his electric group.
Bill Powers by Sally DeFord
“Honey Don’t” is also a Carl Perkins song, the b-side to “Blue Suede Shoes.” Perkins was part of the Sun Records roster in the 1950′s, the label that launched the careers of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis. But despite this company, and the massive hit he had with “Blue Suede Shoes,” Perkins never saw the fame and fortune of his label mates.
Although Perkins’ rockabilly sound was an aesthetic inspiration for sure, it was while traveling through northern Mississippi last May after Honey Don’t had been recorded that Powers gained a deeper appreciation of his legacy. He was reading a biography of Perkins during that trip, and Powers as describes, “That’s when I realized how underrated he was, and the struggles that he faced that other people didn’t. Carl Perkins did a lot of his traveling up through rural Tennessee and northern Mississippi, the same places where I grew up and where I was coming back to visit family. I was reading that book along the way, and it was talking about these juke joints and these [types of] places. How he was picking cotton when things got bad and he wasn’t making enough money.”
It struck a personal chord with Powers. He and Gray are raising two boys in Paonia, and the reality of making a living, much less trying to make art, is a constant concern.
“I don’t really have stars in my eyes or concerns about being a star,” Powers muses. “I would like to be in the place financially where I could just follow my muse, you know? Just some recognition among other writers that I like, that’s the thing I sort of crave in some way, but I don’t really care about being a star. I just want to be able to do what I do and not have it be a burden on my family, or me. I looked at Carl Perkins and thought, ‘If this dude can do what he did at the time that he did it, when life was so hard, and he had so many adversities – ‘.”
He pauses for a second then says, “It just came to me, that wow, our band was really appropriately named.”
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
It is festival time again and thousands are hitting the bluegrass trail, with no small amount of them hauling their instruments along. Why? Do they expect a frantic plea from the stage for a fill in? Do they feel that by toting a fiddle case around the grounds they will be suspected of stardom?
Hell no! They are just doing that thing unique to acoustic music festivals worldwide: they are going to jam.
Now jamming is as old as American music itself. It was used in the early days to pass the free form jazz music from New Orleans to Chicago, and mountain music from the coves and hollows to the factory towns of the rust belt. Jamming allowed skilled, but untrained, musicians to develop their own code to pass a new tune along without having to write charts. Jamming moved into the hipster clubs of New York, where after-hours exchanges between various players from the different bands in the city, players like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, Cozy Cole and John Coltrane, broke away from traditional jazz, giving us bebop.
Yes, jamming is important, and though the type we will discuss here will probably not lead us into new musical horizons, it can improve your playing in a myriad of ways. All you have to do is know the rules. Yes, there are rules, and I’m sure everyone knows they exist. But it is a good thing to go over them from time to time, and this is as good a time as any.
Let’s start with the basics, okay? Fine. Now, before you leave your campsite in search of the perfect jam for you, it is wise to have new strings on your instrument and make sure it is in tune and will remain so. With the advent of cheap electric tuners and knowledge of how to secure the string to the tuning post, you should be able to be in tune and ready to play.
Now go find a jam. Maybe, if the festival is large, you might take a stroll around and check out what’s what. If you are a practicing multi-instrumentalist, it might be a good idea to see how many of what is being plucked. When you decide what instrument you will drive, find a jam where you will fit the best. This is accomplished by noticing how many of your type of instrument is at work.
Now, a word about guitars. If that is the instrument of your choice, you should probably be able to vocalize as well. Jams are lousy with guitars and, unless you find one where guitar music is the focus, it is unlikely that the other players will back down so your solos will be heard.
Sometimes jams are just too big. In this case, you may want to lurk on the edge until someone leaves and a spot opens. When that opening happens, it’s best to just add some rhythm or fills until someone offers you a break. When that break happens, do your best to make a good impression, and then back out and see if you get another shot. If the song goes around a couple of times without you being given a spot, just back out and move on.
You should become adept at finding jams where your level of playing will fit nicely. However, that which you might take for a small jam could be a band practicing and they may not welcome your efforts. I’m just tossing out some negatives here because you don’t want to be known as a pushy player. You will find out that if you play with reserve and taste you will be welcome in many circles. It also helps if you know a fair amount of instrumentals, as well as the vocal standards.
Here are some fiddle tunes which have remained popular over time, and still endure. The keys commonly used are included.
1. “Soldier’s Joy” – D
2. “Billy in the Low Ground” – C
3. “Red-Haired Boy”-A
4.”Blackberry Blossom” – G
5. “Fisher’s Hornpipe” – D
6. “Cherokee Shuffle” – D
7. “St. Ann’s Reel” – D
8. “Crazy Creek” – A
9. “Jerusalem Ridge” – Am
10. “Black Mountain Rag” – G
If you are playing guitar, you may find a capo useful when playing long instrumentals in A or D. Learn by watching other guitarists and be aware that if the jam has a lot of harmony singing, it is not unusual to have someone call a tune in F or Bb.
I hope that you will follow some of these pointers to a rewarding string of festival jams. Remember, being polite and playing within your limits will go a long way towards making friends along the festival trail, and you will be surprised by how many faces you will start to recognize. In my opinion nothing beats walking around the camp area empty-handed and having someone say to you, “Here’s a ‘X’ player; go get your instrument and we’ll pick some.”
There are a few other things you might want to remember. For example, keep a pocket full of picks and a few packs of strings so you can help a player out.
Don’t forget to be in tune. If you don’t have a tuner, grab a note from the jam, then go down wind to get it right. It’s rude to walk up to a jam and start tuning while a song’s playing.
You are in someone else’s space, so don’t mess up the balance by being the third or fourth mandolin. A good jam can absorb quite a few guitars and several fiddles, but a bag of banjos or a murder of mandolins can shut things down.
Finally, if you don’t like the way things are going, you can just leave. If you are a musician, you should be sensitive enough to pick up on the vibe.
Now, think about what I said up top: jamming is a way of moving music around. If you remember that, you will try to leave an idea and take one as well. You’ll be helping the music stay alive.
Tomas Texino is a musician, humorist and friend to all animals. He is a blogger and regular contributor to BGRASS-L, though his exact whereabouts are sketchy. Stalkers and other interested parties may contact him through his MySpace page at www.MySpace.com/texino.
Besides numerous workshops and jamming opportunities, the museum setting also offers an array of special activities you won’t find at any other festival. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the Pioneers of Bluegrass Gathering, which brings together our musical forefathers and mothers to honor their legacy. Further, this year’s ROMP will include the largest reunion of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys band members ever attempted.
“When we have the festival, there are all these exhibits that open,” IBMM director Gabrielle Gray says. “The whole nature of a museum is a mission to preserve the past for the present, so you have this whole element of being wrapped up in history. You’re getting the roots of it. [The music lineup doesn’t] stick with just the traditional bluegrass; we have progressive bluegrass and sometimes we have things that are not strictly bluegrass.”
“So in that regard it’s very much like the other bluegrass festivals,” Gray continues. “But the element of having educational forums with the first generation telling their life stories, and the recognition ceremonies, and the unveiling of the hall of fame, and the legends concert—all these things are very much unique to this festival. If you’re really into the history of [bluegrass] and the origins, and the preservation of it, then this [festival] is going to be very attractive…I would probably walk a long way to go to a festival like this, just because there’s so many iconic figures that attend every year. Fifty to 100 of the first generation are here every single year.”
Pete Wernick echoes that sentiment. “It’s kind of like, to a circus person, ‘What do you think about having the roller coaster next to the ferris wheel?’…it’s the occasion of these two things together—having the chance to be at the this festival and see the museum, be a part of the event at the museum. It’s the kind of thing you make time for in your schedule, if you have the time to do something as neat as that. It’s the kind of place that you would come in from a long distance for. There will be some things going on there that wouldn’t be going on anywhere else because of the museum focus.”
Doc Watson
A film festival will feature videos from the museums’ own oral history project, while a new Rounder Records exhibit and panel discussion will illuminate the history and influence of this important roots label.
This year, IBMA executive director Dan Hays will unveil plaques for The Dillards and The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, this year’s inductees to the IBMA Hall of Fame, which is housed at the museum.
There will also be the third annual Legends Supper and Recognition Ceremony, which individually honors pioneering bluegrass musicians on stage. Festival goers can attend the supper for an additional advance-purchase ticket.
This year’s gathering is especially exciting, as it features the largest reunion of Blue Grass Boys to date. As Gray described to me, “It’s going to be gorgeous this year, really really fine. David Holt is the master of ceremonies for the event. Then it will all be followed by a performance by Doc Watson, David Holt and Richard Watson. So that will be a fun night for sure. It’s not really what you’d call formal, although a lot of people wear formal [for the supper portion]. It’s just celebratory. ‘This is your wonderful life and we appreciate all that you did for this music. Because your music makes our lives much happier than they would be without it.’”
Recognizing these pioneers is vital, as Gray explains that “the thing that is very important is these people are not going to be with us forever. In fact, they’re not going to be with us very long. So if you have an interest in seeing how bluegrass began—hearing the authentic first sounds, how it was played way back when—they really need to do that soon and support the festivals that have the first generation players performing,” Gray says.
“Then, to have dozens of them in one place at one time? It’s really quite astonishing. And to hear the stories, my god, it’s just drop dead fabulous and hilarious! You just roll on the floor, they’re so funny!”
Another noteworthy event, being put together in conjunction with the Bill Monroe centennial celebration (which officially kicks off September 13th and lasts for a full two years), is a juried art exhibit. Fans can submit works based on Bill Monroe songs, and then a jury will select 80 works of art. When I spoke to Gray, she was in the process of going through the submissions, as she described the mountain of artwork in her office.
“They’re wonderful!” she said excitedly. “It’s just going to be an incredible exhibit. Some of [the paintings] are gigantic too.”
An audio tour will accompany the exhibit for visitors to the Museum. “When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex went out of business in New York City last month, we went up there and bought what’s called an audio guide tour,” Gray explains.
“So we’re going to program this to where, when you get within three feet of a painting, it will play the song. Bill will be singing, and you’ll see the lyrics posted beside the painting. Then you can go to another part, and on to the next song. So that’s going to be totally fun!”
This exhibit will be running at the IBMM alongside others planned for the centennial, such as a Blue Grass Boys exhibit, and the premiere of a Bill Monroe documentary, as told through the stories of the Blue Grass Boys. The individual interviews have been gathered, but, “we’re going to interview them en masse when they’re at ROMP,” Gray says. “There’s like 78 of them coming. It’s going to be a huge number of people that played with Bill Monroe.”
Wernick is also running one of his inspiring jam camps, which begins on June 21st, three days before the main events of the festival. “[This festival] is already in gear on Wednesday, and the first performing starts on Thursday. So the camp and the festival overlap a little bit. That way the people can come for one, and when the teaching is over they can stay for the festival and probably get in quite a bit of jamming just on their own momentum from being at the camp,” he says.
Wernick's Jam Camp at Merlefest 2004
“The camp for some people is a sporty kind of chance to just play music for a few days,” Wernick reflects. “But it’s really designed for people who are not yet really familiar with [jamming] or have not really done it at all.”
“So we like to encourage people that they hardly have to know anything to get started, that it really just works if everybody follows the rules. So we even get people who are just a week or two into playing. They can really start playing and being part of a jam session. That’s our idea, that we’re trying to get all the unused instruments of the world back into use, because people started playing them and then gave them up. We’re on a campaign to get them all used again, and that’s what we’ll be doing at the museum for two or three days.”
Where the future meets the past
When the IBMA and their Fanfest moved from Owensboro to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1996, and then to Nashville in 2004, the people of Owensboro wanted another local event that would continue to celebrate the bluegrass musical legacy, Gray says. “There are lots of loyalty factors. Most folks in Kentucky feel very protective and parental towards IBMA. When they left, that left the museum as the foremost anchor of bluegrass in its home state. So we really had to scramble to make things sustainable here,” Gray continues.
“This is our official state music, clogging is the official state dance, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ is the official state song. There’s this huge heritage here, and [Owensboro is] right next door to Ohio County and the Bill Monore Homeplace, so there’s a lot of heritage involved, and some pride too, but it’s mostly affection.”
There was also the need for the IBMM to create a signature event. With these two factors driving it, the first ROMP was held at the museum in 2004.
The museum serves a valuable purpose beyond being a mere tourist attraction. Mandolin player and guitarist Ernie Evans (Valerie Smith & Liberty Pike) runs a benefit concert series for the IBMM. He says he was awestruck the first time he visited the Museum in person.
Bill Monroe display at the IBMM
“Looking back at that experience, I recall standing in the lobby of IBMM with my wife Debi saying, ‘Oh my God, look at this place!’ It gave you the feeling that being part of bluegrass was something special. By that I mean the detail and class with which the museum presents bluegrass is not something you see every day in [regards to] a genre of music, unless it is mainstream. We looked at each other after completing the tour and I said, ‘All of the musicians and industry people would have to be so proud to wind up with some of their artifacts in here, and consider it such an honor.’”
“The museum creates a new opportunity for musicians to share their legacy for future generations without competition,” Evans continues. “You don’t have to break records in sales or depend on media hype to be inducted.”
Wernick, who was president of the IBMA when the museum was first conceived, agrees. “Though basically [bluegrass music is] doing well, you have to stay the course. Sometimes early things get forgotten, formative things that were going on and not many people were there to witness it.”
“When it gets a little more popular, people are thinking mostly of the present. But the present is built very much on the past, in both America and in bluegrass. [There are] cautious steps into the future, [the music is] always moving, but it’s not just getting caught up in the latest fad,” he says.
“That means the museum is all the more important because it means that people that have a sincere interest in learning what the past was like and what the formative years of bluegrass were like—the people, who they were and what they did—it really enriches the present and the future to have the past come alive,”Wernick explains. ”The museum is where the future meets the past. Kids come to see people that maybe they’re going to follow in the footsteps of.”
“There was a ‘Valley Forge time,’ you could call it, in the history of bluegrass music when the going was not so easy, and it was a long road to travel and there was a lot of work to do,” Wernick continues. “That era has mostly passed, but we have our forefather in bluegrass to look back to and salute, and that’s what the Hall of Fame is about particularly, and the whole museum. It’s all about that. These are the people whose shoulders we’re standing on.”
This deep sense of appreciation is evident as Gray describes the emotional impacts of seeing so many first generation pioneers at ROMP. “When I’m in the presence of all those first generation bluegrass musicians, I can barely speak without crying. They’re coming in, they’re hugging each other, they’ve got their families and their entourage of favorite people that follow them here,” she says.
“They’ve just got a presence about them, it’s almost impossible to describe…you feel like you’re immersed in, I hate to say glory, but that’s what it feels like. It’s some kind of aura. I’ve never experienced anything like that. I just go around with my heart in my throat for two or three days, I can hardly not cry [laughs]. But at the same time, it’s such a thrill. Your emotions just get ratcheted up to the nth degree. But right when you think you can’t stand it anymore, the current acts come on and it’s like, phew!”
That’s when it’s time to boogie down.
The work of the IBMM is ensuring that this music will continue to be a living, vital entity well into the future. But all the while, it’s going to be a lot of fun too, and ROMP is a rare opportunity to celebrate the total picture of where we’re going and where we’ve been. So while you’re airing out that musty tent, scrubbing down those icky coolers, and tuning up your instruments for campsite picking, you might want to start looking up the best routes to Owensboro. Because this is one party you don’t want to miss!
Continue reading for a schedule and list of bluegrass pioneers attending ROMP…
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
It’s often said that friends are the family we choose. This, then, is a story about family, and it began in 1973 at Camp Flaming Arrow in Hunt, Texas. A 14-year-old named Jeff Gavin arrived as a camper, looking up to two 19-year-old counselors from Midland, Texas – Rice Harrington and Dixie Watkins III. Harrington was Gavin’s art instructor, and, upon noticing the young camper played guitar, he passed on some musical lessons. Gavin would return the next year as a junior counselor, and was excited to find himself in Harrington’s cabin – Cabin 10. Harrington, Gavin, Watkins and a 15-year-old camper named West Warren would spend the next three summers at Flaming Arrow together. “At camp, it was very ‘M*A*S*H’-like behavior,” Gavin says of their youthful misadventures, which inspired personal mythologies and forged deep friendships that lasted several decades.
Harrington was the central figure in this bunch, with the creative spark and big heart that drew many to him. He would go on to teach art at San Marcos High School for over twenty years, bringing that energy into the classroom. But in 2003, Harrington unexpectedly passed away. It was a shock, and in the wake of his loss, Gavin, Watkins, Warren and Jack Harrison, a friend of Harrington’s from Fischer, decided the best way to honor his life and spirit would be to celebrate the things Harrington loved – art and music, especially bluegrass and acoustic music. So in August of 2004, Cabin 10, Inc. was created. This November will be the 7th year that they have held The Rice Festival in Fischer, Texas. Besides boasting an ace lineup of bluegrass and acoustic music, the festival provides funding for The Rice Harrington Art Scholarship. The award is given to a graduating senior from San Marcos High School who intends to pursue a degree in fine arts.
With the success of The Rice Festival, this year, Cabin 10, Inc. teamed up with The Central Texas Bluegrass Association to launch a spring festival, RiceGrass, to fund The Bill Gibbs Scholarship for the Advancement of Folk Music. Rewarded to performing arts graduates; last year’s recipient was Wimberely, Texas’ own multi-talented Sarah Jarosz. The scholarship is named after the leader of the Bill Gibbs Quartet that Harrington, Gavin and Watkins formed at camp. Gibbs, a fictitious character created by Harrington, was the frontman, but never saw fit to come to his own gigs, leaving a perpetually empty fourth chair on the stage. “Cabin 10, Inc., like the good ole camp days, has always been about not taking ourselves too seriously,” Gavin explains. One needs look no further than the “Cabin 10 Staph” shirts and the groups’ “Bored of Directors” to see that this is definitely an unpretentious operation. Although it was created in the wake of deep grief, what Cabin 10 does is an expression of pure joy. With that mindset, let’s look back at RiceGrass.
RiceGrass 2010 by Roads
Saturday, March 27th
Mind those curves on Fischer Store Road as you make your way south through the hill country. Tucked at the southernmost end of the road, before it forks and heads down towards Canyon Lake, there is a postcard-perfect Victorian farmhouse, with a tin-roofed, open-air cantina on its lush, rolling front lawn. Fischer Haus Bed and Breakfast is the quiet country spot city folks dream of in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but this weekend, as I rolled down the dusty driver’s side window of my little red Mazda, I could see folks milling around the cantina with beer mugs in hand, and hear fiddle music filling the warm, Texas spring time air.
You couldn’t have asked for a homier setting, and that hospitality was stitched in the details of the festival. If you purchased a souvenir mug or wine glass, on Saturday, you were treated to complimentary beer and wine. Besides the fact that few will argue with free libations, the reusable cup was a fabulously eco-friendly move. Water and soft drinks meanwhile were free all weekend, which was a definite necessity in the warm sun – or later in the evening, if you had gone to town on the free booze.
As I claimed my camping spot, I could hear the unmistakable “Haw haw haw,” of “Turkey in the Straw” inspiring peals of laughter and shout-alongs. Billed as Dennis Hubbard & Friends, Fischer Haus co-owner Hubbard (mando) got to reap the fruits of his labor as he stood on the stage he built, with Eric Gerber (guitar/vox), Kelley Mullford (fiddle, banjo), Biscuit (washboard, billed as “concusionist”), and Larry Wheat (guitar, fiddle, mando and vox). Taking us down “Old Plank Road,” Biscuit laid down some serious scratch on the washboard. It was the kind of make-a-band approach you gotta love at bluegrass festivals, where you just grab your closest buddies and start shouting out tunes.
Kimball & Painter by Grubbs
An intimate camping set-up in the gnarly live oaks was directly adjacent to the farmhouse, meaning you could bounce to your tent and back lickety-split (it also meant that you had the burly Fischer Haus rooster as an emphatic, old school alarm clock). Thanks to some help, I was able to decipher my tent’s physics, and caught some of Kimball & Painter with The Gibson Sisters. Rose Kimball and Judy Painter have been partners-in-crime for 17 years, and Bandera, Texas’ The Gibson Sisters (LaurieGibson on fiddle and Sally Gibson on bass) provided an apt backdrop to their earthy voices, laid-back stage presence, and songs rooted in honest soil. Painter’s “The Ghost of Billy Grey” won second place in the Woody Guthrie song-writing competition last year with its tragic telling of a miner’s life. Another song about “dried up Texas blues,” and those, “big cracks in the ground,” was a reminder that harsh summer was coming ‘round the bend. But sitting in a lawn chair with grass between my toes, soaking in their nicely done version of Bob Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain,” this was pure springtime goodness.
Fiddle player David Bass discovered that imitating a rooster crow on your instrument can attract some truly fowl attention. When The Freight Hopperswere warming up behind the farmhouse, apparently that ornery rooster come charging to the sound, thinking it had some competition. Relating this story, as he demonstrated the sound, someone in the audience yelled “Here they come!” As the cantina erupted in laughter, The Freight Hoppers pushed full-speed ahead in their set, feet stomping, strings snapping and fingers flying. After going on hiatus in 2002, these North Carolina cats are back. They have a jubilant spring in their take on old time, with a warm, witty stage presence. They informed us that, “‘A cappella’ is a Latin word that means no banjos,” before crooning an old jingle for New Grape Soda (which was originally sung by a duo called the New Grape Twins). This isn’t mere nostalgia though. As they trotted out tales of repo men (“Mr. Reilly the Furniture Man”) and songs by blue legends like Blind Wille McTell and Mississippi Fred McDowell, they subtly drew links between our current troubles and those of the past, delivered with that vital energy that keeps it a living experience. Some things never change, but humor and musical catharsis can always pull you through the hard times.
Hello city limits
I see your sign
Left all my worries way behind
Left all my heartache and troubles there too
Hello city limits
I’m starting out brand new
THSB by Roads
I could hear those exhilarating lines from Red Allen’s “Hello City Limits” coming from the cantina and I bounded down from my campsite. It’s the clean-slate at the end of the journey that gets our feet moving, and few bands tap that excitement as well as Austin’s own Two High String Bandon their latest album Hot Texas Bluegrass Burrito. Live, they really open up the throttle and let it ride, and this was a fluid set that moved with deceptive ease. During “High on the Ohio,” Billy Bright‘sbluesy mando rolled into Alan Munde‘s tumbling banjo, then Mike Montgomery’s fiddle took the lead before passing it on toGeoff Union‘s delicate flat-picking guitar. Meanwhile, my friend and her son twirled in the grass. Chojo Jacques joined the band on stage for a few tunes, including Monroe’s “Moonlight Waltz,” which featured him and Montgomery’s fiddles twisting tightly. During “Sonny’s Ride,” a song Bright wrote about driving with his dog down Fischer Store Road, the band pounded down the pavement in tandem, before pulling back. Bright stepped forward, ratcheting up the tension, drawing out higher and higher notes on his mando, before breathlessly breaking free and taking off running. I’m fixing to make tracks to Colorado soon, but I know what Texas will always sound like to me. It will sound like “City Limits,” which always reminds me of driving into Austin for the first time, seeing that twinkling skyline over the rise on the highway. It will sound like “Moonshine Boogie,” which brings up memories of blurry nights wrapped in downtown neon. It will sound like the bumpy “E. Compton Blues”, which I’ve danced to at the Cactus Café, Mexican restaurants, coffeehouses, and in the hill country grass with sun on my arms. It will sound like Two High String Band.
If we honored storytellers with the reverence they deserve, Caroline Herringwould be commanding a lofty temple. Joined by Bright on mandolin for a spell, she certainly had the cantina hushed for her set. She drew heavily from latest album Golden Apples of the Sun, which takes inspiration from Judy Collins (whose version of W.B. Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Angeus” inspired Herring’s own musical journey on the album), Cyndi Lauper (a stunning “True Colors”), and Ma Rainey (“See See Rider”) among others, placing her in a lineage of strong female voices. Every family has stories, and Herring’s own has a mail order bride from Costa Rica, a grandmother figure – “Abeulita” – who used to send Christmas trees via train to the family that was ashamed of her. “Mistress,” meanwhile explores the true story of a slave named Rachel, whose lover was her owner. Unlike many such relationships, they lived as husband and wife on an east Texas plantation, until his family had him declared legally insane and institutionalized, and sent her back to the fields. “But she kept on living,” Herring exclaimed. We often pave over our past shame, but those ghosts sounded hungry as Herring sang:
You can read all our names in the records.
You can deny all the days as they go down.
There’s a brick-laid pathway calling you to find us
Underneath a golf course in an east Texas town.
Stairwell Sisters by Grubbs
San Francisco’s The Stairwell Sisters are five badass women, whose concrete and glitter edge is balanced by the country soles on their clogs. Latest album Get Off Your Money was produced by Lloyd Maines, a Texas seal of approval if there ever was one. But even when playing a folk classic like Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Travelin’,” they kept a sweaty punk buzz rumbling. When bassist Martha Hawthorne and dobro player Lisa Berman leaned in close to the mic, Berman brandished that slide guitar with cool, confident rock star style. They may have been joking about covering Led Zeppelin, but they weren’t joking about Springsteen, and their cover of his devastating “Youngstown,” delivered in their potent harmonies, was a powerful punch to the gut as evening settled in around us.
Unassuming legend Laurie Lewis, joined by long-time musical partner Tom Rozum played an enchanting set, as the stars began to spread across the sky. Lewis switched between guitar and fiddle with ease, as Rozum played mandolin. They stripped the songs down to bare, glistening bones, whether the lovelorn sigh of Lewis’ own “Texas Bluebonnets,” or the simmering avarice in David Olney‘s gritty “Millionaire.” It was earthly heartbreak to manmade hell, but when Alan Munde jumped on stage for the last song, it raised the tin roof to the heavens.
Barnes by Roads
As much as we need those genuine roots, we also need visionaries to water the branches, otherwise we risk this music becoming mere nostalgia. There’s absolutely a place for all of it (if we can set aside the tired “traditional” versus “progressive” chatter). Thank god then for an artist like Danny Barnes. He stood on stage with his banjo in his hands and his laptop to the side, ready to lead us into fearless new territory. The slack-jawed crowd that got it hung on every shape-shifting note. On banjo alone, Barnes will blow a few new holes in your cerebrum, but add the laptop and his folkTronics approach, and it’s a whole other animal, as he uses Ableton software to incorporate samples while layering and manipulating the sound of his instrument. The jaunty, rump-shaker “Misty Swan,” from superb latest album Pizza Box strutted with a bass-heavy gutteral growl, a whomping beat that made someone behind me gasp, “WOW!” Sprinkling in bits of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” Barnes than dropped the beat out entirely and simply played all over it in a dizzying whirl. Beside songs from Pizza Box, many of which got the folkTronics treatment, we were treated to banjo-only versions of “Good as I Been to You,” “Life in the Country,” Bad Livers‘ “Little Bitty Town,” and one fellow’s request for the moving “Big Girl Blues.” With moments of graceful note shaping and electronic fueled insanity, structure and demolition, this was an astonishing set by one of the most uncanny songwriters and musicians working today. At one point, I glanced up and noticed the sign behind him on the cantina stage that read, “Texas ain’t no place for amateurs.” No foolin’. Barnes is light years ahead but, as I watched the moon climb the rungs of the sky over the cantina, something tells me his body of work will be eternal.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
When you think of retirement, images of Florida condos, golf courses, and cruise ship shuffleboard come to mind. That’s not the case for Alan Munde. Although he may have retired from his teaching post at the commercial music program at South Plains College in Levelland, Texas a couple years ago, he isn’t slowing down any time soon. These days, you can find him playing with his own Alan Munde Gazette, Austin favorites Two High String Band, and Elliott and Janice Rogers in Ranch Road 12. He also plays shows with old friend and flat-picking guitarist Adam Granger. “I’ve got everything from a highly rehearsed band to a loose live band to a trio doing original songs to a duet,” Munde says on the phone from his house in Wimberley, Texas. “It covers a good range of experiences. It’s really good for me.”
His current projects all reflect the common threads that have run through his career – namely, the desire to constantly grow as an artist, and the drive to seek out the joy that comes from playing with good people. Growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, Munde found his musical feet while at OU in the mid-1960′s. During that time, he befriended Texas jazz guitarist maestro Slim Richey, who ran a music shop on Campus Corner and sold Munde his first banjo, Byron Berline, a fiddle player who he met at a weekly folk music jam on campus, and banjo player Ed Shelton, who became his teacher and mentor. He honed his bluegrass knowledge further post-graduation, when he joined Jimmy Martin’s band. For nearly two years, the Oklahoma boy traveled up and down the east coast with Martin, playing traditional bluegrass festivals and recording songs in Nashville.
In 1972, Munde moved out to Los Angeles to join his college buddy Berline in Country Gazette. It was a move that put him at the forefront of the newgrass movement. Bringing bluegrass music to a rock and roll audience, CG opened up for acts like Steve Miller Band, Crosby & Nash and Don McLean. They also incorporated a free-wheeling west coast sound, with rich, sunny group harmonies and reworkings of popular songs from the likes of Gene Clark and Elton John. The group bridged a lot of gaps at a time when bluegrass music was going through an evolutionary step, and throughout it all, Munde’s playing truly demonstrated how you bring bluegrass banjo into these shifting contexts without losing the essential heart. He would remain a constant in the fluctuating lineup of CG for nearly two decades. Besides having this influential band on his resume, Munde has also released several solo albums, and an extensive collection of instructional material.
Munde is both a trail blazer and an admired sage in the bluegrass scene, but he’s also a humble gentleman, with a thoughtful nature and soft-spoken wit. He recently sat down for a lengthy conversation with The SPPS.
Two High String Band at Fiddler's Green by Clay Levit
The SPPS: What do you think is unique about bluegrass music in Central Texas?
Alan Munde: I grew up in Oklahoma, which is similar to growing up in Texas, and you’re a long way from the bluegrass center in the east; North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and on up into Pennsylvania. Over there, nowadays, it’s almost a family music. It’s been around long enough that there are children growing up in families that have played bluegrass for a number of years. When you grow up in Texas, it’s somewhat of a foreign music, whereas country music and western swing would probably be more the norm. So if you play bluegrass in Texas, you’re kind of different. You don’t necessarily have a large family support group to teach you all the ropes and give you all the clues and signals into the bluegrass culture. So in a sense, you’re learning it from a distance. You get recordings and you may have been to some bluegrass festivals here and there, but most of the people I know are first generation players. So in a sense, you get the styles and the techniques without the depth and the background, the cultural part of playing bluegrass music. As a result, sometimes the music comes out a little different and you’re influenced by different things. Whereas, if you were a traditional bluegrass player from North Carolina, there might be some kinds of songs that you wouldn’t do, and certain kinds of chord progressions and forms. If you’re from Texas, it might seem fairly natural to do that. If you did something and someone said, “Well that’s not bluegrass,” it wouldn’t compute to a certain extent, because it sounded like good music to you, played on bluegrass instruments. There’s a difference in attitude about what really makes up bluegrass music. It manifests itself in a broader view of what bluegrass is.
The SPPS: What do you like about playing in Texas?
Alan Munde: First of all, I like the country. I really love Texas. I love the western part of the United States and feel really comfortable in the geography of it all. I think in the end, the people in Texas and the musicians are more open to doing different things, or just having a different sensibility about how the music is played. They’re not as rigid and firm in their beliefs that it goes a certain way and a certain way only. I like the greater openness and the acceptance of different musical approaches than maybe [what exists] in some other parts of the country. In a sense, I think there’s a geographic element in that. In Texas, we have miles and miles of Texas, wide open spaces and huge vistas. Whereas if you live in North Carolina or Virginia in the mountains, your views are just of the mountainside next to you or on either side of you. There’s a difference in your visual sensibilities and I think it translates in your sense of how music can go. If you take Bob Wills as a model for music making, he took lots and lots of different styles of music– jazz, old time fiddle and folk songs, and the music of the Spanish speaking population – and melded it all together. So in a sense, even though in [Texas] bluegrass you don’t play western swing, there’s that attitude of using lots of different influences. Even if they’re subtle influences, you feel like it’s been done before and it’s alright for you to do it too.
The SPPS: Is there anything you don’t like about playing in Texas?
Alan Munde: I think the reverse of what I said – if you were in North Carolina, or some place that was really solid into bluegrass, the sense of appreciation would be higher. Here, I don’t think it’s thought of too much. The singer/songwriter or electric band with drums I think is ultimately held in higher esteem then an all-acoustic bluegrass band is, which is fine. It’s just the way it is.
The SPPS: What kind of venues or festivals are your favorite in this region and why do you like those places or events so much?
Alan Munde: You know. that’s a good question. People always ask, “What’s your favorite places to play?” and many times I think they’re wanting, “I played for 10,000 people,” or, “I played for this huge event.” For me, it’s real simple. It’s any place we play that the sound is good, you can hear yourself and you can hear the other musicians. The music is really fun to play at those times. It could be at a venue that holds10,000, or it could be at a venue where there are ten people, but those are my favorite times and places to play.
The SPPS: Are there any specific places that come to mind?
Alan Munde: The Cactus Cafe in Austin is real good [editor’s note: please follow the campaign to save the Cactus Cafe here], so is Artz Ribhouse. I’ve played at Central Market and really enjoyed that. I’ve also played Kerrville and it’s been real great. There’s lots and lots of places, but it always comes down to, ‘Could I hear the music? Did I enjoy what I heard and enjoy playing [there]?’
The SPPS: What changes have you seen in the Texas bluegrass scene over the years?
Alan Munde: I’ve seen that there’s a growth in understanding of the core style of the music. I think the music has been around long enough now, and people have been playing it long enough, that they really have a grasp of the core sensibility. But, once again, they still have this broader approach to what you can play within that style. There is a Texas-based band called Cadillac Sky who have really taken the music way beyond traditional music, with lots of influences from pop and jazz, and they’ve done a really great job at that. The spectrum of the players here has broadened and gotten better, so the real traditional players play really fine traditional bluegrass and the far-out, edgy players play the far-out, edgy stuff really well also. The quality has gotten better throughout the spectrum.
Munde with Earl Scruggs, 1971. The photo was taken at a festival in North Carolina, Munde was a member of Jimmy Martin's Sunny Mountain Boys.
The SPPS: Going back, let’s talk about Ed Shelton, who taught you to play and was your mentor. What was he like?
Alan Munde: Ed was a repairman for the National Cash Register Company. This was back in the days when cash registers were mechanical. He worked for them, and he had a wife and a family, but he loved bluegrass music and he played the banjo very well. He played in a way that I wanted to play. I met him while he was living in Oklahoma City. He would call me – I didn’t have a car because I was just a youngster in college – and he would come get me. I would come up and spend the weekend at his house and we would mostly play music all weekend. He would play something, I would stop him at some point, ask him how he did that thing and he would show me until I got it. We had these certain tunes that we worked on – “John Hardy” and “Paddy on the Turnpike” and “Bluegrass Breakdown.” When we were apart, I would try to come up with something that was a little different then what he had done. And when we would get back together, I would show him what I had worked out in one little place and he would show me some things that he was doing.
He also had access to recordings of live bands – The Osborne Brothers, Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs – all these things that I would [normally] have no way of hearing, he had those and we would listen to those. A lot of those he got from Byron Berline. So Byron had those same tapes, it would be reel-to-reel tapes back in those days. We would listen to those and try to decipher the licks and the solos and the backup, so it was a real wonderful time just to get really into it. Every musician goes through a time when they spend all their time playing and rehearsing and trying to get their technique better. Those years with Ed Shelton and on through Jimmy Martin were those times for me. That’s all I had to do basically. When I was with Jimmy Martin, it was never ever enough to make a living, I had to pump gas and paint houses. I was a substitute school teacher. But in-between all those [jobs] , I would just play. Or I should say, practice. So with Eddie, he was just really good to me and very sharing, with not a selfish bone in his body. Everybody should have, no matter what field they are in, some experience like that, where an accomplished person shares all the nuances of how to go about it. I mean, there’s a real art to just knowing which finger of your left hand to put down at a certain time, so it was a real big help.
The SPPS: Could you describe the experience of playing with Jimmy Martin?
Alan Munde: When I went with him, I was 22 and he was probably in his late-40s, I’ll say he was 48. So he had been around a long time and had quite a career and made some really great recordings. On top of that, he was from a different cultural background then I was. My dad was a civil engineer and my mother was a homemaker, but she had a degree in math from the University of Oklahoma. So I came from that sort of a background, and Jimmy was from a much more rural background. It was a new experience for me dealing with his take on things, just how he looked at the world. And he had a drinking problem, which I don’t think is any secret at all. So that made things a little more difficult. But the other side of the coin was, I loved the music. I loved playing his music the way he wanted it played. He was really adamant and insistent on having the music played the way he wanted it. He wanted you to listen to his recordings and get it as close to that as you could. It was a real opportune time to learn how bluegrass music went, and went really, really well. Some of it, [particularly the] traveling was difficult, just on a personal level, but I think we we got along well. I never argued with him or said anything to make things difficult for either one of us.
The SPPS: Did you stay in touch with him at all after you left the group?
Alan Munde: I did. I would see him at different events and we always spoke, and were always friendly. I called him when he was in the hospice and talked to him. He was very generous with his view of my time with him in his band, thanked me for doing it, and said we had some good times together, which we did. It always went well, because I never, ever had a fight with him. There actually was no arguing with him. It’s just, he is what he is, and you just accepted it, or he’s not a part of your life. But I think when he died, he thought of me kindly. And I of him.
Country Gazette in 1973
The SPPS: What was it like for you to move from playing strict bluegrass with Martin, to playing with a group like Country Gazette?
Alan Munde: When I was with Jimmy Martin, it was the real hardcore bluegrass scene. Mainly, the places we played were bluegrass festivals, which had just blossomed in the late ’60′s and into the ’70′s. But at the same time, there was this streak of inventiveness and diversity in the musicspawned by a lot of players from the northeast, like New York and Boston, [and musicians like] Peter Rowan and David Grisman, Bill Keith on the banjo, and then in the west The Dillards, The Kentucky Colonels, Roland and Clarence White. There was a real interest with the younger players in playing other kinds of music than songs that appealed only to rural, country music fans. The younger crowd was interested in what their peers were interested in, the same kinds of songs and the same kinds of musical influences. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’ The Burrito Brothers’ The Byrds. Then New Grass Revival started along in 1971, and they were influenced by rock and roll. So with Country Gazette, Roger Bush, the bass player, had been in the Kentucky Colonels and Kenny Wurtz’ the guitar player, had been with The Burrito Brothers. Then there was Byron on fiddle who was living in L.A. as a studio musician and had played on movie scores with Henry Mancini, on recordings of The Rolling Stones and lots and lots of different groups out in California. But they all still loved bluegrass and wanted to do a bluegrass sound.
So we got together and recorded our first album [1972's Traitor in Our Midst], but the big difference between it and the bluegrass of the east was the song selection. It was more west coast songwriters. We did several Gene Clark songs, we did a Herb Pedersen song. The singing style was very different because we didn’t have a central focus for a singer. For example, if you played in Jimmy Martin’s Band, he’s the singer, he does it all. If you were with Lester Flatt, Lester Flatt’s the singer. If you were with Bill Monroe, it’s Bill Monroe. In Country Gazette, it was much broader. Everybody, except me, sang some lead. It was more of a group presentation for a vocal sound, which at the time was more like The Eagles. The vocal sound was more west coast then east coast, especially for bluegrass.
Also, the recording values were different. We doubled the vocal harmony to give it a much bigger, fuller sound. When I recorded with Jimmy Martin, we would go in and set up and record the song from beginning to end. There was no overdubs, there was no, ‘Oh, I’ll go back and fix it in the mix.’ When you recorded it, it was done, and if it didn’t come out right, then you did the whole song again. At the time, they’d book a session for three hours. I don’t know why that was the standard in Nashville, but you booked it in three hour blocks, and we would go in and record three or four songs. Nowadays, in three hours you barely get anything done because there’s so much multi-tracking and overdubbing. So when I went with Country Gazette on the west coast, they were more into that [style of recording]. You’d record a basic track and then overdub, so if I messed up my banjo part I could go back and punch it in. I could never do that when I was with Jimmy Martin, I had to get it right. Or if I made a mistake and they took the cut, [the mistake] was just there. It was a different recording sensibility, because they spent more money on recording in California than they did in Nashville. It was a whole different world for me and it really opened you up to try things if you knew that if you didn’t get it right, you could go back and correct it.
Country Gazette at that time was part of this California country rock scene. So even though we were way, way bluegrass, I thought, we ended up playing on shows for all other kinds of music. We opened up for the Steve Miller Band, we played in Europe, we were on television shows that Donna Summers was on, and The Rolling Stones and Soft Machine. It was no big deal over there in Europe at the time because we were part of this west coast scene, rather than bluegrass. We flew to locations and rented cars and drove around. It was very different from loading on a bus, or loading four in a car and a bass in the middle with our instruments in the truck, and driving 700 or 800 miles straight from Nashville to play one or two nights, and then turning around and driving 700 or 800 miles back.
The SPPS: After learning under Ed Shelton and playing with Jimmy Martin, how do you feel you developed as a musician during your time with Country Gazette?
Alan Munde: When you’re with Jimmy Martin and you did, “You Don’t Know My Mind,” there is a banjo solo that goes a certain way and you were asked to do that. But with Country Gazette it was like, “Here’s this song we’re going to do that nobody has ever thought about playing a banjo on, and how do you want to do it?” So I got to figure it out on my own. There’s a song we recorded, that Elton John song “Honky Cat” [on 1973's Don't Give Up Your Day Job], and our producer at the time was a gentleman named Jim Dixon. He was really, really good and it was his idea to do that song. He came to me and he said, “If you can make the banjo work on this, then it can be done. If you can’t, we’re not going to do it.” So I took the Elton John record home and worked on it and came in with something that he thought worked just fine. So we did it. I got to be be the creative source on the banjo in Country Gazette, rather than having to follow other people’s models all the time.
Country Gazette Reunion in October 2000 in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Pictured: Roland White, Roger Bush, Byron Berline, Joe Carr, Billy Joe Foster and Munde.
The SPPS: You also taught at South Plains for several years. Can you describe what that environment was like and the music program? A lot of great musicians went through there.I know you taught Spring Creek.
Alan Munde: You’re absolutely right, there were some really great players, and really good people. You know if you’re taught trumpet [for example], there’s 150 or 200 or 500 years of teaching and pedagogy about learning to play the trumpet. And you go from this graded study to the next graded study and it just moves forward in this logical progression that has been worked out over the many, many years of people playing trumpet and trying to teach other people to play. Also, its more embedded in the public schools. If you wanted to play saxophone, or trumpet, or even stringed instruments, like the violin, starting in the sixth grade you can begin to study those things in class with teachers and be part of musical groups that perform all the way through high school. Then you move on into college, and [college instructors] know where high school teaching leaves off, so they can pick it up. Whereas the program we ran, the commercial music program, there was no one place these students came from. So when they came to you, their talent and their musical understanding and their skills were all over the map. Some of them came wanting to learn to play bluegrass not even knowing what bluegrass really was, without a background [in the music]. All they knew was they’d heard a banjo or a mando or a dobro on some recording, and somebody said, ‘Oh that’s bluegrass.’ So they said, ‘Oh, I want to do that!’
They would show up at school, and some of them were very, very talented and had a lot of skills. You mentioned Spring Creek. Chris Elliott, the banjo player, when he came to school he was a guitar player and he had a harmonica holder around his neck. He was playing harmonica and singing Neil Young songs. While he was there, he heard bluegrass and just really, really liked it. [He] was really sharp and motivated, and picked it up really quickly. I love Chris, and enjoyed having him as a student. But he came in not knowing anything [about bluegrass banjo], and within two years, he was doing it. So you have these students with all those varied backgrounds and abilities and understandings, and you have to focus them in on what you want to do pretty quickly. So I had to tell them what I thought on how the music meant [laughs], not what they thought it meant. For the most part they were happy with that.
Also, there wasn’t a lot of really specific instructional material available. There is nowadays. 25 years ago, there was some, but not exactly what I wanted, so I had to sort of invent my own as I went along. The other faculty did too. Teaching at a college is different than just teaching in your studio, or in your home or at a music school. You had this whole bureaucracy you had to answer to – ‘How does this relate to the school and it’s mission, and how do you assign grades? What kind of curriculum do you set up? What is an exit test for this instrument?’ Those kinds of issues [were raised], and you had to catch it in language that matched the bureaucratic language of the other programs. So it was a challenge just to think about it,. But we had a lot of smart people on the faculty, and they did a really fine job of making it work and making it compatible in the community college environment. I’m really proud to have been a part of it.
The SPPS: Did teaching also help you as a musician?
Alan Munde: Oh sure! I got a better grasp of what it was I exactly was doing. Why did I hold my hand like that? Why did I put my fingers down in that way? What do you have to do to reproduce the style as exactly as you can get it? It made me look into all the little nooks and crannies of playing. It also made me realize how much of music is just the same thing over and over. It’s just mastering a set of skills, then training your ear to hear these happenings that come up over and over, identifying them quickly and then putting your fingers down where they need to be. It was just an enlightenment to me as to how music was really working, if I sat down and thought about it. It helped me out a great deal. I’m a better, wiser player than when I started [teaching] in 1986.
Cover of 2008 release Old Bones
The SPPS: Since you grew up in Oklahoma and feel such a connection to Texas, how has that sense of regional geography and music informed what you do?
Alan Munde: Every region in a sense is the same, in that they all have access to the radio, and TV and to the same recordings. For me, I was just trying to play the banjo as close to bluegrass [style] as I could, but what crept in was all these other sounds. So I play bluegrass banjo, but it’s got a softer edge to it. I use a different harmonic sensibility about the chords and how you move through the music than somebody who grew up in North Carolina might do. It just depends on what is around you when you’re learning. Even if you want to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, there are going to be sounds around you in the area that you grow up in that stick in your head. Not even with forethought – they just wind up being in [your music] because it’s in your brain. For me it was a lot of western swing bordering on jazz, like Slim Richey. Even though I always wanted to be a bluegrass banjo player, his sound was in my head. Or the sound of western swing violin. Texas has this style of fiddling called contest fiddling, and Oklahoma and Texas share the same sensibility about it. That stuck in my head. So you start fooling around with ‘em [these other sounds] and playing them in the context of bluegrass and your own sensibility.
The SPPS: Now, with internet download, mp3s, even burning CD’s, it’s so easy for people to get so much music. What do you think are the consequences of that?
Alan Munde: In a way, it’s a problem because you wind up not having a core or a center to your music, so you have a musician that says, “Oh, I can play this or I can play that.” They can do so much, but they don’t have a central thing holding their music together. It doesn’t have a central personality about it that people can hang on to and say, “That’s so-and-so.” It used to be in bluegrass, you could hear a band and say, “That’s Flatt and Scruggs, that’s Reno and Smiley, that’s Jimmy Martin.” Or in jazz guitar, you could say, “That’s Barney Kessel, that’s Tal Farlow, that’s Herb Ellis, that’s Charlie Byrd.” Nowadays, people have been influenced by so much, that’s it’s really hard to pick out one from the other. But that’s also the function of there being a lot more musicians, a lot more bands. I’m not trying to make a case that I’m an old fogie or anything [laughs], I’m just saying that it’s harder, I think, for newer players to find their voice because there’s so much going on that’s so good. You want to be a part of it all. That’s one thing I like about Billy Bright [Two High String Band], he’s really hip in lots and lots of different ways. He’s really dead-on, he’s got this way of playing that’s absolutely Billy Bright’s way of playing and that’s real cool. And Elliott Rodgers is a really great songwriter and singer, but when he does it, it all comes out his way. Same with Slim Richey. He can play lots of styles of jazz guitar, but what he does comes out highly focused. You can hear lots of different pieces of other people in there, but he does it in his own way.
The SPPS: What kind of changes have you noticed over the years in terms of making a living as a musician?
Alan Munde: One thing that I’ve come to realize, and I think everybody has, is it’s really difficult to make a living when all you do is want to do is perform. You have to do other things, and if you can make them part of the music, then that’s really great. So you also have to teach. If you have a product, you have to have a website. You don’t limit yourself to playing in any one band, and, for some musicians that can do it, you don’t limit yourself to playing any one style of music. You play in a bluegrass band one night and accompany a singer/songwriter the next night. Another night you plug in and you’re in an electric band. Or you even [play] different instruments. You have to be a much broader musician then just playing one style and one style only, and one instrument and one instrument only, and one band and one band only. The more you spread yourself around, the better chance you have to make a living.
The SPPS: After all these years of playing, what still drives you?
Alan Munde: It’s easy – I love music. I love playing, and I love being a part of musical events with other people. I’ve always enjoyed being in a band, and who I play music with is sometimes more important than the actual music that gets played. I’ve enjoyed being around musicians that I like, not just their music, but them personally. I’ve just played music all my life, and want to continue that. And I always think I’m going to get better. Maybe. You know, when my dad retired, he didn’t do anything. I think this happened to a lot of people in his generation, all they ever did was work and they never had any hobbies to give them added pleasure in life. I don’t think he was terribly happy when he retired. But I always tell people, “I know exactly what I’m going to do when I retire. I’m going to learn to play music.” So I’m still learning. I find great joy in learning a new way to get from one note to another, or learning a song a little bit differently. Just to have the experience of playing in the moment, moving my fingers and hearing what comes out. Thinking about it, and trying to come up with something just a little bit different than the day before. Just that. I love doing it.
Alan Munde
Alan will be playing with Two High String Band on Saturday and in a duet with Byron Berline at RiceGrass this weekend.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
CTBA and Cabin 10 Present RiceGrass, a Two Day Spring Bluegrass Festival in the Hill Country
…and Steam Powered will be on site!
RiceGrass will be held Sat & Sun, March 27 & 28 on the beautiful grounds of the Fischer Haus Bed & Breakfast in Fischer, Texas (where most folks camp while attending the Rice Festival in the fall) Danny Barnes, Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum, Byron Berline & Alan Munde, Two High String Band and more will perform at this spring festival in the Texas Hill Country presented by the Central Texas Bluegrass Association (CTBA) and Cabin 10, Inc. Bring your children and friends to enjoy camping, jamming, and performances from the finest local and touring bluegrass and old-timey musicians.
(In addition there will be short “tweener” sets featuring some of
CTBA finest musician members.)
String up your instruments and bring them with you, as there will be plenty of jamming in the on-site primitive camping area. Tickets are $80.00 for the weekend, $70 for Saturday Only, $20 for Sunday Only. For information on discounts for young adults and CTBA members please go here. Children 12 & under are free when accompanied by paid adult. Proceeds from the event will go towards performing arts scholarships funded by Cabin 10, Inc. & The Central Texas Bluegrass Association.
Each day an instrument will be raffled off. Fiddler’s Green, an authorized Martin Guitar dealer in Austin, is donating a Martin LX-1 on Sunday and Cabin 10, Inc. is donating a handmade banjo on Saturday.
Jan & Dennis (owners of the Fischer Haus B&B) will be selling hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, etc. both Saturday and Sunday. Complimentary water, soft drinks, wine and cold beer is included in Saturday’s ticket, but only water & soft drinks on Sunday. Bring folding chairs or a blanket to spread out in the field. Boagie and Louie are the camp dogs and prefer to garner all the attention, so please leave your pets at home.
Fischer Haus “Cantina,” has since been added on to including a bathhouse with hot showers. Tent campsites behind the B&B are in a beautiful canopy of oak and old growth cedar trees. All parking for campers is now on site. Limited trailer camping will be open to small vintage or pop-up types under 18′ - call the Fischer Haus folks ASAP (830) 935-3011 to reserve place. Primitive camping is $10/night. Larger than 18′ trailers and RV’s (as long as they are self-contained) can park free within a short walk of the festival site.
To purchase advance tickets via PayPal, click here. After 4:00 pm on Friday, March 26, tickets can ONLY be purchased with CASH OR CHECK at the gate beginning Saturday at 8:00 am.
…and make sure to check back for a full review with photos next week!
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Memories of John includes 14 tracks of tunes and songs. Some are well known to John Hartford fans; others are complete renderings of sketches that John Hartford left behind.
A major highlight of the Sat. March 13 Catskill Symphony Cabaret Concert will be a return engagement of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, American folklorists, musical virtuosi, and composers. This concert will offer a variety of selections from the wide repertoire of these extraordinary musicians, who have become one of the most celebrated duos on the American and international acoustic music scene.
Ungar and Mason are noted not only for their work with Ken Burns in the PBS Grammy-winning feature, The Civil War, and their soundtrack “Ashokan Farewell,” which was nominated for an Emmy, but also for their many other network TV spots. Their appearances on A Prairie Home Companion and on soundtracks for Brother’s Keeper and Legends of the Fall have added to their fame and popularity. Garrison Keillor, host and creator of A Prairie Home Companion says their music is “simple and overwhelming . . . joyful and full of feeling . . . an apotheosis of American traditional music.”
The Symphony will open this Concert with selections from The Andalucia Suite (including the well-known “Malaguena”) by the Spanish-Cuban composer Ernesto Lucuona. This concert will be offered in the “Cabaret” style, with the audience seated at tables. Light snacks will be served and beverages will be available.
A second highlight of this concert is the now-traditional Conductors’ Raffle. One of this year’s four candidates, after brief instruction by Music Director Charles Schneider, will have an opportunity to lead the Orchestra in a performance of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The winner is determined by the amount donated by supporters of each candidate. Senator James Seward will serve as Master of Ceremonies. This year’s hopeful conductors are:
DOUG DECKER: Well known in the area as Member Service and Marketing Director at HealthLinks, as well as a local radio personality for 22 years, member of various local bands, Orpheus theatre performer, and former Eagle Scout. His TV appearances include “According To Jim” with Jim Belushi, “Suddenly Susan” with Brooke Shields and “The Norm Show” with Norm McDonald.
SAM GOODYEAR: Born in Cooperstown, raised, educated and lived in Morocco, Zurich, Washington, Turkey, Ankara, Paris, Greece, Swaziland, and Alabama, and has a Degree in French and Music from Yale University. Known as actor, pianist, singer, stand-up comic, radio announcer and cartoonist, he portrayed John Adams in an Emmy-nominated television adaptation of Jefferson & Adams.
DR. MICHAEL LEVENSTEIN: Claims medicine only as a hobby, with his future goals to be determined, depending upon conducting opportunities (he has no conducting experience, but is willing to learn). Musical experience includes clarinet, percussion and guitar lessons in public schoolsm, as well as Ashoken Fiddle and Dance Camp at Ashoken, N.Y. References are available upon request
JIM MULLEN: His memoir of moving from Greenwich Village to a village in the Catskills, called It Takes A Village Idiot, was a finalist for the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor. In his 2002 spoof of baby memory books, spaces for ‘Baby’s First Tooth’ and ‘Baby’s First Haircut’ are replaced by spaces for things like ‘Baby’s First Ritalin Prescription’ and ‘Baby’s First Lawyer.’ His freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and many other outlets.
As a continuing feature, an anonymous donor makes it possible for any one or two adults to bring any number of students to this concert without charge. For more information, or for reservations, call 607-436-2670
Paul's been the SPPS's server slave since the get-go. He's the CIO at Earthnet in Boulder, Colorado and is a die hard Linux freak. He's also an avid live bluegrass archivist.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Audio from our Thursday night showcases is up! Check it out here.
And while you’re listening to these sweet recordings, have a gander at these photos of last night’s showcase revelries, straight from the SPPS Memphis Bureau Desk.
Pre-showcase: Chris “C-Bob” Elliot checks out a banjo at Bob Carlin’s Gold trade show booth.
Boston’s Joy Kills Sorrow opens up the showcase.
Then straight from Ozark, Missouri, it’s The Chapmans!
Looks like they’ve got that crowd rapt.
Brooklyn’s Sweetback Sisters lay it down…
and get the crowd pumped with some flash cards.
Very nice Sisters! (psst is that a drum we spy? How’d you sneak that into Folk Alliance?)
Henhouse Prowlers! Need we say more?
Joy Kills Sexfist? Or does a Sexfist kill Sorrow? Hmm…
Punk legend Tommy Ramone and Claudia Tienan, aka Uncle Monk. What an honor to have them at our showcase!
Laura Cortese & Jefferson Hamer Duo, working their magic.
Allison Williams & Her Band rocking it.
Finally, Eggleston, Virginia’s Old Sledge close down what sounds like a fantastic night of music!
Thanks to Keith and Garian for the photos!
Stay tuned for recordings of Friday night’s showcases, and photo coverage of Saturday night, tomorrow.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Reports are trickling in from the SPPS Memphis Bureau Desk at Folk Alliance 2010.
Our taper Keith Bergendorff says:
“This conference is like heaven for anyone who loves traditional music. It’s a surreal experience to see a Marriott completely overrun by folk musicians, and there is beautiful, heartfelt music being played wherever you turn. While the conference is of course an opportunity for artists to gain exposure, evidence of the love of their craft is abundant everywhere, especially at the late-night private showcases. The SPPS showcase Thursday night concluded with a sprawling bluegrass jam that lasted two and a half hours and concluded long after the promoters had gone to bed.”
Sounds like a rowdy time last night…and we’ve got some evidence to prove it! Check out audio from the weekend and some photos below!
Taper Keith is setting up to capture the craziness…
Bob Carlin stopped by…
…and brought us this awesome poster!
Showcase time! Chicago’s Tangleweed served up some high-energy traditional bluegrass for starters.
Followed by Boston’s Della Mae, featuring the twin fiddles of Kimber Ludiker and Laura Cortese.
Quoting Keith: “They dazzled a standing-room only audience with a blend of delicate and boisterous arrangements.”
Then it’s banjos in the round, with Chris “C-Bob” Elliott and Allison Williams, demonstrating Scruggs and Clawhammer banjo techniques.
Looking mighty dapper there fellas! Keith reports that, “Henhouse Prowlers played with conviction and panache, and showed why they’re among the leading traditonal bands in the Midwest.”
Nashville-based Nora Jean Struthers & Her Band lit up the room next, playing a sunny set of country songs.
Tripping Lily from Cape Cod, Massachusetts closed down the bands portion of the evening. Although they might use traditional instrumentation, as Keith reports, “Their songs are anything but traditional, showcasing their unique perspective on life and acoustic music.”
Then it was open jam session time!
Singing songs until the wee hours.
Who needs sleep?
Thanks to Keith and Garian Vigil for the photos and reports!
Stay tuned tomorrow for wrap-up coverage of tomorrow night’s showcase session.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
My friend overheard an older woman in the bathroom of The Doughtery Arts Center talking about playing bass in her band. She joked about how, “It’s hard to have a reunion show when your band members keep dying off!” Now I’m of the mind that a little gallows humor is a healthy thing. Despite our attachments, it’s inevitable that scenes and their associated haunts come and go. So do the people involved in them. What lives on is what’s created and a sustainable sense of community running deeper and longer than a mere scene. In that community is the potential to keep art going as a vital, living experience.
This sense of community was apparent to me at the Austin Friends of Traditional Music2010 Midwinter Festival. The event was truly inter-generational, from the little kids who were taking workshops and peers my age picking outside, to the older folks who were sharing their musical knowledge and stories. Next to the front door of the Center, there was a nonstop picking circle with a rotating cast of characters.
Once inside, you were greeted by the friendly volunteers at the snack bar, who were busy slinging plates of everything from BBQ to hummus and veggies, along with some dangerously tempting cakes and pies. Besides the performances on the main stage, there was a well-stocked schedule of workshops, featuring things like old time jams, ukulele instruction and shape note singing lessons. Wandering the linoleum halls of the Center, peering into classrooms that usually house eager kids for art classes, one might find a gaggle of fiddle players, a collection of waltzing couples, or a group intently listening to the history of the AFTM.
It was certainly a fine day of music, nine hours worth in a packed schedule that included acts such as: Austin-by-way-of-Austrialia Thom the World Poet performing Thomas Hardy’s work, backed by the cleverly-named Bucolics Anonymous; the pre-war American tunes of Austin Banjo Club; the emerald harmonies and Celtic storytelling of Raising Jane; an appearance by local Tejano legend Manuel “Cowboy” Donley; the airy rhythms of community drumming group Inside Out Steel Band, that us straight to Trinidad with sand between our toes; and the powerful four-part harmonies of the Sacred Harp choir that sent us to heaven. This lineup circled the globe and brought us back to home soil, and I overheard more than a few people say that this was the most diverse lineup the event had boasted to date.
So with that, this writer thought she would share some other personal highlights. This is only a taste of what the AFTM had to offer, but Central Texans, make sure to mark it on your calender next year, so that you may gather some snapshots of your own.
Workshop by Rempert
The Balkan Singers
It was a hair past 12:30, but The Balkan Singers were already in a feisty mood. Their commanding voices muddled, rubbing the sleep out of our eyes, at least for those of us who still have trouble operating on a pre-noon schedule on the weekends. At one point, a song was introduced as, “a drinking song,” complete with jokes about audience participation. I can’t quite get the image of those twinkling eyes and wily grins out of my head, as one singer mimed raising the cup to her lips before the chorus broke out into song.
Consistently compelling maestros on their own, but put them together and some of kind of strange, wonderful alchemy happens. Their take on the duet is much more aggressive and spacious than your usual acoustic duo acts, with turns both breathless and soul feeding. They take you on a journey whenever they hit that stage. For instance an intense, edge-of-our seats number called “Bear Creek Road,” which Bright said was about driving with Jacques in the Santa Cruz Mountains, took us through nail biting passes, twists and turns, to rest on a grateful exhalation of safety. Even the more laid back songs were defined by rhapsodic moments, whether it was Bright picking high, tight notes through the lovely Kenny Baker tune “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” and or the two laying out “Up the Country” over a penetrating pulse, marked by Jacques snappy bow draws. At one point someone cried out with excitement, and I couldn’t have expressed it better myself. With one sweet album behind them (last year’s Texicali Blues) and another one coming out soon, they are a duo to keep on eye on, creating roots music for the new millennium
Pete Keane & Howard Raines
Keane (guitar, vocals) and Raines (fiddle, mandolin) picked on some classic tunes, including a nicely done take on Jimmie Rodger’s “Jimmie’s Texas Blues,” with Keane yodeling, and singing that immortal line, “The way I been treated, I wish I was dead.” Blues come from turmoil, but their core evokes a catharsis that leads to peace. As I looked around at parents gently herding fussy kids and a woman knitting up a storm in the back row, I was struck at how sweet this gathering was. Sweet, but certainly not stuffy. It was definitely a moment to simply breathe and let your troubles unwind.
Don Weeda and his cohorts in Slavadillo were a fine way to ease into late afternoon. Dance songs from Macedonia, The hypnotic accordion, percussive clatter on all manner of exotic-looking instruments and mesmerizing vocals drew us into a spell. I was particularly taken by the finger cymbals, called zils, as they danced in Anne Alexander’s hands, glinting in the stage lights. By the end of the show, singer Kathleen McDonagh’s daughter was hopping all over the stage, while a group danced in a line across the theater floor.
“What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin?” Steelhead String Band fiddler Trent Shepherd quipped at one point. “You can spill beer on a fiddle!” Steelhead brought a dose of levity to their set, but that didn’t take away from their serious musicianship. Playing a selection of mostly West Virginia fiddle tunes, Shepherd punctuated the selections with stories about growing up there. It brought the music into a well-defined sense of place, where it was effortless to close your eyes and imagine mist rising over the rolling expanse of the Allegheny Plateau. In a set that featured tunes by Melvin Wine (at the mention of his name, someone whooped loudly – only at a traditional music festival eh?), Blind Ed Haley and Doc Watson’s version of “Roving Gambler,” there was a vibrant sense of making the music a living experience, passed from hand to hand, with all the lonesome ache and raw joy it contains. The interplay between Shepherd and banjo player Jerry Hagins was also a real pleasure to watch, especially during “Lazy John,” where the banjo plunked while the fiddle wailed. “June Apple,” with a clogger to boot, was a hot way to end the set. And let’s not forget another joke, courtesy of Hagins: How many gorillas it takes to screw in a light bulb? The answer is one. But you need a lot of light bulbs.
Dan & Christy Foster with Ralph White
Ralph White by Rempert
John Clay, singer/songwriter, banjo player, and founder of Lost Austin Band, was an important figure in the seminal Austin scene of the 1960’s and 1970’s that revolved around the core of Threadgill’s and the Armadillo. Being younger and only two years an Austinite, I will openly admit I had not heard of him until tonight. But Dan and Christy Foster, joined by ex-Bad Livers fiddler Ralph White, played a short set of Clay’s work that left me primed to do some further research. There’s a keen eye for quirks and physical geography in his tales, storytelling that’s more flesh and blood than murky and mythic. His characters, many of whom occupy a west Texas town called Stamford, are warm to the touch, and their exploits, like the doomed juvenile delinquent protagonist of the “The Anson Runaway,” played out movie-style in my head as the Fosters sang. Meanwhile White’s distinctively dark bow work struck ink throughout the songs. At one point, Dan Foster spoke of running a radio show, saying, “I heard a lot of songwriters, but few touched me like John.” This was just a taste, but I could see why he holds Clay in such esteem.
Sidemen for Hire
Closing out the festival was Sidemen for Hire, a grab bag of Austin pickers consisting of Dave Seeman (banjo), Steven Crow (bass), Kevin Willette (mando), Jon Kemppainen (fiddle), Gary Mortenson (dobro), and Tom Duplissey (guitar). They had a grand time playing some choice cuts, such as Flatt & Scruggs’ “Over the Hill to the Poorhouse,” Mark Brinkman-penned “Devil’s Road,” The Stanley Brother’s “ This Weary Heart You Stole Away (Wake Up Sweetheart),” and an audience-requested “Soldier’s Joy.” Crow really dug in with his vocals on “Poorhouse.” Duplissey and Seeman broke off running on guitar and banjo, while Willette and Mortenson provided turns delicate and slinky on mando and dobro. It doesn’t get much better then when you’re playing some of your favorite tunes with old friends, and it was the perfect way to end this breezy day on a high-spirited note.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
We are pleased to announce the schedule for the SPPS Showcases at the 22nd annual Folk Alliance. Our showcases are being held Thursday, February 18; Friday, February 19th; and Saturday, February 20th. If you’re in Memphis for the conference, be sure to stop by!
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Most folks still had their coats on inside The Independent, a new-ish, and rather utilitarian, venue on the hip east side of Austin. It was a Saturday evening most Austinites would choose to spend hiding in their houses, as central Texas was experiencing its annual two weeks or so of genuine cold, rendering the land of breakfast tacos and Lone Star beers into a treacherous frozen tundra. Or at least you’d have thought it so, judging from the overheard grumbles about the weather. But no matter, there was some serious cowboy-booted stomping to be done – cold concrete floors be damned – as Shotgun Party and Green Mountain Grass shared a double bill that was poised to help us shake off our chills.
When Shotgun Party took the stage, the small crowd huddled in closer. We may have been shivering on the floor, but lord, it was smokin’ under those stage lights. Jenny Parrott (guitarist, lead singer and principle songwriter) beamed with a wily grin that made you wonder just what she was scheming while she played that sweet archtop acoustic. With the firey fiddle of Katy Rose Cox and the meaty bass of Andrew Austin-Peterson, the trio craft a sound that’s positively dreamy, an effortless smorgasbord of western swing, pre-war blues, Tex Mex and stripped-down country, with strokes of speakeasy shivers and jitters of gypsy jazz.
Shotgun Party by Manny Moss
At times, a punk aggression even snarls in their execution, as it did during their cover of well-loved traditional “Red Rocking Chair.” Driving on Cox’s diesel fiddle fuel, it was dizzying and delightful. But they are just as apt to settle into airy spaces, where the music flits and shimmies with an elusive sparkle. Their brassy, commanding stage presence, with snazzy, color-coordinated outfits to boot, held the whole operation together. Parrott introduced one particularly locomotive tune as, “A song I wrote about teenage boys while I was in puberty,” the lyrics peppered with images of thighs and peaches, all delivered in her potent, earthy voice. With a timeless sensibility that might well inspire some fresh bed frame bruises, those flashes you spy ain’t sequins, but genuine spitfire. Shotgun Party is an act to keep an eye on, and I’d suggest you sidle up to the bar and get acquainted. This is some potent, head-spinning, grab-the-back-of-your-chair-for-balance stuff.
By way of contrast, GMG’s stage presence was laid back, but there was no denying the fervor in their music. Considering how they often take time off to pursue other projects, it’s impressive to see how absolutely in sync they are when reunited. The GMG boys are schooled sonic geeks – Trevor Smith (guitar and banjo) especially is a double threat to look out for – unafraid to just go with the flow when they get onstage. With bluegrass as their base elements, they let their limbs stretch out in psychedelic progressions. That unpredictable nature has certainly gathered an enthusiastic, tight-knit family of fans to their hearth. But they have a keen sense of timing, knowing when to pull on the reigns and drive it home. That kept this show moving at a snappy pace in the midst of their explorations. It’s a gonzo take for sure (and the group does indeed describe themselves as “gonzo grass”), but as weird as they would get, that old home place was always in sight, glimmering over the horizon.
GMG by Manny Moss
Many of their songs are spiked with a sense of humor that’s not too far removed from John Hartford. Take “Doggymouth,” about being woken up by a beloved, if slobbery, pet, which saw Dave Wilmouth (mandolin) and Jesse Dalton (bass) growling the lyrics. This slid nicely into the sunny coda at the end, which features the lines, “Every creature’s one/That lives under the sun/And every dog, every dog will have his day.” Meanwhile, songs like the broody “Banker” or mournful “Bleuridge” exposed a darker sensibility, with criminals on the run and heavy, aching hearts. Smith’s banjo was as fleet footed as the thieving protagonist in ”Banker,” running over Dalton’s thumping bassline, before Adam ”Pickles” Moss’ goosebump-inducing fiddle broke in to audience cheers.
The crowd had parted to give them room for their barbershop-style encore on the floor, and as the band returned to the stage with their instruments, a gentlemen in overalls turned around and beckoned to no one in particular to come to the dance floor, eager to stomp down the last minutes before we would be left to fend for ourselves amongst the organic coffee bars and sleeping yoga studios that have infiltrated amongst the easter-egg colored taquerias of the east side. I was thinking in that moment how I would love to peruse Shotgun Party and Green Mountain Grass’s record collections. You got a taste of what might lurk in their vinyl boxes, or more likely these days, on their computers, in the respective cover choices. This evening we were treated to Bob Wills and Billie Holiday by Shotgun, and Olla Belle Reed, Peter Rowan and even Phish (a peppy “Poor Heart”) by GMG. Of course, in this iPod era, where listeners often consume music tracks like they would a bowl of M&Ms, it is hardly surprising for bands to draw upon a wide swath of influences.
But it’s important to note that neither Green Mountain Grass nor Shotgun Party merely skim the surface. If there are common threads to be drawn between them, it’s that they are both two acoustic roots bands that are comfortable living in this time of musical plenty and breathlessly quick evolution. They may follow their own crafty muses, but they don’t let those roots get out of focus. One can see the grooves where they’ve dug their heels in and the calluses that show they’ve done their homework, sense they’ve traced those histories every which way and back again. They approach their craft with care and intention, but when they take that stage, they’ll hit those spontaneous moments of musical zen, the kind that only come when you’ve put in the real work.
GMG by Manny Moss
Unfortunately, there were no tapers at this show, but check out some sweet live videos below (plus a link to the GMG LMA collection)
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
The annual conference draws together music industry professionals from throughout North America and the world to share ideas, network, and celebrate traditional music and dance. It is an event of celebration, education, and entertainment for all who attend. It will be held over five days in Memphis, TN. Events will take place at the Memphis Downtown Marriot and Cook Convention Center, February 17-21, 2010.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” – Wendell Berry
“In Yiddish we have a phrase, ‘de nomen est omen,’ the name is an omen,” Mark Rubin declares. “Don’t go to a doctor named Dr. Slaughter. But the guy named Dr. Dick is probably a urologist.” We are discussing language, specifically, how it’s used to describe music, but also the greater ramifications labeling can have. In the background, Hank Jr.’s football theme buttresses the commercials between plays on the TV at Waterloo Icehouse, a droning contrast to the topic at hand.
“Words have power,” Rubin reflects. “Words have meaning and meaning has context. They have weight. Words like ‘nigger’ and ‘kike,’ they mean something. There’s a reason why someone reading those letters would have an emotional response to it. The same way I have a response when I hear the word ‘gypsy,’ one of the most foul misuses of a word ever perpetrated. If you can call something blues, you can then put it in the blues category, and put it on the blues ghetto.”
“I think I first became aware of this problem, this idea of language and labeling and the way it can destroy you, or it can make you, when I worked with a guy here in town called Roosevelt T. Williams,” he recalls. “That was his name, [he was] Mr. Williams to me. When I met him he was 88 years old. He was a piano player and he sang American songs. In his repertoire, besides his own original material, were tunes by Willie Nelson and Irving Berlin, but they called him Gray Ghost because it was a cute little blues name. And they called him a blues piano player. So by calling him a nickname, that wasn’t even one that he particularly liked, they could then not call him ‘Mr. Williams.’ Simply due to the tone of his skin he couldn’t be a pop musician or be a great American songwriter. What he had to be was a blues musician because that’s the box we have set up for old black men.”
He stops and shakes his head. “It’s wrong on sooo many levels.”
The power to self-define then becomes crucial, as he describes:
Mark Rubin by Todd V. Wolfson
“When I first started playing in the Mexican American community, I worked with Santiago Jimenez Jr [and his band]. I heard a lot of white people tell me about their music and tell me about their culture. I’d be damned if I’d ever heard it from any of them. So I asked them, ‘What do you call your music? Cause I’d heard it called all these different things. They said, ‘Eh, we used to call it conjuno, which just meant group, but people don’t know what we mean, so we call it Tex Mex, ‘cause it’s a mixture of Texas and Mexican music. Like us, we’re Tejanos.’ By naming it, they own it. If someone else names it, you don’t get to own it. This is where a guy like David Grisman is a genius, he calls it ‘Dawg music. ‘He owns it. This is where Bill Monroe is a genius. He calls it ‘bluegrass music.’ Danny Barnes is doing the same thing, he’s got his FolkTronics. He names it, in other words, he can control it.”
“[But] if you’re so culturally illiterate that every time you see a white guy with a banjo, therefore it is bluegrass, then Bob Schneider wins the best bluegrass band in Austin award for 8 years running,” he continues. “So this is a degraded and culturally disconnected society. A third world nation culturally, and it does so simply by use of its language. I firmly believe that there’s a direct correlation between the misnomering of culture and the misnomering of everything else. Because if you can call waterboarding ‘not torture,’ if you can just change the meaning of the word ‘torture’ – the only way they can get away with that is because they made the word bluegrass meaningless enough to now describe Chris Thile. It’s not Chris Thile’s fault, I’m not faulting the artist. But Bad Livers never played a note of bluegrass. Not ever, not once. But it kept being a term that got put on us.”
To Europe and Back Again
Despite the Livers mistakenly being labeled as bluegrass, with Rubin’s own lifelong connection to the music, one assumes he would have found his way deeper into the bluegrass scene. Although he had Nashville aspirations when the Livers were shelved in 2000, this wasn’t to be the case. “One of the reasons I didn’t go into bluegrass music here in the states is because I’m Jewish,” he says frankly. “You don’t get to be in bluegrass music if you’re Jewish. It’s an ugly, dirty little secret that I don’t mind exposing. You couldn’t do it if you were black, I doubt you’d be able to pull it off if you were Catholic either. As much as we like to think of the United States and people as being open, bluegrass music is W.A.S.P. music. It’s the music of the economic and cultural disenfranchisement of once powerful Southern white voices. That’s what it is. I am from Stillwater, Oklahoma and I speak the way I do, but I don’t go to church. And I don’t go to their church. So even though I’d be very welcome to come play a festival, I would not be entirely welcome in traditional Nashville, there would be no doors open to me there. Now of course people reading this will probably say, ‘That’s not true, There’s plenty of Jews’, well, check yourself. Let’s check that out. They may be people of Jewish descent, but they’re not practicing Jews.”
Mark Rubin by Todd V. Wolfson
Remembering the incident that made it clear to him that the bluegrass establishment wasn’t going to welcome him with open arms, he says, “I bounced this idea off some people on a tour bus, at IBMA where I was hanging out, and a guy – a very famous bluegrass singer who I’m not going to embarrass – he said ‘Well Mark, we’ve already got us a bass playing Jew’ [referring to Mark Schatz]. He was saying it kind of like a joke, but he wasn’t joking. At that point when that door is closed to you, and I do mean closed, there’s no point picking a fight on that one.”
“Because in some respects, he’s right,” Rubin reflects. “If this music comes from the Church of Christ and of the Southern Baptist convention, [then] it’s music that comes from these peoples’ hearts. It’s one of the reasons that I like it so much, it’s so pure and so authentic. And I have no problem singing gospel music, like I say I’m down with Jesus, he was a fine upstanding Jew, it’s just the guys that follow him around that kind of give me the creeps. I work regularly with practicing Christians and it works out real fine, Ricky Skaggs and Danny Barnes high among them, because they happen to be practicing Christians. They actually behave Christlike.”
Rubin shares another anecdote: in 1996 he was trying to arrange a tour with concert promoters in France for his aforementioned long-time friend and musical collaborator Jimenez Jr., for whom he had produced a record. The promoters’ excitement faded when they found out Rubin intended to come along as the bass player. “They go, ‘Oh Mark, but of course you cannot come. I mean, I can get a white bass player here in France.’”
He pauses to let the point sink in. “In other words, this music business that we’re in, it has rules. And if you’re going to be playing Mexican music, you damn well better be a beaner,” he says, angrily spitting the last word out. “Like Ray Benson told me years ago, ‘It’s not the best guy for the job, it’s the right guy for the job.’ So the French want to see a bunch of brown guys playing music. Bluegrass doesn’t need another Jew. These are hard, painful lessons that I learned about some of the most important music in my life, to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to be involved, on a very fundamental level. So that’s what forced me in some respects into the ghetto of Jewish music. And in Europe they feel pretty guilty about what they done to us, so they’ve kind of made room for us at the cultural table.”
Always sensitive to language, Rubin dislikes the word klezmer (“’Klezmer’ means bum, it’s just like jazz, it’s just as disgusting a word, but somehow it just got put on there and now it’s not going to change.”), instead saying he’s, “Been spending a lot of time in Europe under the auspices of playing Jewish Ashkenazi dance music.” In 2000, he started working with Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, a brass group from New York City, who participated in a cultural intersection program with Boban Markovic Orkestar, a Rromani brass band from Serbia. They would do three tours with the band, and as Rubin describes:
“We went from Croatia to Latvia to Hungary, all these places on the map experiencing all these deep experiences, but at the same time [we were] traveling with Rromanis and seeing that, basically, they were treated like black people were treated in Mississippi in 1956. That was an eye opener. I had noted the dichotomy between, oh, they really wanted the gypsies up on stage, but they don’t really want them hanging around, which was something that happened to the Jews. The Jews were really famous for being bankers and being entertainers, those were the things they could do [legally]…It’s this love/hate relationship that Europe has had with these two different communities.”
Rubin then had the opportunity to be part of an EU-funded project called The Other Europeans that set up an ongoing cultural dialogue between a group of Jewish musicians and a group of Lăutari musicians. “It’s been amazing,” he says of the experience. “I spend about two months out of every year over in Europe work shopping with these guys in Vienna, Krakow and Weimar, Germany. Then we do concerts and lectures and demonstrations. It’s like a fairy tale story for me. It doesn’t pay too well, but the life dollars you get from these encounters and making these relationships with these musicians – it’s just otherworldly.”
But Rubin felt like there was a piece of himself that he was neglecting during this time. Despite being, “kind of a known guy” in the musical circles he traveled overseas, “I was completely ignored here in the states. I had bands playing all the time but none of them were at the same level [as Bad Livers], so people would come to me and say, ‘So what have you been doing?’ As if you’ve dropped off the face of the earth. I go, ‘I’ve been dancing in moonlight with gypsies.’ That doesn’t mean anything to them. ‘I’ve played Serbia.’ They can’t even point to it on a map. [They say] ‘Oh, I never saw you at Rockygrass,’ so they just assume that you don’t even exist. I had this long talk with Barnes about this, he said, ‘Man, I know you’ve been working really hard, but nobody knows you’ve been working really hard. I know what you’re doing is really worthwhile, but you haven’t tended the garden around here.’”
That rang true for Rubin. “The whole time I’m in Europe, I’m having these intercultural dialogues and we’re talking about European this and European that and I’m thinking, ‘I am not a European. I’m a kid from Stillwater, Oklahoma. This is not really my authentic voice.’ … So in this analytical nature, I talked to myself, ‘What do I really like? What are the things that are genuinely American? What are those things that appeal to me and make me insanely happy for no reason whatsoever?’ And then I started picking around with this guy Silas Lowe.”
Silas Lowe and Mark Rubin aka Fat Man & Little Boy
They’ve Suffered For Their Art
Rubin met Lowe when he was hired to do a piece on local old-time music for The Austin Chronicle in 2007. Lowe had just moved to Austin, and, “In the conversations with him I realized he was a smart cat and was a good musician with a similar philosophical bent to music. [There were] some interesting corollaries in our personalities too, we’re both pretty well hated by everybody else who knows us [laughs]. The relationship I have with Silas is eerily reminiscent of the relationship I have with Danny Barnes.”
As Rubin describes, the group was started, “on a dare,” after Lowe took Rubin to a bluegrass night at Hole in the Wall, an Austin bar that’s a live music institution of sorts, about three years ago:
“I sat in the back drinking beer with Silas and after it was all over, we went to some other bar and I looked at him and I said, ‘Was I being punked? I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but you’ve got to be kidding me.’ Four groups of four or more people, a total of nearly twenty people, had invested time, money, energy and effort to create four sets of music that were so bad it was comical. Like as if it was a joke. That kind of fed back to how disappointed and embarrassed I was about what I thought the legacy of Bad Livers had been. I remember watching them, I was looking at the level of musicianship, and the level of craft was so degraded and low that I looked at Silas and I said, ‘With my mediocre talent and skill I could go do that and do it better.’ This happens to a lot of musicians, they’ll see something and go, ‘I can do that.’ And he says, ‘Well fine, go ahead and do it then. And I say, ‘Fine I’ll go ahead and do it. Alright come over to the house.’ We spent precisely twenty minutes working on material and we booked a gig. And Silas said at the gig, the first gig we played together, ‘We’ve got six emails invested in this gig right here.’ “
The Atomic Duo!
They intended to create performance art, billing themselves as an old timey brother duet reminiscent of Depression-era string band acts, to satirize musicians that take traditional music, and themselves, so seriously, while completely missing the heart and intention. But their best-laid plans didn’t quite pan out the way they intended:
“After doing about six or seven gigs, we really screwed up because we were trying to play badly, purposefully badly, and some of it sounded really good. So I had a meeting with him about six months into it, I said, ‘Look here sucker, we’re either going to have to suck or not, we’re going to have to make a decision.’ So we kind of begrudgingly decided, ‘Well, we might as well be good then.’”
This fall saw the release of The Atomic Duo (Rubinchik Recordings), the group’s first record, which also marks the first American folk recording with Rubin since his Bad Liver days. It features Rubin on resophonic guitar, fiddle and vocals, and Lowe on mando, man-jo (aka “melody banjo”) and vocals. A collection of songs that both Rubin and Lowe brought to the table, it was recorded live over the course of three hours at producer George Carver’s house, giving it an organic charm free of overdubbing or productive slick. Although it features blues, rags, ballads and waltzes from our collective past, it’s not washed in sepia and draped in calico. Instead it’s strikingly vibrant, capturing the warm-blooded immediacy in these timeless pieces. Rubin describes the selection process for the tracks:
“When I met Silas, I knew he was a mandolin player, so I tried to point him towards some mandolin music that I thought he would like. For instance, ‘Easy Winner,’ ‘Tanners Rag,’ ‘Take These Lips Away and ‘After the Ball.’ [Whereas] tunes like ‘Blues in the Bottle,’ ‘Milwalkee Blues,’ ‘Sitting on Top of the World,’ ‘Memory of Your Smile’ – these are tunes I’ve been singing my whole life, songs I’ll still be playing twenty years from now. But what’s fascinating about young Silas Lowe, and why I think he could just be a genius – you know what he did? He came over one day and he cloned my 80 gigs of music off of my laptop. He started swimming through there and finding stuff. If he found something that caught his ear, like a Blind Blake tune, he would work out his own arrangement on the mandolin. Then he would come and play that for me. Now bear in mind, I never heard the original, or I may have heard it once a long time ago, [but]I never really studied it. I just approached it that my friend Silas came to me with a song.”
“It’s a more naturalistic approach to music,” Rubin continues. “Some of my great heroes were Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, Big Bill Broonzy, guys who knew a song and altered it to fit their own personality. I think that’s what ended up happening [with Silas]. Some of them are just folk songs laid out the way they are, but if you had heard the original ‘Rope Stretchin’ Blues,’ it doesn’t really relate at all to what we’re doing. The original ‘Turpentine Farm,’ I’ve never even heard it in my life. ‘Going to Germany’ is a full jug band [number], there’s five or six musicians on that track. So in my guitar playing I’m trying to edit the best of the different kinds of instruments in it. Trying to distill it down to where we’re not trying to mimic an old sound or an old approach, we’re just trying to take what’s a classic piece of music, I like to say, ‘a song for the ages,’ and infusing it with our own experience and musicianship to breathe life into it and make it present.”
Noting that he’s labored over past albums much more, Rubin feels, “It’s the best sounding record that I’ve been involved with in a long time. Number one, I didn’t produce it, that’s why [laughs], I was smart enough to let somebody else do that, but secondly, it was just zero agenda except, ‘Hey this is some cool music, let’s have a good time.’ The record has enough clams on it to make chowder. But that’s not the message people are getting. Some people that I know that have known me a long time, and who ought to know better, tell me that they like that record and play it a lot.”
Fat Man & Little Boy by Max Minor
So the conceit that started the band has dropped away. “I feel kind of weird because we’re dressed up kind of goofy,” Rubin says, refering to a photo on the back of the album sleeve which features him and Lowe suited up and holding their instruments stiffly, with dour expressions. “This is a joke picture, back when we were doing our performance art thing, so we wore this dressy getup and we have this kind of stilted look in our face. I like it ‘cause we look mildly retarded. [But] we decided not to wear getups or pretend like it’s another time. You know, the whole O Brother,Where Art Thou? routine. It’s a trap that people run into, and I hate it … [Instead] just though our own personalities, our own musicianship we’ve developed an approach. I really look forward to my new concept. As Silas likes to say, ‘Most bands have terrible material, and they play it badly. Then there’s a lot of bands that play really great, but play terrible material. We’ve got the best material that ever was and we play it pretty terribly.’ That’s our conceit.”
“I know some great songwriters, and the same thing with Silas,” he continues on where they would like to evolve from here. “So we’re thinking, why don’t we take material from people that we know and respect and do the same thing? So lately in our gigs we’ve been doing tunes by Don Walser, Danny Barnes, Steve James. We do a tune that Silas learned from The Hunger Mountain Boys. These great songs are just grist for this mill. I really want to see what we do with contemporary material that speaks to contemporary experience, but that just happens to be in this classic way. I think that’s a more interesting conversation then dressing up and pretending you’re a brother duet act.”
Rubin views the ultimate aim through his analytic lens:
“We’re just trying to have a living experience. That was a filter I learned from working in Europe all this time. How can you take this music, this Jewish music for instance that was wiped out in the Holocaust and that was completely assimilated by the time it came to the United States, how can you go back to that and try to make it vibrant and alive and mean something to you in a modern age? It’s a difficult process. But for American music, it’s pretty darn easy because, for me, you just get up and you reference all the things you like about acoustic and American music and then you throw out all the parts that you don’t like. Then you get another guy who does the same thing and then you create your little sound. I hate to say it, but that’s kind of how Bad Livers got rolling. It was just that we were focusing in on those things we liked the most and editing out the things that we didn’t like.”
In many ways, this project brings back memories of the Livers for Rubin, with the sardonic humor (early taglines for the duo included, “Come see why no one comes to see us,” and, “We’ve suffered for our art, now it’s your turn”), lively stage banter, and the enjoyment that comes from playing with folks that get it:
“This reminds me eerily of how Bad Livers first started off, with no expectations, no limits. Silas turned to me the other day and he said, ‘You know playing with you is the only time that I’ve never had to edit anything that I do.’ I’ve never once said anything but complimentary stuff about what he does and I’m not making it up, because I really like what he does. If he wants to show up at the gig with a guitar and play guitar all night, I’m not going to bat an eye. I showed up with a fiddle one time, I played fiddle all night long, he didn’t say a word. This reminds me of the time I showed up at a Bad Livers gig with a tuba. That’s what I played all night long and nobody said a word. Because that’s not that important anyway, what’s important is getting your needs met in the moment.”
Fat Man & Little Boy (with George Carver and Steve James) - CD release party at Fiddler's Green, by Clay Levit
As far as his future hopes for the project, Rubin isn’t putting too much on it. He doesn’t care about record sales or booking gigs, although he admits, “We’ve deluded ourselves into telling ourselves that this is an art project, that’s how we’re able to hold on to this detachment from it.” He does say, “I have a feeling that in every town in America there’s ten or twenty dudes that would really like what we’re doing. And if I could just get my record to those guys and if I could just hit the road every once in a while and just play for those guys, I would be completely thrilled, that would be all that I require. I’m real proud of it, and I’m just so happy and edified to see that other people like it as much as I do.”
They have indeed attracted some like-minded musicians to sit in, including Steve James, Doc Hamilton, Alan Wooley (Rubin’s former bandmate from his pre-Bad Liver days in Killbilly), and Betse Ellis (The Wilders, who Rubin describes as, “One of my favorite violin players on the face of the earth.” ) “What I’ve found is if you resonate life and love and joy in what you’re doing it will attract people who are interested in life and love and joy. We’re envisioning a tour right now where we’re gonna go to every town where we have friends that play music who just want us to come and play with us,” he explains.
It’s plain to see why so many want to jump on stage with the duo. Rubin and Lowe’s infectious relish for the source material, often spiked with a loving irreverence, creates an environment where it’s futile to resist that fun suction. This easy going musical attitude is reflective of a renewed simplicity and joy in Rubin’s philosophical approach:
“Once again I learned the lesson that I must have forgotten before. The Native American kids I grew up with, they used to say, ‘Great spirit wants you to be happy all the time.’ Not just happy but deliriously happy. And if you’re not deliriously happy all the time, that’s on you. That’s your problem. And I’m beginning to understand that the more that I play music and the more that I work with musicians. You know, the death trip. The unnecessary complexity, strange agendas, all this stuff – this is all a death trip, it’s all based on fear. Who cares what material success you have in the world? It doesn’t bother me because I’m striving to win the battle every night.”
“Danny [Barnes] made this analogy one time: this is archery,” he continues. “I know when I’ve hit the target or not. That’s an internal thing. And you’re not always going to hit the target, but by god you’ve got to have a great time while you’re doing it. ‘Cause life is short people, it’s shorter than anybody can imagine. You cannot have regrets and you cannot be self-editing and constantly in this position of trying to create something out of nothing. I think that goes back to what I was talking about with intention, motivation. Here I am again, learning my motivation is love for this material, and the joy I receive from playing it in the company of good friends. That was my motivation and that needs to remain my motivation if I’m to be successful. My version of successful is the look of joy that’s on my face every time I play. People have been sending me pictures of us playing and I don’t remember ever being so happy and smiling all the time.”
2009 has been a tough year for Rubin. Besides the injury he’s been through a divorce, a home foreclosure, and buried sixteen friends (“a couple of them by suicide”). But he maintains, “I got to tell you, this is the happiest I’ve been in my life. What is it man? Sitting down and playing some good old American music with my buddy Silas. It’s just an expression of complete pure joy.”
Reflecting on his surgery, Rubin concedes that even if he doesn’t play bass again, it will be ok. “For me, the instrument itself just doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s like, where’s the music? What’s the music living in? What can I do to propel the music forward? And if that means picking up a fiddle or a tuba or a bass or whatever, I’m not trying to impose my own view on that. I’m just trying to be quiet and listen. Do like my dad said, keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, then when you formulate something good, add to the conversation.”
Love Versus Fear
Throughout our two-hour conversation, Rubin would often mention the names of his musical heroes (Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, John Hartford, Mississippi Fred McDowell, for starters), who have inspired him to find his own voice in whatever musical culture he’s traveling in, while celebrating those elders’ work. “I hope to bring something to my conception of music that has a cord that runs through all of those forms, that I have a sound an approach that’s identifiably my own, however, it honors whatever custom or tradition I’m working in,” he explains. It’s a difficult and vital balancing act. But for Rubin, it ultimately comes down to very simple terms of intention – love or fear. He mused at one point:
“I had a conversation with this guy the other day, and he was saying, ‘Well I have to go work with that guy, he’s the only banjo player in town; And I go, “Well, he’s a douche bag. So you’re telling me you have to go play with an unpleasant person. You’re making this conscious decision because you want a banjo player?’ In other words, that’s not a musical decision, that’s not a love-based decision. That’s a fear-based decision. And Bill Monroe didn’t create bluegrass music by making some fear-based decisions. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, he by-god created it and there it is.”
The threads all tie together, in a cultural conversation about how we can move forward by honoring our past.
“We as Americans have a shared cultural literacy and cultural heritage that too often is eviscerated and just not presented to people,” Rubin explains. “I think people would feel better about themselves [if it was]. A lot of us feel depressed right now, a lot of us feel really down trodden, like we can’t do things, like we’ve been taken out of the system, that our vote doesn’t count and our opinions don’t count. But the fact of the matter is, we Americans are a resilient people. And we have a deep and rich cultural legacy that, I think, if we were more in tune with, we would be a more powerful people. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean us, the little people. I’m not talking about the people who run the structure here. This is why Woody Guthrie was so radical. Art has the ability to do this. I don’t mean to force an agenda or some kind of construct on it, but I think we have a lot to be proud of, as long as we recognize the inequities that we have also created. And I think that’s an outcropping of what [Fat Man & Little Boy] are doing with our music here. I hope.”
As Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, “How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?” There are many painful stories and subtexts to face in our history, and Rubin enlightened this writer on a couple tonight, from the origins of the word jazz, to the real story behind the song “Going to Germany” which is about how black soldiers were sent over to Germany to step on land mines during WWI. It might seem easier to tune it all out with TV static. But history is full of maddening repetition, and these fearful times seem to provide nothing but sad proof of just that as we are rapidly being forced to confront the dark side of the American dream.
But maybe it’s about time we redefined that vision. Our cultural legacy can then be our salvation, especially when we look at examples like Bill Monroe. He renamed his music “bluegrass,” grasping it away from the snobby elite that decried it as “hillbilly music,” bringing dignity to his art. By similarly owning our shared story we can perhaps travel out of the death trip and onto a different path. Call it love, call it enlightenment. Define it how you will. Thankfully, we have guides like Rubin to take us there.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home. – James Michener
It’s a chilly, drizzly Monday evening in Austin, a few nights shy of Halloween weekend. At the Waterloo Icehouse on the north side, Hank Jr. is emphatically seeking reassurance that we are, “Ready for some footbaallll!?!?” on T.V. Sitting across from me at a shellacked table speckled with neon beer sign light, Mark Rubin is scanning over my list of hyper-planned out interview questions, which have long and graciously gone out the window.
“Playing in Europe?” he says, with his light Oklahoma drawl. “I’ll just tell you this. In America, we have football, and there they have orchestra. That’s all you need to know. High school orchestras over there can whip the Austin Symphony with their eyes closed. They believe that music and culture are human rights. We think they’re something you should pay for and do for a hobby. As long as football is in the high schools and orchestra is not, we will be a second class nation mark my words.”
Rubin, who even describes himself on his blog – Chasing the Fat Man – bio as, “an opinionated loudmouth,” doesn’t mince his words. “I try really hard not to have an opinion about something that I’m not pretty well educated about,” he explains at one point. “A big problem I get into is when someone asks my opinion I have a tendency of giving it to you. I will tell them precisely how I think and if I say something crappy about somebody I have no problem saying it to their face. A lot of people aren’t used to that. But life is really short. We don’t have time for this crap. People are dying every day. Just because I say I think that’s a stupid move, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen you do,’ that’s based entirely on love. That’s because I care. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have an opinion.”
Mark Rubin
A stubborn rebel with a finely tuned sense of justice, Rubin comes armed with that quick-to-bite wit that comes from being an outsider, the essential self-protective survival skill for those that get perpetually labeled “not one of us.” But independence from the confines of any particular scene has driven him to perpetually seek out authenticity in the midst of commodified cultures. Rubin is then fighting on the outposts to keep that genuine American heart beating. Best known to many as the bassist and foil to Danny Barnes in Bad Livers, he has been involved in a plethora of projects too numerous to name here, but even a perfunctory glance at his bio reveals a list that draw from wells as local as Texas swing (Ridgetop Syncopators) to the Middle East (1000 Nights Orchestra), from instructing at Klez Kamp to supervising film soundtracks (Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys). He has also made tracks across Europe as a champion of Jewish music, and has now felt called back to his home soil in latest project, a sly Americana duo with mandolin player and vocalist Silas Lowe called, in his true sardonic fashion, Fat Man & Little Boy.
It should be noted, I’m catching Rubin at an uncertain time. Tonight, he’s in a lot of pain from a shoulder injury he sustained while in New York City to play some gigs with Andy Statman (“One of my heroes for as long as I’ve been playing music,” he notes). He lifted his bass over a turnstile Greenwich Station and tore his rotator cuff.
Although he explains the success rate for this surgery is about “80 to 90%,” ”The fear that you have when you have an injury like this is, will I ever play again?” Rubin explains. ”And it’s on the table, I’ll be completely honest with you, that’s an open question today. Will I be able to play in the same sort of aggressive way for which I’m known for playing?”
It would be a shame if not, since watching Rubin nimbly blitz the bass is a thing of savage beauty. He’ll know once the healing and rehabilitation process takes effect, and is looking at a couple months recovery time. But the flip side of the unfortunate injury is the support he received. Being a musician ain’t exactly a lucrative gig for most, giving little wiggle room for the unexpected, and Rubin was faced with the question of how he was going to pay for the surgery and its associated costs. Forgoing the usual charity gig route, he decided to simply set up a donation link on his blog. Within thirty-six hours, he had raised the money he needed.
“I had gotten donations averaging a hundred dollars an hour for 36 hours,” he says. “The inherent goodness of people will surprise you. I had contributions from Canada, London, Berlin, Weimar, Germany, Chisinau, Republic Moldova, Krakow, Poland. Places I can’t pronounce, people I don’t know, and finally the one that capped it was I got a hundred dollars from a lady in Osaka, Japan who I gave a lesson to in Germany two years ago. On the one hand, I felt sad having to go out to the public that way, but then to find out that I had such a supportive community, probably more supportive than I am aware of in my daily life – it’s sad that it takes tragedies and difficulties to illustrate that to you, but it’s very warming and heartening to know.”
It speaks to the roaming trajectory Rubin has cast over the years in his rangy career. He approaches music the way one should approach travel, with open eyes and open ears. For Rubin, the two experiences are inextricably interwoven. “ ‘You want to see things and see how the world really is, be in a band,” he reflects. “Because you don’t get the first class accommodations, you get the same kind of accommodations that people in your own economic strata get. That’s whenyou really find out what the world is like. You sleep on somebody’s couch in Hungary or see what a border crossing in Serbia is like – that will change how you think about your own country quite a bit.”
This extends to a more philosophical level. The antithesis of what could be described as “cultural tourism,” Rubin has followed where his innately curious nature have led him, and when he wants to play something, he dig in deep and tries to understand it. The driving question is, “What are my intentions?”:
Mark Rubin at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival 2008
“The motivations that drive consumerist America have to do with consumerism. For instance, ‘I bought the right hat, I bought all the instruction books, I joined the club, I spent all this money, I bought the instrument, hey, I’m in now.’ One of the problems with the United States and its relationship with the rest of the world is that the rest of the world is not a consumerist world. They don’t believe in conspicuous consumption the way we do. There’s this idea that Americans believe that their wealth doesn’t make somebody else poor, when nothing could be further from the truth. There are only limited resources on the earth, and I think that if you’re going to approach someone’s culture this way, ‘Well I can just pick and choose whatever I want to do, and it’s ok because I’m just visiting, and I’m an American so I can do whatever I want’ – its imperialistic. There’s nothing I find more ignoble.”
It’s an idea he’s approached from several angles on his blog: “My major ballywick has to do with context. I think that’s sorely missing from our society right now. People don’t take time out for a moment and consider the ramifications of their actions. If they did, I think they would be kinder and gentler and more forgiving and more involved in their own communities, rather than doing, what the Buddhists say, spewing confusion. Our society is designed on keeping everybody in a confused state. We’re at the point now where if people want to have a genuine cultural experience they have to make it up.”
Oklahoma Roots
Rubin credits his father for installing this profound understanding of the well-tread adage, “Be a traveler, not a tourist.”
“’He said, ‘The most disrespectful thing you can do is to be a tourist in somebody else’s town. When you go someplace, rather than showing up with a list of things you want to do, keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, and see what’s going on. See how people are dressing, how people are acting, how people are talking, that will answer everything you need to know. You’re going to have the best experience by going to a place to do that. If it’s set up for the tourists, don’t go there, just ignore it. Never be a tourist.”’
“In his life, he liked to extend that further,” he continues. “’Never be a dilettante.’ If you were going to go and do something, then you were going to go and do it. You’re not going to play at it, you’re not going to play like it. You’re going to do it, and you’re going to honor whatever that is. That was a crazy, big time, major component of my upbringing. For instance, when I decided not to go to college and I wanted to be a musician, my family said, ‘Well that’s fine, but if you’re going to do this, you better damn well be the best at it.’ Which, number one, Jews are not failures. You know – ‘The goyem are looking, don’t screw up, they’re looking!’ [laughs]. That’s a big part of my life, ‘Don’t fuck up, we’re the only Jews in town!’ So you’re constantly on guard. And the other thing was, ‘Don’t screw around at it, just go ahead and do it to the best of your ability and take it as far as you possibly can.’”
Rubin was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma, a town located in the prairie northeast of Oklahoma City. His mother was an English teacher and his father was the director of international student affairs at OSU, with a hobby as an announcer for the Cowboy marching band, . His parents had both been in concert band when they were in college, and had originally moved to Stillwater when his father became executive secretary of the Kappa Kappa Psi Marching Band Fraternity. Although Stillwater is politically conservative, the agricultural engineering program at OSU attracted an international student body that exposed Rubin from a young age to a multi-cultural perspective:
”I was on one hand introduced to the world through these international students who cooked weird food and spoke in weird languages and listened to crazy music, and on the other hand I was basically living in the buckle of the Bible Belt and was a practicing Jew. That’s a dichotomy, that’s something you have to wrap your head around. It’s kind of like being the only black kid in the neighborhood. Only black kids probably had it a lot worse than I did.” The family would drive every Sunday to attend religious school at a synagogue in Oklahoma City, but even in that community, ”I was considered kind of a weirdo because I didn’t show up for Hebrew school like everybody else did on Tuesday because my family didn’t feel like driving the 120 miles. I lived a lot of my life on I-35.”
