Tag: grateful dead

MIXTAPE: Bobby Britt’s Songs of Hard-Won Joy

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The songs and artists on this playlist evoke a sense of hard-fought, hard-won, deep and rich joy. It is not a simple, one-dimensional joy. It has the sound of being churned about, tried and tested again. And now, just maybe, the joy being properly vetted, can be enjoyed. I look up to these artists, as they convey a message of calm and confident optimism.

We are all faced with the dualities of a temporal world…birth and death, gain and loss, pleasure and pain.

These songs speak to the strength of the human spirit amidst that world, and give me courage to carry on regardless of what’s happening, good or bad. They also provide a glimpse at an eternal reality of peace and balance (that has nothing to do with time, space or duality) that is hard to see or believe in when I am churning in the opposites…fear of loss, a craving for more and more solidity, and the dread that I will never have or be enough.

We need artists for this very reason; to go beyond our normal, conditioned ways of thinking about life, and to give us a new perspective with which to test our old and sometimes outdated paradigms.

My area of expertise is bluegrass and old-time fiddle. Though I am not a vocalist or pop artist, I gain inspiration from all styles. The feeling and sound of the above mentioned “hard-won joy” is what transcends specific genres for me. A goal of mine is to take this base emotional element, and with it, transfuse my fiddle playing and songwriting.

My hope is that you can find some joy and something to relate to in these songs as I did. Thank you for listening.

Photo Credit Louise Bichan

Canon Fodder: The Beau Brummels, ‘Bradley’s Barn’

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Who invented rock ‘n’ roll?

Don’t answer that: It’s a trick question. Rock ‘n’ roll, like most complex sounds and genres and world-conquering forces, wasn’t actually invented. Instead, it germinated and mutated and mushroomed and erupted. It’s not the product of Elvis Presley or Sam Phillips, nor of Jackie Brenston or Louis Jordan. Rather, it is the product of all those people and more — all conduits for larger cultural ideas and desires. Rock wasn’t an invention, not like television or the telephone or the automobile or the atomic bomb. Similarly, its sub-genres and sub-sub-genres in the late 1960s weren’t inventions, more like waves swelling and cresting through pop culture.

The Beau Brummels didn’t invent country-rock in the 1960s, although they did help bring it into being. Long before the San Francisco rock explosion in the late ’60s shot the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane to national prominence, they were gigging around the Bay Area as one of the first American bands to respond to the British Invasion. In 1965, they recorded their breakout hit, “Laugh Laugh,” with a kid named Sly Stewart, later known as Sly Stone. They held their own against Southern California groups like the Byrds, the Standells, and the Electric Prunes (who were marrying their garage rock to liturgical music in one of the most esoteric experiments of the era). While tiny Autumn Records could never fully capitalize on their success, the Beau Brummels did achieve enough notoriety to appear in films and television shows. (The quality of those outlets, however, remains questionable: Village of the Giants, a kiddie flick starring Beau Bridges and Ron Howard, was skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000.)

They have a full slate of excellent hits, each marked by songwriter/guitarist Ron Elliott’s melancholic lyrics and Sal Valentino’s unusual vibrato, which had a way of turning consonants into vowels and vice versa. The line-up shrunk from a sextet to a trio, which meant fewer harmonies, but a more streamlined sound. Released in 1967, Triangle strips away the electric guitars and, in their place, inserts folky acoustics and chamber-pop flourishes. It’s a song cycle about dreams, simultaneously baroque and austere, and it finds the band stretching in weird directions. For example, they cover “Nine Pound Hammer,” which had been a hit for country singer Merle Travis in 1951. Perhaps more surprising is how well they make it fit into the album’s theme.

In fact, the Beau Brummels had been peppering their sets with country covers since their first shows in San Francisco, and their 1965 debut, Introducing the Beau Brummels, included a cover of Don Gibson’s 1957 hit “Oh Lonesome Me.” They weren’t alone, either. As the “Bakersfield Sound” became more prominent on the West Coast for mixing country music with rock guitars, rock musicians were completing the circle and borrowing from country music. In 1967, Bob Dylan traveled to Nashville to make John Wesley Harding, his own stab at a kind of country-rock.

The trend culminated in 1968, when the Beatles covered Buck Owens on The White Album and the Everly Brothers released Roots. In March, the International Submarine Band released their sole studio album, Safe at Home, and five months later, the Byrds released Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Both were spearheaded by Gram Parsons, a kid out of Florida who was in love with the kind of mainstream country music that most West Coast hipsters had long written off. He is still identified with the country-rock movement, often declared its architect or instigator — and with good cause.

Early in 1968, at the behest of their producer, Lenny Waronker, the Beau Brummels decamped to Nashville — or to rural Wilson County, just outside of Nashville — to record a new album at the headquarters of Owen Bradley. The previous decade, Bradley had helped to define what came to be known as the “Nashville Sound,” a more pop-oriented strain of country music meant to appeal to as wide an audience as possible — not just rural folk, but urban listeners, as well. Even so long after his heyday, he would have been revered for countrypolitan classics by Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, and Conway Twitty.

Although it bears his name, Owen Bradley didn’t produce the Beau Brummels’ Bradley’s Barn. Instead, Waronker remained at the helm. But working in Nashville meant they had access to local session players, including Jerry Reed on guitar and dobro, Kenny Buttrey on drums, and Norbert Putnam on bass. The Beau Brummels had withered down to a trio at the beginning of the sessions and, by the end, bassist Ron Meagher was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. As a duo, Elliott and Valentino were able to craft a very distinctive sound that’s more than just rock music played on acoustic instruments.

