Tag: Telluride Bluegrass Festival

New Grass Revival: Four Members Look Back on Their ’80s Albums (Part 2 of 2)

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A beloved band that was perhaps ahead of its time, New Grass Revival will be inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame during the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards on October 1. In the second half of our oral history with New Grass Revival, we hear from band members Sam Bush, John Cowan, Béla Fleck and Pat Flynn. Read the first half of the interview, which is part of our celebration of the 75th anniversary of bluegrass.

In 1981, founding members Courtney Johnson (who died in 1996) and Curtis Burch left the band after a long tour with rock ‘n’ roll star Leon Russell. As a result, New Grass Revival began its newest incarnation with Béla Fleck and Pat Flynn.

Sam Bush: Courtney and Curtis were older than me and John and they were just burned out. We had worked harder on the road with Leon than we’d ever worked in our lives.

Pat Flynn: New Grass Revival had established a following on the circuit in the late ’70s, but Leon Russell had sucked them into his orbit and taken them away from the bluegrass world. So by the time that band [lineup] broke up, they really had to start over.

SB: I had met Béla in a band he played in called Tasty Licks, and Béla had hired me as the fiddler on his first album, Crossing the Tracks.

PF: Béla was a smart kid. He thought, “If I’m going to come out with a solo album and nobody knows who I am, why don’t I hire high-profile people to play on it?” That’s a smart move!

Béla Fleck: I liked the original band when I heard it, but I admit I was attracted to smoother and jazzier stuff at the time. I have matured a bit since then and now I am a huge fan of the early band, their bravery and iconoclastic spirit, and a poetic expression of their time and place. They were committed to the moment and improvising, and taking the music to a new place that resonated with a lot of folks who loved bluegrass, but it didn’t totally represent them.

SB: Pat and his friend Scott Myers had opened for New Grass Revival on the Colorado tours we did. We loved his guitar playing because it wasn’t like the bluegrass players. He was a rock electric guitar player that could do it on acoustic.

PF: I’d moved from Los Angeles to Aspen, Colorado, and got to know the band at Telluride. Sam had a hand in writing some songs, but they really didn’t have an in-house songwriter. I had always written songs for the bands I was in. And Béla brought a unique and original instrumental vision. So all of a sudden you had two new people that could supply original material.

SB: They were the two musicians who could bring the next step of another sound for us. I called Garth [Fundis, the band’s producer] and said, “You’ve got to come hear these new pickers we’ve got, this is something, this is really good.” I knew it was too hot for me to handle — I didn’t feel I was qualified to produce the four of us. We needed another ear, an outside opinion, because we had so many ideas between the four of us.

PF: On the Boulevard was the first album we released in the US, but we’d done a live album in France almost a full year prior. Technically Live in Toulouse was the first album we made as a new band.

JC: We’re playing like a well-oiled machine; it’s really a good record. It has one of Sam’s instrumentals on there called “Sapporo” that might be 11 minutes long!

SB: The idea of “Sapporo” started when the band went to Japan for the first time. It was my favorite city over there; it was also my favorite beer. A mandolin player over there taught me a five-note Japanese scale and that is a recurring riff you hear us play as we jam.

JC: The first year we were together with Béla and Pat, the energy and the love and everything was way up, confidence was high. And On the Boulevard is one of my favorites. There’s no drums, it’s just the four of us.

PF: It was very fresh. I remember the recording sessions at Jack’s Tracks studio in Nashville. We had a decent budget from Sugar Hill, enough to record comfortably and take our time. I experimented with different guitars and arrangements. We were able to bring the music into the magnifying glass of a studio and really look at it in depth.

JC: The dynamic of the band had changed so much, because Béla was already miles ahead of everybody in terms of his ability to play. He practiced all the time. In the old band, I was in charge of shoveling coal into the engine and Sam was flying around on top painting whatever picture he wanted to paint. Courtney and Curtis, they were kind of like myself, advanced support players. But now you’ve got two other players who can play at the same level of Sam. So we could take this train anywhere. We could get off the tracks.

PF: I had brought some songs with me to the band and I was very happy with “On the Boulevard.” I had written it prior to joining. It was pretty much autobiographical. I’d been living in Thousand Oaks, California, and there’s a boulevard that runs through the middle of the Valley, and as I watched it from the window it was like its own little world, a parade of passing people. It was one of the earliest things we worked out.

SB: My songwriting partner Steve Brines had died a sudden death of a heart ailment he didn’t know he had. So Steve was gone and I was still writing instrumentals, but I lost my enthusiasm for songwriting.

PF: I was especially happy with “One of These Trains,” the way the material came out, and the band took to it so naturally. I was encouraged that I was in the right place with the right people. I loved Sam’s instrumental “Indian Hills,” and John did a great blues number called “Just Is.” We were discovering each other’s powers and personalities as musicians and friends. I remember it very fondly. We were struggling for employment to connect with the old fans and that album was a big help — when it came out, we created a pretty big buzz.

SB: Toni Foglesong told her husband Jim, who was the president of Capitol Records Nashville, “I heard a band that makes a sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before.” So, Jim came to hear us and he said, “I want you guys to record. I don’t know how we’re going to sell you but I want you to be yourselves.”

Two studio albums followed: New Grass Revival in 1986, and Hold to a Dream in 1987.

SB: Every time new people joined, we encouraged them to bring their influences into the music. When Pat joined he was influenced by those Southern Californian songwriters like Jackson Browne, and the country-rock Telecaster picking he knew. One song where I specifically hear Pat’s southern rock influence is “In the Middle of the Night,” on the ’86 album.

PF: I was very involved in the country-rock sound like the Eagles and the Flying Burrito Brothers and the songs I wrote were well-fitted for a bluegrass approach. I didn’t have to make adjustments musically or lyrically, just in the area of arrangements. I had to make sure the songs I wrote had great solo spots for the instrumentalists and I had to fit the songs to whoever was singing, either John or Sam. So I started to instinctively shape my material where there was plenty of room for improvisational playing and also good range of vocals for those two.

BF: This band was full of guys with very different musical influences. If you didn’t want to be challenged, it was the wrong place for you. Some folks surround themselves with people that love all the same stuff they do, and that can work too. But in New Grass Revival, we were all into different stuff, which we brought to the band to see if we could get our favorite stuff included.

SB: Béla is a jazz player and when he came in his favorite musician was Chick Corea. I had his records, but they didn’t make so much sense to me until then.

BF: I think my interest in jazz gave me some cool tools to work with in a bluegrass context. I wrote a tune called “Metric Lips” [on Hold to a Dream], which was partly in jig time. I feel like that main melody had some Chick Corea influence. Sam was highly influenced by John McLaughlin and his great bands. One of them was Shakti, a collaboration with Indian musicians. This seemed to encourage his interest and ability in odd meters, which I also was quite fond of exploring. So if you look at “Metric Lips,” you have Irish music, Indian music, and fusion jazz represented, along with some raging bluegrass. It’s puzzling that it actually works, but in my opinion, it does.

PF: When you’re in a bluegrass band, it’s blend or die! You’re cramped inside a van together and you’re sleeping feet to nose. You’re in a very confined space together more than you are with your significant others back at home.

JC: We called our bus The Bread Truck. We’d bought it from a dry cleaning business. It wasn’t like the 36-footers I had in the Doobie Brothers; it was less than half of that, closer to a van.

PF: John slept half the time, I would be reading a book or writing a song, Sam would be listening to reggae or some weird eclectic thing, Béla was always fiddling with a new tune.

BF: For me it’s the intention and commitment to the ideas that make them work in this band. The same ideas might not work for a band that didn’t play so confidently. Of course we loved bluegrass and that was the common denominator. Each guy also played with a savage fervor or intensity, and perhaps that was another denominator.

PF: We could really charge each other up with the solos. We admired each other, and when somebody threw a flaming ball out there it would be a challenge. And in that exchange, gosh, we became so much better players. I remember listening back to tapes and thinking I lifted myself up and above myself. We all did.

BF: The new band with me and Pat was a somewhat cleaned-up version of the band. We still improvised and pushed hard, but we also were going for a supercharged, seamless tightness.

PF: The thing I remember that we developed between the first two albums was a hardcore consistency. We could turn it on and it would just come on full-bore despite whether or not there was a good sound system or the weather was bad or the crowd was sluggish. We could always count on each other to present a united front. There were no weak links. We just locked into that energy and never lost it.

BF: And we made singles for country radio, which is hard to imagine the early group doing.

SB: We knew we were going into a country market, but I think there’s a misconception that Capitol Records changed us, when in fact the change came from us. We were the ones that said, “We’ll try this song,” and maybe we wouldn’t have tried it in the past.

BF: We were still too out there for it to work, but we were trying to take the music closer into the mainstream, and that was bringing a lot of new people into the scene and showing them what bluegrass could produce.

PF: We would laugh about that in a sad way. The jocks would come to us and say, “I love your stuff, I listen to it at home,” and we’d say, “What about playing it on air?!” They’d say “Yeah, but it’s bluegrass….” We finally got “Callin’ Baton Rouge” into the top 40 which opened up a lot of shows and airplay for us. But we ended up disbanding before we could really bring that home.

SB: For our last album, Friday Night in America, Wendy Waldman became our producer and we really tried all kind of things on that. It’s hard for an athlete to know when to stop, but I really think our last record might be our best one.

PF: I saw a deepening musically. John’s vocals had got better and better, but he also doesn’t get the props for his bass playing. He was a terrific player — listen to his work on Friday Night in America, see how he connected the melodies, the tone he got and the way he tied together the four instruments. They would get noticed, but the glue was John.

SB: John and I had been together 15 years and we were burned out. We lived on the road and I was suffering responsibility overload. And we couldn’t possibly accommodate all that Béla was writing, the type of tunes he was writing. I physically couldn’t play them and neither could the rest of us! We all loved each other, but it was time for him to go on, he needed to express himself. Because at that point it’s not about making money, it’s about musical happiness and your satisfaction.

PF: We’d got together in 1981, and we played our last job as a band on New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1989. We were opening for the Grateful Dead at the Oakland Coliseum, 10,000 people inside and 5,000 outside. That night was particularly memorable — on the right side of the stage sitting nearest Béla was Bonnie Raitt, on the left side, near to me, was Jane Fonda — and I’d always thought what a shame we didn’t release that. Years later someone walked up to me and said, “Remember when you guys opened for the Dead?” I said yes. He said, “Have you got a copy of that set?” I said no. He said, “Do you want one?” A tape of our concert had leaked out among the Dead fans. I contacted a friend at Capitol Records and then that set was remastered and released on a two-CD set called Grass Roots, which has stuff you wouldn’t find on our records. It had its rough spots as a live tape, but you’ll hear that energy and visceral connection we had with each other on stage, you sure will.

(Editor’s note: Read part one of our New Grass Revival Bluegrass 75 feature.)

 

Aoife O’Donovan Finds Her Heart in the Verse of Others

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It’s not easy keeping up with Aoife O’Donovan. The 37-year-old Boston native grew up in a musical family, cutting her teeth with Crooked Still, a progressive bluegrass group she founded with four friends in 2001, and Sometymes Why, an Americana trio. She worked with Goat Rodeo Sessions (Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile) on an album that won a Grammy in 2013. Then, after an impromptu collaboration at Telluride Bluegrass Festival, she turned around and formed I’m With Her with Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz, winning a Grammy for “Call My Name.”