It was on this stretch of highway and in those Stillwater streets he began to absorb the local musical culture. ”What’s on the radio from 6am to 10am every morning? Bluegrass gospel,” Rubin recounts. “When you would go into your community and they’re having a picnic or a soccer game and they have entertainment, it’s going to be a country band. My parents were big dancers, which is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to dance music in the first place. They used to square dance and polka dance, so they hired a local bluegrass band to come down and play for the square dances. Ever since I was a little baby, I would be seeing these bands. My father, to his dying day, played baritone horn in a community band. This idea of communal music making and music which is native to where you are has always been really important in my family.”
Dallas, Texas 1987, playing in a punk band called Bedrockers
The family moved to Norman when his father took a job with the Hillel Foundation there. Rubin describes the move as, “The difference between night and day.” The town was close to Oklahoma City, which had an active reggae scene that exposed Rubin to Jamaican music, as bands like The Itals, The Melodians, Justin Hinds, and Freddie McGregor rolled through OKC in the early 1980’s. He also became involved in the punk rock scene, immersing himself in bands like The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and Minutemen. By the time Rubin was a junior in high school, he’d already pre-enrolled in OU, but in his spare time, he would tag along with bands, and even had a stint as a roadie for The Flaming Lips at one point. At the time, he says, ”I didn’t really identify myself as a musician, just a big music fan. I played tuba in high school and elementary school, but that’s not exactly a punk rock instrument. I picked up [electric] bass just for fun about high school time.” Rubin began playing in local reggae bands, and never completed a college degree (”I like to say I have a B.A. in LSD from OU,” he notes dryly).
Oklahoma’s Native American culture also left an indelible impression on Rubin, whose adopted brother was a fancy dancer at pow wows his family would attend every other weekend. When he moved to Dallas in 1987, he was in for a culture shock. ”Man, that’s a white town. Where are the brown people with the cool food and the fun dances?” Being poor, Rubin found himself living in the African-American and Mexican neighborhoods in economically segregated Dallas, which further broadened his musical horizons.
All of these diverse experiences combined help shape a world view which Rubin describes as “analytical”:
“I’ll meet these kids from Philadelphia or Boston or New York. They’re fifth generation Jewish American. They’ve lived in an environment where Yiddish was spoken regularly, where Jewish culture, custom and context were just part of everyday life. Hell man, I was in Stillwater, Oklahoma, this was completely not my experience. So when I go out and seek culture that belongs to my own community, I’m looking for it through a completely different filter. They look at it because they’re in it. I like to say that, the man who’s on fire, he doesn’t know if he’s on fire, or if the house is on fire, or if the whole world is on fire. All he knows is, he’s on fire. So people that are in those communities, they have no idea that it isn’t like that someplace else. Looking back at my own cultural heritage, I think I was able to bring a new perspective to it. I’m not going to say it’s not an authentic experience or a more authentic experience, or a more culturally rich experience, I’m just saying the way I came to was not just a cultural and emotional way, but also from an analytical way, the way you would look at it from the outside. That’s been a long part of my history, being able to work within cultural and musical contexts, trying to live within them authentically, whatever the hell that means, while also recognizing it’s not mine.”
Bad Livers, 1991 by Ewolf
A Band of Proud Misfits
“People ask me, ‘What was the secret?’ And the secret was that there was no secret,” Rubin says of Bad Livers. Formed in Austin, Texas in 1990, the band often gets written up as a bluegrass/punk hybrid, but that is hardly an accurate portrait. Barnes and Rubin, joined in the first six years by Ralph White on fiddle and then by Bob Grant on guitar and mandolin, plus whoever else jumped on for the ride, were united by a shared love of American music, and a punk rock stubbornness that refused to play nice.
“Whatever people told us to do we did the opposite,” Rubin recalls. “People told us Bad Livers would be a stupid name. People told us never to work with Ralph White. I was told point blank never to work with Danny Barnes. And I was thinking, ‘Huh, if everybody tells me he’s useless, well a lot of people think I’m useless. So that’s just the guy to find.’ In our career we would hear about other musicians, ‘Oh that guy, he pisses everybody off,’ and me and Danny would go, ‘Hmm. We need to meet this guy.’ We ended up meeting some really amazing musicians [that way], guys like Erik Hokkanen and Steve James, who had reputations for being art over friendly. At the time we shuttered, we were talking about doing a record with the fiddle player from Sun Ra’s band. You don’t get those sorts of opportunities unless you make the sacrifices that have to do with not making the sacrifices.”
They signed with punk rock label Touch and Go to release their first album, Delusions of Banjer. They freely covered Motorhead, Thelonious Monk and The Stanley Brothers. They opened for The Butthole Surfers one night and The Dillards the next. And although many fixated on the novelty of that (an early single of a “Lust for Life” cover didn’t help matters), the band didn’t go out there with a gimmick. By giving themselves complete musical freedom, they simply kicked aside the usual parameters and assumptions that spring to mind when an audience sees acoustic instruments, particularly a banjo, on stage. As Rubin explains:
” ‘I’m not going to do what the people at Bluegrass Unlimited want me to do. I don’t give a shit what No Depression has to say about it. If y’all want to talk about it that’s fine. We’re going to continue to do it, talk amongst yourselves.’ That was the core nexus for nearly a decade of Bad Liver performance. We thought that was natural, but other people found it refreshing … Because we were acoustic, because we came from American sources, and because we were kind of snot-nosed and go-to-hell in our attitude, little aspects of the Bad Liver diamond could meet others’ agendas. We were never invited to the party, we were never let in the door. But the jamband guys saw what we were doing, and the punk rock guys really saw what we were doing. I remember once a guy come up to Danny, and he said the funniest thing, ‘cause it was true, he goes, ‘Man, somewhere up in the middle of all that, there was some really good bluegrass banjo-playing.’ Without ever having to pander to any one audience at all, just doing what we thought we should do, and just being so happy about that, that created some positive energy and that moves you down the road.”
But having that open agenda didn’t mean that the band didn’t have a call to arms. One the contrary, the band was deeply concerned with how artistic endeavors, particularly those of traditional Southern music, could be a source of empowerment. Rubin describes their “raison d’être”:
“We were trying to bring dignity to the disenfranchised. To bring dignity to poor people and to people that don’t have voices. To display to the greater community that there is great dignity and there is great honor in these cultures which have been cartoonified for fun and profit.”
Mark Rubin & Danny Barnes
For ten years they slogged up and down the highway asphalt, crammed in a van and sleeping on couches. Fueled by that shared mission, it nevertheless was a difficult way to barely make a living. Bad Livers went on an extended hiatus in 2000. Barnes had moved to Washington state in 1997, and as Rubin explains, “It was one of those kind of things were Dan goes, ‘I want to go do a solo tour,’ and I go, ‘You go right on ahead.’ And then I didn’t hear back from him again until 2008, ‘Hey I think I got a gig!’” Rubin is referring to their headlining slots at Pickathon and Hardly Strictly bluegrass in summer of 2008. “[But] you know that in the eight years that Bad Livers didn’t play, not one person ever asked me what happened?” he says sadly. “That says a lot. Not one fan, not one journalist. Nobody asked. I find that to be kind of strange.”
Although often cited as influential, for Rubin the resonating ripples of the Livers’ good work definitely remain a question mark. He often feels their stated mission went unnoticed. Mentioning disdainfully, “You got your whole hillbilly scene and your alternative this and your alternative that and your punk country and all this stuff,” I was curious if he was worried that would be their legacy.
“Oh absolutely,” he admits. “In 2000, I was personally sick because the bands that came up in our wake I thought were just terrible. I don’t mean terrible musically, I mean terrible culturally. I felt like they were using the door that we had opened to basically reinforce these negative stereotypes and that they did not have an honor or a dignity, but quite the opposite. They were rube-ing it up, being cartoonish and being base. I think I’m coming off like a condescending intellectual, like a tea-sipping Yankee New Yorker, but the fact is, it was tea-sipping Yankee New Yorkers who put together these terrible bands. Not just new Yorkers by the way, plenty of kids from the Midwest got it wrong too. I thought that the legacy of Bad Livers was to lower the bar, to have cheapened and demeaned Southern American culture yet another click.”
“I think when you ask me this question my mind goes to Jerry Garcia for a second,” he continues. “I was never a fan of The Dead. That had more to do with the people – kind of like Christianity, I like Jesus just fine, it’s the people who follow him around that got me scared, same thing with The Dead. As I got older and I’ve listened to some more of The Dead and I’ve read a lot of stuff [about them] I realized that the guys in The Dead, they listened to some great music man. Those guys were into American music. Once they had the ear of the public, they did everything they could to shine that light back onto the people that they were into. But their audience never snapped to it, they never snapped to this idea of an American cultural legacy. Like, okay, we’re jamming out and everything, but the nexus, the core, is a shared American experience. That you should listen to Fred McDowell, you should listen to Blind Lemon [Jefferson] and you should listen to Gus Cannon and you should listen to Bill Monroe.”
“I remember watching a documentary about bluegrass music and they interviewed Jerry Garcia and asked him, ‘Well, do you still want to be a bluegrass boy?’ and he just looked at the camera and he said, ‘I still want to be a bluegrass boy today.’ He had this childlike wonder in his face. And I thought, for a sensitive person, to have gone as far as The Grateful Dead had, and to be so wildly influential, and then to realize how awful and wrong that went, based on what your original intention was, and everyone is saying, ‘Jerry, you rock, you rock,’ and you’re going, ‘No no no listen to this Gus Cannon 78′ – That will drive a guy to heroin.”
“Using that analogy though, I don’t want to say that Bad Livers had anything to do with that sort of cultural legacy,” he further reflects. “I could never even imagine, ‘cause I don’t have the bank account that shows it [laughs]. But that’s how I thought, I felt like I was going to have to guard against my own disappointment in what I saw as all of the good work that we tried to do in trying to enlighten people about their own culture and their own circumstances and to take pride in it, was just completely ignored in the wake of the novelty of what we were doing … I’d be on stage and the Saxon Pub and people would come up to us and go, ‘Oh we love that song you do,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah that’s the Stanley Brothers, you should check them out.’ Well they’d come back two weeks later and say, “Yeah, I got that record, I don’t like it, I like your version.’ And you’re thinking, ‘Boy I’m screwing up.’ I’m personally not doing my job right, because what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to find the core, the essence of that music and highlight that. And most people are just looking at the outside. They’re not delving further in to the heart of it.”
But Rubin, cautious about sounding too optimistic, does feel recent years have shown him, that at least to a few switched-on folks, the miles logged were not in vain. Even if he will remain unsure of their legacy, he has been approached by folks as diverse as Yonder Mountain String Band to Bill Frisell who credit the Livers with opening their eyes a little wider: “I think only recently I’ve met enough people and seen enough stuff that I would go, ‘Yeah, oh hey that was inspired by us? Wow. I’m proud of that.’
“I got to tell you, showing up at String Summit this year was a real oh-ho moment for me,” he recalls of the Livers slot at YMSB’s festival. “It was a chance for a lot of people, and in some cases people that weren’t even born when we were making our records, to come up and say how moving and important it was, and how that led them onto a journey that found them other things. Like I wish everybody went out and bought a Don Stover record, I really do. In fact I think anyone reading this right now, at this moment should stop what they’re doing and go over to i-Tunes and download you a Don Stover record, I recommend you start with Things in Life. I can pick up the guitar or mandolin and sing you every song on that record. If I could have found a way to repay Don Stover with respect before he passed I would have done it, but I can’t, so what I’m going to do now is try and get his message out.”
Check back soon for part 2, where we discuss why Rubin didn’t end up in Nashville, his travels in Europe, and the story of Fat Man & Little Boy, how a performance art act turned into one heck of an Americana duet…stay tuned!
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
At 85 years old, Tut Taylor has traveled through nearly a century’s worth of history, and the unique path he has followed has taken him straight through the heart of bluegrass music – from its early days with Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs through newgrass, which he helped pioneer as part of John Hartford’s Aero-plain Band, to spearheading The Great Dobro Sessions with Jerry Douglas in 1994, which earned him a Grammy. A skillful luthier (he recently designed the “Tutbro,” his very own Dobro, just to name but one example), dedicated archivist, and dynamic picker, even his style of Dobro playing is distinctive, earning him the nickname “The Flat Pickin’ Dobro Man.” Throughout his extraordinary journey, Taylor has always been a musician’s musician, an independent soul, and a man with an intuitive sense to capture moments. Taylor’s tapes, many of whom we have the great fortune of sharing on this very site, feature a veritable who’s who of great pickers and creative minds. So join us as we share a few snap shots from a photographic collection that could fill volumes.
“I started in 1955 with my first tape recorder,”
Taylor reflects.
“Before that I had a Philco disc recorder, and I started recording onto disc in the 40’s. I later transferred the reel-to-reel tapes, and later on to something else, but that’s the thing that first got me started. Back then [the recordings] were on disc, it was an aluminum disc with an acetate coating on it and there was a needle in it to cut the groove, like how they used to make records. This was a home apparatus that I used. A lot of stuff when I first began taping came over the radio.”
I was curious if he happened to remember the first thing he ever taped.
“Man… you talking about 1940 something, it’s 2009!,” he says with a laugh. “Well, the first thing I ever recorded was probably off the Grand Ole Opry on a Saturday night, somewhere back in the forties.”
Musical connections and friendships in the years since have given Taylor exceptional access, allowing him to capture countless shows, informal jam sessions, and rehearsals. A few of his tapes include picks that took place at the WSM radio DJ convention in Nashville during the mid to late sixties. Taylor describes the environment:
“It was a weeklong event that they invited DJs from all over America, and from all over the world. Primarily [it was for] the DJs, for them to know about what was available in music, and it gave them an opportunity to come in and meet other DJs and discuss the music. During the time they were having that, we were having a little group of us downtown in one of the hotels, and we’d come in on about Thursday, all the bluegrass folks would, and we’d all pick and jam until Sunday morning and then we’d all go home. We usually had these in two or three hotel rooms and people would just show up to pick. And of course, I always had my recorder with me, and so it was a great opportunity to listen to a lot of people.” (#20, #45, #38 side one)
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One of the pickers present on some of the tapes from the convention was Bill Monroe, who was said to have a reputation for not liking the Dobro. But Taylor is quick to set the record straight.
“I’d known Bill for a good many years before we ever met there [the DJ convention],” he explains. “A couple of occasions I got to play with him and his band, and it was pretty cool…It wasn’t that he didn’t like the [Dobro] players, he just didn’t like the instrument in his band because Roy Acuff, they were both on the Grand Ole Opry at that time, he had a Dobro player in his band, so he didn’t want to copy Roy Acuff. But he loved the Dobro. A man that has a lot of blues in his music, he has to learn the Dobro… so we had a lot of good fun together. You can put that down in black and white, Bill Monroe loved the Dobro. And put in capital letters that Tut Taylor said so! There’s a lot of misconceptions and misinformation and untruths have crept in over the years, and a lot of it just ain’t true.”
Two others whose trajectories have intersected with Taylor’s were Clarence and Roland White, who first came together with Tut to record 1964’s Dobro Country. The Kentucky Colonels were playing regularly at Ash Grove, a club in Los Angeles which was the west coast central for bluegrass shows at the time, and Taylor taped some of their shows. 2003 saw the release of Tut and Clarence Flatpicking, an album of Dobro tunes, with White on rhythm guitar that was also captured during that era. Taylor describes it thusly:
“I went out to Hollywood to record an album, that’s where I met Clarence and Roland… Back then, Clarence was just a picker like everybody else. Weren’t nothing special, you know, but he was a good picker. Real good finger picker. And as a flat picker, he set his own style. I liked him so well I asked him to make all my Dobro tunes with me.” (#26, #29)
Back in the Goodle Days
Steam Powered Aereo-Takes
Taylor first met John Hartford, Norman Blake and Vassar Clements in the artistic nexus that was Nashville in the early 1970’s. It was an environment where musical sparks were flying, strings quivering and like-minds meeting, a great magnet pulling talent and drive together from both the old school veterans and the more hippie-fied youngsters, suits and ties mingling with beards and bell bottoms, riding the second wave of bluegrass music that had been building momentum from the 1960’s revival.
1971
Taylor moved to Nashville at the beginning of the decade, to open the GTR Music Shop with George Gruhn and Randy Wood. He would later sell his share in GTR, and open the Old Time Pickin’ Parlor in 1972, with Wood and Grant Boatwright. He describes what the scene at the Parlor was like – casual, creative, and welcoming – as long as you were willing to listen of course:
“Above the music store was a repair store. Downstairs… when you go into the Old Time Pickin’ Parlor, you would take a right and go over to where we had a stage set up where we did a lot jamming and performing, and we’d have an audience come in at night. But a lot [of times] at the Old Time Pickin’ Parlour, people would drop by during the day. Anybody might come, any musician – professional, unknown, whatever – would drop in and want to pick. Of course, we were always ready to pick with somebody and make them feel at home and get them up there to pick. We would just have fun. That went on during the day, and at night was when we had little shows, not every night though. And then a little later, we’d pull in a pizza and cold beer and people would come enjoy the music. But it was a listening place. It was where you’d come to listen to the music, you didn’t come to talk. We didn’t put up with any of that, if they wanted to listen and enjoy, they were welcome, but if they wanted to talk, they had to leave.” (#21-has Aereo-plain Rehearsal and OTPP)
Jam sessions like these would take place all over Nashville during that time, including at a building that Roy Acuff owned next to the Ryman Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry was held until 1974. (#35, #40, also #43 has side A from OTPP and side B from last Opry radio broadcast)
“Those were just good fun times,” Taylor says of these sessions at Acuff’s. “A lot of fun, lot of pleasure, lot of happiness. But nothing out of the ordinary. Any time you get to get to play with good musicians, it’s more fun, whether they’re professional or not. When a musician plays an instrument, the better he plays, the better you’re going to be… because he’s going to make you sound better and make you want to play better. And that happens a lot when you play in environments like that. You’re very alert, very attentive and you listen and you look.”
In the midst of this thriving Nashville scene, Hartford, Blake and Clements decided to form a band – The Aereo-plain Band. The resulting album, Aereo-plain, was a ground breaking record. Steering old time traditions down a freewheeling river, with four great musicians at the helm (who were joined by Randy Scruggs on electric bass in the studio), the album organically and lovingly re-examined Americana with quirkiness and warmth, dancing over the boundary lines between heritage and evolution. Often the best things come when you don’t force them, and the work they did on Aereo-plain is certainly evidence of that, still sounding juicy today when that needle hits the vinyl. The relaxed demeanor of the project was inspired by Hartford’s hands-off bandleader approach.
“John was a creative person,” Taylor describes. “He was creative in writing, I don’t know how many books he wrote, but he did write some books. Creative in his music, completely different. He had more rhythm in his soul than any person I’ve ever known. And he was a very free spirited individual. When we got The Aereo-plain Band together, he just told us to play what we felt – if we felt like playing a song to play, if we didn’t feel like playing, not to play. If we wanted to create something or add something to the song, we had liberty to do that. So I think that was one of the reasons that The Aero-plain Band CD has over the years become such sought after music. Because actually, [although] we didn’t know it at the time, we broke the barrier, we broke the mold. What we were playing was different than anything anybody else had ever played. It was a forerunner of the so-called newgrass movement. We didn’t know that then, that was not in our attention.”
“When all four of us got together we kind of played off of each other,” he continues. “One of us inspired the other and would inform another to play better or to play different or to be inventive, to just let the bars down and go for it. [Hartford] was very enjoyable to work with and it was a great experience. The only sad thing about it, he recorded back then on Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers never did push the album, it never got out there in the marketplace like it should have been. But even then, over the years it’s gained a lot of notoriety.”
The recording sessions were similarly relaxed, taking place at Glaser Sound Studios in Nashville and Electric Lady in New York. Producer David Bromberg left the tape running the whole time, capturing the natural sonic explorations of the four musicians. Bromberg ended up choosing the tracks that became Aereo-plain, and in 2002 an album was released called Steam Powered Aereo-Takes. A friend of Hartford’s, banjo player Bob Carlin, was instrumental in getting the second album together. Taylor says, “To me it’s a better CD than the first one. But that’s because it’s a little bit more of the bluegrass. And besides, I get to play mandolin more on it.” (#28 – Electric Ladyland Studio)
“But I like ‘em both,” he reflects. “There’s nothing like that first album you know. But this second one is just a continuation of the same feelings, the same music, the same time, the same everything. Just different selections. And there’s a lot more other than that, but it’s only those that John selected to go on out.”
The band would enthrall many fans in the live setting, even bringing their music to the stages of Boston Symphony Hall, with Arthur Feidler and the Boston Pops. As Tut describes it, during a time of playing many inspiring shows, “That was the icing on the cake…that show was videotaped but it’s not available. It would be nice to go back in time and see that. But it was wonderful to play in symphony hall. We were there among the upper crust, of the musicians and society. We were just old country boys done come to Boston.” (#89)
Taylor’s work with The Aereo-plain Band brings him a palatable sense of joy, and he feels grateful that he was involved in a project that inspired so many:
“I still receive emails from people thanking me for that album, and [saying] that it was one of the first albums that they listened to that turned them on to music. It’s always nice to hear, even today from people that still like that album and how they got started in music by listening to it. I’ve met a lot of friends [through it].”
Keeping It Tut
Growing up as a young man in rural Georgia, Taylor first learned how to play more or less in isolation, being inspired to take up the Dobro the first time he heard it over the crackling radio waves, his curiosity immediately piqued. His two main influences as he developed his craft were Bashful Brother Oswald and Buck Graves, better known as Uncle Josh:
“Oswald, he started playing with Roy Acuff in 1939, and that’s the first time I ever heard a Dobro, when I heard them playing on the radio. I didn’t know what it was and I had to find out. When you live in a rural area, about all you got is the radio. You don’t have a vast knowledge of what’s going on in the world, or in music, because all you do is listen to the bands brought to you to listen to. They don’t give you a lot of information, so you just have to listen to ‘em if you like ‘em and then tune in every time they come on. Oswald was the main Dobro player I listened to, and then later Buck Graves. I got to listen to him, and he was a completely different style to Oswald’s playing, with more rolls and things, so those were the two styles that were available to learn from back then…those two guys influenced everybody in the world to play Dobro.”
Of course, Taylor had to take what he could from them, and then run with it in his own style, since he didn’t play with finger picks. But when Taylor finally met them, he remembers being a bit star struck. “Oh, I was thrilled, like any other country boy would be. And thought they walked on water and all that good stuff.”
As far as his flat-picking style goes, he received intrigued comments, but “that’s about it. It was hard to understand how I could play with a flat pick and it wouldn’t be hard to understand if a lot of people played that way, it was just the way to play the guitar.”
Although Taylor’s unique musical skills are well-respected and admired, his approach never seems to have caught on. I asked him why he thought that was.
“I’ve heard of two or three [players] but there’s not many out there,” he says. “I think it’s because people want to think they can’t play it with a flat pick. ‘Cause everyone else plays it with thumb picks and finger picks, so they figure that’s the way it has to be played. I doubt it will ever change. You know, that’s ok by me, just so I long as I can keep on picking.”
Taylor intends to keep on doing just that, and his independent streak has certainly set an example for new generations of musicians. Looking to future of bluegrass music, however, he does express a concern over the old songs disappearing.
“I have a lot of good friends, young people, that are just amazing and play some of the best music ever played, but there’s still a little difference in the young peoples’ playing from the old seasoned playing. Young people, they’ll learn the chords to a song, then they play the scales over the chords, but they don’t have the melody. This is not in every case, but is often the case, where a lot of young people don’t put enough emphasis on learning the melody to a certain tune. They’re getting good, really good. And I admire them for it, and a lot of older people, around my age, they say, ‘There’s the future of bluegrass, they’re going to carry it on! They’re going to carry in on after we’re gone,’ but they’re not because they ain’t learning the old traditionals.”
“As you listen to music and go along through the years, you can notice this change,” he continues. “And of course, they interpret it differently, so they’re going to play it differently. That’s the problem with a lot of younger people, is that they learn a tune and if the guy they’re learning it from is playing it wrong, they don’t know any difference and they learn to play it wrong too. They don’t put in the time to learn how to distinguish the difference. The music will go on, but not the music that I grew up on, knew and played… it’s disappearing.”
But he is just as quick to encourage younger pickers to forge their own path in the tradition.
“[They] copy other people, a lot of young people do,” he muses. “And they don’t develop something of their own. In other words, they don’t – ok to give you an example, a kids is going to learn to play the banjo like Earl. And he learns that stuff and a lot of times they’ll venture out and change a little or add a little to what they’ve learned…But they never come up with any original stuff on the banjo or whatever. Some do and some don’t. And so it depends a lot as to how they learn it and how they play it as to what’s going to happen to it.”
“You gotta learn what you can and then strike out on your own,” Taylor says, passing along his wisdom. “Do your own thing. Sometimes it takes awhile to do that, because you’ve gotta learn the instrument. You can’t do your own thing until you learn how to play it. But then as soon as you learn how to play it, from other people or however you learn, experiment, and see what you can do with it.”
Taylor has certainly always done his own thing, while he keeps the music he loves living and breathing, through all the snapshots, miles of tape, and broken strings accumulated along the way.
A great intro to Tut’s live music archived here is the Tut Samplers – a “best of” composed of 7 CDs full of cuts hand selected by our Historian, Mitchell Wittenberg.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Two years ago, I camped next to Pete Kartsounes at the RockyGrassAcademy. This year he had bigger things on his mind—he was getting ready to hike. It’s what he does during the end of July, all of August, and part of September to raise money and support the non-profit organization that he founded towards the end of 2007: Hike4Cancer. Kartsounes is a talented and visionary singer/songwriter who makes his home in Boulder, Colorado. Many music aficionados are familiar with his work. He is now raising his profile assomeone who gives back to his community. He shared some insight around his ‘hike,’ prior to lacing on his shoes and hitting the road.
Kartsounes explained how the event got going. “I started Hike4Cancer with my long time friend John “Digger” Pelaez in November of 2007. We had both been looking for a way to “give back” and when I approached him with the idea to raise money for a cause with hiking and events he was instantly ready to get started.”The hike is actually a series of hikes that ramble around Colorado, accompanied by musical fund raisers that Pete promotes along the way. His web site, http://hike4cancer.org, lists the hikes for this year, as well as the concerts that are held to raise money.