Bradley’s Barn crackles with ideas and possibilities, from the breathless exhortation of “Turn Around” that kicks off the album, to the ramshackle lament of “Jessica” that ushers its close. “An Added Attraction (Come and See Me)” is a loping rumination on love and connection, as casual as a daydream under a shade tree. The picking is deft and acrobatic throughout the album, as playfully ostentatious as any rock guitar solo, and Valentino sings in what might be called an anti-twang, an un-locatable accent that renders “deep water” as “deeeep whoa-ater” and pronounces “the loneliest man in town” with a weeping vibrato.

Bradley’s Barn wasn’t the first, but it was among the first country-rock albums. It was recorded and mixed by March 1968, when the International Submarine Band’s Safe at Home was released, but for some reason, the label shelved it for most of the year. It was finally released in October, perhaps as a means to capitalize on success of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which hit stores in August. Once leading the way in country-rock, the Beau Brummels were suddenly playing catch-up. And yet, compared to those two Parsons-led projects, Bradley’s Barn feels like much more of a risk, less self-conscious about its country sound. Safe and Sweetheart were primarily covers albums, with only a few of Parsons’ originals and a handful of Dylan compositions. Their purpose was to define a sound, to translate hits by Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and the Louvin Brothers into the language of rock ‘n’ roll. As such, they’re landmark albums, showing just how malleable rock ‘n’ roll could be — how it could stretch and bend to accommodate new sounds and ideas.

Save for the Randy Newman tune that closes the album (and was recorded in L.A. right before the Beau Brummels went to Tennessee), Bradley’s Barn is all originals, each one penned or co-penned by guitarist Ron Elliott. He has a deceptively straightforward style, evoking complex emotions with simple words. Alienation and isolation are his favorite topics, which lend all of his songs, but especially this album, its distinctive melancholy. “Every so often, the things I need never seem to be around,” Valentino sings on “Deep Water.” “Every so often, I pick up speed. Trouble is, I’m going down.”

On “Long Walking Down to Misery,” Reed’s dobro answers Valentino’s vocals with a jeering riff, turning his yearning for love and comfort into something like a punchline. That sadness and the music’s response to it — alternately bolstering it and undercutting it — is perhaps the most country aspect to this country-rock album. Elliott, in particular, understands how country works, just as much as Parsons does or Dylan does. Every song is a woe-is-me lament, lowdown and troubled, but not without humor or self-awareness. Even “Cherokee Girl” uses the imagery that would be identified with outlaw country in the next decade.

Bradley’s Barn flopped, when it was finally released, overshadowed by the Southern California bands and generally abandoned by the label. In 1969, when “Cherokee Girl” failed to register on the pop charts, the Beau Brummels broke up. They’ve reunited a few times since then, most famously in 1975, but generally they live on in reissues and oldies playlists. “We weren’t trying to do country,” Elliott told rock historian Richie Unterberger in 1999. “We were trying to do Beau Brummels country, which was a totally different thing. But it didn’t really catch on.”

Old & In the Way, ‘Old & In the Way Breakdown’

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As a genre, bluegrass has always had outward-facing ambassadors — bands and musicians with platforms that enabled them to reach a wider audience than the usually insular ‘grass niche. The Dillards, as “the Darlings,” brought bluegrass to thousands of TV viewers on The Andy Griffith Show; the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band birthed an entire generation of fans with their iconic Will the Circle Be Unbroken album, showcasing the genre’s founders and heroes; Alison Krauss, with her wildly successful crossover-and-back career — she has won more Grammy Awards than any other woman ever — showed the masses that bluegrass can be aesthetic, understated, and artful without sacrificing its raw, rustic energy. It just takes a tiny taste, a glimpse behind the curtain, to hook outside listeners with that high lonesome sound.

In 1973, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Vassar Clements, Peter Rowan, and John Kahn coalesced as Old & In the Way, becoming one of the most influential bluegrass ambassador bands in the history of the music. Their eponymous debut record is widely regarded as the best-selling bluegrass album of all time — before the soundtrack for the infamous O Brother, Where Art Thou? surpassed it. Though Old & In the Way only lasted a year, their legacy lives on, extended and expanded through several live recordings. Released in 1997, Breakdown was recorded live at the Boarding House in San Francisco, California, by Owsley “Bear” Stanley in October 1973. The “Old & In the Way Breakdown” showcases that Garcia was not only a fan of old-time and bluegrass, but he had the chops, too, tearing it up on the five-wire. Budding bluegrass fans take note: We call this tune “Patty on the Turnpike,” too.

Join BGS as we celebrate Jerry Garcia’s songbook, from the Grateful Dead to Old & In the Way and beyond at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles on March 30. With bluegrassers Sam Bush, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, Sean Watkins, and many more. Get your tickets for Jubilee: A Celebration of Jerry Garcia now.

Jerry Garcia: Expanding the Musical Consciousness

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Before becoming the psychedelic guitar-playing icon of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia was already living a life completely dedicated to music. Heavily immersed in the folk idioms that coalesced with the beat poet scene in San Francisco — and in the peninsula towns of Menlo Park and Palo Alto — in the beginning of the 1960s, Garcia’s concentration, determination, and passion for musical collaboration planted the seeds for a force that would not only influence the world in song, but that would let loose a seamless tie to multiple genres through multiple generations. What’s now viewed as Americana, Garcia was creating with the Dead right from the outset. His impact looms far and wide, perhaps even greater as the years since his passing roll on. From the bluegrass world of the McCourys to esteemed guitarists like Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, and David Rawlings, to jam bands like Leftover Salmon, and the current generation of musicians like the National, Jenny Lewis, and Ryan Adams, Garcia’s ethos is being deeply felt and utilized.