Meanwhile, it’s been ten years since O’Donovan released her first solo record, Blue Light, and since that time she’s released five more — with a new EP appearing this month. On Bull Frogs Croon (And Other Songs), she applies her soothing vocals and folk sensibilities to the poetic verse of others. The EP builds upon three numbers that bring to life the poetry of the late Peter Sears through songs O’Donovan wrote and arranged with Teddy Abrams and Jeremy Kittel for the 2015 Britt Festival in Oregon. Pared down from orchestral arrangements to a tour-friendly string quartet, she rounds out the five-song EP with two covers: Hazel Dickens’s “Pretty Bird” and traditional folk song “Lakes of Pontchartrain.”

BGS caught up with O’Donovan about what drew her to Sears’s poetry, the qualities of a great folk song, and how she stays grounded while throwing herself into so many creative endeavors.

BGS: What drew you to his Peter Sears and his poetry?

I had never heard of Peter Sears before getting a call to write a piece for the Britt Festival in Oregon. My friend and colleague Teddy Abrams suggested that we look to the poet laureate of Oregon for inspiration, so I got a book of Peter Sears’ poems at my local bookstore and was immediately in love with his writing. I absolutely loved his work. I loved the way he was able to write about simple things, everyday things, everyday feelings — it felt like these were the thoughts of my own heart. I loved it so much. In sifting through these books, I found these three poems — that didn’t go together, weren’t from the same collections — and I put them together. I was lucky to get to meet Peter Sears at the premiere of the piece in Oregon, back in 2015. He passed away a couple of years later. But he was a really special guy.

You didn’t write these lyrics, but did any of these lines or themes coincide with something you were going through personally?

The whole song cycle of Bull Frogs Croon has that. I set these songs to music at a very different time in my life, four years ago, five years ago. They’re three songs that are incredibly relevant to the human experience. The opening song, “Night Fishing,” is a meditation on stillness, on finding comfort in your own solitude. That’s definitely a human experience — I go through that all the time. “The Darkness” [describes] the idea that waves of emotion can come over you. The final song, “Valentine,” is a love song. It’s a two-stanza poem about the simple act of being in love with somebody, and I think that’s also universal — I hope people can relate to that!

In addition to the trio of songs inspired by Sears, you included two covers — one of which is “Lakes of Pontchartrain,” which is an Irish folk song you’ve included in live shows for a while. What are your roots with that song?

It’s one of my all-time favorites. My uncle James sings this song at certain jam sessions; as I was growing up, I would hear him sing it all the time. Every time I sing it at a concert, it’s the one song that people come up to me afterward and say, “I love that song! I love that song!” I hadn’t yet recorded it. The Paul Brady version of this song is the main recorded version, in my mind. It’s just the most beautiful song.

You grew up playing folk music with your family, and you performed many traditional songs early in your career with Crooked Still. From your perspective, what makes a good folk song?

“Lakes of Pontchartrain” is a classic example of what makes a folk song good: It has a long story, and you can really follow along with this guy. You can see yourself in his shoes. He’s lonely, he doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t recognize anybody. And then he meets this beautiful girl who just shows him kindness. It’s not like it has a happy or a sad ending: It’s just an ending that could happen to anybody. She’s engaged to somebody else. But that doesn’t stop her from being kind and from them having a beautiful connection. I actually love that part of the story: “Fair thee well… I never will see you no more, but I’ll ne’er forget your kindness.” I wish there were more songs in the world that were about that.

You also included a Hazel Dickens song. Tell me about your relationship with her and her music.

Hazel Dickens is a very special person in the bluegrass and folk community. There aren’t tons of women who are as lauded as she is, of that age certainly. She wrote beautiful songs, and she was an incredible performer, singer, and musician. “Pretty Bird” is a very tragic song. I recorded it years ago for a Hazel Dickens tribute record that never came out, and then we re-recorded it with Crooked Still, just violin and voice. I wanted to have a string quartet recording of this. Jeremy wrote this arrangement years ago, and I think it’s just stunning. I’d been doing it live — any time I was around a string quartet, I would do “Pretty Bird” — and I just wanted to have [a recording of] it.

What’s someone or something you’ve seen in music recently that makes you feel excited or hopeful?

I have been listening non-stop to the Bonny Light Horseman record. I saw that live a few weeks ago and was absolutely floored. I had not enjoyed a live concert so much in a long time. The singing was so good. The record is so good, and the live show was just even better — more enhanced, and oh my God it was just so good. I just can’t even… I loved it so much. It was like the record on steroids. Everybody should be listening to that.

You’re involved in so many ongoing projects. What keeps you going on a daily basis?

One thing I love to do daily is go for a run. When I’m running, often I’ll get song ideas, or have some lyrics pop into my mind. Sometimes I don’t remember them, or I’ll remember them days later I’ll say, “Oh, I had that idea, I had that idea” and I’ll write it down. But I think making sure to carve out at least a little time for yourself is crucial, as an artist and as a musician.

And then of course, getting to connect with my husband and my family — little tiny things, like when my daughter does something amazing. Surrounding myself with people that I love and friends and family are a huge part of that for me. When I am home, one thing we’ve been doing is trying to have meals together, even when the timing is inconvenient. Maybe it means we have lunch at 11, or we have dinner at 5:30 — earlier than most musicians would probably like to be eating — but we’re really sitting down and talking about our day. I love that. My two-year-old is now saying things like, “Tell me how your day was! Tell me how your day was!” It’s a nice moment to just put the phones away, put aside everything not at the table, and really talk to each other.