Kartsounes talked about his love for hiking and how things came together in the structure of hiking and playing music. “I have been touring musically through Colorado for almost 15 years now and when I was asked to hike the Colorado Trail by a friend (Nean “Namie” Bacile—the only recorded triple TRIPLE Crown winner, meaning that he is the only one to hike the Continental Divide, Appalachian, and Pacific Coast Trails three times apiece) and found out the general routing of the trail was from Denver to Durango, I soon realized that I could play in towns along the way. There are also an abundance of festivals in the month of August in Colorado that are along the way as well—which is pure luck and seeming to work out!”
The Hike4Cancer organization determines a beneficiary for their yearly activity. This year, that beneficiary is “There With Care,” a group that provides services to children and families facing critical illnesses. Kartsounes elaborated, “We have raised a good amount of money for our beneficiaries. No number is too big or too small and it keeps getting bigger. One step at a time is our motto. We will most likely work with a new beneficiary each year although we are really liking what “ThereWithCare” is about and who they are as a group: wonderful folks doing amazing things for families with children who aren’t so fortunate. We are very grateful to be working with them this year.”
Kartsounes took a moment to talk about his current band—the Pete Kartsounes Band (what else?). “I have been touring and playing with my own bandfor the past year and a half. It is a solid four piece band with an additional member—so is always a five piece band. It’s really nice to have complete freedom in who I have with me. There are so many amazing musicians/friends in this area we live in and it would be silly to not utilize that. My band is myself on guitar/vocals, Kevin Malone on Bass and vocals (Kevin and I have been playing for about 9 years together), James Thomas on keys/vocals (James and I have had a few bands together over the past 10 years), and Ryan Sapp on drums. (Ryan is a new addition and I went to highschool with him…..we have known eachother for a long time and he is an amazing drummer. We sometimes do the string band thing (without drums) as well. The 5th members have been Greg Schochet (Mando/Guitar), Andy Thorn (Banjo), Bob Hemenger (SAX), Joe Lessard (fiddle) and the list keeps getting bigger. It’s complete musical freedom and keeps everyone on their toes. It’s always fresh for all of us and we like to keep it that way, as well as original.
Many people think about doing things for charity, but don’t take action. Kartsounes is one of those inspiring folks who are out there making a difference. He said, “I have been playing music for 15 years, driving around the country, staring out the window, and wondering—what the heck am I doing with myself! I am always inspired by someone I see making a difference. There was once a man on the Montel Williams show that donated his bone marrow. He had no clue who it was going to and just wanted to help someone. He saved a girls life with that, and when I watched that I knew that I wanted to be like him. I wanted to “give back” and do something good in this life, and I found a way to do that with what I love to do (hiking and playing music). Of course we all seem to have some kind of a direct affiliation with cancer and it’s a horrible reality. We all love kids and they are our future, so it was an easy decision for us to get to when thinking of who are we going to support and why. We just are giving back and if it inspires folks to do the same then that is great! We hope that every year gets bigger and better for Hike4Cancer. More people helping, hiking, and spreading the word. Its not about us…..it’s about who we are helping.
Check out that Hike4Cancer website and donate to Pete’s cause. You can arrange to go hike part of the way with him. The pickin’ will be great!
Tapers Notes: With a Pete Kartsounes show you never know what you are going to get. Some long jams or some classic’s like “Welcome to the Machine”. Tonight was no different. A strong “Semi-Acoustic” first set followed by and all out “Electric Set” to top off the night. – Lantz <lancifarian at gmail dot com>
Highlights: Finally Made It Home, Immigrant’s Life, The Last Dance, Those Blues and If I Can Go Back to a Moment
Kathy is a bass player and a problem solver living in Louisville, Colorado. She enjoys playing her upright bass, writing, gardening, and living through the next great adventure.
I’ve found my wings and I’m ready to fly Some things in life are better left unknown
Or there would be no wonder no why
But as I travel through this world
I want to give all those things a try, yeah
“Left Home”
With temps in triple digits, it’s been unusually hot this month, even by Austin standards. Outside at Threadgill’s, an understandably mellow crowd languished in the heat, waving homemade paper fans and downing gallons of water and beer to try and wash the sweat away. But when Sarah Jarosz took the stage, an opening slot for The Greencards, we’re reminded why we have ventured out in such trying conditions. The eighteen-year-old Texan has that quality that no amount of technical talent, which she possesses in droves, can teach you – crowd-hushing naturalmagnetism. It’s an unforced charisma balanced with an old soul sensibility that renders her impressive debut album, Song Up in Her Head, splendidly spunky, yet utterly timeless.
In the liner notes to Song, Chris Thile describes a seven-year-old Jarosz asking him for an autograph and, says, “During that brief encounter she sweetly and frankly expressed her hope that she would get to play music with me someday.” Jarosz certainly hashad that true artists’ drive in gear from a young age, and on this album, the gravitational pull of that energyhas drawn quite a line-up: Thile, Tim O’Brien, Abigail Washburn, Mike Marshall, Jerry Douglas, Ben Sollee,and Sarah Siskind, just for starter, as well as superb up-and-comers likeAlex Hargreaves, Paul Kowert(The Punch Brothers) and Samson Grisman (son of David). On stage, she spoke of how exciting it was to work with her “musical heroes,” saying recording the album was, “a dream come true and a great learning experience.”
Jarosz really lights up a stage, and I tend to be the type that’s more sold onlive performances than studio recordings, but Gary Paczosa and Jarosz’s production on Song captures that illumination nicely, while utilizing the tools of the studio to create a well-crafted sonic dream. At times the notes mingle in sweeping washes, such as the gorgeous “Long Journey,” where Jarosz’s building piano lines begin taking off, but then gather the other instruments around the current in a full, deep immersion. Meanwhile, thestirring title track and the rolling instrumental “Mansisinneedof” both show a great interplay with Jarosz and two mando maestros – Thile and Marshall respectively. The lines twist and dance, winding together like river channels searching for the sea. The other instrumental track, “Fischer Store Road” brings in Douglas, Hargreaves and Grisman in a toe-tapper that shows how deep her clawhammer skills can drive that spike. Throughout this record, her playing is rich, but never showy. But besides her chameleonic instrumental skills, I count six instruments she plays on this album, as O’Brien points out in the liner notes, “While her instrumental talents are formidable, let’s make one thing clear: Sarah is a singer. She’s just flat got it.” I concur. She has an intuitive sense of delivery, with decided subtletyandmoments of muscle. The recording captures the soul that shimmies through her voice when you see her perform, and man, she can sing and stomp some blues with the best of them.
Texas certainly has produced its share of great songwriters, and Jarosz has the elements to be a slugger in this league, nodding to that tradition onstage at Threadgill’s with a choice Patty Griffin cover of “Long Ride Home.” On the album, those classic themes of time, distance, and questions of how love will survive across these variables are all woven through Jarosz’s words. She throws in those cool twists and turns in lines like, “Public transportation is my private ride, yeah” (“Left Home”) or, “The middle of the floor feels safe tonight,” (“Edge of Dream”), that reveal a little something in the midst of the travelling, unique views disclosed. Meanwhile, “Broussard’s Lament,” a song about Hurricane Katrina, is conscious, but not heavy-handed. In her stage banter, Jarosz said she was inspired to write the song as a fourteen year old watching an interview on the news in the aftermath of the hurricane. To compliment the original material, the two covers on her record are intriguing, rather leftfield choices, Tom Waits’“Come On Up to the House,” which has some especially chewy bass by Grisman, and The Decemberists’ “Shankill Butchers.” The latter is appropriately ominous, with the toy piano affecting a creepy carnival tinkle. You can just imagine the maniac cackles in the night. It’s the darkest track on the album, and it will be interesting to see as her career evolves how she may tap into that blacker and weirder vein of Americana.
If there’s an overriding theme, it’s that of the journey. The take presentedhere is personalized, joyously reflective. It strongly evokes a certain time in my own life, an image of myself as a freshman in college at UVM, staring out bus windowsor bumming rides from folks with cars to see shows on the weekend, getting to know an unfolding east coast landscape from my new base inBurlington. As my external world widened, so did my internal geography. There was excitement, wonder, and a feeling of an unwritten future, a feeling that I try and hold on to no matter what has happened in my life since I was eighteen. This album gives me those expectant butterflies, a reminder never to let those beating wings die. When The Greencards - who, for the record, played a fan-freaking-tastic show – excitedly brought her on stage at Threadgills to throw down on some numbers, including a great take on “Blue Night,” to loud cheers, it was obvious that the fluttery feeling is infectious. Last I read, Jarosz is off to Boston’s Berklee School of Music in the fall, a college that has been a meeting place for many great musicians (Two High String Bandwere spawned here in their earliest incarnations for example). Wherever Jarosz goes from here it’s going to be her own journey, and may she keep that sense of wonder shining strong
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
I rode up the canyon to my second Little Schoolhouse in the Pines show on May 22—a tribute to John Hartford, put together by stellar banjoist Jayme Stone. My four friends and I were very excited about the show. We knew that Jayme had gathered a group of high quality musicians to entertain us for the evening. We also knew the show was sold out and that we were among the lucky attendees.
John Hartford was and still is a legend in the bluegrass and old time music world. He lived from 1937 to 2001, and knew early-on that his place was in the music world. He was a multi-instrumentalist and taught himself banjo, inspired by Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe. His songwriting skills produced some seminal tunes that dig into one’s mind and are hard to let go of.
Stone explained prior to the show how he came upon the idea of doing the tribute to Hartford. “John Hartford’s songs, musical sensibility, and innovative banjo style have been a huge influence on me. I’ve been playing tunes of his for years and wanted to gather some like-minded musicians to pay tribute to his legacy. Everybody I talked with got immediately excited about the idea and wanted to be involved.”
Stone elaborated a little more on the preparations for the tribute. “It’s been such a joy to dig into John’s repertoire and banjo style. His music is a whole world onto itself with so many fantastic songs, old-time fiddle tunes, and music for all these different eras. We’ve been incorporating an arranging idea that John calls ‘windows.’ Everybody is encouraged to change what they are doing every 16 bars. That could be playing the melody, a harmony, a rhythmic figure, chromatic lines, or simply laying out. It’s a really organic way of keeping the music spontaneous and different every time. So I’m looking forward to hearing what everybody does!”
When we arrived at the Little Schoolhouse, we found a wonderful cast of musicians assembled to entertain us. Guitarist Brad Murphy and mandolinist Rich Zimmerman, of Slipstream fame, joined Jayme, along with Ryan Drickey on fiddle, and Ian Hutchison holding down the bass. K.C. Groves waited in the wings to lend her sweet vocals to some of the tunes. The crowd milled around prior to the start; many familiar faces from the local bluegrass scene were out in force for the event.
Prior to the show, I was curious to know how they settled upon the songs for the set list. Stone explained the methodology. “Everybody brought in tunes. I had a long list of favorites and it seems like we’re doing them all. There will be a bunch of lesser known gems and some tunes from out-of-print records, as well as his famous tunes like ‘Gentle On My Mind.’ There’s just so much music to draw from!”
The Little Schoolhouse was packed to the gills when the crew kicked things off with a tune called ‘Wrong Road,’ that had Zimmerman carrying lead, and Groves chipping in with harmonies. The musicians appeared even more excited than the audience members to be playing John Hartford music with each other.
The third tune in the first set, ‘Half Past Four,’ incorporated the ‘windows’ technique that Stone mentioned prior to the show. He explained laughingly to the audience that it cut down on rehearsals. The song was an Ed Haley fiddle tune that Hartford once recorded. Haley was a blind fiddler who traveled extensively throughout the Appalachian region, and made many recordings of his music prior to his death in 1951. Hartford took a keen interest in Haley in the 1990’s and researched his life and music. Stone’s tribute version showcased Ryan Drickey’s excellent fiddling skills and was a real crowd-pleaser.
They just went on and on with great songs that Hartford wrote or performed. Highlights for me were ‘The Goodle Days’, from his Steam Powered Aereoplane record, ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain,’ which he performed on the ‘Down From The Mountain’ Tour, and ‘Tall Buildings.’ Stone talked a little about the impact of that song and how he, Stone, played it once for a student who cried over it. Drickey and Groves did the vocals and it was a powerful effort on a powerful song.
The band closed out the first set with, as Stone put it, “one of the greatest tunes ever written.” Zimmerman crooned “Gentle On My Mind,” the song that is always associated with Glenn Campbell, and was Hartford’s greatest claim to fame. The tune won two Grammy awards in 1968 and was the theme song for Campbell’s television variety show from 1969 to 1972. It was the perfect song to end the set and ensure that the audience could not wait for more great music.
John Hartford lived in a house that overlooked the Cumberland River outside of Nashville. From an early age, the river called to him; he ran away as a teenager and joined a riverboat crew as a night watchman. He was certified as a steamboat captain and followed the activity of the boats fanatically from his home. During the second set, Groves relayed to the audience her experience when she met Hartford in Nashville and spent an hour with him at his house. She especially noted the joy he took in watching the river traffic. Stone chipped in, “John was in love with steamboats. He was a steamboat captain and wrote a bunch of tunes about the river.”
The second set honed in on some of those songs. The first tune out of the gate was ‘Steam Powered Aereo-plane,’ which Zimmerman sang. This was a seminal song that is sometimes attributed as contributing to the ‘newgrass’ that Hartford influenced later in his career. Groves also performed another Hartford song about the river called ‘Long Hot Summer Day.’
The second set also represented the old time quality of Hartford’s music. The tribute band performed songs that Hartford did not write, but performed, such as ‘Squirrel Hunters,’ ‘Old Grimes,’ and ‘Pea Patch Rag.’ The encore song to the evening was ‘Wish We Had Our Time,’ another old time tune that Groves has done with Uncle Earl, her old time band.
Stone elaborated later about Hartford’s qualities. “John is just so genuine, kind-hearted and honest. His speaking voice is the same as his singing voice. You can tell it’s him after hearing just one note. I value that in a musician. He was also a diverse musician, playing old-time fiddle, foreshadowing newgrass a decade early, writing quirky tunes and developing many unique techniques on the banjo. I’ve culled little things from his playing but more than anything, he’s someone I look to as an example of an artist who has truly found his own voice–always inspiring.”
Stone relayed the news to the audience that the tribute band has another gig lined up and expects to tour the project a little, so this won’t be a one-shot deal. He explained afterwards how strong the connection is with the musicians in the group. “These are all great friends and musicians I’ve played with informally over the last few years. They all share a love of old-time music as well as an openness to different approaches and sounds. I like the music to breath and the interaction to feel like a conversation and they are all the kind of people i could sit around and gab with, musically or otherwise.”
Hartford’s web site has this quote, which epitomizes his relationship with music. After recording his first record, he said, “Had I not made this record, I would have still made these songs and sung them to my family, my friends, and then softly to myself.” Amen to Jayme Stone and his tribute band for carrying on that tradition.
John Hartford Tribute
Little Schoolhouse in the Pines
May 22, 2009
Salina, Colorado
Recording: 2 center mics: Marshall 2003’s>V3>R44 @2448 2 outer mics: AKG C1000s>R44 @2448 (mics set in front of band).
Mixed: using all open source tools. Audacity on Ubuntu 9.04 to normailize, mix to 2 tracks, 24>16bit,48000>44100, tracked, etree scripts to flac. comments: prennix at gmail.com.
———————————-
The Band
Jayme Stone – banjo
Rich Zimmerman – mandolin & vocals
Ryan Drickey – fiddle & vocals
Brad Murphy – guitar
Ian Hutchison – bass
KC Groves – vocals
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Kathy is a bass player and a problem solver living in Louisville, Colorado. She enjoys playing her upright bass, writing, gardening, and living through the next great adventure.
back in November, Sandy sent us an email and a donation – one of many. He was a supporter from the get-go around here. Taper, archivist, and lover of life. We’ll miss you Sandman. Our Hero.
It’s no secret that in recent years, Old Settlers Music Festival has been branching out from its acoustic and bluegrass roots. This being my first OSMF, I had little to compare it to, save for collected stories from friends and new acquaintances – and observations of threadbare t-shirts boasting past line-ups. On the one hand, nostalgia always casts our hindsight in a rosy glow. There’s a well-known local joke that goes, “How many Austinites does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer: “Five. One to change the bulb and the other four to complain about how much better the old bulb was.” On the other hand, one always worries at the possibility that, “another good thing has done gone on,” as John Hartford, whose last performance was at this festival, sang in “Tear Down the Grand Ole Opry.” In recent years, no shortage of festivals have sprung up – and some have fizzled out just as quick – and the concern of co-optation, with line-ups being determined by money rather than by the original spirit of the organizers, is a lingering worry that creeps down into the fans of any event.
photo Dave Jackson
But, at 22 years old, OSMF has held off on the corporate atmosphere that younger, albeit more behemoth, fests jumped on to after they learned how to walk (I’m looking at you Bonnaroo). The key is that OSMF has maintained a sense of intimacy (which may have something to do with the steep ticket price), a truly family friendly atmosphere and a hands-on feel. Give me reasonably priced microbrews served by jovial bar tenders, a small but substantial collection of independent food vendors and handicrafts (not to mention the Salt Lick BBQ just next door) any day over the corporate swag jungles of Austin City Limits and Bonnaroo. The close stages in the Salt Lick Pavilion made it easy to bounce between sets, but were arranged in a way that sound bleed was never an issue (I’m looking at you ACL). The port-a-potties were clean, as were the grounds (thanks volunteers!), and recycling bins were ample. My main complaint would be the water situation in the main stage area. With no spigots set up onsite, and only one vendor selling teeny bottles for two bucks, this is pretty shabby. Since you have to take a bus back to Camp Ben McCullough, and many goers opt for day tickets which do not allow access to the campsites, you don’t have many water options. The security seemed cool with people bringing smaller bottles in, but with nowhere to refill them, hydration went quick, especially after the sun came out. Also, the anti-bacterial soap stations were frequently broken throughout the weekend. These are pretty basic health issues that I hope will be addressed at OSMF 2010.
video by Mike Abb
Ah but we’re ultimately here for the music, and for Spring Creek (info/live sounds), an SPPS Partner Band on the rise, their perspective on the festival was very positive and affirming, as Taylor Sims (guitar) and Jessica Smith (doghouse bass) described.
photo D Jackson
“It was the first festival I ever came to, as just a listener, and that was just six years ago.” Sims reflected, “So to get to play it is great, it’s quite an honor. It makes me feel like we’ve come a long way. Sometimes it’s hard when you’re on the inside to actually see the changes, but when we get to come and do things like this, play such great festivals and get signed to Rebel [Records], it becomes easier to see that our hard work is paying off.”
Exactly!” Smith agrees. “Coming here a few years ago, watching all these amazing bands on stage – Del, Leftover Salmon, Yonder – all those guys have played this festival and now we’re playing it, its definitely pretty cool… I would say this festival is very comparable to Planet Bluegrass and Rocky Grass and Telluride in a lot of ways. It’s mostly kind of a younger crowd and a good diverse mix of music, but all great music, and it’s really laid back. Camping and jamming is a big part of it and just has a really great, high spirited crowd.”
Campground Stage - photo Manny Moss
Thursday April 16th
With threats of thunderstorms looming, the sky was a rather ominous gray as my husband and I pulled into Camp Ben McCullough. Passing by the Campground Stage – set up in a tin roofed picnic pavilion – we could hear a sharply executed mando lick from Joe Walsh of The Gibson Brothers , the first act of the festival. With Eric Gibson on banjo and Leigh Gibson on guitar, the brothers have an easy-going stage presence and some solid original material, including “Iron & Diamonds” (from the 2008 release of the same name), which explores life in the mining town of Lyon Mountain, New York, with its passion for the local baseball team. Their sense of place songwriting and the group’s tight, immaculate picking was impressive, but with periodic sprinkles of rain, we decided we should set up our tent while the ground was still dry.
Comfy Camp Ben was already buzzing with festivalgoers firing up grills, popping beers and plunking banjos. Some had been raging for a few days, since Camp Ben is a public campground when the fest isn’t on. We managed to throw our tent up just in time to rush back for Great American Taxi.
Vince Herman - photo Manny Moss
As the drizzle thickened around us, GAT bear hugged the diverse strands of Americana music, from bobbing funk to honky tonk janglers to vigorous grass, pulling up to a smoky bar to down shots of the strong stuff and chatter silver-tongued about some highway love. From rocking opener, a great cover of Bad Livers’ “Lumpy Beanpole and Dirt” (man, it would have been nice to see them here) to encore “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” an old prison song made famous by The Band, this was a set that channeled some legendary voices. Vince Herman lights up the stage with his jovial presence, chuckling throughout “One of These Days,” and throwing a brick on the gas pedal with his mando picking in “Nobody’s Business.” His moving “Appalachian Soul,” a rousing cry against mountaintop removal mining, was a fitting moment of pause. Propulsive playing shook its thang throughout, with guitarist Jim Lewin taking some cues from Jerry Garcia during “Straw Man,” and Chad Staehly pushing those keys during “American Beauty.” When Herman joyfully declared, “it’s a good night to boogie with y’all!” (during, uh, “Good Night to Boogie”), we couldn’t have agreed more and responded in kind. This is a band that always leaves a grin on my face.
the Gourds - photo Manny Moss
Up last was Jitterbug Vipers , a classy show of Deep Texas swing and smoky jazz that has leapt from a flickering, grainy black and white reel into Technicolor. They turned the dusty pavilion into a speakeasy, complete with couples holding each other tight as they swayed across the dance floor. All we needed were the martinis, but the beer would do. Twenty one-year-old singer and violinist Katie Holmes’ honeyed vocals and scats danced through classics such as, “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” “Blue Skies” and “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” And when she draws that bow, stand back. Visually the band are a fun bunch to look at – from Holmes’ laid-back poise to bassist Francie Meaux Jeaux’s Rainbow Brite-inspired hair to drummer Masumi Jones’ uber-cool art school vibe to the man himself Slim Richey’s bushy white beard and sunglasses. But that was just a bonus to their stellar playing. The sax bopping and hopping over flowering piano jangles, Richey’s distinctive guitar work dripping and driving, and the tight rhythm section getting toes tapping. These cats created a dreamy atmosphere, sending us floating into the night, as a banjo breakdown mingled with a cover of “Dead Flowers,” two different campsite circles holding things down in their own musical home fires.
Friday April 17th
Waking up to torrential rain beating the roof of our tent, we peered outside. The tall grass was bending sideways under its force and as the morning progressed, it pounded the earth into mud and streams, as thunder rolled and lightening flashed. Still we could occasionally hear brave pickers from nearby campsites, and they soundtracked our morning, as we hunkered down until lunchtime with PB & J, and later PBR, the latter of which caused mad splash dashes to the port-a-potties. At the Campground Stage, from noon until three, The Flying $ Bunkhouse Band hosted various acts from the campsites – something that wasn’t clear on the schedule, as they were listed as playing from 12 until 3 – a prelude until the main stages opened. Huddling under the pavilion we caught folkie duo The Flying A’s , aka Hilary and Stuart Adamson. Hilary Adamson made purposefully cheesy jokes, and they remained sunny on that stage, even as the thunder roared and the rain rattled the tin roof, threatening to drown out their singing. A nicely done Texas swing take on “Fly Me to the Moon,” was lovely with their two guitars and Beth Galigher’s (Flying $ Bunkhouse Band) pretty flute flourishes.
The weather had begun to slack off, so we decided to see the first bands scheduled to start at four. To travel across FM 1826 between Camp Ben and the Salt Lick Pavilion area you have to take the shuttle buses – which are actually a fleet of hired school buses, so you can relive your back of the bus glory days or front of the bus dorkdom. Coming to the main area, we were informed, not surprisingly, that the stages were running late. The Bluebonnet Stage wasn’t going to be running today, so the bands had been moved inside to the Discovery Stage (which was located in a nifty, long shed-like building). Blue Highway, I was informed to my disappointment, was stuck in Houston and would be unable to make it. As the festival staff scrambled to get things moving and figure out the revised schedule themselves, we decided to explore the grounds, and try and find a dry spot to hunker down.
Julie Fowlis - photo D Jackson
While walking behind the Discovery Stage I had heard the sound of bag pipes and upon investigating, spotted a petite, dark-haired woman wailing away on the instrument. This was Julie Fowlis . Singing in Scottish Gaelic, I let the sounds of the language and the music simply wash over me, although Fowlis did provide us with history lessons. One old Scottish love song she described as being, “unusual because there’s a happy ending.” It was about a woman pining for her lover at sea, only to have him return, drawn back by her singing. Fowlis similarly drew us in with her transcendent voice as her band sketched delicate textures around her. They could also throw down in the jigs, which was a welcome way to warm up. Eamon Doorleywas marvelous on the bouzouki, an instrument that sounds similar to a mando and resembles a large lute. “This weather makes us feel at home,” Fowlis had mused earlier, and for the encore she busted out those bagpipes to play what she said was a traditional dance to stop the rain. Points for trying!
photo Manny Moss
One band I had missed at the campsite stage the previous night was Blackie and the Rodeo Kings . Named after a song by Canadian folk singer Willie P. Bennett , the trio of Tom Wilson, Stephen Fearing and Colin Linden make a tremendous noise for three dudes with guitars – and sport some rhinestone cowboy fashion sense. They stewed the acoustic, electric and slide into a dense goulash, dialing it down with broodier numbers like “Veil of Tears.” A mischievous spirit and cock-eyed grin marked their show, like the spangled pizzazz on their black suits. But we ventured out from their set on the Discovery Stage to see The Greencards, nervously watching the heavens lest they start dumping on us again. Two Aussies (Kym Warner on mando and Carol Young on bass) and a Brit (Eamon McLaughlin on fiddle), I’ve heard a lot about this group, who originally made a name for themselves in the Austin bar scene and have since moved on to Nashville. They have a restlessness that fits their name, a wide-eyed and open-armed approach that ponders, breathlessly spacious, before it bursts at the seams with dashing breakdowns. “Fascination,” the title track on their just-released album, has a tapping, creeping melody, while their take on Stanely Brother’s classic “Another Night” rummaged for a while before finding its dancing shoes. An intriguing group with a fresh sound, reminding me a bit of Nickel Creek with a case of the blues, they would burst through those cumulus layers with often unexpected precipitation.
I know precious little about Cajun music. It’s just never been part of my musical lexicon, but seeing the legendary Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet has definitely inspired me to do some musical research. They drew the biggest crowd I saw at the Discovery Stage all weekend, with folks teetering on the ledges and stretching out into the lawn. This is music that just wrenches your soul into a gleeful spring, steeped in brightness and a measure of rust. Sawing fiddles, throaty accordions, slinky guitars and a kicking rhythm section had folks getting down in every direction. From waltzing numbers sung in French to funky zydeco hip shakers, this group makes you move muscles you didn’t even know you had. For the last song they asked the audience if they would like to hear a fast or slow number. Everyone screamed for “FAST!” and the band left us with a good and greasy aftershock. The shed shook with a fury, flying feet trampling mud into dust.
The Bodeans - photo Manny Moss
The BoDeans have been at it since 1983, but may be best known for “Closer to Free,” which was used as the theme song for the show “Party of Five.” On the Hill Country Stage, they had plenty of enthusiasm, and were whipping the crowd into a frenzy, but I personally wasn’t really feeling it. After the hearty meal of Beausoleil, I just was hungry for some more natural grit, not E-Street style rock band starters, but I think I was alone. When they played their big hit for the encore, it felt like the expected rock show punchline. But hey, they delivered what the crowd wanted and they certainly can’t be faulted for that. The mood couldn’t have been more different for Hayes Carll , whose drawn comparisons to Townes Van Zandt. Plugging into the current of hard living, with a rough and tumble backing band that shifted between slow burners and country tread, Carll has a vocal delivery that’s uncontained and slumps over the bar before hitting you unexpectedly with some hoarse punch. He wields a pen that’s been soaking in an outcast well, from the defiant “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” to the heavy thing of beauty that is “Arkansas Blues,” standing as a proud younger addition to that Texas tradition, which was well represented this weekend with Ray Wylie Hubbard and Robert Earl Keen .
Robert Earl Keen - photo Manny Moss
But it was a set that may have been served better earlier in the day, as it seemed like much of the crowd left. Perhaps switching the scheduling would have been better, letting the Bo-Deans close out the night.
I did leave for a while to check out local jammers Flounders Without Eyes at the Discovery Stage, although mostly just to see Adam “Pickles” Moss and Dave Wilmoth from Green Mountain Grass sit in for a few tunes including a rambunctious “Freeborn Man.” Moss rambled to some great heights with his fiddle while Wilmoth spun some snaky blues-inspired picking. It was a treat to see them up there, but once they left, I admittedly lost interest in the Flounders. I wandered away to catch more Carll, and then catch my bus back to camp, where I whiled away the late night hours losing myself in the campsite jamming ether.
Saturday April 18th
Back from a few months break, those GMG boys were all over the show this weekend (OSMF MVPs!). No wonder they were rubbing the sleep out of their eyes a bit at the start of their noon set on the Hill Country Stage, under a persistently cloudy sky. An Austin quartet currently making some tour tracks, they got no qualms about taking weird left turns, dropping the bottom out and going completely free-form in the midst of their blazing ‘grass. The four – Wilmoth, Moss, Trevor Smith (banjo and guitar) and Jesse Dalton (bass) – have an inviting stage presence, as they play with fierce hunger and unforced intuitive chemistry. They have some witty lyrical styles as well, taking turns both dark and light hearted, sometimes in the same song. Jaunty anthem of sorts “84 Blues” drops geographic locations like hot rocks on a run from the cops, and “Banker” – with its lyrics, “you mistake me for a banker/but I am just a thief” – was appropriately dedicated to the Wall Street CEOs. There were unexpected cover choices in this set, such as Radiohead’s “Exit Music for a Film” and friends and fellow Austinites The Blue Hit’s “All the Children,” with the latter eliciting warm laughs from those in the know. This unpredictable, uncanny, and at times refreshingly offbeat, group always manages to surprise me each time I see them.
Sarah Jarosz - photo D Jackson
In Sarah Jarosz’s career thus far, she has shared the stage with countless of big name acts, and has some heavy hitters (Tim O’Brien, Jerry Douglas, Mike Marshall, Abigail Washburn) on her upcoming album Song Up in Her Head (which she co-produced with Gary Paczosa on Sugar Hill Records). Oh yeah, and next month, she’ll graduate from high school. Switching between banjo, guitar and mandolin, and backed by Sam Grisman on bass and Alex Hargreaves on fiddle, she owns natural talent in spades and an effortlessly confident stage presence. To be that relaxed and assured at 18 is no easy feat, but to pick the hell out of “Rocky Road,” break hearts with original songs such as “Tell Me True, and bust out a killer cover of Tom Waits’ “Come On Up to the House” is something else altogether. Phenomenal. I pulled my jaw out of the mud and made my way over the Discovery Stage only to have it dropped to the floor once again by Spring Creek. These four have a genuine rip and a commanding bellow in their sound, with a powerful stage presence that draws you in with a force field pull, incendiary as they draw choice weapons and lean into that single mic. Smith wailed on a honky tonk number, Sims explored all those pretty female distractions on “Drivin’ Me Crazy,” banjer-killer Chris Elliot and skillful mando and fiddle juggler Alex Johnstone leaned into the mic for an old-timey duet, and the four simply threw it down and kicked it around on “Bowling Green.” This is some exciting, hot-ass grass, and as the set ended, the audience was screaming for more. But I guess the stage needed to move on, and as they were grabbing their instruments, it appeared they were told they wouldn’t get an encore. The boos were as loud as the cheers had been seconds earlier – maybe louder. Luckily, we would be treated to a second dose of Spring Creek on Sunday. And, lo and behold, during their set the sun came out, ushering in a gorgeous day just as quickly as the storms had arrived on Friday morning!
Belleville Outfit - photo M Moss
I had to take a campsite break at this point, leaving the compelling acoustic amalgamation of Austin’s The Belleville Outfit at the Bluebonnet Stage. I made it back in time for The Lee Boys at the Hill Country Stage. Their sacred steel always rocks the show, and even an agnostic such as myself can get down with their lofty, raucous injection, at least for a little while. I may not be able to testify, but I can surely dance. Under the hot afternoon, the space in front of the Hill Country Stage came alive with folks moving and shaking what god gave ‘em to Derrick and Keith Lee’s colossal vocals, Roosevelt Collier’s screaming steel, and Alvin Lee’s depth charged guitar. The Lees like to see things get rowdy here on earth even if their eyes are turned towards heaven.
Before the The Travelin’ McCourys took the stage, my buddy turned to me and said, “This is going to be bluegrassy goodness.” And hell yeah, the MC at the Bluebonnet Stage was wearing a “Del Yeah!” t-shirt when he announced them. Del’s sons do him proud even without the patriarch on stage.
Travelin McCourys - photo M Moss
This set was absolutely note-perfect. They barreled out of the gate with a turbo charge, Ronnie McCoury soaring on his mando, Rob McCoury laying waste to his banjer, Jason Carter sawing and singeing his fiddle, Alan Bartram thumping that bass, and Cody Kilby (a welcome addition) igniting on guitar. The McCourys spread the love to several influences in their set – Hartford’s “Vamp in the Middle,” Jimmy Martin’s “Hold What You Got,” timeless classic “Another Place Another Time,” the tears in your beers “Lilly Hoskins,” and even some of Grisman’s “Dawg” music, which they dedicated to Sam Grisman, a mutual appreciation of the generational torch passing. Couples reeled in each other’s arms by the stage in the golden early evening light, the McCourys an impeccable score to an idyllic scene.
Next up on the Bluebonnet Stage was Ray Wylie Hubbard. An elder statesman to Texas songwriters, his music has a wicked throb squirming through it, something that makes you want to dance inappropriately, slipping a low, sinister moan through those nether regions. “Snake Farm” snapped at our legs and hips and “Name Droppin’” was prefaced by Hubbard’s opinions on the subject. “I think it’s an amateur thing to do,” he growled, before launching in the swiping, snaky song. Hubbard speaks his mind, and even his t-shirts say, “Screw You, We’re From Texas” (named after one of his songs). A stubborn Lone Star attitude served up undiluted enough to burn holes in your throat.
Lee oys & McCourys - photo M Moss
The McCourys and The Lee Boys first teamed up together at Del Fest last year, and then again at Warren Hayne’s Christmas Jam. I wasn’t quite sure how the sounds would mesh together, but gospel and bluegrass are deeply entwined, and a collective of musicians who juggle both tradition and evolution are no doubt united by a common language that extends beyond their respective genres and families. “Let’s Celebrate,” with its declaration of, “We’re gonna have a good time!” was the best way to sum up this ecstatic show. The bands sort of switched off leading on different songs, with the Lee Boys trumpeting a rock charge, shredding Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” at one point, and the McCoury’s driving the rootsy train through classics like “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad.” They met head on and wrestled, fiddle racing over steel, mando stewing with chucka chucka guitars, and rhythm sections colliding, a jam session between friends, everyone on stage having a blast. Isn’t that ultimately what OSMF is about? I even kicked off my shoes and danced in the sand pit on the side of the stage, grit between my toes as little kids waged glow stick sword fights around me.
Robert Earl Keen - photo M Moss
Headliner Robert Earl Keen’s set was being broadcast to troops in Iraq, giving “I’m Coming Home,” an extra layer of heartache, especially when the screen would flash a live feed of the soldiers. In festival land, it’s easy to block out the real world, so it was sobering and grounding reminder of what’s happening outside the gates. Like Hubbard, Keen is another Texas institution, and I appreciated the opportunity to finally see him. Coming after the Lee Boys and McCourys’ set, this was an energy shift for sure, but his band sounded rock solid with rolling country, and a great cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Flying Shoes” is something you can never argue with. While Keen was unraveling his droll, earthy tales on the Hill Country Stage, New Monsoon was deep into sonic explorations over at the Bluebonnet. Vets of OSMF, they are a band that dodges any darts you may throw at them. Tonight, they were leaning heavily into Phish territory, slipping periodically into Americana roots outfits, and then pulling out some rollicking Allmans flavors on “Alaska.” As talented and diverse as they are, they aren’t a band whose music I find sticks in my head. I like eclectic and I like lots of ideas, but sometimes I feel like there’s a lack of cohesion in this lot. I just haven’t quite found the thread that I can wrap around my finger and take with me after their show is over.
The night got mighty interesting after that, as my buddies and I attempted to navigate the muddy ground at Camp Ben, like lost ducklings, in search of the stage at the fabled Camp Good Times. As we traversed the darkness, we gradually began seeing friendly, familiar faces and lights in the trees. Coming into a clearing, we found the stage. Raina Rose was singing, joined by Smith and Moss from GMG, and Andrew Pressman (bassist from a cracking local outfit called Electric Mountain Rotten Apple Gang ). The space in Camp Good Times looked like some kind of psychedelic fairyland. A chandelier with lights tumbling down hung above the crafty stage, which was flanked by paper structures, and tube lights that wound through the ground. No mics set up here – this was entirely unplugged, to the point where shushing was in order. This was my first time seeing Rose, a Portland, Oregon-based singer-songwriter. She’s not afraid to get plenty of grit under her fingernails with her words, and her voice has head-spinning potency. I only caught a couple songs, but she sold me.
Green Mountain Grass - photo M Moss
The Blue Hit took over the stage next. I think fans of Sometymes Why would dig this. It’s very left-field, shuddering with a strange illumination. Revolving around the singular voice of Grace Rowland, a feisty songwriter with otherworldly, spine tingling pipes, this group snaps you to rapt attention. There’s stage presence and then there’s a voodoo kind of magnetism, and with the lights flickering at Camp Good Times and what looked like an endless sea of black beyond, something was sparking akin to magic. John McGee’s guitar and David Moss’s cello tumbled and prowled, while Grace stood in the middle of their instrumental tosses, her singing hushing us to silence. The Blue Hit played a captivating set, and we were treated to several faves, like the creepy carousel-like melody of “All the Children,” and they even teased GMG’s “’84 Blues,” as a nod to the GMG’s earlier cover of “Children,” the haunting “Out the Door,” and the poppy “BoysGirls.” I have to admit, I never thought I would like that song from Pocahontas (“Colors of the Wind”), but stripped down and performed with an eco-warrior edge of anger instead of Disney’s saccharine bombast, it had some reverb in a forest the weekend before Earth Day. Re-examinations that strip away assumptions – that summarizes this trio.
Green Mountain Grass closed down the late night and their traveling jams and warm vocals radiated waves that swept us forward to write the night however we saw fit. Some folks pounded terra firma, others simply sat in rapt captivation by the side of the stage. Others flitted back and forth, bumming cigarettes and shwills of booze to keep their party going. No matter what narrative yarn we followed, we were all carried through by this band. The yearning in this music mirrors our own journeys and to hear them in songs such as, “Long, Long Road”
I’ve been on this road for I don’t know how long
Just a ramblin’ and singing this song
With my fiddle and my bow I don’t need no place to go
I’ll just keep walking til I get back home
or their heart-swelling version of Ola Belle Reed’s “I’ve Endured,” I felt like it was touching at some core of my own search for home. They were joined by Rose at the end, whose voice was sounding strained, but she soldiered on for a feverish take on “Jolene,” where she stomped the stage in a fury. Then, the musicians all threw down with Django Porter , a guitarist who has played with Willie Nelson, and was quite a force of gypsy nature. At this point it was creeping up towards 4:00 a.m., and those on stage all deserve serious props for remaining upright, much less keeping the energy high throughout the show. I thought about this late night show on my way back to the campsite. When I was younger, I loved punk and truthfully still do, but more the drive behind it. That DIY philosophy and art for art’s sake is an elusive ideal. But I think that’s what in part what attracted me to bluegrass – the moxie to keep that spry musical fire alive and the sense of community that inspires. This was that spirit in action.
Manny Moss photographer
Sunday April 19th
I woke to sunshine streaming through my tent, leaf shadows dancing patterns across the nylon. I lay for awhile, just simply listening to the sounds of Camp Ben waking up, and then catching the distant music of The Rockin’ Gospel Project starting on the Campground Stage. On Sunday, there were only a few bands left to play in the campground, and I had two I really wanted to see. After enjoying a pleasant stroll in the virtually dried up Onion Creek, I wandered back to the Campground Stage to see my second helping of Spring Creek . They drew quite a crowd for noon on a Sunday, and I couldn’t have thought of a better way to redeem my sins from the night before. This band has a red-blooded firebrand force with a keep-it-real, old school yen as they own the stage, and it was wonderful to soak in their electricity once more. It was also a prime chance to appreciate more of their versatile songwriting, from the spicy “Cuba Vera Swing” to their rousing “My Love is Way Up on the Mountain.” And yes, they got a well-deserved and overdue encore this time, ending on an exuberant cover of Elton John’s “Honky Cat.”
Stonehoney were up next, and if you dig the Eagles, you would probably like this band. My feelings on The Eagles are best summed up by The Dude in The Big Lebowski, so they eventually sent me back to my camp, to dismantle my site and pack up the car. As I watched Camp Ben clear out around me and said my goodbyes, I could feel the weekend catching up with me. But I wanted to see The Lovell Sisters , and I’m glad I made it back to the Campground Stage one last time for them. As we sat on the stone picnic bench in the back, we watched the friendly scene around us. Kids hula hooped, families picnicked, and a group of older folks silly on beer played a sloppy game of checkers, as the unmistakable shudder of a Dobro filled the air. I was really impressed by these sisters, whose melodic sensibilities are spot on, and whose playing shakes the topsoil. A triple attack of Dobro, mando and fiddle, and backed by a rhythm guitar and bass, they were a shiny end to the weekend. A gorgeous a capela gospel number was followed by a haunting cover of Massive Attack’s “Tear Drop,” kudos for bringing something unexpected to the table, and for infusing it with a rootsy shimmer all their own. It was my end credits to the weekend, and it was after that, with creaky bones, muddy feet and sunburned shoulders, we piled into our little red Mazda and drove on, back down that road towards home.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Dan Appenzeller is the event director and the president of Folk West, the non-profit corporation that puts on Folk ‘N Bluegrass and the Four Corners Folks Festival in Pagosa Springs. Appenzeller gets so excited when talking about his upcoming event in June that you can almost picture him jumping up and down. He gives a rundown on the background of the festival. “The history is that we wanted to do a different festival. We wanted to just book independent artists because during that time of the year there was already a big festival that was booking less independent artists, so to speak. So we came up with this concept called ‘Indie Fest.’ Well, I did that for three years and that just didn’t catch on. We were able to cross over a bit and were going to do bluegrass and world beat and all sorts of things and have more of the open genre thing. There was a lot of great world beat stuff I wanted to book and rockabilly and stuff—and you could get a little bit more electric. It didn’t catch on. So we decided we’d do a more traditional event and make it real educational and have more workshops. 2008 was the first year for Folk ‘N Bluegrass. This is our second year of that but our 5th year of doing a festival the second week in June.”
Appenzeller is the event director and the president of Folk West, the non-profit corporation that puts on Folk ‘N Bluegrass and the Four Corners Folks Festival over Labor Day weekend. He handles site logistics, booking, artists, and production. He is over the moon as he describes the lineup he has in store for the lucky folks attending the festival. “The lineup is spectacular. We’ve been wanting to get swing music as well as bluegrass and we’re trying to get some of those newer names out there, that are brilliant but just need to come forward a bit. The John Jorgenson Quintet will be playing this year. We have a band called the Belleville Outfit which is this band that just got signed by one of the major booking agents. They are really breaking through—they are just playing amazing swing. They steal every show they go to!”
Appenzeller is just getting started with his overview. “Bearfoot Bluegrass is doing the Bearfoot Bluegrass camp this year and they’ll be doing it from now on. We’re going to be expanding the kids camp because it sold out. Also performing will be Tony Furtado and his trio. It’s a killer trio—Tony only plays with great people. I really like Tony; I just think he’s incredibly innovative. Sweet Sunny South is playing (spps partner page). They’re so fun. They just have that sound—they’re very compelling—they bring you into it. They sing about neat stuff and they don’t take it too serious. Then, we got this band coming in called the Boston Boys. That’s a bunch of sort of prodigy kids that go to the Berklee School of Music. One of them is Sam Grisman, Dave’s son. They’ve come up with this whole unique sound. They’re going to be playing my free show, too, on Friday. They are absolutely a ball. They’re in their early 20’s. They are the latest greatest.”
He takes a big breath and continues. “Also Missy Raines and the New Hip. She’s got four new players and went to festivals and got these new guys who are a brilliant band. We are so fortunate to get her out. Also coming is Sarah Jarosz. Sarah just got signed by Sugar Hill. So she’s going to perform on Saturday. I think this festival is just unreal!
Badly Bent is a regional band out of Durango and they are absolutely great. Mark Epstein is the banjo player who sort of leads that band and he is a heck of a player. They played last year and they were just tight as a drum. You know the Infamous Stringdusters (spps partner page), of course. They are like six of the best players alive! Then we booked a band called Frank Solivan—you know Country Current—the U.S. Navy Band ? Frank was the front guy on that. He got out of the Navy and he formed his own band. Then, the Expedition Quartet (spps partner page)from Boulder—they’re like the brain trust out there—remarkable. Also, the Jeff and Vida Band(spps partner page). They come from Nashville. A killer band!”
Folk ‘N Bluegrass will take place on June 5, 6, and 7 at Reservoir Hill Park. Appenzeller describes the location. “The acoustic stage is just green fields surrounded by trees and the forest. The site is just remarkable–120 acres. It is a plateau of forest that sits right above and in the middle of Pagosa Springs. The site itself overlooks the range of the San Juan Mountains. It’s funny, you’re isolated in this festival world. If you want to go into town—you can—we have a shuttle service that runs for free, that starts on Saturday. It’s just amazing. Right down below we have the world’s deepest and nicest hot springs. Right beside the main venue is a good 60 acres of just forested camping, all big huge ponderosa pines. Now with that you can’t have huge RV’s up there, so we’re limited on the RV side. We also have camping on the river—offsite spots that are incredible. But onsite is where it’s at, ‘cause the picking is the thing, there. It’s always been a great picking festival. It draws those people who don’t even leave the campground—they just play.”
Something new for 2009 is the Bearfoot Bluegrass Camp for Kids on June 3, 4, and 5, prior to the festival. The camp is open to young people ages 5-17, and includes all bluegrass instruments and ability levels. The Bearfoot band from Alaska also teaches the Kid’s Camp at the prestigious RockyGrass Academy.
There are lots more great aspects to the festival. There will be free concerts on Friday, June 5, in the evening at the Pagosa Springs Town Park Gazebo. Once the festival kicks off, the agenda includes workshops, late night shows, campfire jams, and a free kids program. The kid’s tent is set to be the site for recycled crafts. They will make jewelry, creative instruments, and other projects using recycled CD’s, oatmeal containers, paper towel tubes, and other items along with feather, glue, paints, glitter and more.
Appenzeller is the first to admit that he could not put on this festival without his skilled staff members. He describes some of their contributions. “Crista Munro is the executive director—what that says is that she’s everything. She’s in charge of real marketing and making sure I don’t overspend everything and keeps me grounded and keeps us all flowing. She’s the true manager of all of us. The number two guy on site is Brian Smith. Brian Smith’s been with us for as long as the festival. He’s the site manager. He manages everything up there during the festival. He’s got a huge job. He’s a remarkable guy.”
Over the years, Folk West has accumulated many local supporters for their events. Appenzeller explains. “The town loves it. We have 400 volunteers for Four Corners and about 200 for Folk ‘N Bluegrass. They’re all wonderful people, happy to do it.” He is a big fan of his typical audiences, as well. “It’s a remarkable crowd. What we think we’re good at, is the connection between artist and audience is nowhere better than at the Folk ‘N Bluegrass festival. That means you get right up close. You have a real theater experience up front.”
Over time, Folk West upgraded their site, moving around power and rearranging the vendors to better accommodate the musicians. They replumbed the water for better access for the campers. Appenzeller said they became smart as they gained experience and learned how to delegate. He closes with some last words about his event. “I’m happy with our direction. I’m incredibly happy with the audience that shows up. We’re working with the best folks. When we came up with the idea for this festival, we wanted to do the kind of festival that we would go to ourselves.”
Sounds like Pagosa Springs is the place to be in early June. Get your tickets soon for Folk ‘N Bluegrass at their website at folkwest.com
Kathy is a bass player and a problem solver living in Louisville, Colorado. She enjoys playing her upright bass, writing, gardening, and living through the next great adventure.
A cold December night in Texas (yes, it does get cold in Texas), where cheap pitchers of Lone Star beer and heating lamps kept us warm under a billowy white tent that encompassed the outside area of The Tiniest Bar in Texas (that is its name, I’m not sure if its diminutive stature compared to other watering holes has been officially evaluated). It’s a small group gathered under the tent, comprising a few folks huddled up at picnic tables. On the plywood stage, Billy Bright (Two High String Band) and Wayne “Chojo” Jacques (The Waybacks) are playing a duet of mandolin and, what Jacques’ website describes as, a “Stratocaster type octave mandolin/mini guitar” that is holding us rapt, glued to our benches. It’s a brew where the dense, raw earth of Jacques axe weaves through the iridescent sparkle of Bright’s mando, with the results taking a left turn in their dance and tumbling down the mountainside, notes thrown into tailspins as they shake off the dew. I felt sincerely happy to be amongst those to witness it that night, but you too can catch a case of the Texacali Blues (Fiddling Cricket Records).
The album’s name nods to Bright and Jacques’ respective states of residence, but also hints at the mile markers flying by in the rearview mirror, the redrawing of traditional roadmaps. The record is stock full of sneaky sonic surprises in its stripped down approach, from the magnetic mando and fiddle duets, from Kenny Baker’s “Cross Eyed Fiddler” to Bright’s Tejano-influenced “Guillermo,” to the intriguing electric/acoustic interplay on Jacques’ “J.N.P.T.” and the traditional “Over the Waterfall.” The sounds of the electric instruments are native creatures in the landscape they’ve created, especially on the completely plugged-in “Nashville,” where Bright plays the electric guitar with fine delicacy, really making it sing. Jacques’ playing is decidedly rough and tumble on this track and his mando/guitar hums and breathes with a mantle-cracking buzz. Bright’s comment on the fake façade of Music City, where one has to explain, “Bluegrass music is not country,” boasts an addictively catchy melody, but is executed in a winsomely askew manner that would freak out most uptight Opry goers.
But there’s also plenty of straight-up acoustic picking on Texacali. The two travel copious terrain in the songs, whether it’s a cover of Blind Blake’s “Police Dog Blues,” where Jacques and Bright’s mandos chase each other through the junk yard and onto the box car, or “E. Compton Blues,” a Bright tune that is part of the Two High repertoire. It’s as bouncy and burnished as ever pared down to two players, as Jacques’ razor-sharp fiddle slices cleanly through Bright’s mando chops. An end cap of “Reuben’s Train/Little Sadie/Soldier’s Joy” brings it back to the roots, a fitting end to an album by two musicians who put their own distinctive twists on tradition. What I may like most about this record, is that the overall production feels casual and loose. When pickers enter the studio, the grit and human warmth, and that occasional blessed messiness, that draw many into bluegrass is often polished away to a point where it’s too clean and shiny. If you can see your reflection in the licks, the music can feel like it’s lost some essential earthy soul. But throwing this on, there’s a sense of breathing room, beauty and bruises left wonderfully intact, captured moments of Zen from two masters.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Alluring, absorbing, and a little bit far out with a whole lot of chutzpah – welcome to the uncanny world of Sometymes Why. Kristin Andreassen, Ruth Ungar Merenda and Aoife O’Donovanarethree musicians who have done a lot of string band groundbreaking. But they came together as Sometymes Why because of the common turf they shared as songwriters.
“I’ve been writing since 2001, but there was a lot of songs that didn’t really fit in the Uncle Earl band model, they were too weird,” Andreassen explains. “What I like about Uncle Earl is we keep it upbeat, danceable and not too weird. My good friends Ruth and Aoife realized they had songs like that too, that didn’t fit in The Mammals or Crooked Still. The only place we had to sing them was the after party, sitting around after the show being quiet, and eventually we said, ‘You know, let’s do a gig and sing these songs.’ It just evolved that way, organically.”
Playing their first official gig at the Sidewalk Cafe in January 2005, they may have started out as a vessel to catch those quiet, weird, after-the-show pieces, but have carved a lusciously fresh and innovative sound on their own terms. Their fantastic new record, Your Heart is a Glorious Machine (released March 10th on Signature Sounds) leaves you with a spun head spun and a swelled heart, and is an exciting expansion from the lo-fi glow of 2005’s self-titled release, So come along, sweep your assumptions aside, and follow the winding ribbon, as we attempt to unravel Sometymes Why with Andreassen.
“It’s really fun for me because it’s a totally different move from Uncle Earl. I don’t really like one better than the other, but I think it’s nice to have those two different personality outlets,” Andreassen says. Built on the strong foundation of the three’s distinctive, yet complimentary, songwriting, “It’s almost more like an institutionalized singer in the round thing where we just bring a song we’ve written and the other two then just back it up. I think that’s why Sometymes Why is just so easy, it naturally comes together.”
Their live shows are set up to reflect this individuality, with each woman owning the spotlight for her words, while the other two provide vocal and musical support. The trio easily draws the audience into an inviting rapport, as Andreassen describes: “We sit and we play, and we all sing around one mic. We just take turns in the middle seat, singing lead, and I think it’s really natural and totally impromptu, we always spend a little time just sort of gossiping or conversing onstage. It’s natural, as though you were in our living room.”
The band is still trying to figure out the best rooms for their sound, and Andreassen delves into this dilemma: “I really am curious where to get our agent to try to book this band, because you know we did pretty well [on the last tour] in these venues in Seattle and Portland, but they are kind of the same places Uncle Earl or Crooked Still would play. And Eugene in particular, the venue was a bar and it got pretty quiet for us, but basically it was a bar, and it wasn’t the perfect listening room at all. But going all the way into art centers just seems a little bit like over kill, because we do want to get a younger audience that can pay a reasonable ticket price.”
The challenge then becomes finding venues unique as they are, and Andreassen discovered at least one on the last tour in, “Bellingham, Washingon…We played this little place called The Green Frog Tavern. It’s this crazily cool little venue that sort of feels like a dive bar with peanut shells all over the floor and cheap beer, but it’s all really reasonably priced micro brews, and a great guy who runs the place. The whole room was just used to being a listening room. So this dive bar all of a sudden becomes deadly quiet when we start playing, it was amazing. There were even three or four dogs sitting in the room listening to us, it was very Bellingham.”
What’s In a (Genre) Name?
“People are always like, ‘What kind of music are you playing right now?’ and I’m always like, ‘I don’t know what to call it!’” Andreassen laughs. “What exactly do you play?” is the age-old question punted at musicians, but it’s certainly a good sign if there isn’t an easy catch-all answer. Andreassen pondered this in terms of Sometymes Why:
“I think we are kind of destined to be misreported because we spent so much time in the bluegrass and old time scenes. I think the people that are writing about us see us that way and they will forever introduce us as, ‘Kristin, Ruth and Aoife from Uncle Earl, The Mammals and Crooked Still, have made a record that doesn’t really sound like bluegrass,’ instead of just finding a way to say what it does sound like. I mean you have to admit, the record is so far from bluegrass. It really doesn’t have anything to do with bluegrass… and it’s even debatable whether our other bands play bluegrass. It’s kind of funny, it’s just the word that chases us around all the time. I am waiting for reviewers that maybe listen to other kinds of music, people who listen more to Feist or Andrew Bird or Laura Veirs, that songwriter parlor music that’s kind of quirky and out there. I feel like those people would like our record, but I’m not sure. I mostly read from the folk press.”
But she would emphasize, “Don’t get me wrong! I’m really glad that No Depression and those sort of bluegrass and country magazines are reviewing the record, I think it’s great if Uncle Earl and the Mammals and Crooked Still can draw someone into our records. I think it’s fantastic they will follow us into this new aspect of our songwriting universe.”
“I guess there’s some need for a new genre name,” She continues. “Like a couple of years ago I heard the term ‘apartment music.’ Someone told me, ‘You know, in Rhode Island now there’s this whole scene of apartment music,’ and I’m like, ‘What’s that?” and they are like, ‘Oh you know music that’s not loud enough to wake the neighbors.’ And I said, ‘Oh that’s a good description, maybe that’s what we play!’ [laughs] It’s like little toy instruments you might have in your living room, so that kind of works. But then Aoife’s dad called us ‘folk noir’ which I really like too. Like folk music, but it’s got this kind of vibey, mysterious edge. Those are the two closest genre definitions I’ve heard, but just calling it folk to me seems sort of strange. We play in weird keys and we go in and out of time signatures and use these really strange harmonies. The songs are not very accessible in some ways, I mean I don’t really know what defines folk, but it seems like there’s something not quite folk about it.”
A term that I find myself drawn to is, “leftfield folk.” It doesn’t wall itself into traditional acoustic structures, although it starts with pieces of the scaffolding. Rather, the music runs off into the stranger corners of the field, wanders to places where road songs and mountain ballads don’t quite apply, thumbing a ride to the bright lights and the rumble of the city. What it maintains is the sense of adventure and the aching heart that comes from those wide-open spaces and asphalt scars, only bringing them into darker, hushed corners, exploring out-there instrumental hardware and arrangements, unafraid of embracing a pop sensibility. It’s down to earth with a wry sense of humor, not artsy fartsy, preferring a good pitcher of microbrew over a sipped glass of champagne. But it’s a little too offbeat and hushed for a crowd that wants nothing more than to holler and kick up some dust. So it’s somewhere to the left, hanging out with the folks who pull their wardrobes from thrift stores, daydream on colorful canvases, and scratch rough poetry on bar bathroom walls.
The band’s natural chemistry was inherent on 2005’s self-titled album, which Andreassen refers to as ‘The Black Album’ (there was also a family friendly silver version released, but more on the song that necessitated that later). Describing the recording approach for the first album, Andreassen says, “We were recording a rehearsal just for kicks and we ended up with a whole ten song record by the end of the day, which became the black album. That recording is just in mono, most of it’s on one mic that we are singing into. We happened to record it in a big space so it sounds full, but it’s the real deal [laughs], a one take, no edits, as-is performance.”
The sessions for latest album, Your Heart is a Glorious Machine took place in Dreamland Studios, outside of Woodstock, New York. If the walls of this studio, once a 19th century church, could talk, they would dish out tales of The Band, NRBQ, the B-52s, 10,000 Maniacs and Ron Sexsmith for starters. The band’s sense of on-the-spot, DIY ingenuity was as finely tuned as ever in this inspiring setting, as they created sounds out of the various instruments living in every corner of the newly-reopened studio.
“It’s a super great vibey place and we were the first thing that happened there in about 8 years because the studio had gone out of business. Everything was sort of dusty and covered up, and they had just cleaned it up to start using it again. We used just about every keyboard in the place. There was a grand piano, an upright piano, a Wurlitzer, a Rhodes, a toy piano and a Hammond organ and we used all of them.”
Producer was the multi-talented Jose Ayerve, whose credits include founding ever-evolving indie rock group Spouse, with whom Mike Merenda occasionally plays, and producing albums by bands such as Winterpills. Using a producer also marked a difference from the approach of the first album, but Ayerve was a perfect fit, and a familiar face to boot.
“Jose is an old childhood friend of Mike [Merenda], Ruth’s husband,” Andreassen explains. “Jose’s just a really talented guy with a great ear for music. So we thought of him for Sometymes Why because we were on the fence about whether we wanted a producer at all, we thought we didn’t want someone who was going to be extremely heavy handed. Jose is a nice middle ground in terms of somebody we knew as a friend and respected, but also had really good musical ideas.”
The result is an album which takes those organic elements and unforced charms of the first release and combusts them into a record that’s as addictive as it is inspired. This is also a great headphone album. There’s loads of texture and detail to get lost in, whether it’s the ethereal washes, the cricket samples on closing track “The Sound Asleep,” the interplay between twinkles and bassy growls and tom drums, the interlaced vocals, the fiddle that will sneak in the back door, or the Hammond B-3 that will shatter the windows, like on the killer cover of Concrete Blonde’s “Joey.”
“Joey” is just a bloody fantastic song, the kind that makes you want to grab a hair brush and shamelessly belt along in the bathroom mirror. Sometymes Why gives it the powerful, passionate treatment it requires. Andreassen explains how the band settled on it as a cover choice: “It’s a ‘you’ song, which is the only thing it has going for it thematically [in terms of the album]. What we were looking for in a cover, was a song that’s spoken to a person named ‘you,’ it’s a song for ‘you.’ Because that was what we noticed – by sheer accident every single song [on this record] is to a ‘you’ – ‘I want to take you home,’ ‘you were my friend and then I kissed you,’ ‘I want to fold you into a paper crane,’ – it’s a very personal record, the whole record is basically this letter. And so we wanted a song that did that. And ‘Joey’ – ‘If you’re somewhere passed out on the floor/I’m not angry anymore’ – [the song is] talking to this person. So that was how we thought of it, we were brainstorming songs that were talking to people.”
“The Sound Asleep,” meditates on times in our lives when things fall apart, reading like a letter to one’s self. Andreassen provides insight into this song:
“A whole bunch of things kind of collapsed around me, last February or March, when we’d sort of finished all the Uncle Earl touring and other things in my life had just fallen apart at the same time. I just found myself at home with no job, no concept of what I would do for a job even, and all alone in the house for a week. That’s when I wrote that song. I was so tired and the major thought that I had was that I was sleepy. I was sleeping like twelve hours a day and I was thinking how good that is, but how the only reason I was able to rest was because nothing else I was trying to do was working out. When I’m actually working, or when my life is so-called working, I sleep like three or four hours a night. So it’s about the imbalance of that, sometimes you have to fail at something to be able to get the time to rest. The universe forces it on you. But the upside of it is that even when you’re in the middle of a deep hole, where you can see that things are collapsing, it just means they are changing. Like Ruth says a lot, when something bad happens, you have to seize the moment and write a song about it right then, because otherwise you’ll turn around and things will be looking up again [laughs].”
The album is made up of seized moments. As much as these songs are a deeply personal windows into Andreassen, O’Donovan and Merenda’s lives, they are also mirror of our own experiences – our relationships that have gone sour, our sense of ambivalence and confusion in matters of the heart, our deep sense of longing for another person, even if its just for one night – as expressed in sultry opening track, Merenda’s “Aphrodisiaholic.” This is a record that explores the nuanced shades of women’s hearts and sexuality, with refreshing sincerity and fearless wit.
Coming from a strongly female perspective when it comes to below the belt subjects, even in this day and age, still makes some folks a little uncomfortable. But as Andreassen reflects, “You know if there are people that are uncomfortable, we probably don’t know who they are because they probably stopped coming to our shows and won’t buy the record. Most of the people that come up to us and talk to us think it’s really funny, or really bold and they appreciate that. I think we put [‘Aphrodisiaholic’] as track one on our record just as a nod to the last record, the black record. We got a bit of a reputation in the folk underworld – maybe that’s what we should be, the folk underworld – because we had the ‘I want to f**k you’ [O’Donovan’s ‘Too Repressed’] song on that record, so we’d meet people and they’d be like, “Oh, you’re Sometymes Why.’ We were kind of known for this one sexy song. So we kind of put this one song on there first be like, ‘Hey we’re still here and we’re still gonna make you squirm a little bit, but maybe just a little bit.’ And that’s ok with us. Not that we want to make people feel uncomfortable, but we’re trying to not censor ourselves. And if people don’t like it they can just not buy the record. But for the most part I think people buy the record because of it. It’s really honest, it’s really uncensored.”
Amen to that! Follow Andreassen, Merenda, and O’Donovan down this path and discover the vision of Sometymes Why – uncensored, undefined and utterly unique.
Sarah lives a relatively quiet existence in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys dancing to bluegrass, trolling through sales bins at record stores, hiking, camping and attending screenings of old movies.
Music aficionados in the Boulder and Lyons, Colorado area only have to blink and they’ll find Nancy Thorwardson on stage performing in one of her many bands. Nancy is an extraordinary songwriter who has taken a style of music typically found in Texas and Oklahoma and imprinted her own Colorado stamp on it. Thorwardson was eager to share her background with the SPPS on a recent weekend in March.
Thorwardson just had a birthday and she is very excited about the future. “It’s looking great right now, I have to say! I’m playing in tons of bands and I just feel like there’s a really new breath of life for me right now in terms of my music. I feel really excited about it and I just hope I can keep on playing for years and years. It’s a really rich musical time for me. I just had my 54th birthday on Monday and I just think it’s so exciting to have all this—it’s just exhilarating. It’s also really fun to spend time in groups with a broad demographic base.”
Thorwardson explained how she got involved in playing music as a child. “I went to graduate school in Stillwater, Oklahoma in geography and one of my friends who was a student was a musician in a western swing band—he played fiddle and guitar. We used to go out and dance to him and one day I said to him ‘it’s just amazing that you can play music like that’ and he said ‘well you can play music’—I said ‘no I can’t!’ Well he loaned me a guitar and showed me some chords. I was an adult and off and running with it. Shortly after that I moved to Colorado and got involved with Swallow Hill—that was when Swallow Hill was just starting—and I kept on playing and playing…”
Thorwardson is a multi-instrumentalist and plays rhythm guitar, ukulele, drums, other percussion instruments, and a little bit of piano. Many folks in the music scene around Boulder see Nancy playing swing music, which is mostly popular in Texas and Oklahoma. She talked about her favorite genre of music. “Western swing and standard swing really do speak to me the most—somewhat in that order—there’s a lot of overlap. I love and always have loved old timey music. I played old timey and contra dance for years and years when I first was getting going here in Colorado—which is great for stamina. I also really love Cajun music—I played in a Cajun band out in Port Townsend, Washington for a number of years. I played drums and triangle and washboard and sang a little bit of Cajun songs.”
Thorwardson has a wonderful body of original work that she showcases on her two CDs. She explained how she got started writing music. “I started writing by writing second verses to songs. I was playing in a western swing band here in Colorado back in the 80’s—the Cactus Crooners. The gal that was the lead singer in that band did a lot of Patsy Montana songs, and others of that genre and she thought they weren’t long enough, so I started writing second verses. Then it wasn’t such a big leap to write the whole song.”
Thorwardson’s latest CD is composed of her original songs with various bands playing the tunes with her. This is a different spin from some recordings which list out the guest musicians, but don’t normally have guest bands on tap. She explained, “I had this idea for a while. In 2006 was the first CD of all my songs. I thought I would really like to show more variety—variety of styles—as a composer you don’t
want to be cubbyholed or pigeonholed. I thought about getting a bunch of different singers. I still have that in mind maybe for some other project to make it more variety. I thought, well I know a lot of different bands that I really like. I wonder what it would be like for the Hi Beams to do my songs—more rock-a-billy and I thought—why not?”
She is already busy with new songs for a future recording. “It’s kind of funny, and I don’t know if it’s like this for all songwriters. When I’m working on recording I don’t really write very much. As soon as I’m done with that project I start thinking about the next one. I have some new songs and I have some songs that I have written over the years that might be on the next recording.”
There was a time when Thorwardson was in almost a holding pattern in terms of creating original work. “I played a lot of music when I moved out to Washington state but mostly I moved out there to take care of my mother who was infirm and had some health situations. I did that for 7 or 8 years and I didn’t do any pursuing or traveling. Port Townsend is a very musical town –there‘s tons of musicians there and music camps right in town, so I played a lot of music but I didn’t do any recording, that kind of stuff. So when I moved back to Colorado it took a little while to get the boost, and I started working on the recording projects and then I started playing in a bunch of bands.”
Thorwardson has some stories to tell about some of her original tunes. “Well, the first song that I wrote that actually stayed intact and became a song and is in the world now is called “My Prairie Home.” That one has been recorded by a whole bunch of different people and it’s got a life of its own. It’s really thrilling—it’s the most exciting thing to me. It’s like if you have kids and they do well, and they’ve gone off in their own world. So, writing that song, it just kind of came out of that time when I was writing second verses for other western songs. I grew up on the prairie and had a mid-western outlook and it almost wrote itself. The band I was playing in at the time did it, and it got recorded, and at that time in the western music world there weren’t that many people writing songs that actually sounded sort of old and that one really caught on, as well as a couple of others that I wrote shortly after that. The Western Music Association has an annual music festival—it used to be held in Tucson every year—and I walked into the lobby of the hotel and there was a jam session going on and people I didn’t know were singing that song and I was so thrilled—was I in the right place or what?”
Another song that is special to Thorwardson also has a story associated with it. “There’s another one called “Paint the Town,” that I wrote—it was kind of an emancipation song. I wrote it one summer when I had just changed a bunch of things in my life. I was on a road trip back east with a friend of mine and we went to a music camp and that’s another one that just sort of came out, just wrote itself practically. That’s another one that I had an experience where I was at a music festival or party and someone asked me to do that one and I did and the first person to record it was a gal named Jill Jones down in Texas and she had put a yodel in it and everybody had learned her version of it. So I did it without the yodel because I don’t yodel, but everybody started yodeling!”
Thorwardson’s mother played music but in general Nancy didn’t come from a huge musical family. “My mother was a musician when she was in college and shortly after college she played a bunch of piano. She played big band kind of tunes and show tunes. My sister was also a musician. But we really didn’t play music around the house.”
Predictably, her major musical influences come from the swing world. “The early western swing folks are the biggest ones: Bob Wills, Bill Boyd and all those guys that had the big swing bands—and I think mostly because that’s what really gripped me to play. I sort of grew up listening to more big band and show tunes.”
She has six bands which are: The Silver Stars (swing), Swing State (swing), Gadzukes! (ukulele), The Ringtones (folk combo), The Blue Mountain Ranchhands (western swing), and The Quarry Gals (gal vocal group). Like every part-time musician, Thorwardson juggles work and music. “It can be a little challenging and would be more challenging if my boss was not one of my band mates. I work for Jani Little and she’s in the western swing band I’m in—The Blue Mountain Ranchhands.”
Nancy is a role model for the SPPS. She has taken a style of music that is part of our Americana heritage and modernized it with her original tunes. Her recordings inspire enthusiasm in her work and also promote interest in the old time and swing music of the past. Keep track of her goings-on at www.nancythorwardson.com.
Kathy is a bass player and a problem solver living in Louisville, Colorado. She enjoys playing her upright bass, writing, gardening, and living through the next great adventure.
Most of us have heard the saying “Sharing is Caring.” We speak it to our children. But, in the day of the Internet, it takes on a new and different meaning. The caring needs to include the provider of a service. In this case, The Steam Powered Preservation Society.
The SPPS does a lot under the hood that we don’t see. What most of us see is the sharing of music and information. If we care about the quality of the music or news, then we need to share some back. We need to help keep the SPPS as they help us.
In today’s turbulent music environment, we are watching as established foundation walls are crumbling. Walls of the brick & mortar retail stores; walls of the RIAA; walls of the music business and the walls of how we think about the value of music.
The SPPS is different. Their walls are not limited by virtual space but real dollars. They need to have the facilities to hold their vast collection. They need the plumbing that allows the world free access to that collection. They need your caring by sharing a few dollars to help them survive this turbulent time.
There is another way you can help too. You can spread the word about this fine organization. You can try and get others to contribute their music to the archives. You can help bring new members into the society. These are ways you can show just how much you care about the music the SPPS provides.
The economy is not weathering the best of times and people’s budgets for entertainment are not what they used to be. Disposable income is no longer disposable. People are seeking new outlets for new music and the SPPS certainly fills that gap. But would it be too much to help them in that effort? One could certainly get enough music to fill multiple CDs for the price of just one.
A little bit here and a little bit there helps. And, today, the SPPS needs your help. The SPPS makes it easy too. You can support the SPPS by just clicking on this link. It does make a difference and, it is tax deductible too!
By sharing a few dollars a month, you can show how you care about The SPPS. We all need to help each other and it is easy to forget or overlook the society during these difficult times. So, when you renew your membership into your local bluegrass club, acoustic society or other musical charity, please think of us too. Thank you!
Bob created the first bluegrass web site on September 9, 1992 while working on an electronic documentation project. This was the world's 7th web site. Bob is the founder and owner of www.cybergrass.com
Anders Beck, Dave Bruzza, Michael Devol, Paul Hoffman and Michael Arlen Bont
Paul Hoffman - photo by Eric Kinnally
Greensky Bluegrass Band is a perfect example of a new generation of musicians who both carry the traditions forward and expand upon those traditions to push the boundaries and produce new and interesting sounds. Their set lists are all over the board in terms of style; the bottom line is they want to please all the fans—those of bluegrass, rock, folk, you name it. From their cover of “Road to Nowhere” to the more traditional sounding “Into the Rafters” to their seminal original tune, “Reverend” they offer a little bit for everyone. It’s been eight years for them now with no sign of things slowing down.
It isn’t often that a band from Michigan is the top dog at one of the most prestigious band contests in the bluegrass festival world. Greensky Bluegrass is from Kalamazoo, Michigan, yet they travel coast-to-coast year round spreading their music to the southeast and Colorado bluegrass festival staples among others. Paul Hoffman, founder, mandolinist, and vocalist, is proud of their progress in the business, the win in a prestigious contest, his songwriting, and just about everything else about this band. Hoffman characterizes the Greensky music as “new acoustic roots.” They do some covers but are leaning more and more to their own original works, which are a combination of bluegrass and rock and roll.
In 2006, Greensky won the Telluride Bluegrass Festival band competition. Hoffman talked about how their music changed afterwards.
“Since we won the Telluride contest, we added Anders Beck on dobro. The sound and dynamic of the band have grown a lot. I’m very pleased with the way things are headed musically. We’re coming up with a lot of new ideas and the growing crowds are inspiring unexpected energy into our stage show. Winning the contest introduced us to a lot of new fans, musicians and venues across the country. It’s like a letter of recommendation from a distinguished source.”He is hoping to come full circle one day. “One of my hopes is that we’ll be invited to return to the festival. Celebrating the solstice somewhere else just doesn’t have the same weight.”
Micahel Arlen Blont on Banjo - photo by Eric Kinnally
Along with Hoffman, Greensky is composed of Michael Arlen Bont on banjo, guitarist Dave Bruzza, bassist Michael Devol and Anders Beck on dobro. The three founders of the band—Hoffman, Bruzza, and Bont—have been performing together for eight years and can practically finish each other’s sentences. They came together in the same manner that has proven tried and true for many a musician in search of a band. Hoffman explained.
“Bruzza, Bont, and myself met in an open mic’ setting in 2001. We’ve been Greensky Bluegrass ever since. Things became more serious and when we added Devol on the bass, we began touring nationally. The four of us won the (Telluride) competition together and added Anders on dobro on the last day of December in 2007. We created a formula that just keeps bubbling over the glass. It’s hard to look back at how things have changed and imagine the individual moments spanning 8 years.”
Their songs choices are an entertainment in itself. For those listeners who are more on the rock and roll side of things, Greensky sings the Talking Heads tune, “Road to Nowhere” like they own it. This is the
Guitarist Dave Bruzza
song that everyone has heard before, that the audience members like to sing along with and shout “Hey!” at the end. Their harmonies are polished and the ‘bluegrass aspect’ of their instruments is much more muted in this tune than in some of the others they do. This is a definite crowd pleaser.
For the more traditional fans, Greensky performs a tune called “Into the Rafters.” The song has a sound and feel that takes one back to the roots of bluegrass—echoing the influences of the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. Banjoist Bont does not let the listener forget that this is a bluegrass song.
bassist Michael Devol
Finally, in yet another twist in style, Greensky offers “Reverend.” This is the type of song that ambushes a listener and then settles in for the long term. One wakes up in the morning humming it after the Greensky show from the night before. When asked about a song that has some significance to him, Hoffman didn’t have to think twice before naming “Reverend.” He wrote the tune after a discussion with a friend who is ordained and also a songwriter. It’s a beautiful song, evocative and longing and a tribute to Hoffman’s talent as a songwriter. His bandmates give their all to it; the harmonies are lovely. The tune is a hard-to-describe combination of bluegrass and perhaps Steve Earle with a rock undertone.
Greensky has a busy travel schedule. They do over 200 gigs a year and enjoy a hectic festival season. Further, unlike many of the bluegrass bands from back in the southeast, the band members are well-acquainted with the snow and the fun to be had in it. They have their ‘Ski Tour 2009!’ scheduled for the first half of March in Colorado when they will have gigs in Breckinridge, Keystone, Denver, Durango, Steamboat, Crested Butte, Boulder, and Fort Collins. They finish out the month in the mid-west where they likely will still get some more skiing in—passing through the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Anders Beck on Dobro photo E Kinnally
With four recordings under their belts, Hoffman is looking forward to cutting another live CD this year. They spent time in the studio in 2004 and 2006 to do “Less Than Supper” and “Tuesday Letter.” They followed up in 2007 with their first live recording of “Live at Bells,” and then went back to the studio in 2008 for “Five Interstates.” Their hard work has paid off with the help they need to build upon their success to date. They have a manager and a booking agent; further, Tim Carbone of the band Railroad Earth produced two of their recordings.
Their original work is the foundation that they are laying for a new generation. Hoffman confirmed that Greensky allows and encourages listeners to tape their music and post it on the internet. That behavior has led to some of the gigs that comprise their hectic travel schedule. They frequently have people come up to them at shows and say they saw a performance on the internet. When they meet tapers they try to accommodate them as much as possible. Greensky Bluegrass knows which side its bread is buttered on. They’ve been doing this for eight years, with many more to go.
Kathy is a bass player and a problem solver living in Louisville, Colorado. She enjoys playing her upright bass, writing, gardening, and living through the next great adventure.
In 2006, Greensky won the 