Garcia had a mind hungry for knowledge and interested in art, comics, and horror films, even as music ran through his family. After initially getting an accordion for his 15th birthday and successfully trading that in for a guitar, the quest for constant improvement was born as he devoured the styles of Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Buddy Holly, and Bo Diddley. As the ‘60s approached and the initial rock boom faded, Garcia and his friend (and soon to be Grateful Dead lyricist) Robert Hunter found themselves in the middle of a very fertile Bay Area folk scene. Being steeped in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music led to a fascination with the Carter Family and then Flatt & Scruggs.

It was at this time, in 1962, that Garcia began his complete immersion into the banjo and the bluegrass style of Earl Scruggs. He formed the Hart Valley Drifters with Hunter and David Nelson (later of New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band), and the scene grew to encompass the likes of Eric Thompson, Jody Stecher, Sandy Rothman, Rodney Albin, Janis Joplin, Jorma Kaukonen, David Crosby, Paul Kantner, and Herb Pedersen. The Hart Valley Drifters performed at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1963 in the amateur division and won Best Group, and Garcia took the Best Banjo Player award, which strikes with irony as, throughout his career, Garcia would never consider music to be a competition of any kind. He was more into turning people on.

While absorbing as much music as possible and focusing on his craft with diligence, Garcia came into cahoots with people like Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and John “Marmaduke” Dawson through a string of continuous collaborations and a rotating cast of characters at joints like the Boar’s Head, Keppler’s Bookstore, and the Tangent. McKernan was the blues aficionado with the biker looks and heart of gold who would lead Garcia into the electric blues band the Warlocks, which then became the Grateful Dead, while Dawson would be the one who had the canon of songs for Garcia to base his pedal steel guitar learning around to form the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

But it was on a cross country road trip with Rothman in 1964 that Garcia met David Grisman, the young mandolin player to whom Thompson had tipped him off. It was at Sunset Park in West Grove, Pennsylvania, where acts like Bill Monroe and the Osborne Brothers were featured, where Garcia and Grisman first did some pickin’ together, and a friendship was born that would lead to musical ventures that would have more than a lasting impact.

Both Garcia and Grisman were imparted with some crucial advice from Monroe, which was to start your own style of music. Garcia, no doubt, led the Dead (as much as he refused to admit to any leadership role) to their unique musical domain, while Grisman created his own “Dawg” style of music that was the precursor of “New Grass” in the ‘70s. According to Grisman, “Jerry was always the true renaissance music man.”

While each had gone on to create their own paths, it was 1973 when they started hanging out together at Stinson Beach, picking and having fun, when Peter Rowan (a former Bill Monroe Bluegrass Boy member) joined in along with legendary fiddler Vassar Clements, and, needing a bass player, John Kahn was brought in. Old & In the Way was born. In typical Garcia nature, the musical fun led to some local gigs which, thankfully, were recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley. With the guitar and the Dead being Garcia’s main drive, getting back to the banjo and picking with his pals in Old & In the Way was not only stress free, but fun and a piece of his musical puzzle that really exemplified how the muse consumed him. It wouldn’t be out of the norm, at the time, to find him in the span of a week or two playing gigs with the Dead, Old & In the Way, and one of his other musical soulmates, Merl Saunders.

The release of Old & In the Way, taken from Bear’s recordings at the Boarding House in San Francisco in October of 1973, hit the world in 1975 on the Dead’s Round Records label. It was through the Dead Heads fan club mailing of a 7-inch, 33 rpm sampler that many fans got their first dose of Old & In the Way. Many of that generation — and a few that followed — were exposed to bluegrass thanks to that release. The album continued to turn on the masses and was widely respected as one of the best-selling bluegrass albums of all time.

While fame was never of interest to Garcia, the expansion of musical consciousness was, perhaps, the most beneficial and unintended consequence of his popularity. Just like the Dead were doing with their music — turning kids onto Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Johnny Cash songs — here, Garcia and Old & In the Way were turning rock and rollers onto bluegrass and the songs of Peter Rowan, the Stanley Brothers, and Jim and Jesse McReynolds. The aspect of turning people on to music was certainly not limited to bluegrass, where Garcia was concerned. The Jerry Garcia Band was his outlet for a good 20+ years, wherein he’d groove to just about any and everything. Motown, Louis Armstrong, Los Lobos, Allen Toussaint, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Van Morrison … the stream of tremendous musical taste was just about endless. And, of course, adding his own flair, passionate vocals, and one-of-a-kind guitar to it all made for hundreds of satisfying shows and numerous albums.

Jerry Garcia made music that was loaded with adventure. Improvisation was his nature, always seeking out what was around the bend, never wanting to play the same thing the same way twice. That adventure is what drew so many to him and his music. That adventure lives on, not only eternally in his music, but also through the lives, songs, and good deeds of those he inspires.

Illustration by Zachary Johnson

That Ain’t Bluegrass: Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley

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Artist: Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley
Song: “Friend of the Devil” (Originally by Grateful Dead)
Album: The Country Blues

Where did you guys first find this song? From the Grateful Dead or from a secondary source?

Trey Hensley: I picked it up from the Dead. The first — maybe the second — record that I bought by the Dead was American Beauty. It felt pretty natural, the original is somewhat bluegrassy. It has [David] Grisman on it, so it felt like it would be a cool tune to cover. I took it to Rob one of the times we were rehearsing and it just fell in — it was perfect.

What else about the song made you feel like it would fit solidly within bluegrass, not just on the fringes?

TH: I liked the subject matter; it’s just a well-written song. It already had the melody of a bluegrass tune, and I know that the Dead got a lot of people into bluegrass, from Jerry [Garcia’s] banjo playing and Old and in the Way. That slightly outlaw-ish subject matter just fell right in with what I think of when I think of traditional bluegrass tunes.

What was the process for you guys putting together this song?

Rob Ickes: I felt kind of ignorant because it’s such a huge song and everybody knows it, but I had never heard it before! I love that. I think my ignorance helped my enthusiasm for the song. I had never heard it before, but when Trey brought the song, I just loved it. I loved the subject matter, also, and it sounded like a cool bluegrass thing. We came up with that little hook on the top of the song — it kind of reminds me of “Blackberry Blossom,” the way the chords go. We came up with that melodic figure, that’s like a fiddle tune, with a bluegrass feel to pull it more toward ‘grass than the original version. Also, I heard that the Dead never performed the song at that tempo (on the record) again. They would perform it pretty slow.

I think because it’s a Dead song, it lends itself to a sort of space jam in the middle of the tune. When we play it live, we really pick it out. It’s a showcase for both of us, but especially Trey on the guitar. He really takes it to the moon and back. We just did a bunch of shows with Tommy Emmanuel and David Grisman, and we closed with that song every night and would send it out to David, because he played on the original, of course. People went nuts over that instrumental section.

Is the jam section your favorite part of playing it live? What else do you love about performing it out?

RI: For me, it’s just hearing what Trey does with it every night. [Laughs] It’s always totally different. He’s just a great improviser. It’s fun to hear all the different stuff that comes out of him every night.

TH: I would say the improvisation part. It puts me in that Dead state of mind. You want to come up with something different. Being into bluegrass and jazz and all kinds of different stuff, improvising is my favorite part of music, in general. Especially on that one. There are no rules. It has a shape, but within that there are no rules. It’s pretty much a free-for-all. And I like that it can be as loose as we want it to be. It feels great and it’s always fun.

Ever since the beginning of bluegrass as a genre, there’s always been this tradition of covering songs from outside of bluegrass. Why do you think that’s something that still continues to this day?

TH: That first Bill [Monroe] record has so much on it that, by today’s standards, would not be considered bluegrass — like organ and other stuff that’s kind of outside the driving thing that bluegrass has become. I think that’s the beauty of bluegrass: It can work within whatever you want it to be.

RI: You know, Earl Scruggs was listening to Benny Goodman, and he was really into this clarinet player named Pete Fountain. Bill Monroe was listening to Jimmie Rodgers. Arnold Schultz, a great blues guitarist from Kentucky was, of course, a big influence on Bill. That’s what I like about what Trey and I are doing. It’s kind of rooted in bluegrass, it has that energy, but we’re exploring other music forms. When we play live, we’re usually playing acoustics, but we have some pedals. We’re playing through pickups. I’ll use a phase-shifter at certain points on that song and Trey will use a wah pedal, kind of tipping his hat to Jerry Garcia — even musically, he’ll quote some Jerry Garcia licks in his solo. We’re using this bluegrass background, but we don’t live in that shell. I’m a big fan of John Scofield and some other electric guitarists, and those guys have a lot of effects pedals that they use in a very musical way. It’s not just some BS. It’s fun to explore that with these acoustic instruments. It allows us to try new things sonically that are very exciting. We love mixing it up.

I grew up listening to Tony Rice. I always think of that late ‘70s/early ‘80s period when he was in the studio so much, doing the David Grisman stuff. And his solo albums were very jazz- and improvisation-oriented. At the same time, he was doing the Bluegrass Album Band. It was all killer. Really, really top-notch. I’ve always been inspired by musicians like that, who always continue to seek inspiration. You have to go out and look at new things to get inspiration. You can’t just look at the same four walls every day.

You know that ain’t bluegrass, right?

[Both laugh]

TH: I’ve heard that for years now! [Laughs] I like to take it with a badge of honor. I love bluegrass, but I love to expand on bluegrass. I think anything that I’m ever going to do is going to have that core of bluegrass. It’s never going to go away, because I love it so much. But if everybody wants to be like Bill, they’d expand upon the music.

RI: The sentiment you’re talking about … who knows? But I think it’s usually more of a fan thing. Those people like the tradition that bluegrass encapsulates. There are definitely some musicians that feel that way, too. I’ve always listened to musicians who are exploring and trying new things. That’s what Bill and Earl were doing. It’s ironic, because I think what people love about bluegrass is that exploring. So, to want to shut it down is kind of contradictory to what made it great in the first place. I also get that people like it because it represents something, whether it’s the “good ol’ days” or whatever. And I get that, when people started adding drums to country, it drove a lot of people away from country music. The same happens with bluegrass fans today. I guess I just listen to music that makes me feel something and I don’t really care about the instrumentation. I’m listening for what people are putting into it.

Doc & Merle Watson: Play ‘Never the Same Way Once’ on New Box Set

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Owsley “Bear” Stanley was a hero of the psychedelic counterculture, notorious for both his production of high quality LSD and his engineering work for the Grateful Dead. (He built their famed concert sound system, known as the Wall of Sound.) But his contributions extended far beyond the psychedelic revolution. By plugging his recorder directly into the sound board and placing microphones on and around the stage, he became a transformative force in the landscape of capturing music. Upon his death in 2011, he left behind 1,300 reel-to-reel tapes of shows he recorded in venues around San Francisco in the 1960s and ‘70s. Last month, the first of these recordings — known as Bear’s “Sonic Journals” — was introduced to the world in the form of a seven-disc box set titled Doc & Merle Watson: Never the Same Way Once. Released by the Owsley Stanley Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Bear’s son, Starfinder Stanley, the box set captures Doc and Merle’s four-night stint at the Boarding House in San Francisco in 1974.

“The idea is that this is all preserved for future generations to discover,” says OSF board member and executive producer of the box set, Hawk Semins. “Our primary mission in real time is to keep these [tapes] from disintegrating, from deteriorating and being unlistenable and, thereby, having lost an important segment of modern American musical history.”

The OSF’s preservation efforts are dedicated to digitizing all of Bear’s reels. So far, 200 reels have been digitized with the help of their Adopt-A-Reel program, in which anyone can pick a show to have preserved in their name for $400. Once a show is selected, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer, Jeffrey Norman, pulls the tape, follows a digitizing protocol approved by field experts, and returns the tape back to the archive.

“We have a policy that we do not recreationally listen to any of the reels. We treat each reel as though the time that we preserve it is going to be the last time it’s going to ever be played because we don’t know what condition it’s in until we start running that reel,” Semins says. “I don’t want anybody to think we’re just sitting there with our headsets on enjoying all this great music to ourselves. We don’t listen to it until it gets digitized. We don’t know what’s on the reels until it actually gets digitized and we play it back.”

As a dedicated Doc Watson fan, Semins had some sway when it came to selecting Doc and Merle’s shows for universal release. His fandom aside, Semins says the decision can also be attributed to the combination of sound quality and the caliber of Doc and Merle’s playing. Plus, the arrival of Doc in San Francisco is not without historical significance. Psychedelic musicians — including the Grateful Dead — held Doc in high esteem for his authenticity.

“There’s a 40-year gap between the time that that original roots music was being played and the time it was being archived and resurrected by Alan Lomax at the Smithsonian. Compared to medicine, it is like treating erectile dysfunction before and after Viagra. So we’re looking back 40 years, at this moment in time, and archiving this particular juncture of this icon of roots music going out to psychedelic San Francisco and letting it all hang out,” Semins explains. “And it shows in the looseness. I mean, the playing is tight, but in the looseness of the atmosphere, the attitudes. Doc’s clearly having fun, and, you know, he’s always charming, but there’s an ease.”

Bear most likely met Doc at the Marin County Bluegrass Festival a few days before these shows took place.

“Picture the two of them sitting down at a table having a hushed conversation where Owsley hands Doc a microphone and explains to him the process that he’s going to use and why he thinks it’s important for him to record the show and getting Doc’s buy-in on recording,” Semins explains. “That’s an unusual situation, right? Who but Owsley in 1974 could show up at a venue and say, ‘I wanna record you,’ and have that artist from a totally different idiom, not with the Grateful Dead, not with their scene, listen to him, hear him out, be persuaded to say, ‘Yeah?’”

Watson’s long-time friend and bassist, T. Michael Coleman, recalls watching this conversation in the liner notes of the box set. As he puts it, when he listens to the box set, he hears “a legend recording a legend.” Wrought with unique elements, Never the Same Way Once is an essential addition to Watson’s catalog. These shows mark the first time he played songs like “Hound Dog,” “Chicken Road,” and “Doggone My Time,” and his virtuosity is palpable. When the OSF debuted the box set at MerleFest this year, listeners immediately honed in on Watson’s energy.

“We started taking pictures of people listening to the headset that we brought and we’d put on ‘Black Mountain Rag’ from disc seven, and they’d look real serious and all of the sudden their eyes would pop up,” Semins recalls. “[Doc] gets so fast at the end of that ‘Black Mountain Rag’ that he ends up in a place where he doesn’t expect and it starts cracking him up …He laughs and he turns to Merle and he goes, ‘I don’t know what I done there,’ and then he starts noodling around with the guitar and he goes, ‘Oh I see, I see.’ It’s incredible.”

The OSF applied the same care and precision that Bear took while recording when they produced the rest of the box set. In addition to material provided by Coleman, the accompanying 16 pages of liner notes includes contributions from guitarist David Holt and the most contemporaneous photographs of Doc and Merle taken just three days before these shows. Sketched by Starfinder Stanley and adapted into cover art by Mike DuBois, the cover features Doc’s famous guitar, nicknamed “Ol Hoss,” multiplied and arranged in a circular design.

“This juxtaposition of the roots music meets psychedelia, it goes right to what we were trying to accomplish with the cover art,” Semins says. “That’s Ol Hoss as a sort of kaleidoscopic, psychedelic Appalachia meets West Coast. The idea was this is what happens when worlds collided, and the design … we call it Gallagher Mandala for the Gallagher guitar.”

When it came time to find the perfect name to encompass this momentous release, Semins and company took a note from Coleman. “We had no intention initially of ever doing a seven-CD box set as our first release, but we heard the stuff and we couldn’t decide what to choose,” Semins says. “And so we ran this by T. Michael Coleman, and we said, ‘Should we be concerned that you guys played “Tennessee Stud” all four nights?’ And T. Michael said, ‘Shoot, we never played “Tennessee Stud” the same way once, let alone four times!’”

Photo credit: Jim Morton

Real Player’s Music: A Conversation with Paul Hoffman of Greensky Bluegrass

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Greensky Bluegrass first got together and started playing music in 2000, and the band has spent the better part of the years since on the stage playing dive bars, living rooms, festivals, or, more recently, sold-out crowds at well-loved venues like Red Rocks and Ryman Auditorium. The Kalamazoo, Michigan, band — which is made up of members Anders Beck on dobro, Michael Arlen Bont on banjo, Dave Bruzza on guitar, Mike Devol on upright bass, and Paul Hoffman on mandolin — has done its part to welcome new fans into the bluegrass fold, too, thanks to funky covers, relentless touring, and an approachable jam band vibe in and out of the studio that is evident on their latest full-length, Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted.

You started out playing in people's living rooms and at open mic nights. What aspects of your beginnings, the first couple of performances that you did, have you retained now that you're playing these huge venues? How did that shape the way you guys perform now?

That is a very interesting question. Congratulations. I think [what remains is] the spirit of what we do and playing for fun and making it fun. We kind of have, for better or worse, this motto that, if you want to be on the line, you've got to be over the line sometimes. There's a lack of fear of mistakes, or a lack of fixation on perfection. We were pretty bad in those early days, but we were just going for it, having fun. I think that spirit of us truly enjoying what we were doing and making music together translates really well with our crowd. The experience of our show and that whole aspect of it is really important to our music. It's one of the things that have kind of been there all long.

Tell me about Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted. What about that lyric stuck out to you for the title? What made you think that would sort of encapsulate the rest of what was on the record?

The whole verse is, "I know everything for all that I know, but there's always two sides to the way both of the stories go. Sometimes things are left unspoken, should be shouted, written down, and quoted." I think, for us, there's kind of a underlying meaning that “Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted” means things better left unspoken.

I don't know — we liked it. Album titles are tough. We threw around a lot of ideas. We debated this one because it's long. Shouted, Written Down, and Quoted … that's wordy. I dig it.

I think that lot of your fans are not necessarily bluegrass fans first: They're not finding your band because they're out looking for the hottest new bluegrass band. Some people may be finding out that they love bluegrass through Greensky. What about your music and the way that you interpret bluegrass do you think is drawing new people into the genre?

I suspect that you are entirely correct. I think its because we came [to bluegrass] that way, too. Most of us found bluegrass through the Grateful Dead, through Jerry Garcia.

In those early years of playing shows, we did all these bizarre covers. “When Doves Cry” was one of the first ones. That was the first off-the-wall thing we did. We'd go to these bars and do these gigs where I'd have to really sell the band to get us in there in the first place, to the manager or whoever is booking the bar, because they're like, "There's no drums? Do people like that?" Then we'd play "When Doves Cry" and it's like, "They know this."

It's the same story you hear about bands all the time playing covers to draw people into their sound. Not only does it draw them into us, it draws them into bluegrass. They’re like, "Maybe I like the banjo."

Maybe there's this preconceived notion before that bluegrass is hillbilly music that they would never be into. We're kind of a jam band and we improvise, so that's something that also drew us to the music — that bluegrass is a real player's music because there is so much soloing. It's like jazz almost. There are these standards. There's a form and a melody: You blow the head and then you improvise on the theme and then you blow the head and the tune's out. It's like what horn players do with be-bop. That attracted us all, as instrumentalists. It’s not like being in a rock band where the guitar player takes all the solos and the keyboard player does a little bit of solo flair, but it's really like the one guy's the lead guy and the rest are all the accompanists. We all do all the jobs. We all accompany each other. We all share the role of the drum kit. We all are soloists.

That brings me to another question I had because I know that you are one of the chief songwriters in the group. There's a big process from the time that you think of a song and when it's a finished song — or who knows if its ever really a finished song. Can you run me through the general process? How does a song go from being in your brain to being something that you're fleshing out with everybody to being something that you're either playing on stage or recording?

It varies from song to song. The typical process for Dave and me is that we write most of the framework of a song and the lyrics, and then the band is more involved in the arranging process. Sometimes we write the instrumental hooks together that go with the songs, which is often described from the melody of the lyrics. Sometimes it's different figuring out different parts, stuff like that, but the degree to which the song is finished can really vary.

There have been songs that I had written that were pretty much done when I brought them to the band and didn't need a lot. Then, there are others that needed parts. The textures and the rhythmic feels are where we can really experiment with our different influences and fusion. If it's a straight-ahead bluegrass tune, it's pretty easy to just figure out who does what and what goes where. When we start getting into different rhythmic textures, we talk about how a lot of our music has these soundscapes, and I think this album is a good example of that. There are moments on there that are spacey melody mood pieces more than a solo flair or something like that. It's not like, "That's so cool what he played." It's this texture that we all create together. For us, that's some of the most fun stuff we do.

One of my favorite songs on the latest albums is “More of Me.” Where did that song come from and what might it mean to you or what do you think it might mean to other people?

That's a good one for that soundscapey kind of thing that happens in the middle of that tune — just that bereft moment. I think it's very much resolved of what our lifestyles are like: touring and having other desires, maybe someone else, or maybe just other things in life that you don't have time to do because you're busy doing whatever you need to be doing. It’s about the idea of wishing that there was more of you to do all the other things. It's kind of creepy. [Laughs] I wrote it with the intention of being sort of romantic, wishing somehow that I could have more of me to leave you when I go. It comes off as a little creepy I've discovered, plus the melody and the general vibe of the tune is so dark. I joke around with Yoda, "More of me, keep you when I go, I will."

That's funny.

I think there's just some darkness in those lyrics that maybe I fell a little short on the romance. I think the concept is sort of romantic or lofty or idealistic or something like that.

Speaking of being in a couple of different places at once: Y’all recorded this in two different places, and I think I saw that this was the longest time that you've spent in the studio for any of your records. What effect do you think that had on the final product, and why did you choose to do it that way?

If you go back and read any of the bios of any of our records, we've said that every time, because that's what we do. That's how we increase our budget: We just take more time. Taking more time allows us to be a little bit more experimental. This time we came into the studio a little less prepared. We had played none of the tunes live. We had some really serious arranging and learning to do. We did it intentionally to let more of a creative process happen in the studio. With the earlier albums, spending less money and having a smaller budget, you want to be more prepared so you're not wasting your time, but also wasting your time can be really artistic.

We'd go down the rabbit hole of chasing some tone on an instrument or on a microphone for hours at times and maybe were aware the whole time that we weren't even going to use it. We just wanted to see if we could do it, challenge ourselves. "Let's try this tune like this." And then everyone being like, "I don't know if we're going to be able to do it or if it's going to be a good idea, but let's try it to see if we can accomplish it." Then, if we tried it and we didn't think it worked, we’d try harder to make it work, even though we might not use it. Having the opportunity to do that is, one, fun as hell. Two, it creates more of a creative process than just us going in there and playing the music.

We recorded in two places, which we've never done before, and we took a longer break than we've ever taken before between spots. When we recorded the last record, we took two days to just watch the Super Bowl and take a break, which was nice. This time, we had a couple of months off. As I mentioned, we were sort of composing the songs and figuring out what to do with them as we recorded them. We laid almost everything down in Nashville and then we had these really rough mixes of everything mostly done to sit on and reflect on and figure out what they needed and what they lacked and if they were working and how so and such.

You guys are on your own label and you've always been independent. Now that you've gotten to know the music industry a little bit better, do you think that's affected the band's trajectory at all? Is there anything that you particularly like about it or that has been an obstacle for you guys in doing that?

It's certainly presented some challenges and some unique development. Not to discredit record labels and what they do either, but I don't know if some gigantic budget to expose us to a wider audience would have made us like Mumford and Sons or something. I like that band, too, just so you know. But I get the concept that the record label now sort of stands for this thing that's like a million dollar loan: If you have enough money to invest, you can turn your money into a lot of money.

But we’ve self-funded our albums and stuff, and you know we're reaching a wider audience everyday and we're doing it one fan at a time. I have this theory that a lot of that stuff that the media of the music industry blows up can sometimes create hype for a band that the band's not ready for. If that had happened to us a couple of years ago, I don't know if we'd be as prepared as we are now. We keep taking a step up — steps up — into bigger rooms, and because those steps are somewhat gradual, we're learning a lot as we go. We're ready to carry the weight, so to speak.

In the lifespan of our band, a really awesome thing has been happening where bands like the Lumineers, the Avett Brothers, and the Head and the Heart, Mumford and Sons — these acoustic-esque bands that you guys cover a lot of and who write their own material — have come into the mainstream. A lot of that is really encouraging for us. There's this duality of successful music, and the very produced pop music and pop country that's succeeding is sort of creating this thirst for the opposite. I want something that sounds real, and it’s good to see a record just blow up because it’s real. I think that that's really cool, very encouraging.

Photo credit: J VanBuhler

MIXTAPE: The Capitol Theatre

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Up in the farther most corner of Westchester County New York, right at the Connecticut border, sits a renovated 1920s playhouse that also happens to be one of the best music venues in the Northeast, if not the whole country. The Capitol Theatre first opened its doors on August 18, 1926. Over the 90 years since, it has seen quite a few changes … and a whole lot of history. In the 1970s, the Cap was an A-list rock club before a 1983 change in ownership flipped it back to being a traditional theatre. More shifts happened over subsequent decades until the Cap's most recent rebirth in 2012 with Peter Shapiro (Wetlands Preserve, Brooklyn Bowl) at the helm.

Here, Shapiro takes us through the club's musical history, song by song.

Grateful Dead — “Ripple”

Jerry Garcia said it best himself: “See, there's only two theaters, man, that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting, and all that — the Fillmore and the Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country."

With that level of praise, it’s no wonder that the Grateful Dead played the Cap 18 times in 1970-1971 alone. To this day, members of the Dead still play the Cap.

Janis Joplin — "Mercedes Benz"

Perhaps the Cap’s most famous true story of rock history is that, on August 8, 1970, Janis Joplin wrote "Mercedez Benz" at a bar in Port Chester called Vahsen’s. Later that night, she performed the song for the first time at the Cap in what turned out to be her last New York show and her third-to-last show ever.

Hot Tuna — "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

Hot Tuna has the distinction of being one of the few bands to play the Cap in all three major eras that it's hosted rock bands. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassidy have played the Cap stage four times in the '70s, three times in 1989-1990, and twice in 2014-2015. They were back again this year.

Derek & the Dominoes — “I Looked Away”

The Eric Clapton-led supergroup didn’t tour much in support of their classic album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, but on December 4-5, 1970, the Cap was one of the lucky stages to have hosted this group. Duane Allman was not part of the band’s touring lineup but he also played the Cap with the Allman Brothers Band that same year.

Phish — “My Sweet One”

When the Cap was first reborn as a rock venue in the late '80s, many of the '90s future musical innovators were just beginning to make a name for themselves. Phish gained a huge New York following in the early '90s with seven shows at the Cap between 1990-1992 before moving on to bringing 80,000 people to their own festivals. While drawing from just about every musical influence under the sun, the Vermont foursome never shied from showing their love of bluegrass and Americana on songs like this one.

Little Feat — “Sailin’ Shoes”

During the Cap’s '90s revival, many bands that hadn’t had the chance to play the theatre in its prime were finally able to take the stage. In 1990 and 1995, rock heroes Little Feat were able to bring their unmistakable melting pot of musical influences to the Cap. Since reopening in 2012, they’ve been back three more times, and on September 9 of this year, we'll make that four.

Bob Dylan — “Times They Are A’ Changin'”

When the Cap was reborn in 2012, Bob Dylan had his first performance ever at the Cap in the newly renovated theater. What better song to celebrate an exciting new time in the Cap's history.

Willie Nelson — “Somebody Pick up my Pieces”

The country legend made his long-overdue debut at the Cap with two consecutive shows on September 18-19, 2013. Not many artists of his caliber can say that they’ve had several generations of fans in their audience at the Cap.

Wilco with Billy Bragg — “California Stars”

Jeff Tweedy and company were well aware of their musical roots when they recorded “Mermaid Avenue” with Billy Bragg. Using lyrics from Woody Guthrie they crafted music that sounded timeless yet relevant for the 21st century. In 2014, Wilco sold out three nights at the Cap to mark their 30th anniversary, even throwing in a nod to the Grateful Dead with a cover of "Ripple."

My Morning Jacket — “Get the Point”

While their eclectic sound can range from garage rock to funk and electronic music, My Morning Jacket always incorporates elements of their Kentucky roots. Despite having already headlined major festivals and arenas like Madison Square Garden, MMJ stunned the Cap with a three-night run of shows in 2012. To make these intimate shows even more special, each show had a unique set list with no songs repeated from previous nights.

The Avett Brothers — “Morning Song”

Of all the bands that have brought the sounds of roots music and Americana to new audiences in the last 10 years, few have generated as much excitement as the Avett Brothers. Their 2016 show at the Cap sold out within minutes, providing fans with a special and intimate night. The Cap loves to book bands that are known to play much larger venues as a way to give fans a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Ryan Adams — “To Be Young Is To Be Sad (Is To Be High)

Few people have held the torch of consistently prolific songwriting in America as long as Ryan Adams. While his musical ventures have taken him as far as metal covers and Taylor Swift interpretations, Adams always returns to his folk-oriented roots. In his debut at the Capitol Theatre on July 24, 2016, Adams brought along bluegrass group the Infamous Stringdusters and singer/songwriter Nicki Bluhm. The Stringdusters and Bluhm added lush harmonies and acoustic bluegrass instrumentation to his songbook.

Greensky Bluegrass — “Burn Them”

Ninety years later, the future is most certainly looking bright with up-and-coming groups such as Greensky Bluegrass set to carry the torch for roots music on the Cap stage. The Michigan bluegrass group will be making their debut at the Cap on September 17, 2016.

Nashville's 3rd & Lindsley celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with a MIXTAPE of its own.

Photo credit: Scott Harris

Kurt Vile with J Mascis, ‘Box of Rain’

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It wasn't always cool to like the Grateful Dead. There was a period there, in the '90s especially, where Deadheads were often regarded as deadbeats, clueless hippies who were clinging to some sort of departed ghost — all while the rest of the world grunged out or glammed up, basically turning anything associated with "jam bands" into a pejorative. Hemp? Patchwork pants? Thanks, but no thanks — or, shall we say, all apologies.

But the Grateful Dead always had way more to offer than just a culture, and their music — from those spiraling, dreamy licks smeared across the War on Drugs or the noodle jams picked up by Rayland Baxter — has been far more influential sonically than just the dancing bear-shaped imprint they left on aged Deadheads' bumper stickers. A new collection, Day of the Dead, curated by Aaron and Bryce Dessner — both members of the New Yorker-reading, Brooklyn-residing polar opposite of a jam band, the National — gives the group its proper due with a 59-song tribute featuring the likes of Courtney Barnett, Real Estate, and Fucked Up. In other words, people who make both perfect and imperfect sense — because beneath the flannel and the distortion pedals, everyone's a not-so-secret Deadhead.

One of the best songs on the tribute — and one that really showcases that not-so-fine line between the lo-fi, slow RPM weed-rock of today like Mac Demarco and the psychedelic days of the Dead — is Kurt Vile's version of "Box of Rain," accompanied by J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. The duo keeps those signature Telecaster riffs intact, along with vocals that touch softly on Phil Lesh's original mournful coo, and warps it into something that easily could have rolled off of Vile's recent catalogue, with its gaze half at its shoes, half toward the concrete skyline: Proving in one slick track that it's not just cool again to like the Grateful Dead, it's actually pretty essential.

LISTEN: Town Mountain, ‘Big River’

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Artist: Town Mountain
Hometown: Asheville, NC
Song: "Big River"
Album: The Dead Session
Release Date: November 13

In Their Words: "The Grateful Dead have always had a knack for taking other artists' material and making it their own. All throughout their career, they dipped into country music hits, and the music always seamlessly sounded like Grateful Dead songs. 'Big River' is no exception to that. Johnny Cash sang it with conviction and Bob Weir followed suit. However, Bob seemed to sing it with a bit more playfulness. We took that idea and plugged it into the Town Mountain sound.

Town Mountain has always loved JD Crowe and the New South, especially the early stuff and specifically an album titled Bluegrass Evolution. He recorded some material with drums and pedal steel trying to bridge the gap between bluegrass and country. We immediately saw the potential for 'Big River' to have that same element. We got some of our good friends — Evan Martin (drums) and Jack Deveraux (pedal steel) — to come into the studio and lay their parts down. The final recording fits right into our wheelhouse: the country side of bluegrass." — Jesse Langlais

Artwork: Taylor Swope