The John Hartford String Band: What Would John Do?
John Hartford
“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.”
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