Photo credit: Rich Gilligan

The Lil Smokies Tighten Their Bond with ‘Tornillo’

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The Lil Smokies’ long-awaited album Tornillo reflects the vast openness of the Texas desert town in which it was recorded, possessing all of the energy that comes with a renewed creative spirit. In a phone interview with lead singer Andy Dunnigan, BGS discussed rule-bending, burnout, and how recording at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas revitalized the Montana-based band.

BGS: It sounds like this album is really special to you. Can you tell me about the process of making it? What’s memorable about this one?

AD: Yeah, this is a special one. We were coming off of two or three solid years of extensive touring. We were pretty road-worn and dare I say a little burnt out. When we came into this session we needed to become a little more unified than we had been while on the road. We were looking for somewhere that we could go and get outside of the box creatively.

Texas was somewhere we had never spent a lot of time. We wanted to go down to the desert and we wanted to be able to live on the compound. These were all [realities] that Sonic Ranch in Tornillo was able to provide us, so when we got down there we didn’t really leave for ten days.

We lived a stone’s throw away from the studio. We’d wake up and eat huevos rancheros and then head over to the studio. We were kind of autonomous in the fact that we could make our own hours. It really brought us back to life. We were really unified in our work and the production of this album, and I think that’s really ostensible throughout the songs.

How much does a new album like this, where you have brand-new material and are fresh off the experience of recording, help motivate you to keep going out on the road?

I think it’s just that we toured the last album for a couple years and got a little tired of some of those songs. We were playing so much that we didn’t have all that much time for writing. I found myself trying to juggle between writing, being on the road, solitude, hobbies, and having a girlfriend. I was thinking, “Man, there’s just not a lot of time.”

So now that we were able to hammer out some new songs, getting back out on the road seems so much more enjoyable. I think when we’re having fun on stage there’s a direct correlation to the audience. They’re feeding off us and the pillars of reciprocity are strong.

This album definitely sounds like you’re having fun and doing things your way. You sort of bend the rules of bluegrass, but always in a way that adds something to the music. How do you keep an open mind about trying new things without being gratuitous about it?

We wanted to think outside the box for this record, but we didn’t want to do it in a contrived way where we say, “OK, this is going to be a weird album, so we’ll just make it intentionally weird.” We wanted to cater to the songs and adhere to what each song needs.

On the title track, “Tornillo,” we had originally worked up our traditional way of doing it with the bluegrass ensemble, but when we started playing it, it sounded like something that should be on the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. We were thinking, “This just isn’t going to work.”

Then Rev, our guitar player, worked up a piano arrangement and brought it to us towards the latter part of the session and we were like, “Oh man, this is so awesome. We have to use this.” We were just serving the song, and that was the ethos. Once we had the piano foundation, we started experimenting with drums and horns and some baritone guitar.

It was really fun for us. We intentionally gave ourselves a surplus amount of time in the studio so we could tinker around a little bit. We wanted to experiment sonically, and I think the results are really fun. It opened our minds to what you can accomplish in the studio if you have enough time and patience.

This album has a clear overall sound. Big, open, and full of space. Is that something you went into the studio wanting to accomplish, or did it develop more on the fly?

It’s a little bit of both. We wanted to create something big from the get-go, but we weren’t sure how we were going to do that. We knew we wanted to record live because that adds a little more energy, we had it in mind to drench a lot of it in reverb to create sort of a Fleet Foxes vibe or something a little more alt. That’s the kind of music that a lot of us have been listening to and getting inspired by for the last few years. We’re all listening to a lot of different music and we wanted to expand outside of the bluegrass domain in the production at least.

In your bio it’s mentioned that you “draw on the energy of a rock band and the Laurel Canyon songwriting of the 1970s.” How did bluegrass become the avenue that you express those influences?

Well, I think we all started out playing bluegrass. I came to it in my latter years of high school. I went down to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. I had gotten an electric guitar from my dad. He plays music for a living, so he gifted me a Strat, and then a lap steel. I listened to a lot of David Lindley and Ben Harper. Those were kind of the gateway into bluegrass music. Then when I went down to Telluride it blew my head open.

I think we all have our pioneer stories of how we got into the music. That’s how you meet the community of players. There’s this whole vocabulary attached to it but as you get older you expand your musical library. I think we listen to a lot of songwriters and a lot of rock. We still happen to play these bluegrass instruments, and we love bluegrass, but we’re just trying to express what we want to say while wielding bluegrass instruments.

Do you find that you’re an introduction to bluegrass music for a lot of your fans?

I do, and it’s one of my favorite remarks after shows. People say, “Man, I hate bluegrass, but I love you guys.” I hear that a lot and I think it’s funny and ironic, but it’s cool because I think there has to be somebody to pull you in and make you realize that you’ve been wrong about the stigma perhaps. I know I was that person at one time. I thought, “Man, bluegrass music? My dad plays the banjo. This is really lame.”

I think we’re seeing bluegrass kind of blossom into its adolescence and beyond, because for a while I think it was restricted by the staunch purists who were slapping everyone’s wrists for playing minor chords. Now we’re seeing Punch Brothers, Greensky Bluegrass, Infamous Stringdusters, and of course now Billy Strings, who all have obviously done their homework religiously and can pay homage to the traditional godfathers, but they’re also putting their spin on it. It’s really cool and it’s getting people excited. I think to be included in that group is really awesome and I think it’s an exciting time to be riding the wave.

How much do you rely on melody, texture, and other instrumental factors to further the meaning or story within a song?

A lot of it happens in the arranging as well, but a lot of times when I’m writing a song there will be a hook line, and that’s sort of from a rock standpoint. You have your verse-chorus and then there’s a riff or something. You know, this band was almost an instrumental band for a short period in the beginning. We were listening to a lot of David Grisman, Strength In Numbers, and a lot of that music.

We loved writing instrumental music, and then when I started singing and writing songs we kind of fused the two worlds together. Those little melody parts and arrangement parts are still so fun to incorporate in songs. In a tune like “Giant” on this album, we wanted something kind of spacy to create a dream-like state, so we tried to write something that sounded kind of spacey and sleepy.

Some of these songs are intentionally ambiguous in their origins. What is the intent behind that ambiguity?

I went to school at the University of Montana for creative writing and poetry and I love the way words sound together as much as I love melody. Sometimes the words and just the assonance, what they sound like, will dictate the melody and vice versa. Once I have a word in my head and I’m kind of ad-libbing on the guitar I try to steer away from some words and how they sound.

I like to write stories and have some ostensible narratives, but I also just love words and how they sound. “World’s On Fire” has a couple meanings in there but I also like to keep it intentionally ambiguous because I think it’s fun for people to create their own story.

You’ve said your time at Sonic Ranch “encapsulates all of the good things about being in a band and making music.” How did the band grow from the experience of making this album?

To circle back on what I said in the beginning, it’s a huge a sacrifice to be in a band. There’s the greatest ups and the greatest downs, kind of married to each other. Coming off of those past three years of touring we were all a little tired and burnt out, and maybe questioning if we were on the right path. During our studio session in Tornillo I think we were all realizing that this is why we do it.

When you make an album it’s like setting a bug in amber. It’s this fossilized preservation of your life at that point. The word tornillo literally means “to fasten” and refers to a screw. We named it after that place. The place really tightened us up together as friends and as a band. I remember leaving there and feeling really proud of what we had accomplished. I think it’s the most unified we’ve ever been as a band.

Photo credit: Bill Reynolds

Barbaro Brighten the Midwest Bluegrass Scene

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Barbaro’s first full-length studio album, Dressed in Roses, stands as a true testament to their musical identity and the sound that has launched one of the Midwest’s most in-demand acoustic acts. In a phone interview with Kyle Shelstad, the Minnesota group’s guitarist and lead singer, BGS discussed the arranging process behind these songs, how the band has grown, and the current state of the Midwest bluegrass scene.

BGS: You’ve released singles and an EP in the past, but tell me a little about this album. What was the impetus for making Dressed in Roses?

Kyle Shelstad: In general, I feel like the album is a good testament to our sound right now, and also to where we’re hoping to go. We recorded this with the unit being together for about a year. Some of the songs Isaac [Sammis, on banjo] and I had for a couple years prior, before Rachel [Calvert, on fiddle and vocals] and Jason [Wells, on bass] joined the band. After they joined the band these songs kind of had a new life and developed their own sounds.

You re-recorded the songs “Barbaro” and “Loathe.” Did that experience shine a light on how you’ve developed as a band in the past few years?

Exactly. While the arrangement was pretty similar, I think the way we play it as a group has definitely changed. So I think our goal in doing that was to pay homage to the sound we have now and the work we’ve been doing on it.

I think this is your most consistent album yet. When the band first came together did you have an idea of what you wanted the sound to be like, or has that organically grown over the years?

It’s definitely organically grown, but I’ve also always had an idea of what I wanted to do. Isaac and I started playing together as just a guitar and banjo duo, and we had to find ways to make that… well, not super annoying. So we tried to focus on texture and arrangements.

I’m glad to hear that you think it has a consistent sound because part of it, for me, I was concerned. It has a lot of different thoughts and ideas thrown at it. In that sense I think this album is a lot about us trying to figure out our sound. Developing it that way.

Some of your songs seamlessly turn from folk ballads to sections of straight-up funk. How much discussion was there in arranging these songs that are so texturally complex?

I think it’s twofold on that. A lot of these songs I come into with an idea of how I want them to progress and where I hear the song going. But adding Jason on the bass throws some of these ideas on their heads, because he had literally never listened to bluegrass before we got him to play with us. He’s done a lot of studying and research on his own to figure out how that sound works, but at the same time that’s not necessarily what he wants to play. There will be times where I’ll say, “Hey dude, maybe you should just play the root note four-on-the-floor,” and he’ll say, “I don’t know, man, I don’t really like that.”

He really brings a different flavor. When I think the song is going one way he’ll take it a completely different direction. I’ll come in with the ideas and the direction of the tune. That main idea and where I want it to go. But sometimes how we get to that point changes because of the players we have, with Rachel and Jason having such a classical background. These songs moving in all these different directions is part of us trying to figure out our sound and how to cohesively bring these ideas that we enjoy together.

Also, I listen to a lot of jazz trios, and while there’s form there, it’s not like it’s verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-out. I guess part of me feels like I can’t write that kind of stuff very well. Or when I do it sounds too corny to me or something. I enjoy that certain jazz music goes somewhere. There’s always a little thing thrown in there to catch your ear or catch you off-guard.

One thing I’ve noticed when seeing you live is that, while you do have these very cerebral arrangements, you have no problems engaging the audience and taking them with you through these songs.

Yeah, that’s our goal and what we’ve always been trying to figure out. How to write a set list that can put forward what we’re trying to accomplish with these songs but also keep people engaged. I think that took us a little while to figure out. Unfortunately we can’t play songs that we want to play all the time. It depends on the crowd and we need to figure out how we’re going to best get these songs across to this crowd or that crowd.

Did you have any epiphanies or learning experiences in the course of making this album?

As far as epiphanies go, I used to play with Kitchen Dwellers, which is a completely different type of music from what I’m playing now, but a lot of it was based on improvisation and free-flowing. So when you bring in people like Jason and Rachel who are very classically-focused — that’s sometimes an uncomfortable place for them to be. That’s something where we’ve figured out how to work together. We can still have some solid structure, but then find opportunities where we can open up and allow the music to flow in whatever direction that might be.

Speaking of different types of music, what was it like working with your producer Adam Gruel? Horseshoes & Hand Grenades [Gruel’s band] is such a different sound from what you play. How did he influence you as a producer?

I’ve known Adam and the Horseshoes guys for a while. I first met them when we were in the Telluride band competition years back, so he’s always been a buddy of mine. He heard that we were recording an album and reached out to let us know that he had done some producing work and would be super interested in working with us.

That was kind of my first thought, too: “The kind of music you do is completely different from what we’re doing.” But I thought about who Adam is as a person and I thought having that type of energy in the studio would really help us out. Sometimes we’ll sit in rehearsal and spend four or five hours on one section of a song and just beat it to death. To the point where we hate each other and we hate the song.

So bringing Adam in there was a good idea because he knows when to move forward and he has this incredible energy and positivity that allowed us to not fall into that dark hole. After two takes he’d be like, “All right, we got it, let’s move on.” I think that really helped us accomplish what we needed to accomplish in the amount of time that we had.

The Midwest is a hidden gem for bluegrass music with bands like yours, Barbaro and Horseshoes & Hand Grenades. What do you wish people knew about the bluegrass scene in the Midwest?

I think there’s a lot of different bands and a lot of people who are passionate about the music. I moved out here because of the scene. I moved to Minneapolis because of Pert Near Sandstone and what they’d done here. I think that knowing there’s a lot of really great music up here and a lot of big music fans.

There are amazing local bands that play really good tunes and bring people out and keep it full at the bar until the end of the night. It’s a lively scene and it’s only growing. One of our goals is to bring more diversity to the scene and open people up to the idea that this music spreads really wide. There’s lots of different ways that this music can be interpreted. We’re just trying to grow and build this scene even more.

Photo credit: Jeff Mateo

Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers Turn the Dial to Bluegrass Tradition

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For the record, Joe Mullins is a cornerstone of the modern bluegrass community. He’s chairman of the International Bluegrass Music Association, as well as a radio station owner and an award-winning musician. Plus he’s just an easy guy to talk to. During a visit with the Bluegrass Situation, Mullins traced his decades-long career, from teenage gigs to For the Record, his latest album with the Radio Ramblers, featuring Jason Barie on fiddle, Mike Terry on mandolin and vocals, Duane Sparks on guitar and vocals, and Randy Barnes on upright bass and vocals.

BGS: Did you go into these latest sessions with a certain sound or musical direction in mind?

Mullins: We had three or four new songs that we wanted to do, and wanted to make those our own. I try to make certain that when we combine rare tunes that we want to cover with new songs, that we get the perfect balance of a variety of vocal and instrumental arrangements. I don’t like the same ol’, same ol’. We’re fortunate in the band to have so much vocal versatility. There are three of us that can sing any part, plus a bass singer if we want to do a quartet number. So, I make certain there’s a good balance vocal arrangements, keys, tempos, subject matter… If you listen to all 12 songs in a row, I don’t want you to get bored and go to sleep.

That’s harder than it sounds.

It is! Especially when you combine original material with some rare tunes that you want to cover, and that you want your audience to hear. I always find a few of those. We’re called the Radio Ramblers because I have been on radio and on stage since ’82. I was 16 the first time I played a major bluegrass event as a banjo player, the same year I started in broadcasting. So I’ve got a real deep well to draw from, everything from old-time stuff to contemporary country, classic country, Americana music, and everything bluegrass. On this new album, we’re covering a Johnny Cash/Hank Jr. tune (“That Old Wheel”), and doing new songs, and something from a hundred years ago, out of a hymnbook. So there’s a little bit of everything.

I’ve heard you talk before about the bluegrass history in Southwestern Ohio, and you made a reference to Sonny Osborne and J.D. Crowe as being mentors to you. What was that relationship like?

My dad was a broadcaster and a good bluegrass fiddle player. He was in and out of bands. He sat in with the Osborne Brothers a bunch when I was a kid. He sat in with J.D. Crowe when Doyle Lawson and J.D. had the Kentucky Mountain Boys going. He was on a ton of recording sessions in the ‘60s and ‘70s with a variety of bands. In Southwestern Ohio, the Cincinnati/Dayton region, it’s just thick with bluegrass history. Everybody from Flatt & Scruggs to the Stanley Brothers — they all recorded in this area at one time or another. Larry Sparks started here and grew up here.

The Osborne Brothers started here. Their parents had left Kentucky to get a job in Dayton, Ohio, when they were boys. Bobby and Sonny started their career right here in the same neighborhood where the Radio Ramblers started. They started in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, and we started in the early 2000s. Matter of fact, Bobby started singing on the radio in Middletown, Ohio, in 1949 — the same station my dad started working at in 1964, and the same station I started working at in 1983. So there’s just a lot of connection there.

The Osborne Brothers and J.D. Crowe and Ralph Stanley and Don Reno — all these first-generation bluegrass leaders were all family friends. They were in and out of the house when I was a kid. My mom fixed breakfast or supper for everybody I just mentioned, multiple times. Dad sat in with them and played on Larry Sparks’ first record, and played on all kinds of recordings in the area. I saw these guys growing up a lot.

So when I decided to attempt the five-string banjo, I had seen J.D. Crowe and Sonny Osborne and Ralph Stanley in their prime, multiple times, and had all the recordings already in my bedroom. Then, when it came to me pretty naturally, and I had the opportunity to play and perform and record as a young guy, if I was having a struggle with something, I always had access to J.D. Crowe or Sonny Osborne or Don Reno or Ralph Stanley. “How do you do this?” “How do you that?” I got to see them often and I got some one-on-one time with all of them.

Did that strike you as amazing at the time? Or was it later in life that you realized how incredible that was?

Later in life I realized I am the most blessed guy in the world. The most fortunate cat, you know? To be 15 or 16 years old, trying to learn how to play banjo, and have access to these guys always – and get to be encouraged by them, and sing by them… Sonny especially, he would lecture about all kinds of stuff besides banjo playing. “Make sure you go to college! Quit smokin’!” That’s just who he is. We still talk often and I play one of his banjos on this record. He’s had custom banjos built and designed for many years and I’ve had one of them for the last six years.

I wanted to ask about your dad and touring with the Traditional Grass. Was he easy to travel with?

Not always. [Laughs] I often look back on the Traditional Grass – we had it going on in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. We had a ball! We were on the road all the time and back then it was just wide open. Us, the Del McCoury Band, the Bluegrass Cardinals, the Lost & Found Band — and the first generation guys were still out there. We saw the Osborne Brothers, Ralph Stanley, and Jim & Jesse all the time.

I was real young and I look back on it now a ton, because Dad was my age then. He still was a pretty hard-charger. All the other guys in the band were young and it didn’t matter how late the show was, or how long the party went on, he hung in there with us. [Laughs] He wasn’t really hard to get along with. He just got tired and cantankerous sooner than all of us young cats did, I guess. But he didn’t worry about details. He worried the most about playing great music and having a good time.

In the ‘90s, you were pretty visible with Longview, too.

Very fortunate. Worked out great. Traditional Grass toured like crazy in the early ‘90s. We burned it up from ’89 to about ’95. I about burned myself out and burned myself up, just living hard on the road. I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to buy a local radio station here in this wonderfully historic bluegrass neighborhood in Southwestern Ohio.

The Longview thing was already in the works before I came off the road with the Traditional Grass. We started conversations around ’94. I was on the road with that band through the summer of ’95 and launched my first radio station as an owner in the summer of ’95. And Longview recorded first in December of ’95, so by the time the album came out, there was a good buzz with it and it was an immediate success. And we had to go out and tour part-time.

So I had just enough time to get my radio business started and established without a heavy tour schedule. And then I had this wonderful, high-profile gig as a special event recording band that also got to tour and play everything from MerleFest to Wintergrass, from Telluride to Myrtle Beach. We played everywhere as a special event band in the late ‘90s and it kept me from falling off the radar.

If you look back on the late ‘70s when you were developing, to now, where you’re thriving in a lot of different areas, so many things have changed in bluegrass. But what would you say has been a consistent thread from those days until now?

You’ve still got to be able to play in time and sing in tune. [Laughs] I don’t care how young or old you are! Some of the consistent threads are that there’s nothing to hide behind in bluegrass music. You still have to be able to cut the gig. You still have to be able to bring it. I’m still on stage every night with five guys who have to know exactly how to manhandle their instrument, and vocally, it’s all out there.

The simplicity of that part of it — for my band and the sound we look for — it hasn’t changed. It hasn’t changed from the original formula that Monroe and the Stanleys and the Osbornes and all of ‘em have put on stage since the ‘40s and the ‘50s. It’s still got to be players that are masters at the craft. It’s still a combination of art, entertainment, and blood, sweat and tears. That’s bluegrass.

Photo credit: Amanda Martin Photography

Hot Rize Turns 40: Nick Forster and Tim O’Brien Look Back

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He’s had 40 years to think about it, but it took Nick Forster a while to get to a real answer to some existential questions about Hot Rize, the bluegrass-rooted band he, mandolinist-singer Tim O’Brien, banjo wizard Pete Wernick and guitar master Charles Sawtelle formed in in Denver in early 1978. Just what is it that made Hot Rize, well, Hot Rize? And just what is it that make the band — which will host the 29th annual International Bluegrass Music Association Awards on Sept. 27 in Raleigh, North Carolina — still treasured, still distinctive, lo these two score years later?

Forster paused at the question, and then hemmed and hawed a bit before giving it a try. First he tried to break it down to the talents and sensibilities they each brought to the mix. Then he tackled the way they all interacted — the natural combo of O’Brien’s and Wernick’s instrumental skills, O’Brien’s voice, the instinctive guitar skills of Sawtelle (and later of Bryan Sutton, who stepped in when Sawtelle died of cancer in 1999). And then he looked at the balance of celebrating traditions and exploring new paths with choices of material. Blah blah blah. Whatever.

Finally, almost sheepishly, he mentioned one other thing: “Also maybe, I don’t know if it came through sonically, but we were having fun!” he offered. “We were pretty young and had a sense of humor and were having fun!”

Well, there we have it. For fans, for anyone who’s heard the band, there’s no “maybe” about it. From the very first gigs through the three-night anniversary celebration at the Boulder Theater in January with guests Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas — commemorated on the new 40th Anniversary Bash album, recorded in January at the Boulder Theater — it’s that ineffable spirit that stands out, even if we can’t really identify it any better than Forster did.

But let’s let O’Brien have a stab at it as well.

“I don’t want to compare to Bob Marley or anything,” O’Brien says, risking those dangerous waters anyway. “But he was trying to make country music and rock ’n’ roll, and that’s what came out. He had his thing and place and time and what he did. We were too hippiefied and too Western or something to play it like the guys from the Southeast, I guess. We were a Boulder band, a college town band. But we were also a reaction to the Newgrass movement. We adjusted the steering a bit. That was a little too far to the left of us. So we went to the center, but we were still a good deal left of center. … So I don’t know,” he concludes. “It was a weird recipe that seemed to work.”

Not that they followed any recipe, let alone a long-term game plan.

“We thought we’d just play for the summer,” says O’Brien, pulling one right out of the Famous Last Words file.

That was the view from their first gig, in Denver, on May 1, 1978, growing out of jam sessions at the Denver Folklore Center, where they all had found jobs. From the very start there was something different, distinctive about them — the first song the four of them remember playing together was not bluegrass at all, but “Wichita Lineman.” Just two weeks after the May Day gig they were up in Minneapolis booked to play on a new public radio show called Prairie Home Companion, and a month after that they were on the bill of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. And without even thinking about it, they found themselves in a full-time proposition.

“The fact that we didn’t have a long commitment meant we would just be a band for as long as we had gigs,” Forster says, noting that Wernick, a.k.a. Dr. Banjo, served as de facto booking agent as well as band member. “So we kept saying, ‘Yes.’ Pete would say, ‘Do you want to play this wedding? This party? This club?’ ‘Yes!’ We had a goal of trying to make $100 a week take-home pay each. That was a lot of pressure on Pete.”

It was quite the time. Forster and O’Brien were in their mid-20s, Wernick and Sawtelle in their early 30s, all having found their way to Colorado from various points on the compass, meeting through working at the Denver Folklore Center. Fairly quickly, jam sessions grew into something more solid. Forster was recruited to play electric bass (which packed into a car trunk more easily than an acoustic bass), though it was an instrument he’d never played before. As soon as they hit the road they found themselves in the middle of some amazing settings.

“It was an incredible time to be in a bluegrass band, in my view,” Forster says, a time when many of the founding fathers of the form were still going strong, while a new generation — the “newgrass” crowd — was searching for fresh ways to expand the bluegrass lexicon. “I don’t know that we’re fully the third generation of bluegrass, but maybe two-and-a-half. So if we played festivals in the late ‘70s, and because there weren’t as many bands then, a lot of times you’d play the whole weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, two shows a day. So Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley and Jim & Jesse, and [such younger bands as] Seldom Scene and Hot Rize would do two sets a day.”

That was just a part of the vibrant world in which they found themselves.

“Between the sets, you’d sit at your merch table and there’s Bill Monroe sitting at the merch table, and Jim & Jesse, and you’re at someone’s farm in Oklahoma or Georgia, so lots of personal hang time with everyone.”

They didn’t exactly become pals with the old-timers, but a community quickly formed among the younger musicians, particularly after Hot Rize became a client of booking agent Keith Case, whose roster included Newgrass Revival (featuring Sam Bush), John Hartford, autoharp magician Bryan Bowers and Norman and Nancy Blake. Case took advantage of any opportunity to have two or more of those acts sharing bills as much as he could.

“That was so incredible,” Forster says, “to be part of this rolling band of gypsies. Almost every other weekend you’d run into one or even three or four of them.”

Gig by gig it kept going, and kept getting bigger, abetted by their association with their, uh, friends, Western swing ensemble Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers. (“Oh yeah,” Forster sighs. “Those guys.”) By 1990 it had gotten so big that Hot Rize was named Entertainer of the Year in the very first IBMA Awards. But it had also gotten so big that O’Brien and Forster in particular found themselves reassessing things.

“Three things happened concurrently,” Forster says. “We achieved so many of our original goals, frankly. We got to make records, got a bus, got to play the Opry and Austin City Limits, could play any festival. Spectacular. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but we felt a little like, ‘Okay, we’ve done this. This is the end of a chapter.’ Pete and Charles, being older than Tim and me, said, ‘You guys, you don’t understand! This is the brass ring! We hit the jackpot! We’re a band and we can play together and it’s going to get better.’ And we being in our mid-30s rather than mid-40s thought, ‘That’s cool, but we’re going to do other things.’”

And so Hot Rize went into “rest mode,” as Forster puts it. O’Brien, who had established himself as an in-demand songwriter, signed a solo deal with RCA and recruited Forster, who had gone on tour with Sam Bush and John Cowan, to join his band. In the course of that, Forster came up with the idea for a radio show combining roots music and discussion of environmental sustainability, about as Colorado a concept as you could find. That show, eTown, launched in 1991, with its demands ultimately being too much for him to stay on the road with O’Brien.

Meanwhile, Wernick started Live Five (sometimes known as Flexigrass) with some Klezmer-meets-Dixieland approaches, while Sawtelle worked with Peter Rowan and opened a studio, taking on production gigs. There were many calls for reunions, and now and then they would get together for one-offs or a few gigs. When Sawtelle was diagnosed with cancer in 1996 there was a feeling that they needed to do something bigger and took on a full tour, resulting in a live album. After Sawtelle died in 1999 there were occasional shows with several guitarists stepping in, including Peter Rowan a few times. Then Sutton came on board as a full-time member in 2002, though “full-time” was still fairly sporadic, peaking with a 2014 album, When I’m Free, and the first real tour since the sorta-hiatus.

And then they saw that 40th anniversary looming and it was too big to overlook.

“The approach was frankly just celebratory,” Forster says of the concerts. “This is a milestone and it should not go unnoticed. So let’s just do something fun and have a party.”

Photo credit: Jim McGuire

Root 66: Mountain Heart’s Roadside Favorites

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Touring artists spend so much of their time on the road that they, inevitably, find all the best places to eat, drink, shop, and relax. Want to know where to find the best burger, beer, boots, or bunks? Ask a musician. Better yet, let us ask them for you.

Name: Mountain Heart
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Latest Project: Blue Skies

Dive Bar: Phat Bites. Donelson, Tennessee.
Music Festival: Telluride Bluegrass. Telluride, Colorado.
Coffee: All Good Coffee. Weaverville, North Carolina.
Highway Stretch: I-40 West


Backstage Hang: Ogden Music Festival. Ogden, Utah.
House Concert: Humptober Fest. Brownsville, Indiana.
Card Game: Cards Against Humanity
Pizza: Dominos. Walla Walla, Washington. (It's delicious. Shut up.) 


Tour Hobby: FaceSwap … Hours of entertainment.
Gear Supply: D'Addario / Planet Waves.
Brewery: Sierra Nevada. Chico, California / Mills River, North Carolina.
Driving Album: The Pizza Tapes by Tony Rice, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman.