Alan Munde: Playing in the Moment
Alan Munde
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.
Listen to a handy banjo tip from Alan here.
You can read more about Two High String Band in our exclusive December 2008 feature, and check out an extensive history of Country Gazette here.
John Barbour Says:
