bluegrass vacation apologia

Here are some micro-details on my new bluegrass thing, more than anyone could possibly want.

I wrote about how I first got into this music on the album cover. (Go buy it!) Besides the prime mover Bill Monroe and the equally iconic Flatt and Scruggs, the artists that are highest in my pantheon since youth are Jim and Jesse, the Osborne Brothers, The Country Gentlemen, and Jimmy Martin. (I know, I know, but for some reason the Stanleys weren’t on my radar until much later.) Next in line are Del McCoury and all the various and sundry “longhairs”: Sam Bush and his confreres, Tony Trischka, the Circle album guys, Grisman, Norman Blake, Tony Rice, and Ricky Skaggs (his hair got long late). Doc Watson, with one foot in bluegrass and about four feet in other places, was a lodestar ever since I can remember, and John Hartford was another uncategorizable who became an obsession after I saw him live, when I was 10.

In the 1980s I got so hooked on the second version of New Grass Revival that someone really ought to have staged an intervention. I won’t bear any shame for this, though. You can look at the videos online and see how intensely and hyper-creatively these four played — it holds up, no explanatory context needed. The intensity was ludicrous! If the poofy Styx fashion irks you and the songs sound too country-radio-conscious, you’re not paying attention to the right stuff. I went to see this band play all I could, sometimes travelling to cities far from where I lived, in the way sad-sack unemployables would track the Grateful Dead. Before my own gigs, I’d put on headphones and listen to their records, to get me pumped and dancing and to drill into me what the highest standard was. When I joined Special Consensus, at 24, I tried to push Greg’s band in the direction of NGR, with poppy arrangements of songwriter-ish songs, not to mention mullets and shrieking and stage-diving. Very inconsiderate of me. I got my young son in on the cult mentality, too, and to this day we exchange youtube links and marvel over bluegrass’s Fab Four. You get the idea. The serious and musical point in all this, apart from my fanboy pathology, is that the three soloists all offered differing directions in grammar and technique, solid enough to make a lifelong object of study. Pat Flynn’s mind-blowing cross-picking, Sam’s beautiful compositions and extraterrestrial timefeel, Béla’s…let’s say, mental energy. Beyond li’l ole me, they altered the minds of everybody after them who has tried for a mainstream brand of “acoustic” country — Alison Krauss, Dixie Chicks, Nickel Creek, Sierra Hull, and all the jam-band types. Unfortunately for NGR and their pocketbooks, they were years ahead of the curve. One obvious index of that is that it’s easy to find banjo in commercial country these days, where it was pretty much anathema back then. 

Once on the road and doing the thing, I got to interact with some sterling people. Folks like Tim O’Brien, Danny Barnes, Alison Krauss, Charles Sawtelle, Jeff White, and Dan Crary helped inch me slo-o-o-wly away from record-obsessed fantasyland and toward the realization that the acoustic Olympians weren’t gods but mortals — and by a clear margin, grounded and amicable people. I think this helped turn me into someone who, when meeting celebrated figures in more popular realms of culture who act jerkishly or superiorly, rolls his eyes and strolls away. I mean, if Sam Forking Bush doesn’t feel empowered to treat me like a lump of dirt, surely no one else should, and if they do that’s for them to work on and me to laugh at. The genre doesn’t hold out the promise of celebrity, which is a drag in some respects, but also has this positive effect, that bluegrassers are perhaps better situated to cultivate good character, to learn how to endure the attention of strangers while not behaving like pricks. So I’ve been grateful to have many non-pricks to model. There are some grouchy hominids and hard-eyed hillmen out there, for sure, but in my experience, as long as you bring something to the table musically, you’re rewarded with collegial respect.

On the slim chance that someone is reading this without knowing a lot of these names, and is curious about the genre, just start there. And for the hell of it, here are a few more figures I’m very fond of, a smattering of people who embody the older style: Johnson Mountain Boys, Jim Eanes, Bill Harrell, Red Rector, Benny Martin, Delia Bell and Bill Grant, Vassar Clements, Wade Mainer, Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, J.D. Crowe and the New South, Buzz Busby, Jimmie Arnold, Nashville Bluegrass Band, Kentucky Colonels, Don Rigsby, James King, Longview, Reno and Harrell, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper…

People have asked why this now, and there’s no brilliant answer, but if you’ve followed my thing for the last ten-plus years, you know I’ve been leaning in this direction for most of that time. The touring rock-band model I used through most of the 1990s and aughts was wearing me down toward the end. Once I left that for microphones, rotating accompanists, and seated audiences, in 2009, I felt happier at once; the mics sounded better and let me play better, the audience attention boosted the old ego, and the player variety lent more adventure and surprise to performance. Soon after, I started doing shows with deep cats like Mike Bub, Todd Phillips, and especially Shad Cobb, who has heavily influenced me musically and meditatively. Along the way I also learned a ton about groove and listening close at low volume from Robbie Gjersoe and Jenny Scheinman. The result of all this exposure to strong acoustic-ish minds was that my own mind and playing were significantly stronger at the end of the teens than they had been at the end of the aughts — a happy and unexpected outcome for a fellow approaching his dotage. Moreover, I was getting better networked among the grassers. I noticed that if someone recorded one of my tunes, it was usually a bluegrasser, which got me to thinking that I could make a contribution to the genre — everybody played and sang great, obviously, but most wrote lyrics a little unsurely, in my view. It entered my thinking that if I delayed doing a bluegrass project for many more years, chances were I would be diminished in my skills, and others dead. Come to think of it, that animates most of my projects: what resources are to hand right now that might not be later? Relationships wax and wane, people give up music and go into retirement or start preaching, vocal ranges constrict, and so forth.

Bluegrass Vacation was like the Heaven’s Gate of records. It went way over in both money and time, mainly because of sars-cov-2, which descended about two months before we were scheduled to start. It turns out that LA and Nashville are very far apart. Travelling back and forth, rescheduling sessions cancelled at the last minute, and collating the A-players’ schedules made for woeful inefficiencies. A darker reason for the slow pace: some of the early tunes we tracked were…well, the word “dead” comes to mind, particularly since Alison Brown said it while hearing a song played back. “What do you hear as the problem with this?” I asked the players in the control room. “It’s dead,” she loudly volunteered. Bearing up under blunt criticism isn’t always instinctual, but putting more dead music into the world is just uncalled-for, so I received the analysis gladly; I needed to correct course, for I had created a small pile of corpses. Sometimes I had written a bad song without knowing it. Other times I had directed a good song into a cul-de-sac, and the whole thing needed a do-over with different casting and more sensitive (or laconic) direction. It’s wild how much of the basics you can still be learning, forty-plus years after entering your first recording studio. Every time I try making a record, fresh problems arise that I never anticipated, and this time they sprouted up like weeds. So much didn’t proceed as planned. Air fare, hotels, time, money…hopefully the Coen Brothers will use “Silverlake Reel” to underscore a comic chase scene and I’ll be back in the black.

I had written three songs with the tenor singing of my friend Ron Spears in mind. Scott Simontacchi and I drove out to Ron’s place in Joelton and got the arrangements going, but soon afterward Ron fell ill and was hospitalized. At that point I scotched two of the tunes, which to me were inconceivable without him, and asked Randy Kohrs to come in and sing on the third. (Thanks, Randy.) Right before release, Ron died. The usual thing to do here is say, Therefore this is dedicated to Ron Spears. But that dedication is actually going to land on another project coming out soon, a tenth-anniversary edition of my record Gone Away Backward. 

Summing up: global pandemic, non-local recording, scheduling challenges, artistic screw-ups, death. And one more goddam thing: the label that was going to put this out dropped away midway through, so I had to refigure the release platform, on the fly. (Thanks, Alison.) If you take three years instead of the usual six months to make a record, a lot of the world will just change around you as you go, seems to be the lesson. Martin Amis’s remark that on a book tour you’re an employee of your former self always rang true with me. Under normal conditions, going out to sing songs written four or more years prior and recorded bit by bit over a three-year period would require a rather determined adjustment of consciousness. Here in April 2023, though, I’m so bored of sitting home and avoiding social contact that the prospect of a run of shows is positively energizing, almost regardless of what the songs are.

Helping me through the fog was the veteran engineer Dave Sinko. Dave started out doing live sound for Don Williams and (assuming he dies doing it) will finish with the Punch Brothers. I tried a song with him a few years back for a Mose Allison tribute record, recording at Jack Clement’s historical spot, now called Sound Emporium. I was very happy with the room and the mix and the speed of everything, and returned to the Emporium + Sinko combo model to work on Brennen Leigh’s record Prairie Love Letter in, I think, 2018. That chain of events reminds me a little of 2003, when I had worked on a Johnny Paycheck tribute record in Nashville with King Williams engineering and heavy guys like Lloyd Green and Redd Volkaert playing; afterward I couldn’t stop thinking, Man, I want to do that again, but with me writing and singing the songs. Selfish! Anyway, that was close to what happened again here. After making music with Dave at the board and with Dennis Crouch, Shad Cobb, Matt Flinner, and Noam Pikelny accompanying me, I wanted to repeat the fun but without material written by Mose or Brennen, as good as those songs are. When you go off to try and write songs, anticipating that sort of player firepower really “puts a boot in your ass,” to quote Toby Keith in an altered context.

One Glass of Whiskey is a light tune carried by loosely connected thoughts and I don’t think I can say much about it beyond that. Love all the playing here, particularly Ronnie’s easygoing-yet-driving right hand and Dennis’s ride up the neck on the 4th verse. A lot of the magic and mystery of bluegrass is in the oft-mentioned drive. Past the lifetimes of guys like Monroe and Crowe, it’s folkloric knowledge that lives on in the bodies and impulses of people like the ones playing here. I wrote “One Glass” not long after moving to Los Angeles where, in contradiction of the stereotypical view of LA held by people like I was before moving there, I sit on my porch many mornings and watch horses run across a field with a view of the mountain behind them. Originally I had the bridge lyric as “I reach for the first man I see.” But when I played the tune in NYC in March 2020, in a fetid basement venue with the pandemic looming, Madeleine Peyroux said the line sounded fishy to her. So I changed “man” to “friend,” a change for the better and thank you Ms. P. 

The storyline of Molly and the Old Man was a flight of fancy with a moral thrust. I had a friend in high school called Jesse Thompson, whose dad Tommy played in the Red Clay Ramblers, a band everyone loved. Jesse’s mom had died young, and Tommy’s house was a place where, as I remember anyway, the door was always unlocked and instruments were always easy to grab. Jesse and I sang duos together now and then, especially Jimmie Rodgers’s “Any Old Time.”

Now, scene change to thirty-some years later on the main island of Hawaii, where I was talking to a middle-school class about my musical formation. It both impressed and depressed me to find myself struggling to explain this culture of a shared repertoire and familial living-room singing to Hawaiians — so much incredible music was within easy grasp of these kids, in their heritage and in their midst — while by contrast the class was instantly clued-in when I brought up Michael Jackson of Gary, IN. It drove home for me how fortunate I had been to learn music as an in-person activity, and not just as a passive-listening, hero-worshipping pastime. It also clarified that I should devote my life and work to representing that older way. Back on the mainland, I started focusing a lot more on not thinking about records while playing music, but listening with my ears to what was really happening. This all falls into the category of Obvious Stuff That Chance Events Restore To The Front Of Your Brain.

I tried to make a song out of some of these thoughts with “Molly,” imagining that Jesse and I had grown up and gotten married (sorry Jesse, and sorry Donna) and were passing down to our kid the wisdom and the music that Tommy had given us. So the first half of the tune is mostly true, and the second half’s story events, after the modulation, are all made up. The idea is that people and places disappear, sadly and hauntingly, but meanwhile, music persists as an ongoing, vibrating, connective thread. Nice thought!

There’s an earlier version of Lonely Ain’t Hardly Alive that I recorded for a Bloodshot sampler, but I thought I’d do it again with a different cast (except for the mighty Shad Cobb, who’s on both). I don’t think it leaves any doubt about my affection for Jimmy Martin’s uptempo 3/4 wanna-kill-yourself songs. My good friend Don Stiernberg suggested the 2 minor chord in place of the 4 at the end of the chorus, which makes a nice variation on the norm, and another good friend, Mike Fredrickson, gave me the idea that women rebound from romantic heartache easier than men. It was great to finally do something with the frighteningly gifted Randy Kohrs.

Angels Carry Me has a lot of meaning for me, since it’s largely autobiographical. I wrote the first verse on a songwriting getaway in the desert, and it stared back at me combatively: "Anything to add, genius?” When a verse ends “And that’s how I became…” the path forward is hard to see. I was just just four lines in and already had three huge, disparate themes in play: rural loneliness, rock-star worship, and father-son tension. My heart sank as I imagined trying to keep these unlike balls in the air for three more minutes; I couldn’t imagine how to unite the themes or steer toward some endpoint. But after a few weeks of two-steps-forward-one-step-back, pushing through three verses, two bridges, and epilogue (a sectional piece I had never tried), I have to admit I fell in love with the song. The moral in the last line is so apt that it surprised me to think I didn’t have it pre-made and in view while I was writing the rest of it. Two songs helped me move forward when I was stuck: Jesse Winchester’s recording of Stoney Edwards’s “Seems Like Only Yesterday” (with its fast-changing slides of farmhouse scenes) and Paul Simon’s masterly song “Darling Lorraine,” which varies between tender and tough movements to tell a decades-long, emotionally multihued story. I should have mentioned that as I headed to the desert, I listened to Sierra Hull’s records, with the deliberate intention to write a song that she would feel and color in like no one else — in that way, too, the song fulfilled my hopes for it.

Longhair Bluegrass is another real-life song. I didn’t realize back when I idolized NGR that it was a band with a leader. But of course it was, and that Sam’s path and mine have intersected once every few years for the last 25 (usually, when I pay him to come play with me) has been one of my life’s great pleasures. The scene overall has gotten a lot less parochial — kinder and gentler, I’d say — since I was the age in this song. Sam and his Boomer brethren irritated some of the first-generation players, with their fresh take on the music, and their, uh, grooming. But they played and sang with such prodigiousness that no one could expel or deny them. Sharp skills (measured by fluency, speed, and historicity) on one of six different instruments are a ground-level criterion for entry into the field, and for that reason among others, bluegrass emphasizes how you behave and look way less than how you play and sing. Surely every meaningful music style has that selection mechanism whirring within it somewhere. So unfortunately for the first-generation skeptics, the internal logic was all in Sam’s favor. It’s obvious that the force of his huge personality, infectiously full of brains, humor, and loving attention to other humans, has done a whole lot to loosen up and expand Bluegrassland, maybe more than any other single personality has. Alison Brown plays banjo on this one. She has that calmer-than-a-Hindu-cow approach to banjoistic envelope-pushing that has been a thing since Béla Fleck, since Bill Keith before him really, and I love how she expresses her reckless edge here without breaking a sweat.

Backwater Blues is one of those lightweight tunes that I sometimes write as a release-valve while working on harder songs. The inspirations that got me off and running are absurdly unrelated: a Dave Edmunds riff, an Emily Dickinson poem, and a retired guy’s house in Florida where Shad and I played in 2020. (Emily has been a staunch go-to for me for many years — the first line of this song is a direct steal.) I knew right away I wanted to play it with Chris Eldridge and Todd Phillips; they’re great at helping me sound groovier than I am.

Titles that are women’s names come easy to me, and Sweet Li’l Cora-Mae is the latest of those. I also enjoy singing duos with women, with their encouraging attitudes and their high voices. Nora O’Connor and Brennen Leigh are two of my faves. It’s hard to feel discouraged, or to sing very out-of-tune, with them around. I did one “Cora-Mae” with Nora and Robbie Gjersoe for my thumb-drive release Revenge of the Doberman, and this somewhat different two-banjo version with Brennen here. I can’t think of very many recordings with two clawhammers working together, and I’m not sure how it would work if one wasn’t Fred and the other Ginger, so to speak. There’s limits to the possible moves, and a lot of ways you can step on each other. On this one, I’m Ginger and Shad is Mary Ann. 

Some original bluegrass instrumentals with flat-3s, B-section modulations, around-the-horn progressions, and other modest kinks started popping up around the late Fifties — a gesture away from the blues and toward Tin Pan Alley, perhaps, or just a more experimental attitude. I’m not a musicologist so don’t quote me on that. I’m thinking about Jesse McReynolds’s “Stoney Creek,” and Frank Wakefield’s “New Camptown Races,” stuff like that. These were in my mind when I made up Silverlake Reel, over in Dan Harmon’s office at the Starburns building in Burbank. Starburns was the production house of my friend Dino Stamatopoulos and I thank him for letting me squat in the building for a season.

It was a thrill getting to meet Jerry Douglas the day we recorded “Silverlake.” His flurry of notes on the 9th bar of his break on Ricky Skaggs’s version of “Little Cabin Home On The Hill” blew my mind in 1979. Nobody in our extended family except me and my dad were into the grass and so I have very specific memories of 4 or 5 occasions when I’d put on a record and galvanize the grays. When I cranked up Ricky’s Sweet Temptation LP my grandparents filed like sheep into the living room and sank into the sofa, flummoxed. It was Ricky’s unbelievable voice, of course, but also the solos of Tony Rice and Jerry, who were both like Chuck Yeager, breaking the sound barrier. There are these ultra-rare instrumentalists before whom a way and speed of playing seem impossible, and after whom it seems self-evidently doable, with a number of people doing it and taking it even further. 

Nashville Blues is the only thing on the record I didn’t make up, and to be frank, even though the Delmores are on the copyright, they didn’t exactly make it up either. Going back to Arkansas and somebody stole that gal I had are what the eggheads call common tropes, and I think this was true in 1936 too. What was original to the brothers, and a sort of originality more important in music than word-strings, was their style — their delivery (jazzy yet deadpan), their extreme creativity in vocal harmony (thirds, fifths, unison, crossovers, the works), and Rabon’s fast ’n’ fluid 4-string guitar playing. Tim O’Brien and I talked a little about the particular pattern of responsorial and simultaneous singing they used on “Nashville Blues,” but we ended up mindlessly doing something a little different…which is basically the folk method, right? Mindlessness. What a blast to play music with these two! David’s solo is one of my favorites of his on any record — so glad it ended up on mine. I asked him between takes what kind of pick he used, and he said, “A pick that somebody dropped behind a dressing-room couch.” Doc Watson was my gateway to the Delmores, as to Burnett & Rutherford, Carson Robison, Mississippi John Hurt, and a number of others. My conception of all those people’s music, whether I’m playing it or thinking about it, is filtered through Doc, whose style started worming into my grey matter a couple days after I was born, once I was over my pique about having the tip of my penis cut off. The folk method can be quite cruel.

Momma’s Eyes is a type of song I’ve felt more at liberty to try my hand at as I’ve grown older — a sentimental ballad about family, change, and loss. Ten years ago I started to notice how many people around my age were dealing with their parents’ slowly fading away, and how the sadness and stress affected all involved. Inferring from my personal circle, I figured about every tenth or fifteenth person out there has been saddled with this situation. It sounds to me like my singing betrays some self-consciousness, as I faced my friend Brennen and sang these naked lyrics. I like how Scott played the guitar. I had heard he was a good guitarist, but since he works with me as a mandolinist and singer, I hadn’t heard him play, until we started tracking this. Lucky that worked out.

The narrative (such as it is) of Let The Old Dog In has just enough relation to real life to be alarming. Before Covid-19 I had a small habit of returning a little loopy in the wee hours from this bar in Los Feliz called The Drawing Room, where I’d go Sunday nights to sing karaoke and goof off with friends. Donna really would’ve been justified in bolting the door, but she never did. Because of downstream covid effects (i.e. the songs I had slotted and the cast I had in mind to play them were disrupted shortly before the session date), I had this incredible group of players providentially in place, and ended up tracking “Old Dog” and the Silverlake instrumental instead of what had been planned. It was a triumphant day for me (you can hear some of my elation during the soloing) because it now seemed clear that despite all the setbacks, I was working on a good record. As I said to Critter later that night (he was there that day mostly because “Old Dog” was too fast for me to play), I hadn’t felt such a jolt of pure delight at playback for many years. Recordings like this are for me expensive souvenirs of memorable occasions.

It was pretty late in life that I started frailing. About 15 years back, while traveling through North Carolina, I stopped in the town of Zebulon at a banjo shop I’d heard about. There aren’t many all-banjo shops, and this one went out of business a few years later. It was like a dream — dozens of beautiful handmade banjos from makers all over the US hanging on the walls. I had a price ceiling in mind of $2,000. After an hour of playing it came down to two instruments, a bright-sounding low-set one made by Doc Huff of Dallas, Oregon and a mellower, higher-set one with a deeper scoop made by Chuck Lee of Ovilla, Texas. I settled on Chuck’s (with case it was just a bit over my price ceiling) and soon began torturing those around me, including paying audiences, with my clumsy beginner playing. I wish I could have spared everyone and begun at an intermediate level. The only way to proceed was to keep at it and set goals — learn tunes, practice patterns, and test myself by occasionally playing in public. For lessons I used DVDs and banjo-playing friends. Ed Tverdek said, “Imagine you’re cradling an egg.” Danny Barnes said, “The one big rule is, no upstrokes.” Michael Miles said, “Make a skeleton of the tune, don’t go crazy filling it in.” Mike Merenda, a noted liar, said, “You’re doing fine.”

Scruggs-style and clawhammer have zero in common in right-hand technique, and the left-hand commonalities reduce a bit too, once you take it out of open-G tuning. I had some three-finger from an early age, but that was of little use now. To get the hang of the right-hand clawing motion took four or five years of embodiment, of reducing the role of the conscious mind. It also took some trial-and-error to figure out what to do about my right-hand index nail, which was short and recessed from flatpicking. These days, when I have a period of banjoing ahead of me, I go to the salon and get an extension, sitting there among the desperate housewives of suburbia. The nail lasts about six weeks, during which flatpicking is slightly cumbersome but frailing is much easier. Isn’t this interesting?

I’ve written only three or four songs on my Chuck Lee, and Old Time Music Is Here To Stay is one. The melody seemed to emerge naturally from C-tuning; I don’t think I’d have made it up on guitar, or in open G on banjo, either one. The main 8-bar cadence interested me as soon as I heard it, I think because of the concept of contour, which stayed in my head after reading This Is Your Brain On Music many years back. A gently sloping series of notes, like the shape of a mountain ridge. Prokofiev positioned staff notes in a visual pattern corresponding to mountain silhouettes when he was scoring Alexander Nevsky. Following intuitions of math embedded in nature is one way to make music happen. I think it’s also a helpful way to keep the abstractions that infest musical thought rooted in the observable world, since things like contour, pitch, and cyclical events are natural phenomena, not just arid music-school concepts. (Not that those concepts, arid or otherwise, are available to an unschooled guy like me.)

This is another real-life song — the thoughts and opinions and memories are mine. I mean, I didn’t literally plug my ears and run away from banjos when I was a teenager, but I did have the unproductive idea that I’d learn to play electric guitar and join my peers in going ga-ga over the popular music of the moment. It was unproductive because it was a herd instinct that led nowhere in particular; I never got too good on that pricey Telecaster which now gathers dust in my closet. I’m actually better at clawhammer banjo, and I’ve only been doing that for 15 years now. Something’s the matter with me — I just can’t get comfortable with the Rolling Stones or U2 or hiphop the way I can get with banjo music. But if “Old Time Music” is right, who knows, maybe in 200 years people will be relating to “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” and “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” more than to “Brown Sugar” or Pink Lady. Electric guitars might give way to computers, as seems to be happening now, but the mountains will still be right there.

economics, reputation, and the musical life

At this point the pandemic has produced a closed circle of thoughts in this worker, beginning March 15, 2020: Get me out of here, gee but it’s great to be back home, I wonder what it would be like to venture out again, let’s give it a try, oh God I’m sick and coughing get me home, home is pleasant, home is a little too pleasant, home is boring, I miss playing music and connecting with strangers, get me out of here. A thing I should probably be ashamed to admit is that, during lockdown, I missed doing interviews and gabbing about myself. It does offer potential rewards beyond ego-stroking. Having to explain your own motives can sharpen your thinking, and the perspective of sympathetic non-musicians on your work, past and present, can be illuminating.

I just wrapped up a long interview with a distinguished elder of music journalism, and you can read the results a few weeks down the line. By long I mean: somewhere near five hours on Zoom, plus an hour or so of emailing. An investment on both ends but mostly his. The gentleman was not only distinguished and sympathetic, he was informed and quick-witted. We enjoyed each other’s company, I think. It interests me, looking back on the chat, that the line between us sometimes went fuzzy on the subject of money. “How much did you spend on this record?” “How much of your income comes from road work?” “How did you attract so many high-reputation players to the new record - did they lower their rates for you?” And various questions regarding my career “trajectory” that also had an economic hue — like the presumption that rational, self-interested forward thinking is involved in imagining and planning future music projects. Sort of? Not exactly? Still, that’s an entirely reasonable assumption, and all of these questions are, if a little pointed, also reasonable to ask.

I get the feeling in talking to non-musicians that figuring out where to land, on the spectrum between music-making as an occupation as economically grounded as any other and music-making as a priestly, passion-centered calling that plays out in a realm above grubby calculating self-interest, isn’t at all simple or intuitive. Evidently inclining to the second view is a Finnish popular music academic I had a recent and somewhat testy exchange with. “I’m very skeptical of claims that incentives spur creativity,” he wrote me, in response to a question about how twentieth-century broadcasting has influenced songwriters’ work. “Is he nuts?” I thought. How many areas of life aren’t influenced, even primarily influenced, by economic incentives? It does strip the joy out of music appreciation to focus on who paid Beethoven to do what, or on the apparent injustice of people as highly skilled as J.D. Crowe doing straight jobs while no-account jackasses like fill-in-the-blank eat catered food in private planes. However, you can get fruitlessly lost in these thoughts without access to specific data which, generally speaking, the music business works hard to keep out of our grasp — hence the sorts of questions I listed above, as asked me by my gentleman. “How many records do you sell on average?” he actually asked me, and I actually answered. I may come to regret this.

Once, at a Cannibal Corpse show, I found myself looking at the doughy forty-somethings doing their Cookie Monster yowling and thinking about what they got paid and whether an easier line of work was perhaps not available for the sum. I estimated the audience size and the artist net after expenses such as promoter percentage and agency commission, multiplied by 100 (the number of shows in a year), and divided by five, which I think was the number of people on stage. “$70,000 per annum, before taxes!” I thought. It was more pleasant doing this mental math than listening to the music. But as soon as I escaped the racket and stepped onto the sidewalk, it hit me how ill-grounded my math was, and how equally likely it was that at least one of the guys on stage earned three times as much as I had estimated — or half. The privacy of contracts and private patronage are just two factors that keep us from knowing.

I have one son who is above-averagely rational, good at math, and interested in money. This grants me an ongoing connection with a mindset that looks at music as a rational, economic endeavor, and in doing so sometimes hits a wall. I have another son who plays music professionally with an up-and-coming group, making very little money at it. “Why is he doing that?” son A asks me about son B. Not long ago we had a conversation about the layout of the current American music-biz landscape — touring, promotion, intellectual property rights — and the incentives and carve-outs of the various actors — club owners, festival promoters, management, booking agencies. We talked about how son B’s low wages were justified (temporarily) by realism about what the others in the band were earning (very little) and also about what the band’s future prospects looked like (very good). “I’ve learned more about this business in the last 10 minutes of conversation than I’ve learned in the last 30 years,” said A. Well, I don’t have anything like a scholarly perspective, but I have a good grasp on the frame, based on how it feels from inside it.

Since the era of feudalism ended, and the Schumanns and Brahmses were thrown into the marketplace to fend for themselves, fame and wealth have entered into the musical life as potential outcomes and therefore as potential goals. Obviously, the sort of fame that keeps you from walking into a diner, and the kind of wealth that lets you buy an apartment in Manhattan, don’t enter into the lives of over 99% of musical workers. But the fraction of us who do achieve that much economic power creates a Jupiter-like distortion of the field. In our present-day field: young craftspeople like my son make crazy sacrifices with no assured end; businesses, well aware of the “passion” narrative (“I’m in it for the sheer love of it, wheeee!”) and the related willingness to work cheap or even pay to work, routinely demand those crazy sacrifices; music fans routinely apply economic presuppositions to their evaluations of singers, writers, and bands. How is it that less-famous person X comes to interact professionally with famous person Y? If you’re as good as you seem, why aren’t you more famous? You can’t possibly be wealthy, so how specifically do you go about making a living year after year, and how do you make sure that everything won’t collapse in the next one? There’s a good deal of confusion threaded into questions like these.

In a better world, all of our music would be taken in without anyone asking these questions ceaselessly, or idly musing as I did during the Cannibal Corpse show, which, though only 45 minutes long, seemed to go the length of a Blue Note box set. That world wouldn’t be better for the millions of listeners who get added pleasure from knowing that their partisanship puts them inside a social phenomenon that magnetizes a large and fervent paying crowd to a revered, iconic entertainer. Just better for mopes like me who would much prefer a line of communication with listeners unfettered by distracting calculations. We’re sincerely trying to create a calculation-free zone here — in today’s money-mad world, that’s a great value that music offers, an escape room, a place of sensual delight or sacred contemplation.

That, as it happens, is the selfsame zone that we create for ourselves, here inside our collegial frame. “Come to the picking party tonight,” a friend texted me last year, “Mike Judge is going to stop by, as well as one of the Foo Fighters.” “I can come,” I texted back, “but I don’t care who else comes as long as they can play okay.” I think I wrote that out loud, so to speak, to remind myself that, although the name-dropping added some prospective tension to the situation as I imagined the party ahead, I shouldn’t be thinking about it. There’s an official in-group philosophy: whatever handicap your economic power and reputation grant you in non-musical life, that ends as soon as the music starts. At that point, all that matters is the singing and playing — the communicating with one another. Moreover, the official decorum in groups that integrate non-famous and famous musicians is that either a) we treat each other with ordinary human consideration, conversing naturally and non-strategically, or b) the famous ones go even farther, self-awarely extending a tad more consideration to the non-famous, expressing kind interest in their lives and thoughts and so forth. When these unwritten rules are breached, and people start throwing their weight around and acting weird, the party is over.

I’m in a position to notice the little courtesies of my economic betters, since there are so many of them. When I’m backstage bantering with a better known artist, or picking the bluegrass with someone of eminence (whether they’re bluegrassers or not), it unfailingly gives me a wonderful feeling when they ask about my family or invite a musical opinion. Thank you, sire, the children are prospering! Music-making tends to create a special zone outside of social reality, within which we’re not segregated by income or public reputation; we fall into our roles as members of the same guild, approximate peers. I try, with God knows what level of success, to behave in a natural human way back to them. Last weekend my friend and I bumped into a lady at a coffeeshop whose music I’ve loved since the late 1980s. Since it was the night of the Grammys, we small-talked about how it was hard to get snacks at the Staples Center, then talked for a moment about our common love of dogs. When I walked away, I thought about how strange and great it was to be a musician, a field in which two sixty-year-olds who have never met can greet one another amicably and palaver like college chums. Neither of us said, “What was your nomination for? Didja win?” And I didn’t say, “Holy fuck, is it good to meet you — why, I have a long imaginary relationship with you!” We talked about dogs and snacks.

More name-dropping — not all these encounters go so well, on my end. Last year there was a multi-act tribute to the late John Prine, and Emmylou Harris was on stage just after me. She and I have brief interactions every 15 years or so, and I always ruin them somehow. This time, I walked off stage and she said, “That was really good.” Isn’t that a nice remark? Who cares if it’s even completely sincere, it’s a nice gesture; but all I could do was to hastily mumble, “Yeah, it’s a great song,” deflecting her compliment with feigned carelessness. Yeah, yeah, Emmylou, shows what you know, the song was good not me. Fifteen years ago I said something very similar to her, and fifteen years before that, I won’t even go into…

Forget hierarchies. Think instead about the make-believe-land of equality. I’d like to invite people who don’t make music into the musicians’ created zone of economic not-mattering. It clears up a lot. What is Bruce Springsteen doing, fraternizing with Joe Grushecky? How does Joe acclimate to such validation from Bruce, and by the way, doesn’t Bruce understand that this is just a fellow we go see at bars and chat with after the set? In order to make good music, we put all those anxieties aside, at least while we’re in the room with one another trying to make it happen. If you put music at or near the top of your list of values, then the not-mattering, the peer-to-peer mentality, is more of a reality than the income and reputational differentials, which could change, even reverse, in a very short time. The music outlasts the people.

I’m putting out this record in April where there are a lot of Springsteens to my Grushecky! How did I get them to be on the record, and what did I pay them? 1. I called them and asked, 2. as little as I thought I could get away with. No mystery there. Their participation might imply — probably does imply — some appreciation of my skill (a validation that means a lot to me). No doubt they didn’t mind being paid either. Despite what academics might think, music doesn’t just glide along on magic, goodwill, and charity.

My unasked-for advice to you, dear listener, with regard to the spectrum I mentioned, is to avoid the tail-ends in order to get the clearest take on what’s happening within music. Money matters, a bit. It’s good at setting things into motion. Getting Emmylou Harris on a boat, getting people to sit for three hours without a snack. I certainly need money just to get off the couch and go to work, and my sweet son is going to need quite a lot more if he’s to have a family like I did, and get off of a filthy futon in Queens. Not that there aren’t many things I’d happily do with zero financial incentive. In fact the list is very, very long. Drive to Woodstock to have coffee with Annette Peacock. Fly to Vienna to talk for an hour with Gerhard Kubik. Sing for 14 hours straight at a charity fundraiser for homeless people. That’s the problem, though — do one or two of those things and before you know it you’re so deep in the red you have to pray for 10 corporate whoring opportunities just to dig yourself out.

The money someone will pay you to perform, to be blunt about it, is a useful indicator of — not what you’re “worth,” perish the silly thought, but how many people within about 60 miles of that place are interested in your act and how much they’ll pay to see it. That more people are more interested in seeing other people’s shows is a fact I’ve gradually gotten comfortable with, mostly because it’s out of my control. But if I’m making considerably more or less money than last year, that is a fact that interests me very much. What here needs adjusting? I want my life and work to be on a progressive path, and on the path, I’m competing only with myself.

Once I’ve started playing, I’m not thinking about what I’m being paid — and I hope you’re not either. I also hope that, after the show’s over, you continue not thinking about it. I hope you don’t fret about my meager income or the alleged injustice of my not being better known. It doesn’t take much reflection to understand, as I believe most musicians do, even the rich and famous ones, that status and income don’t correlate — at all — to talent or worth. I’m not saying that self-interestedly, because of my rank (honest!). Do you think the best restaurant at the airport is the one with the longest line? That Harlan Coben writes the best books and Herman Melville wrote some of the worst? Be serious. When I was a kid, I idolized a lot of people who drove around and played for small groups in small rooms. Now I’m one of them — surprise! (If my next release sells 8 million, by the way, I’m buying a ranch in Santa Monica and revising all these opinions.)

It’s hard to sort through some of these issues. Keeping some prestige and mystique around oneself is useful. Easier just to dodge the econ talk politely. Dye your hair black, jump on stage, show your incredible hysterical love for music, crawl off to the promoter and sign your W9, take your miserable check, and be on your merry way. But since I get these repeated questions from journalists, whether delicately or pointedly, and since money’s on all our minds, so much as to cloud thinking, I wanted to give my…two cents? Aren’t my thoughts worth more? Anyway, I invite you to let music carry you off into higher realms where princes are eye to eye with paupers.

the ideas that animated Rick Will

Although you should repress the urge to write an essay every time someone dies, I can’t resist putting something out there about my friend Rick Will. He was a lavishly gifted audio engineer and a delightfully odd duck. Because his high intelligence and competencies were overlaid with stoner mannerisms and some pointlessly profane antics, one was sometimes unsure whether to revel in his company, learn from his wisdom, or fear for his health; but two out of three were blessings he extruded wherever he went, and the third was something inscrutable, his private thing with which to struggle.

Rick engineered and co-produced my third solo record (Let’s Kill Saturday Night), back in 1998. I met him after many long, tiresome months of scouting candidates for the job. I had just stepped up from the indies to the majors, and my company’s non-negotiable demand was that I collaborate with a “producer” -- someone with an approved résumé and an established history of delivering commercially plausible recordings within a modest budget. I understood this rationale totally, and even halfway understood why they didn’t want me working with the engineers from my previous two records, but that restriction made for more of a challenge than I anticipated. I went through one candidate after another, upwards of 100 of them. For various reasons nothing was working out.

In March that year I had dinner with Jay Joyce in Nashville. Jay is now a prominent mainstream producer; at the time he was in a noisy and fun band called Iodine, and was a respected figure in an outsider-ish Southern scene. He didn’t think he was the right person for my project, or maybe I didn’t, I can’t recall; but he mentioned Rick’s name. A glance at his history showed a truly promising variety -- Rick had recorded or mixed Johnny Cash, Junior Brown, Tim Finn, No Doubt, and Nine Inch Nails; assisted Don Gehman and T Bone Burnett; produced Amy Correia and Joseph Arthur; was himself in some sort of a metal band. He had started in Nashville back in the mid-1980s when Mary Tyler Moore’s production outfit branched out into music. MTM had a few of the more interesting acts of the time, such as Foster and Lloyd, of whom the latter was my dear friend, and Rick’s as well. So there were several promising threads there. (The T Bone thread alone got my interest -- he was one of the 100, someone I desired most hotly but who was just as hotly undesired at the label. “Why in the world do you want him?” said Roberta, the A&R head, as if I’d suggested hiring a circus monkey. Interestingly, Rick’s more formative experiences, at least his earlier ones, came from working under Don Gehman. “He taught me all about compression,” Rick remarked, “how you have to learn it very deeply, because compression can ruin a record but the exactly right kind in the exact right amount makes it fly.”)

I went to his house, a somewhat secluded property in the hills off West End Avenue, on Love Circle. We sat for an hour in his music-listening room, and he issued vague-sounding thoughts about music recording and scribbled on a legal pad. What was he scribbling, what was he saying? I couldn’t have told you two days later. I just remember thinking: if I didn’t know what this fellow had provably done, I’d have written him off as the kind of sad sack who wanders on beaches and mumbles. I then reflected that I had known people throughout the years who were deeply smart but presented themselves as a little mixed-up -- artistic misfits. So I gave myself a pat on the back for not being thrown off track, and informed the label the next day that I had my man.

The next six months were an extreme period in my life, mentally and actively, and I can’t think of a way around the dumb phrase “emotional roller-coaster.” At times I thought of myself as a helpless loose fragment in a churning imploding mechanism, and at others as a character in a scripted drama with a smallish cast of whom Rick was one of the two or three leading players. But self-dramatizing metaphors aside, what Rick ended up offering me amid that turmoil, in terms of general wisdom, specific production ideas, and positive thinking, not only helped me bridge a rough patch but left me with sharp permanent tools that I’ve been able to draw on in my ongoing effort to make music that sounds good and means something. 

This week I went back and forth about whether to write anything about Rick. The first things that occurred to me, after hearing of his death, were a small number of outlandish acts that, if I put them on the Internet, would risk upsetting people who loved him and casting both of us in a decidedly bad light. I don’t know what he was like before or after I knew him (we almost scheduled a get-together when in 2017 I visited Australia, where he had moved, but sadly missed one another), but in the 1990s he straddled a lonely characterological fence, between hippie good-vibe and punk-rock agitation. There was an engaging ambiguity in him -- “I love everybody” vs. “Fuck everybody” -- but there was definitely an “everybody.” Maybe that’s an ornate excuse for immature behavior. But the more I thought about him, the more I came to think that my attention was training too tightly on a few vivid anecdotes. Just as someone’s recent death needn’t demand a brushing away of thorns, neither does it do the life any relevant justice to grab at them and punishingly pierce our hands. I’m sure we all want not just to be forgiven -- a tough ask -- but to live in conditions of minimal pain. Rick’s life, in its fuller rendering, was guided by precepts that were warm-hearted, creative, and observable. Below are a few of them, along with backup evidence.

Be 14

“Fourteen! Fourteen!” he’d yell, jumping manically on a filthy couch in the room at S.I.R. where the band I and ran songs during preproduction week. Just the single word, and at first we were mystified as to what he was possibly getting at. Rick’s operating theory, we soon learned, was that music should always be played, and much of life lived, as though one were frozen into fourteenness.

At 14, let the record show, I had already begun acting like a cartoonishly old person (opinionated, short-tempered, martini-holding, contemptuous of youth culture). However, that’s not what Rick meant. He meant to be open to impulse, passion’s plaything, not notably professional in attitude, unsnobbish, intensely immersed in art, feverishly in love, and high. Not my approach to life at all; but in the specific field of music performance, these ideas do start to become much more salient.

During preproduction, Rick came to feel that my band wasn’t up to snuff and might have to be fired. “They play like they’re 35, and they’re tired, and they’ve been playing in bars a real long time,” he said to me privately one morning, five days in. His tone was gentle but grave. “It’s not working. It’s not good enough. We can start over again with some great players I can call in. I know these guys are your friends, but it’s your record, not theirs, and it’s not worth the risk.” Panicking, my first thought was a short list of excuses. We were, in fact, 35-year-old bar musicians. What else would we sound like? Also, we had driven ten hours through a tornado the day before preproduction began, Chicago to Nashville, trying to follow the course of the wind from news reports, threading our way down I-65 among wrecked cars, pulling over to jump out and hide in culverts now and then. I was jittery and a little worn down. And what’s more, if I had driven like a 14-year-old, I’d be dead. To me, 35 years old was just fine.

Well, I assembled my little band of washouts and gave them the bad news. They were playing badly, the boss wanted them fired, I had made a plea for leniency and a second chance. Lorne, the bassist, took it stoically and simply said, “We’ve just got to do better, then.” The others nodded in agreement. That’s how much we already trusted Rick’s judgment. Even against our own interests and pride, no one considered that he might be mistaken. (You could say they were interested in keeping their jobs, but believe me, they weren’t being paid enough to be that interested.)

We did a gig at Douglas Corner on a Monday night, at the end of a day off. It was a nice release and a lot of fun, and we returned to SIR the next morning for more abuse. But happily, Rick reported at day’s end that things sounded better to him. The live show had re-stimulated us, after a tornado and a solid week of trying to pass muster before a beady-eyed judge on a filthy couch. The day was saved and the project continued as planned and as cast. But Rick wasn’t entirely done giving us grief for sounding 15 and up, for we did continue to slip now and then into placid professionalism. Rick just wanted the dials all the way up all the time. It was an uphill climb, yet I felt that it was just what we needed, or at least what I wanted.

Thinking it over all these years later, I’m not fully on-board with the teen-spirit dictum. It’s not a tone that’s genre-invariant. Listeners turn to different records for different moods and metabolisms. And there are considerations of personal authenticity. I’m explicitly working from an older-age emotional angle now, and it would create a silly clash to open my face wide and slam my body around while warbling about ancient ghosts or the heartbreak of raising children. Still, I keep Rick’s words close by me as a hedge against complacency. It’s good to get everything routinized, as a benefit of long experience -- travel logistics, getting a stage dressed, daily instrument practice, etc. -- everything except the performing, the music. That needs always to be fresh and in-the-moment. If it isn’t, you begin to lose listener interest, deservedly and immediately. And if you forget what it was like to be 14 and want everything so badly -- if you lose sight of your great good luck in getting to play music for people, in having a song to play and people to listen to it -- then you begin to lose interest in yourself. Cash it in, get a factory job. 

embrace adventure

One day, at Quad studio, Rick and I were tweaking a song (“Take Me To The Paradise”) with a modestly “experimental” section. The last verse was intended to tip into hallucinatory, noir-ish anxiety. “I wish we had a sonic throughline here to underscore the mood I’m after,” I said, or something to that effect; “something like a Blood Sweat & Tears trombone pedal, you know? Suspenseful. But maybe not expressly tonal.” I’ve got a lot of crudely articulated, thrillingly esoteric ideas.

Rick did...well, he did a series of things, and I don’t remember where he got all the materials or just how long it took, but it all happened within that session, and it happened directly after I said all that. He got the key to a car that was parked in the lot outside. He got an extension for an XLR cable that ran 70 or 80 feet. Then he attached a 58 or similar cheap microphone to it, and dropped it under the hood of the car. He took some kind of a weight, and jammed it onto the car horn. Then he ran inside and plugged the other end of the cable into the board.

Cueing up the song and recording the overdub of the ceaseless car horn a few times while experimenting on the fly with EQ and ambience took, as I recall, 9 or 10 minutes. A brief enough period, but a long time for a studio of placid professionals to listen to a continuous horn from a vehicle parked against the small building there on Grand Avenue. The police were on the scene by minute 9.5, and luckily it was a wrap about 30 seconds later. I don’t recall any apology, just a polite feigned smile and a “we’re trying to do very important work here” attitude from Rick as he unjammed the wheel and unrigged the automobile.

We did a lot of fun stuff during tracking. One night Rick dropped a dictaphone mic inside a grand piano and I banged around on the wires with a drumstick, to try for a fucked-up gamelan sort of sound. Another time Rick wanted to try backward acoustic guitar (on a tune called “Bethelridge”) so he ran the tape of the band track backward and I played the song by following the chart backward, from the last bar to the first (challenging for me since it was mixed-meter, and also unmetered in I think two spots). We recorded a couple harmony vocals naked. Probably in part because we were working in the most staid of the three music industry towns, we put some extra effort into going out of the box, as it were. When we did, it wasn’t plotted out in advance, the thought just came into someone’s head and away we went.

Not all of Rick’s thoughts were so sensible. One day, again at Quad, he got frustrated with the responsiveness of the tape machine controls, which were mounted on a rack with wheels, and he lit the rack on fire with his cigarette lighter. In truth it wasn’t the most inflammable object, so the risk and the potential liability were sharply limited. But the fire did catch on a bit, consuming most of a plastic “play” button. It made a nice visual effect -- lovelier than just the normal spectacle of sitting and swearing angrily at a machine. The delicate flame plumed upward and attracted the attention of a perplexed intern, who smothered it with his shirt. In short, you just never knew what Rick would do next.

“And then -- why, you’ll never believe what we over-entitled Ivy Leaguers inflicted on the townfolk after that!” I know, I know. The point I’m going for is how very open to adventure Rick was. Some engineers and producers are closed to it. Strike a piano note, break a wineglass, run caterwauling across the room, and twang a ukulele string with a number-two pencil? Not in my studio! To my way of thinking, engineers should be alert to opportunities to productively smash norms -- and my experience has been that the best ones are. Rick thought of new adventures constantly and jumped into them without a moment’s thought -- he was a firestarter!

be high a lot of the time

Well, this was probably my least favorite thing about Rick but it does bear mentioning.

naturalize the studio

I remember my first four or five times trying to record music in a “studio” -- whether that’s what a guy called the tricked-out room in his basement or it was a lavish artificial space serving a corporation’s bottom line. Having no understanding of the machine technology or the process (what was punching? what was gating? what was the difference between delay and echo? what was mixing? and by the time I had read enough dorky magazine articles and clocked enough session time at $200/hour to achieve fluency in these arcane subjects, how many teeth would remain in my head?) was daunting enough for a teenaged rookie. But these are problems that are solved in a straightforward way, by learning over time. The trickier problem was a psychological one. Something inherent in the nature of a “studio” felt alien and intimidating. All through my 20s, I couldn’t quite crack the puzzle of how to make music in that setting that sounded nearly as good as I could often sound in a normal place -- at home, or in someone’s living room, or in a club, or in a church, or almost anywhere that wasn’t a recording studio.

Studios were places owned and operated by other people, making you a sort of privileged squatter, even though you’d paid (and often dearly). If Michael Jackson had been in the room a month prior, or Steve Winwood was currently working the next room over, you felt your unease increase. You needed to relax, and yet almost anything you’d normally do to conjure a music-making mood was discouraged or forbidden outright. Don’t move around, the mic is fixed right at your mouth hole. Don’t bang your foot on the ground, it’ll get picked up on tape. Don’t try to gain energy from the audience, they’re not there. Don’t make a single noise as the last chord is struck and fades away, but stand deathly still until instructed to move. Oh, and you’ll hear everyone’s voice and instrument including your own through small speakers attached to a device on your head and positioned an inch from each eardrum. Go!

The friendly and relaxed personae of many engineers and producers can go a long way to reduce this problematic condition of tense artificiality, along with improvements in your own learning curve, as your first few studio efforts turn into your first few dozen. Rick Will went the absolute maximum distance that a recordist can go to naturalize and de-louse a studio space. He picked MCA for tracking, for starters. It had been Ronnie Milsap’s room in an earlier era, and had the exact vibe that datum implied: comfy, faded but clean, sunset-over-Malibu colors. (Hey, no blind jokes, cut that out.) The lighting was soft and the hues on the batting were soft too. A Neve room where the optics were Neve as well, if you follow me. The day before starting, Rick gathered us: “Bring anything and everything from home that you like to look at. Posters, statuettes, ikons, framed family pictures, rabbit’s feet. We’re gonna redecorate the space just as much as we want.” Rick brought in a ton of incense -- the joint reeked.

We didn’t use headphones very much, which at that point was a fairly novel approach to me. Isolation had always been such a primary concern in working with engineers that it was hard for me to imagine how not to record with headphones on. But the less I used them in the studio, going forward from those days, the more I found I disliked them, on both a mechanical/physical level and an ideological one. All that said, they’re no huge deal. What was entirely novel to me was that Rick recorded some of our most raucous songs not only headphone-less but with active monitor wedges spread around the tracking room, like a live show. Was there untenable bleed? Yes and no. Considering the decibels pouring from the wedges, the track-by-track isolation was very surprising to hear upon playback -- Rick had incredible knowledge and instinct about mic placement, room dynamics, and wave activity, and so was able to pull this hat trick off far better than most engineers. But yes, there was bleed aplenty, and this proved one more lesson in a long series in my life about its beauty and usefulness.

Summary: Rick had a natural lack of pretense and a goofball sense of humor that drained stiffness from any environment; but he also employed smart tactics aimed at converting studios into rec-room-like performance zones.  

family is love

I don’t remember a day in Rick’s company when he didn’t talk tenderly and at some length about his wife and his infant son Oskar.

music is sacred

Most of us love music, but I always feel there’s a small but essential distinction between those who listen obsessively and compile factual knowledge, in the way of baseball fanatics, and those who have been led by music into a mental space that no level-headed authority would altogether condone. You can look at their dress code and their disfigurements and see that they’ve written themselves out of regular society; you can tell from the very sag of their skin that they’ve allowed music to take years off their lives. Surprisingly, or not, musicians tend not to fall into either category, moderate or extreme obsessives. Entering into a practical relationship with music has its disadvantages but it does temper the mania a bit. 

I don’t know if Rick would have preferred to have been more of a player than an engineer. I think he might have. When he talked about his band, Vagantis, as he did almost daily, he seemed to assume a certain level of familiarity and interest, as if he were talking about the cast of “Gilligan’s Island.” I find it a little relieving to have some interest in dumb old shows or cobwebbed books, just to have something to take my mind off the hypnotic subject of music and to dissociate myself from the behaviors and habits of musical types. The long hours, the official indifference to money, the smoking and other health infractions, the uncompromising political declarations, the dramatic professions of love and loyalty: these are traits that (except for the long hours) I’ve developed a certain ambivalence toward. But they sucked Rick in like a hungry baby.

When toward the middle of our mix session he saw a stream of commentary issuing from my label’s New York office via the studio fax machine, he swiveled around in his rolling chair and addressed me sternly. “We are no longer mixing a record. We are engaged in a mortal campaign to save the art we have created. We will use every tactic at our disposal.” This was exciting to hear but I was also a little concerned by the rhetoric. What was he planning to do, and might it hurt me? One of his bluntest tactics, a not uncommon one I’ve since seen sound technicians use, is to meet a sound-design-related request they deem unwise by pretending to turn something up or down. “Sure -- how does that sound now?” Most people won’t say, “Did you just insidiously pretend to do what I asked for while actually doing nothing?” It’s an accusation. Most people will instead say, “That sounds a bit better, thanks.” And they’ll mean it. 

When we were done mixing, headquarters demanded a re-mix on two songs, by a different engineer in a different city. That was its own story and Rick’s involvement in it is recounted in the next section. After the re-mix, though, there was more trouble brewing over at corporate. I was seeing some symptoms and hoping there was an alternative interpretation, but then an agent told me straight out -- they’re mothballing your record. “Mothballing,” perfect term! He meant that, though the company was committed to releasing my record, it would do that as non-showily as possible, almost with a spirit of penitence and mute regret. When Rick found out about this, he called me on the phone to deliver another of his manifestos. “We are now in a state of all-out war,” he announced. “We will promote the record ourselves, in a guerrilla manner. We will be working under, around, and against the company. The two of us will compile a list of every industry contact we can think of who can conceivably be of aid. We’ll probably fail, but without trying, we definitely will. We’ll...” It went on for a good while. Once again Rick’s militancy was heartwarming and worrying both. His involvement in my record was not really an open question -- it had been very officially done with for months. I didn’t expect his extralegal ardor to lead to great results (nor did it), but it did mean something to me at a point when I was in a dark funk and suffering the death of my pumped-up hopes, even contemplating career flameout.

Something Rick did that combines a lot of these aspects I’m separating out -- the music-love, the impulsiveness, the I’m-14 -- was to pick up an instrument and jump into a song without having been invited. To put this into context, let me say: I’m a pretty good player, my band guys at the time were all pretty good players, and the guests on our record, like Sam Bush and John Hughey and Lucinda Williams, were unmistakably in a realm beyond pretty-good. I’ve never seen any other engineer leap out of the control room and into this context of clearly capable musicianship, holding a rusty banjo and wanting in on the fun. It was a disarming move that he pulled off with charm. On one hand: are you fucking kidding me, engineer? On the other: making a record is making music, which is expressing joy and impulse, unlike designing a stock portfolio or serving on your PTA board. We overlooked this basic fact more frequently than we knew. When our performing shaded into audible joylessness, Rick would often meet it with mockery, making his body stiff like the Frankenstein monster and intoning, “Display. No. Emotion.”

Marx’s thinking about capitalism’s artificial divorce of self from work is -- if it’s not a too-clever-by-half extrapolation -- probably a cousin to Rick’s thinking about music, as it connects precepts like “be 14,” “your band is your life,” and “your record is worth the best battle you have in you.” If you can leave home and enter the offices of your law firm as a changed person, no longer a loving husband or father, but instead a producer of wealth and a cigar-chomping colleague and a warrior on behalf of strangers, good for you. Maybe that’s a possibility. But that doesn’t quite sound like human beings the way we know them to be. And that one-mask-off-another-mask-on approach fails utterly in the field of music, where the fullest (including the softest and the most irrational) expressions of personhood are used in the work. If you somehow are able to suppress those expressions, the work will almost certainly suffer as a result. The “product” is inextricably bound together with the sensation of aliveness, what it’s like to suffer pain and fear and to want for no reason to jump up and kiss people and all that stuff. This is obviously not all that relevant to the human beings coiling the cables or delivering the lunch, but it does have a lot of relevance to those performing and recording the music, and it has total relevance to the person whose name is atop the project and a few others tasked with high-level oversight. The demands of efficiency and procedure must be heard, of course, but with no bulwark to meet them, they will quickly overtake the central task -- the crystalline communication of aliveness.

confound your antagonists with honesty and generosity

Out in L.A. David Bianco was assigned to re-mix the two songs, and David turned out to be a swell and reasonable person, as well as -- no surprise -- a highly skilled engineer. But the session was overshadowed by Rick’s and my opposition to it. In demanding that the music be reopened and reconfigured, the company had offered only procedural reasons -- “this is what always happens at this stage of the operation, don’t worry” -- that I found far from reassuring. At least one of David’s mixes, and maybe both, turned out to excel Rick’s, in the final analysis. But that happy result was in no way pre-ordained.

Rick decided on his own, and rather wildly, to fly out west and drop in on the session. We were a few hours in, and I was just getting into a friendly groove with David, when in popped Rick through the door, with a sheepish Bill-and-Ted expression and holding a bottle of wine with a bow on it. David accepted it gratefully and looked at the label. I remember his eyeing Rick warily, as though unsure of his intent. “This is an extremely expensive wine,” he said, like a confused protest. Rick shrugged and plopped down in a corner chair. “Please go ahead with the work,” he said. “I’m not going to distract you.” I’ve never been at another remix date where, as the work proceeds, the person whose work is being altered has travelled thousands of miles to hover humbly in the corner of the room. A weird situation. Rick and I ended the day nightclubbing around Sunset Blvd. At 4:30AM he was in my room, still hovering humbly. I sat drooping on the bed; I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask him to go. He had spent some of the night acting a little bizarrely, but in the wee hours he was feeling calmer and broadly sentimental. “A lot of people will say they support you and love you, in the music world,” he said, with his eyes gleaming. “But I say it, and I mean it. I will always love you, and I will never stop believing in you. I am truly your friend for life.” It wasn’t the last time I saw him, but it was maybe third-to-last.

Now that I’m reflecting on my time with Rick, I can see a pattern of his frustration with many of the people my production brought into his orbit. The manager, the A&R representative, the attorney, the drummer, several supporting musicians, the re-mix engineer. At times I felt that he felt I was thrusting him into a substratum of amateur incompetence. If that was true, it was a result partly of my own poor decisionmaking (choosing Geffen, not DreamWorks) but more generally of my economic frailty (Rick Will was on my menu of options but not T Bone Burnett). I was very gratified that Rick had such high belief in me, that he thought I was like Hank Williams (!), that he threw himself so passionately into my low-paying project. I’m a little regretful that I didn’t or couldn’t make a smoother path for him through the work. From the inside, it felt as though we were hurling ourselves hard at the goalpost (sorry, sports aren’t my line) as a professional team of bored goalpost-movers repeatedly insured that we landed in the dust. 

Earlier this week I talked with a few of the musicians he wanted to fire from my project for sounding tired and washed-out, and I found no residual ill will, just amused and warm memories. Rick’s displays of extravagant generosity, his adeptness with machines, his sometimes brutal honesty, his declarations of unconditional love, his love of harmony but also of provocation...it was a complex that defied easy analysis, but it surely added up to an unforgettable character.

"Welding, It's Not A Nice Job" -- Todd Phillips talks about Tony Rice

Some hours after Tony Rice died, last Christmas Day, solid and comprehensive appreciations, such as Bill Friskics-Warren’s in the Times and Tony Russell’s in the Guardian, began showing up in the press. Soon after came important personal reflections posted online by Tony’s peers, near-peers, and proteges -- Ricky Skaggs, Bela Fleck, Molly Tuttle, and Chris Eldridge, among others. At about the same time, I was learning, from texting with Todd Phillips, that there was a kind of ongoing informal wake happening among those who had worked closest and longest with Tony. An unburdening and a spreading of grief and stories.

It occurred to me then that there might be something more to add to the public record -- a longer-form, deeply informed personal perspective -- and that Todd, who has an excellent memory and uses words judiciously and without pretension, was the perfect conduit for it. So I decided I wanted to talk with him, on the record, about his years with Tony. The conversation, as I imagined it, would uncover some details on what it was like creating music with and daily observing a radically groundbreaking master whose work transformed the rest of us from a distance. It would assess Tony’s approach to his art from the point of view of someone who had co-evolved and journeyed to worldwide fame alongside him. It would give a level view into Tony as a person. 

Todd said he could get into the spirit of the thing after a little more time had gone by. Meanwhile, I pitched it to the Bluegrass Situation and was gratified that they accepted. When my piece turned out too long -- way long, as in, five times longer than their word limit -- I got their permission to post the entirety on my site here, and they kindly offered to link from the excerpt published on theirs. To be clear, the fault for the overreach and the resultant massive edit was all mine, since I just plowed into the job before verifying the length restriction.

No regrets there. Talking with Todd and writing the thing out was purely enjoyable. And the short version I made for the Situation has strengths of its own. It became, unsurprisingly, a frictionless read after the extreme pruning that was imposed. Editing it so drastically brought to mind John McPhee’s idea of “greening” -- looking for one word in every eight to chop out, which for instance in the first eight words of this interjection would be the word “every” -- and that buoyed me even though I had to net four in every five.

But the verbiage I cut wasn’t fluff. It fell mostly into two categories: substantial anecdotes, and insubstantial words that reveal -- actually define -- Todd’s and my voices. Those snipped-away elements, I think, are of such interest to anyone drawn to the subject that the payoff in reading this longer version should be worth the added focus required -- wading through the “well”s and “yeah man”s. (“Yeah man” is to Todd as “I’ll be back” is to Schwarzenegger!) So here’s the whole paella, and thanks for caring enough about Tony’s accomplishments and magic to dive in.

---------

Last weekend I spent a couple hours on the phone with Todd Phillips, Tony Rice’s close friend and bassist in multiple groups (David Grisman Quintet, Bluegrass Album Band, Tony Rice Unit) from 1975 to 1985. These are wonder years in the Rice story, the years when he used midcentury jazz records, performing peers, and his innate willpower as levers to crack open a stunning new guitar vocabulary, and in doing so went from a bluegrass badass to a worldwide force, above genres and vogues. 

While Tony needs no introduction, a little about Todd may be in order. He came along at a stuttering moment in the bass fiddle’s merry ride through bluegrass music. Dividing the timeline a little over-simplistically, as is sometimes done, by “generation”: the first-generation’s field of bassists was thick with black-toothed comics, busdrivers, girlfriends, and other non-technicians; the second saw some continuation of that, as well as, by contrast, an over-representation on recordings by a very few session masters not specific to bluegrass (Huskey, Moore). This period -- we’re now in the mid-Sixties -- also marked the beginning of a shift toward bass guitar and away from upright. Ten years on, at the point when Todd’s playing started to appear on record, the bass guitar was at or near its height in bluegrass band use. When you think back to the sound of the established blue-chip acts of the Seventies, like the Osborne Brothers, Doc Watson, or Jim and Jesse, or to its wunderkinder like Hot Rize, New Grass Revival, or Skyline, you’re thinking about the sound of mounted magnets. 

Because the Grisman group was closer in spirit, instrumental voice, and historical awareness to jazz than to bluegrass, and because his first bluegrass work grew out of holes in DGQ’s work schedule, Todd doesn’t seem intuitively to land on a family tree beneath names like Tom Gray and George Shuffler. His keenest early inspiration was neither of these men but rather Scott LaFaro. Yet he does occupy a branch on the tree, if a lonely one. The upright elite that emerged after him, in the Eighties -- Mark Schatz, Edgar Meyer, Barry Bales -- made clear that Todd’s creamy grooves and passionate awareness of musics beyond bluegrass had systematically tilted the genre’s bottom end. In American folk-acoustic music these last 40 years you hear emulation -- not so much of his tone as of his sense of where the limits of taste lie in creative chord-linking and busyness in general; in how to lean relaxedly forward; and in how to negotiate or glue together within-group timefeels without being either a cop on the beat or a cork on a wave.

Looking around the scene today, I believe we can give much credit to Todd and his immediate successors for the prevalence of upright over guitar among bassists in younger bluegrass and bluegrass-adjacent outfits. I’m laying out a naked bias here. While I yield to no one in my admiration and even love of John Cowan, I’m just not enthusiastic in general about bass guitars in bluegrass. It’s not as much because a Fender bass sounds bad or inappropriate to the context, or because some old paradigm must be honored to the ends of time. It’s because bass violin, one for instance made by an obscure artisan in 18th-century Germany, is such a uniquely beautiful sounding thing. The instrument is cumbersome, fickle, and fragile, and the physical outputs it demands of its players (and of course the specific challenge of intonating without frets) are peculiarly daunting. If there were anything like an apples-to-apples comparison between the violin and guitar versions, the former would today be as scarce on the ground as a theorbo. And before shutting off my naked-bias firehose, let me point out that any electronic interface, while it can be tamed artfully and can provide aesthetic rewards of its own, is always and inescapably that, an interface. The movement of air in a close environment is a non-replicable and primal pleasure, like peristalsis or sex. 

I met Todd the morning I began working with him, in October 2014. We were headed north that day out of Nashville on I-65 but I can’t remember to what town. Since I hadn’t kept up with who had been out on the road with Joan Baez or Claire Lynch, I was unaware that he was still a travelling musician at all; I’d have guessed he had aged out of that category but it turned out he was only 61 (and was only 24 at the time of the first Grisman record, a trifle younger on average than his Seventies superpicker brethren). We got comfortable with one another fast, after just three or four shows, and there were nine of them on that first run. He enjoyed raunchy jokes, whiskey, and talking about Tony Rice, so we lined up pretty well.

You can tell only so much about a player before actually playing with him or her. Though I’d never stopped to do the math, Todd was the single upright bassist I’d absorbed most as a teenager, since I was so devoted to Tony -- and Grisman, and Skaggs, and the Bluegrass Album Band. Playing with Todd gave me an odd feeling of having stepped back in time, into the grooves of those records that formed me. After the ninth date, I said some sentimental parting words to him at the hotel door, the gist of which was the sentence previous. But he cut me off midway with a hand wave and a “yeah yeah yeah,” and took off down the hall.

As I think you can tell from reading our talk, he’s the archetype of an old-school Californian, a mild-tempered ex-stoner with a fairly open mind and a curmudgeonly edge. He’s as adept at building an instrument or a chicken coop as analyzing acoustic riddles, and his long experience working with people as varied as Ms. Baez, David Grier, Linda Ronstadt, J.D. Crowe, and Elvis Costello gives him a high perch from which to reflect. He reminisced fluidly about Tony on the phone with me for two hours, stopping only twice, once overwhelmed by emotion and once to get a bottle of tequila. I turned on Garage Band as we were talking tortoiseshell:

TP: ....I remember him buffing picks and just going for the perfect edge. It’s like tuning your sights on your rifle! He’d buff and polish till it had a little rounded, kind of a beveled, edge to it.

Was he that way about everything? Chris Eldridge was talking about Tony’s fancy stereo system. Tube amplifiers on each channel, giant studio speakers -- and an oscilloscope!

Yeah. Absolutely man. I’ve been thinking through this since he died. He was all about precision. Accuracy. The obsession with having the pick perfect, and the efficiency of his hands, the motion. You know how everybody said he stood there like a statue: everything was directed toward the fingertips. And the Accutron watches, and when he got into photography, same way -- the lenses, the gear, studying the equipment and the technology. Things that were a hobby, to get into it as deep as you can. And the stereo thing, I learned that from him too, because we’d spend hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to LPs, and he always had the best equipment. Nuts about it, meticulous about it -- everything had to be just right.

How does that relate to the improvising mind?

Well you know, he improvises, but he also continues his dialogue with his solo in every song he plays. Like I always thought Coltrane was taking the same solo and trying to make it perfect. Tony’s kind of the same way, which is why he has a language on the guitar that’s so identifiable. I thought he applied the same ideas no matter what the tune was, in a way, and kept polishing that, and going for perfect, within the constraints of the style that he invented for the instrument.

That’s interesting because it cuts a bit against the grain of the bluegrass mentality, right? I mean his freedom to go off from the melody and impose his own singular vision on sixteen bars.

He certainly was aware of the melody, and you could tell what tune he’s playing. People have compared him a lot to Earl Scruggs these last couple weeks -- you know, he’s playing the tune but he’s also definitely making his statement. You know who it is. Either from the tone, or, certainly, the technique. That’s what people can’t really impersonate. They can play the notes, but that voice that he had on the instrument is just one of a kind.

As familiar with his style as I feel, listening back today to California Autumn and other records I hadn’t heard for a long time, I hear little passages that just don’t sound characteristic of him. It makes me think that, like others of us, gestures will come into his vocabulary, stay there for a little while, and then kind of go away as he goes to concentrate on some other idea.

That’s true, yeah. He would go through cycles, he’d get on a kick. He’d get on riffs, too, of just -- like hearing Billy Crystal say: “You look marvelous.” And he would say that 40 times a day, and then a year later, drop it for some other riff. Spoofing around with his friends. So yeah, the vocabulary would change, according to the era.

That’s fascinating, to compare it to a non-musical example. So let’s dive in, and let’s go back to the start. Tell me about meeting Tony -- when, where, and how you guys got underway with the Grisman project.

I think David met him at a Bill Keith recording session.

...Something Borrowed, Something Bluegrass?

Yeah, that’s it. And we’d been rehearsing, just me and Darol Anger and Grisman, and the bass player Joe Carroll, probably for close to a year. Getting together really regularly, two or three times a week --

Not gigging?

No gigs. I was a beginning mandolin player, and had only been playing two years, at the most. And I was certainly in over my head, playing mandolin with David, but he’d never heard me play bass, which I’d played since I was a little kid. We were doing this in 1974-75, and Clarence White had died the year before that. And we just thought, this is a good band and we don’t need a guitar -- no one else could fill Clarence’s shoes, and that would be the only guy that would work in this thing. Then David came home from this recording session and said: I just met the guy that could do it. 

Shortly after that, J.D. Crowe and the New South were on their way to Japan, and they stopped in San Francisco to play one gig, at Paul’s Saloon. They hung with us for a couple days and...I had never hung with, um, that many guys from Kentucky all at once. (Laughing) It was really fun, man. I know I’ve told you about that Mexican restaurant in Berkeley. It had formerly been a Chinese restaurant and so we were all seated at this giant round table, with a lazy-susan in the middle, and the place still looked like a Chinese restaurant. The Californians -- me, Darol, and David -- and the Kentucky guys -- J.D., Tony, Ricky, Jerry, and Bobby Slone -- were seated at one giant round table. That's my memory of really meeting for the first time and hanging out with all those guys. I remember, first Crowe ordered. “Six tacos and a Coke!” Then each New South guy ordered exactly the same. I guess they were used to the little three-inch tacos you can eat in two bites, not knowing they were ordering the bigger kind. So this big table ended up covered with plates full of giant tacos, surrounded by a pretty interesting mix of characters. I wish we had a photo. Polyester shirts and tie-dye T-shirts all around.

After that they went to Japan, came back, and Tony gave J.D. his notice. He hooked up a little U-Haul trailer -- I mean a little one, he probably had nothing but some clothes, his suitcase, guitar, and his stereo system in there -- and got a little apartment in Marin County. And we started rehearsing. 

At that point, we had what we had, but then Tony’s chemistry came into it. And it just catalyzed the whole thing. It was huge. And Tony had to learn his harmony and a bunch of chords he hadn’t really played before, but we had to learn to play rhythm like J.D. Crowe. So we probably rehearsed for another six months, before we went out and played our first shows.

That’s a lot of rehearsing -- was that a wing and a prayer for you guys, or was there a record contract? What was the light at the end of the tunnel?

No, nothing! It was music. We just wanted that music, all of us.

How did you live?

Barely. I lived in a rented garage behind a house, for fifty dollars a month. In the winter, I would run the clothes dryer that was there, put duct tape over the safety switch, and leave the door open, to heat the garage. I was 22, 23 years old. You can do it when you’re between 20 and 30, you’re just following some dream. And we’d all heard David’s tunes, all felt the same way, and just converged on him.

Ah. The tunes were the core. It wasn’t an abstract concept of “let’s create gypsy jazz with bluegrass in it” -- there were these actual songs that were motivating everyone.

Yeah. So we kind of started over again, with that new chemistry, and it was a lot of work. Tony had to stretch to learn, but it gave us the chance to re-examine everything we’d been doing, and the tightness of the band -- you know, I wouldn’t even call it “rehearsal,” it was developing the band. We were practicing the tunes, but since that format hadn’t really happened before, each of us had to invent our role in it. David’s energy and tunes just drew us all there, and we showed up on his back porch every day. We’d meet at 10 in the morning, and we were together till 10 at night.

Meanwhile Tony kind of turned me into his little brother. He would pick me up in the morning, and after rehearsal, we’d stop at his house and have dinner, about midnight, and then he’d drive me home after that.

Where is this exactly, what town?

I lived in San Anselmo, Tony lived in Larkspur, and David lived in Mill Valley. All within that little area in Marin County.

So tell me about the first gig.

Our first show was in Bolinas, in the community center there. We were already a little cottage industry, making our own posters, Darol and me, and put them up all over Bolinas (laugh), so the thing was sold out. And we had never played through a sound system. We wanted people to hear us just like we rehearsed. I hadn’t heard of a house concert in those days, but I guess it was the closest thing to that, although there were probably 200 people there.

So small room, gather round, and somehow the guitar projected through.

Well, we played with dynamics -- if Tony was taking a solo, we shut ourselves up. We got down light and tight under him. Since we hadn’t played through a sound system, we just did what we did every day anyway.

The first on-the-road thing, not long after, was in Japan. We did a two-set show -- a bluegrass quintet with Bill Keith and Richard Greene, and then a set of DGQ after that -- kind of compartmentalizing the bluegrass. Then, as soon as we got back from Japan, we recorded the first quintet record. So it still had that energy. We were still excited to hear it, too, every time we played it. It would raise the hair on our arms! It was kind of a...strong existence. Life felt -- it was pumped up, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I don’t exactly know what you mean! When he died I was thinking about your grief. I’ve had people I’ve played with or known for decades, of course, and understand it in that way. But in another way...well, a lot of people have been in the armed services, or in a touring band. Early, close companions in an intense situation. But on top of that, you guys were changing music. You weren’t only in a shell together but also under a strong light. You’re 24, you’re the intense object of interest of hundreds of thousands of strangers around the world, and you’re altering the course of music. So it is hard to put myself in these shoes.

Yeah. Maybe it is a little like an Army buddy. But I did that with Tony in three different bands, spending most of ten years with him like that. DGQ, the Bluegrass Album band stuff, then the Unit. A cross between his bass player and his little brother. And also his babysitter, sometimes!

What do you mean by that?

Well, he needed a lot of attention, in a way. He had left the South, where he had friends, and somehow, when he came to California, I seemed to be the guy he gravitated to. On off days, all of a sudden there’s a knock on the door at ten in the morning, and it’s Tony. I’m thinking, “Hey man, it’s supposed to be the day off!” But Tony’s there saying, “Let’s go do something. Let’s go to the boardwalk and ride the roller-coaster. Let’s go to the record store.” We went to the record store a million times. Came home with bags of records and stayed up all night listening -- I mean, he taught me to listen close, whether playing music or just listening to records. 

I was listening to the Tony Rice record from 1977 earlier today. An odd group of players, with some guys deep in the idiom and others not. I think that helps make it a strong record.

I remember, I still owned an old Kay bass, and everybody let me know the bass wasn’t cutting it. And me and Tony drove all the way out to Bolinas again, where Bill Amatneek lived, and somehow Tony just borrowed his solid-wood carved bass -- I couldn’t do that, but Tony got away with it -- and we brought it back and I played the other half of the record with it. The weirdest part is, Tony’s car broke down, coming back over the hill from the beach. And we got out -- we never told Bill Amatneek this -- we got out and hitchhiked with his bass. We ended up in a hippie van. Me and Tony and the bass.

Awesome! Any memories of working with Tony on the 1975 Grisman Rounder album?

He was hilarious! He gets in this mood in the studio where...well, we’d go out to eat, and he’d come back with a couple of cloth napkins from the restaurant. He would fold one up and put it on his head, and put on sunglasses. Kind of look like a...weird Quaker. And then we would drape another one over his left hand and go, “I don’t want anybody to steal any of my licks.” (Laughing.) He wouldn’t record with the one on his hand, but he would leave that thing on his head, with the sunglasses, for like, three hours. Acting like nothing’s going on. Just a way of lightening up the mood.

These days if you need a bluegrass guitarist for a supersession event, there’s like eight guys that you might call. But in this period, there’s one guy.

Yeah. There’s something about playing with Crowe that, you come away a different player. It’s hard to describe, it’s something you can’t get off a record. But another thing is the personality. Tony is just playing his personality. Each one of those guys -- Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Ricky Skaggs -- is such a strong personality. People play who they are, and people like that are really rare. And they’re strong people.

I don’t want to get into a old-man routine here, but in the years since the 1970s, what’s changed? I thought Alec Wilkinson put it well in the New Yorker. Tony effectively set this challenge where you had to either sound like him or try to figure out how not to. Have you heard guitarists who managed successfully not to sound like him, in the years since?

Well, only because there’s a confusion. Nobody took guitar solos in bluegrass -- Clarence, and then Tony. And because Tony opened that door, you can’t help but sound like him as a bluegrass soloist. He found those avenues on a fingerboard that you can play with a strong attack and accurate, strong expression. A lot of it is mechanics. A D28 with semi-high action, there are certain phrases that fall naturally under your fingers, and Tony found those. So I think a lot of guitarists use those avenues because -- they’re there. You might hear different phrases but they’re not as strong. They might be more interesting, they might be more academically pleasing, but the effect -- I haven’t heard it as strong as in those passages that Tony found.

How much did you work with him where he was playing an instrument other than the Clarence White D28?

None. He came out to California with that. Later the Santa Cruz guitar company did make him a couple replicas. And I guess he played an Ovation on a tune or two on Manzanita.

Oh my God!

That’s kind of secret, yeah. Ovation gave him a guitar. I think it’s on the “Manzanita” tune -- it’s lower action and easier to play if you have to play “Manzanita” for three hours. Between him and Billy Wolf, the engineer -- you can’t hear it’s an Ovation, on the record. It really doesn’t matter -- it’s the person, it’s the personality! I’ve heard Grisman on a lot of different mandolins, and it’s always David Grisman.

Tell me about Manzanita.

No, never heard of it.

Sorry, officer.

There was no preparation that I remember. The guys came to Berkeley and we went to work, at 1750 Arch Street. We ran a tune for 20 minutes, then recorded it three, four, five or six times.

Bela Fleck wrote that Tony didn’t like to rehearse much. Was that your experience with him as well?

Yeah. Sink or swim.

What’s the most takes you remember doing?

Probably five or six. We weren’t afraid to edit. We took a razor blade to tape if the first half of one take was better and the second half of another was better. If there was a flubbed note or two, we’d punch in and fix it. But you wouldn’t change what you were doing -- you would just do what you originally meant to do. Like if I’m talking right now, and get tongue-twisted, I’ll just fix it by saying what I meant to say. That’s why the musical flow stays the same. If there was a repair, it was just because your fingernail got stuck on a string or something.

Tell me some memories about traveling on the road with Tony.

He didn’t go out a lot. We went to Japan once, the three Rice brothers -- Larry, Wyatt, Tony -- and me. Just a few days after their father died. And Tony -- maybe that’s when he started -- he just never left his hotel room. And the rest of us went out, because you do a lot of socializing in Japan --

They expect you to.

Yeah, meet and greet and hang out with the promoters and they want to show you the town. Tony didn’t participate at all.

What was he doing in there?

Ordering room service. On the east coast with the Unit, like where you saw us at the Bottom Line -- he’d stick to the room. I mean...he pretty much lived in front of his stereo, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. That’s what he thrived on, if you’d call it thriving.

How did you listen to music away from the home stereo back then?

In the early days, he drove a big noisy Dodge Challenger. A muscle car, with a cassette player in the dashboard. But we’d listen loud. And on those drives from Grisman’s house back to mine every night, it was pretty much all John Coltrane. The classic quartet.

Interesting!

Yeah, and in the next house that he lived in with his next wife: a lot of Oscar Peterson. A guy like Peterson, he plays a lot like Tony. You can recognize the phrases, and they’re just strong as hell. Meticulous mechanics. Tony never studied music academically -- but the sound of it. He took that in and it would come out later somehow, the power and the attitude, more than specific notes or theory.

Did he have any relationship to the written page?

No. Not at all.

Miles Davis constantly pops up with Tony, but I don’t hear a strong kinship. Another name that popped up in his obituary remembrances is Eric Dolphy, which I hear no kinship to. Did some of his influences not come out in his hands, was some of his favorite listening separated out from his playing?

I think those were unique voices. Like Django, or Vassar, or Earl Scruggs. Eric Dolphy, you hear him for half a second, you know who it is.

They’re individualists.

I think that’s it. I mean, I know that together we laughed at how sharp Miles Davis played a lot of his notes, so he wasn’t learning pitch from Miles. But it’s that attitude. He liked those kind of characters, like David Janssen, The Fugitive. He really did have an obsession with David Janssen. Or Lee Marvin.

Ha ha!

I’m not kidding! The Marlboro Man.

People that laid it down.

Yeah, exactly.

I’m curious about the chemistry between Tony and other strong but very different personalities. You’ve told me your take on the Skaggs-Rice dichotomy, the good and bad guys from everyone’s high school -- I don’t know if you want to go public with that.

Yeah, like Ricky would be class president and Tony would be Eddie Haskell. (Laughing) There is a little of that, but I think musical respect bridges all gaps.

What about with David? He’s such a strong personality. Did Tony slip easily into a sideman role?

I guess it’s like a Lennon and McCartney kind of a deal. Not a competition, and the chemistry was -- not volatile, but exciting. The New Jersey hippie and Mister Perfection. You know, when Tony was new to California and a fish out of water, David’s living room was a real event. You never knew who you’d run into -- Jethro Burns, Taj Mahal, Jerry Garcia, John Hartford. I think that was exciting for Tony. He’s the kind of guy who’d dig in his heels and be who he is, and people respected that. He was...I guess I want to use the word “stubborn.” Clear-headed, with his vision. His scope was a little like his guitar playing: narrow, in a way, but it went so far because his range was focused.

Did he find strengths in players who were younger than him? Sometimes that’s difficult.

Who do you mean?

I don’t mean anyone and don’t want to name anyone, but it seems you can naturally respect players who are older than you, while the younger ones are just -- whippersnappers!

OK, I know what you mean. Tony basically didn’t suffer any foolishness.

How did he get along with Grappelli?

Fair. I don’t think he was that interested, and that’s when Tony and I left the band. We had just done this King of the Gypsies movie soundtrack, and David wanted to do a bunch more stuff with Grappelli. I just don’t think that was Tony’s genre. We had already put in the years with the quintet, and I think the shifting of the gears led to Tony’s moving into other projects.

May I ask, were cigarettes it for Tony, or were there harder things he liked to do?

No! He actually went light on the marijuana, compared to everyone else in Marin at that time. He kind of puffed a little bit, slightly, just to participate. 

Did he like whiskey?

No, he drank a few beers at home. I don’t remember any hard liquor at all.

He did write a tune called “Makers Mark.”

Yeah, well. The late-at-night thing, we would go to the record store just before it closed at midnight in Berkeley, buy four or five records each, go back to his house -- and make a pot of coffee. And spin those records all night. I mean, I got into that lifestyle and haven’t been able to ditch it since.

I just have a couple miscellaneous things left to ask you. One thing I saw, in the Guardian obit, was “apprentice pipe fitter”...?

Yeah! His dad was a welder, pipe fitter, and every one of those kids, all four brothers, did that. Wyatt did a bunch of that in Florida, where it’s brutal. He said these giant horse flies attached themselves to your arm and you had to cut them off with a knife.

Oh Jesus.

And those pipefitting fumes -- welding, it’s not a nice job.

What did he do to keep his fingers strong besides play, anything else?

Nahh. He bit his nails. He had no fingernails, and the tips of his fingers looked like blocks of wood. Like the rounded end of a wooden dowel. The guy played a lot. He had hands, and Wyatt has them too, that, physically, mechanically, those hands work in a different way than most people’s. He could push down with his thumb, on his right hand, but also push up, with his first finger. I’m trying to push up with my finger on my thumb now, and I can’t do it. But you can look at those youtubes and see it -- a really strong muscular mechanism between thumb and first finger.

That gets to the observation, made by one of the Simpkins brothers, that Tony’s down and upstrokes weren’t ascribed to the usual beats, weren’t automatized or logical in the usual way. And each was equally forceful. Is that what you observed too?

Yeah. And rhythmically, you hear a lot of that triplet syncopation on the upstrokes. People just say “syncopation,” but -- you know what it is? Probably, technically, it’s playing 3/4 against 4/4. There’s a lot of that up-up-up-up-up, 3 against 4, like Elvin Jones would drum. You can’t tell if it’s in 3 or 6 or 4 or 2. It’s all of it. It’s all of it! And those subdivisions, I guess I learned that from Tony -- you slice that up in all kinds of different ways, so those polyrhythms are all churning in your hands or your head at the same time. That’s what generates good time, not tapping your foot.

I think Tony had all those superimposed polyrhythms in him. I don’t know if it was from listening to records? Of great drummers. You know, we loved this drummer named Daniel Humair. A French guy. We listened to him endlessly, one of the best subdividers we ever heard. We’d just roll with laughter listening to the way the guy chopped up simple time.

Seeing the old Grisman quintet reunited at Rockygrass the other year, as well as Sam and Hot Rize and some others, inspired and moved me a lot. Despite the hardships that are attached to our style of music, which doesn’t offer wealth or celebrity, there’s just player after player who are in their 70s and beyond and are performing as physically and impressively as ever. Sometimes more. And this makes what happened with Tony’s story more profoundly sad to me. The first time I heard him, he was a 25-year-old playing with the wisdom and the authority of an old man. What might he have sounded like now, as an actual old man who hadn’t stopped playing and in good health? I know it’s counterfactual but --

You know, I don’t know why Tony went the way he went. Why he couldn’t be as youthful as Sam Bush. Who knows, if there was some kind of a depression, or if that desire for perfection wore him out. You know? Because he did play with joy, but it was also that crazy obsession, to be perfect and accurate -- maybe he was just too hard on himself. 

He was hard on everybody around him. I know that I developed way more than I ever would have developed if I had never known him. It was not that he was ever mean or harsh to me, but being around him, you put pressure on yourself to live up. I think everybody that played with him was like that. He jacked up the music to this level -- and then it was your challenge to get up there with him. Being around him changed me forever.

I know that Sam asked Tony -- “Man, just pick up the guitar for a few minutes a day.” But I think he just let go of it. He decided to let go, and the rest of us haven’t. I still feel just like I did in 1970. Until I look in the mirror.

summer drive

I went on a long car trip 3 weeks ago, and decided I’d use the endless hours through our nation’s monotonous deserts and garish summits to catch up with some album-format music. In what is now called the old days (“remember, this was before cell phones,” people of my vintage are always saying, or “there was at that time no Internet”; do young people really imagine that these technologies co-existed with landlines and blaxploitation horror and UHF stations?), Kurd Lasswitz and Jorge Luis Borges wrote speculatively of universal libraries containing not just every book written but every book that possibly could be written, given x alphabetical letters and y maximum page length.

With a few provisions, the future has arrived, and picture me in it, please, a dashing Mad Max in my sleek climate-controlled Camry, able to leap 600 miles in a single day, trigger finger on my superweapon, Spotify. One of the provisions separating this potential Utopia from an actual one is that the attention span of the future-dweller has radically shortened. Another is that the library has so far proved galactic, not universal; but if your tastes run to the mainstream and the current, Spotify will provide you near-100% satisfaction. Even a fellow like me, whose music interests skew heavily to the aged, the obscure, and the dead, can summon into being around 70% of his idle discographic whims.

Oh, and one more provision: music content providers, previously called musicians, will henceforth need to use ever-more-wily means to buy food.

My thoughts flitted around, as they are wont to, ridiculously and randomly. I thought I’d try getting some of them into sentence shape, many days ex post facto. It’s tough but it’s salubrious, figuring out what you think. Writing maketh an exact man, said Bacon, or rather wrote Bacon. Amid many hours of podcasts and phone calls, here is what I listened to, in order:

Earl Scruggs Revue

Joni Mitchell

Dan Crary

John Hiatt

Levon Helm

Ron Sexsmith

Tim Krekel

Denzel Curry

Manuel Galban

Kacey Musgraves

Millie Jackson

Dave Evans

Logan Ledger

Shelby Lynne

Billy Yates

Sun Ra

Johnny Carson

George Carlin

“5” Royales

Paul Carrack

The Men They Couldn’t Hang

John Kirby

Norman Blake

Bruce Molsky

Mal Waldron

Sierra Hull

Ole Belle Reed

Martha Carson

Mattie, Marthie, and Minnie

Jean Chapel

Merle Haggard

Delmore Brothers

Big Three Trio

Dolly Parton

Almost none of this was music I’d heard before. About half the artists I had never heard except for four or five songs. However, almost all the names were easily familiar to me and close to my comfort zone. I dug down into my staked territory, depth over breadth.

Earlier this year I was driving through Maryland with a friend who told me how mortified she was when Spotify coughed up a playlist tailored for her, all Tom Waits and Lou Reed et cetera. Yikes! Rockism. She was mortified not at Spotify but at herself. The algorithmic gotcha accurately reflected her recent consumption, and she adjusted the dial straight away.

Nothing shameful about Messrs. Waits or Reed, please understand. But by not boring down deeper you’re missing out on all the rich underground streams composer-performers like that drink from. In our world, a couple hundred celebrated millionaires are perched atop a hundred thousand raggedy-ass nobodies. Besides poorer and obscurer, the latter artists tend to be: blacker, more regionally specific, differently risk-averse (one behavioral distortion comes from wanting the prize, another from wanting to keep it), less explicitly “self-expressive.” Music takes you places. The farther back you go in time, the more your settled opinions can meet resistance. “Lesser-known” doesn’t amount to “better,” but it comes close enough that you want to set a limit on the portion of your listening hours spent in the land of the obvious.

Like my friend, I saw my lazy habits advertised when, at the start of day two, I read down what I listened to on the first day. That’s the section of the list from Earl Scruggs to Tim Krekel, and it’s why, starting at Denzel, the names get a touch more heterogeneous, less writer-singery, less likely to feature a banjo. I mean -- Joni Mitchell, Dan Crary, John Hiatt -- sweet Jesus, get me a walker and a wife named Karen and mash up a plate of peas.

I won’t go item by item down the list, I’ll just focus on some of the names that inspired some memorable or weird or strong-seeming thoughts. A few blind spots to which I’m going to confess might make you incredulous. Who on earth hasn’t heard Joni Mitchell records? Me. Also, if you object to some of my criticisms of highly respected figures, please consider that they can take the knocks, and so can you. If you can’t, get your own blog and knock my records why don’t you.

I’m putting a link to a Spotify playlist at the bottom of the text, in case you want to hear some of what I’m discussing. Not everything on the list or in the essayistic rambling is on the playlist, and I also added in a couple more songs for variety and in the case of Sierra Hull, a little context.

JONI MITCHELL

The album I picked is called Clouds, and I picked her second release so as to find her not at a steady clip but not fresh out of the gate either. She and I have a mutual friend who makes high claims for her music, and so I thought I’d challenge my belief, based on four or five radio hits, that this was sophisticated 1970s music that, like Steely Dan or James Taylor, was just not up my street. Spending 37 minutes in her head did ease my mind and raise my opinion. The fault-finding apparatus falters before such an individualist: her chords are thoughtful and fresh, and her voice is beautiful. It ranges easily over registers, and the relatively thin middle of her chest voice, which seems equally with her floaty head voice to define her sound, drills into my skull very pleasurably.

I never focus on lyrics very much, especially at first listen. If I had I’d probably have enjoyed Clouds less -- inside the pages of a sensitive young woman’s diary in the Nixon era is not where I’d like to be. After enjoying Joni’s record, I understood that my love of Judee Sill’s music has been inadequately contextualized. Judee’s writing is killer, and individualistic as well, but her sad bio and her lower visibility also work in her favor for a music nerd like me. Now that I’ve heard Clouds, it’s hard for me to imagine Judee without Joni just behind her on the timeline. 

DAN CRARY

The dates on the albums are hard to make sense of on Spotify, some correct and some way off. Dan’s Bluegrass Guitar record is labeled 2005, but it came out in the early 1970s. The likeness of the tempos gets wearying after 4 or 5 songs, and there are more interesting fiddlers to listen to at album length than Lonnie Peerce, but it’s always a blast to hear Dan play a fiddle tune. A minute element of his prowess is his thrilling skill at speed-diving from notes way up the neck to notes down at the bottom of the guitar’s range, which, for reasons I don’t understand, is mechanically harder than moving in the opposite direction.

JOHN HIATT

I started thinking about Shane Keister just out of LA, while listening to the Scruggs record. I’ve always loved Shane’s style, without having bothered to check out many of the records on which he’s performed, Scruggs and Hiatt being two rather dissimilar touchstones. In the 1970s Shane had a very attention-getting way with the piano. It was almost wildly energetic (cocaine, maybe?), yet precise and compositionally premeditated. It had the church in it. He was also interested in the Moogs and odder little keyboards of the era.

So I drifted over to John Hiatt’s Spotify page. I used to thumb his first two records, Hangin’ Around The Observatory and Overcoats, in the record stores, without ever reaching for my wallet. I probably feared that my love of All of A Sudden and Riding With The King might be damaged by exposure to his fledgling apprentice work. All these years later, I thought I may as well stick a toe in. I got halfway through Observatory (stopping short of “Wild-Eyed Gypsies,” a title that gives you something of the flavor of this phase in his evolution) and thought, I get it, enough. Youthful spirit and a set of definite skills don’t add up to an original voice, or compensate for the lack of it. An original voice, as we who have tried to attain one should know, isn’t exactly an easy goal to reach. Looking at John’s discography drives that fact soberly home: nine or ten years to find his groove, not much commercial payback until his eighth record. Who gets seven tries anymore? Well, anyone who was paying attention, 40 years back, could tell that John had crazy talents and was getting himself to the goalpost, if a little slowly or asymptotically (too big a crush on Elvis Costello was one thing that hobbled him).

John’s show at Cabaret Metro in Chicago in, I think, 1985 remains one of the most powerful shows I’ve seen. His keyboardist, a white guy who wasn’t Shane Keister, sat stage right at a big creaky B3, seated on a bench that looked like somebody’s grandma’s. There’s nothing clever I can say about how the music made its effect on me; it was grooving and loud, the playing had a unitary focus that likely came from respect for the material, the players had plain clothes and unaffected behavior, the songs were of course well-crafted and emotional, and that’s really all there was to it. 

Back on Spotify, I put on a recent record of John’s, wondering how he had evolved since the mid-1990s. The style he landed on with Bring the Family in 1987, whatever its other attributes, seemed great for aging into. Music evocative of wide fields and lost times, lyrics crammed with notes on coarse experience. Disappointment, loss, surmounted challenges, and sneaky little pleasures. Is that good enough language to get me three cents a word at a 1980s alternative periodical? In the hotel room, later that night, I somehow went down a hole that ended at the first issue of SPIN magazine, where a writer called Glenn O’Brien wrote this about John’s seventh album, Warming Up To The Ice Age:

“Hiatt has natural brown hair in a normal-citizen style and he’s white and wears a regular black suit and a regular white shirt and he plays a black Gretsch guitar. From that you can almost tell he’s okay. He plays non-trendy, smart rock ‘n’ roll. He’s new wave in the sense that ceased being applied to music when it started being applied to overcoats.”

It’s hard to overstate how much I hate this sort of music writing, including that I could spend the rest of the pandemic trying in vain to tease meaning out of the last sentence. The review’s most fundamental failing is to foreground the writer’s persona so self-servingly, in relation to the object supposedly under discussion. That, by the way, was a widely-shared failing in the 1980s, when rock music writers were still in thrall to the mediocre Lester Bangs, the inspiring Nick Tosches, and a couple other people who were themselves in thrall to the 1960s new journalists -- a general cesspool of thralldom and mediocrity which now lies mercifully buried. Besides honoring his literary lineage with his auto-focus, Mr. O’Brien works roughly from the following playbook of antecedent and consequent: 1) Hello, I’m Glenn, here in my professional capacity with 2) some sentences designed to draw you into my arch worldview, including that 3) I approve of this music and the person who made it, which 4) entitles you, as secret generational sharer of my worldview, wink wink, to approve of it in turn. What a lot of junk to be rid of, what a lot of bullshit. 

It seems a short jump from Why should I care what someone named Glenn O’Brien has to say about John Fucking Hiatt? to Why should I care what Robbie Fulks has to say about J.F.H.?, particularly given that there are no ultimately correct opinions about aesthetics. But I’m going to give a perspective that’s a little more informed, and moreover I’ll be so kind as to put it into English. Whether or not I strike you as equal in arrogance to Glenn, what I write will have more clarity, evidence, and falsifiability. 

The opinion of the fellow craftsman isn’t the be-all end-all but it does carry weight. Somewhere around 1997 I was gabbing with a Nashville-based songwriter friend. Hiatt’s Walk On record was recently out, and we were listening to it in my living room. “Cry love?” my friend said, reading the words disbelievingly off the artwork. “Cry love, cry love? The tears of an angel? The tears of a dove? Come on! This is terrible!” Hiatt’s reputation was established in my mind, and I must have appeared taken aback by this wizard-bashing, because my friend doubled down. “Love, dove, of, love -- Jesus, man! This is terrible! No creativity, no meaning, just one dumb rhyme and vapid cliché after the next. He may be John Hiatt, but he has to make some effort!” Harsh collegial criticism! So much better than stylish irreverence.

All right, time for the velvet hammer. Listening to John’s 2014 Terms of My Surrender record, you wouldn’t know that he knew very much about songwriting at all, much less is the same man who came up with melodically precise beauties like “Pink Bedroom,” “She Loves The Jerk,” and “She Don’t Love Nobody,” or pieces verging on transcendence and profundity, like “Have A Little Faith In Me.” His more recent melodies are content-free, and his lyrics -- for once I was listening to them -- are even worse. The first song on the record begins:

A friend of mine said, “A long time comin’, been a long time gone”

Stood right here, whispered in my ear, “All the love gone wrong”

I’ve been living my life like a howling wind, and I can’t put out this flame...

This is very bad news, at the outset. There’s no defined scenario to get lost in, the grammar is unproductively vague, and the rhymes (here/ear, gone/wrong) are middle-school. When are we going to get out of the weeds and onto some pathway of beauty, structure, and meaning? Never. We never will. Here are a few dismaying lines and phrases that follow:

All this time we’ve been turning, turning like a screw, down roads of silver and gold

Livin’ my life like a lonesome whistle blowin’/Now I can’t turn back

Your work is never done/I see you there in that silver blue air...

It hardly bears saying that Howlin’ Wolf wouldn’t have indited, or settled for, “turning like a screw down roads,” nor Bob Dylan, nor W.C. Handy, nor any other blues-tradition wordsmith, white or black or rich or poor, with a reputation behind or in front of him. (“I don’t even try,” he once prophetically boasted.) I allude again to the lucky few hundred, perched atop a hundred-odd thousand. Every one of us, standing atop or stood upon, is obligated to exert himself harder than this. Here is an artist I’ve admired and learned much from. But if I heard this stuff about living like a wind, alternated with living like a whistle, at an open-mic night, I’d roll my eyes discreetly and head to the patio with a beer, closing the door tightly behind me.

DENZEL CURRY

This was a very welcome palate-cleanser after a glut of fragile delicacies and have-a-toke-and-let’s-get-a-groove-going music the day previous. Denzel’s TA1300 album opens:

Welcome to the darker side of taboo

All I got is permanent scars and tattoos

Take another step in the path that you choose

Make a bad choice in your path then you lose

Though this is a little less impressive and forceful on paper than in a vocal delivery, you can tell that we’re back in that happy place of smart rhymes and sharply drawn dramatic stakes. The drama particularizes and tightens:

I knew you wasn’t normal ever since the age of nine

I heard you were molested when you hit the age of five

So in a sense I sensed that all your innocence had died

You swallowing all of your pride, won’t let anybody inside

As you cry me a thousand lakes on my shoulder blade

I say, Everything’s gonna be OK

A few songs later comes “Sumo”:

Anybody wanna B.E.T.?

Man y’all n#@&*s can’t see me

Outta my league, you Pee-wee

Pocket too big, Rikishi

All right, I won’t pretend I know what the hell “Rikishi” is, but the Pee-wee line made me laugh out loud. It doesn’t kill me as hard on the page here, but listening to this stuff is like having baseballs thrown at your face from 6 directions at once. I like the way hiphop bangs furiously on the skull, and I love the way it maintains the value of cleverness in rhyme within popular music -- a much-appreciated reaction to something of a market failure. But, all in all, I was born too early. Hiphop is a hell of a load on the old neurochemistry after 30 minutes. It’s not only trying to keep up with the word flow, it’s the non-human timefeel, which has metastasized across modern music in a way that bothers me. As Sarah Silverman said, I feel like a computer is yelling at me.

MANUEL GALBAN

Blue Cha Cha is easy on the ears but not totally compelling.

KACEY MUSGRAVES

Speaking of born too early, “Haven’t been early since ’88” is the second line on this record by a songwriter who, naturally, is 32 years old. Bang! Dexterity! Wit! And a good sort of pull-quote for reviewers and fans alike. Deft wordplay though striking is no badge of artistic merit; can you set that little gemstone into the ring of songcraft, can you deliver with your own voice, can you come up with 12 more? Can you contrive to (and afford to) line up the specialized mechanics, to get you at the wheel of a vehicle that glides out of the lot and across the country? 

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. From the first few seconds, I was overwhelmed by the level of inter-departmental accomplishment on Golden Hour. I’m guessing a lot of you already know this record. I went public with my appreciation of “the mix” as I listened -- one hand on the wheel, one on my Dick Tracy device. A Twitter-woman responded, “I wish I could truly understand what this means,” adding that she simply liked the music, regardless.

It’s true that the word “mix” has acquired a cloudy and quasi-religious overlay, but most of the time, in ordinary and non-bullshit conversation, there’s really not much of a gulf in meaning between “I like the music” and “I like the mix.” Therefore, saying this or that about “the mix” is often a bullshit move; but I use the word deliberately here, because the sound recording details strike me as absolutely crucial to the radiant effect of the record. I also think it’s useful, by the way, to keep in mind that the separable aesthetic concerns contained in or suggested by the term “mix” -- tones/EQs of the elements in a recording, relative volumes of the elements, balance, atmospherics -- didn’t suddenly spring into being in the late 1960s, when multitrack recording became standard and the work of mixing and unifying multiple tracks became a bigger (more options, more decisions, more time and money) and routinely self-contained segment of record production. After all, Bell Labs came before the Beatles; engineers thought about things like microphone placement on Roy Acuff sessions; musicians in porkpie hats thought about things like the shape of the sound produced by their instruments and mouths, where to be in the room, and how loud to aim for in relation to the broad picture. 

On Kacey’s record -- and I’ll put it in layman’s words, not out of condescension but because that’s actually my angle -- the drums sound upfront and powerful, and the individual instruments are easy to distinguish. Crucially, the vocal floats effortlessly on top of all that, and is a pleasure to absorb, like fluffy cake. To get each piece loud-sounding, distinguishable but not attention-getting, and in balance with the others -- it doesn’t just happen; the word “mix” could just as accurately apply to the human and quantum domains: the complex blend of science, art, experience, and dumb luck that come into play.

Your ears aren’t in the least confused in responding to Golden Hour -- it’s been made with some knowledge of how your ears function -- but you do have some listening choices if you care to use them: you can focus on the whole, or you can listen to the qualities of any single piece. (How the bass sounds, I can’t really say, given that it’s an iPhone and little car speakers.) The one thing I don’t think you could easily do is ignore the vocal. Who (that wasn’t there) knows how this pretty design was achieved. Of course, the fact that they had these great songs and voice to wrap the design around didn’t hurt matters.

Listening, I had the thought that seldom if ever since the commercial era of the majestic Ms. Shania Twain had a record coming out of Nashville seduced my bodily transmitters so completely. I started clicking around on the phone to find out more, there among the Colorado mountains. I was tossed off the interstate for a spell, by wildfires, and enjoyed being thrust more deeply into the landscapes and the thrill of negotiating gravel-road switchbacks while googling. Turns out the producers are Daniel Tashian, son of the legendary Barry and Holly, and a gent named Ian Fitchuk, who -- bingo! -- played on Shania records. Evidently he paid attention.

Back home, two weeks later, I replayed the record, this time with my wife in the car. Experiencing it through her ears, I could tell before she said a word that it wasn’t her thing, that she wasn’t bowled over as I had been. My wife doesn’t go for what you might describe as sensitive-woman art. Under her influence, I began rethinking the reaction I’d had previously. But when a jaundiced opinion from without starts coloring our own honestly formed outlooks, what are we but lemmings? No, I’m sticking with: This is a really strong piece of work.

MILLIE JACKSON

If you haven’t caught up with Caught Up!, it’s a set of songs divided by the narrative point of view of the other woman and that of the wronged wife. I have a large soft spot in my heart for Millie, not just because she’s such a dynamic singer, but because there’s vision and audacity across her long career (concept LPs, arresting artwork including a photo of Millie sitting pants-down on a toilet, rapping well in advance of Sugarhill Gang), she has a raunchy sense of humor, and she likes country. Come on, she is country, let’s not thoughtlessly use that word in its usual racially specific way just because of how the industry happened to play out. 

Millie’s voice is tricky. When she’s in a low alto range, she sounds like that’s where she belongs. As little as one octave up from there, she reminds you of Mavis, breaking up into phlegmy static and hitting her ceiling on control -- then suddenly she’s an octave above that, flying easy as a bird.

Sometimes I listen to music on small regional labels from 60 or 70 years back, and, for all the underdog love I instinctively have, start to entertain contrarian thoughts. Is smaller always better; do lower budgets necessarily help? Is this rough playing anything like an identifiable, individual style? How would more competent and experienced players change my impression of the music? Could I tell a Bullet record from a King record in a blind test, a Roulette from a Vee-Jay? Without knowing who the singer was, I couldn’t. Little companies don’t correlate to uniquely great music any more than big companies do. As Gene Kelly said, “MGM? That was a sign hanging over a lot where we worked.” The quality issues from the workers; when a label has a built-in stable of players, that’s a quality, that’s a sound. Whatever particulates were in the water in Detroit or Memphis, whatever the vision and fascinating personality quirks of the founders, it was the house players at Motown and Stax (not to forget the songwriters) that added consistent value to those labels.

The history of Spring Records is likely very interesting, but Caught Up sails on the work of the Muscle Shoals house band -- Barry Beckett, David Hood, Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson. You can hear that by 1974 these guys are playing like multiple limbs of one body with one mind.

Millie drips with savvy attitude. In a later-life interview, she remarks:

“I was the poor people’s queen. I didn’t sell records to bougies. It was the poor people who bought my music. The women who bought Diana Ross did not buy Millie Jackson. The people in the projects understood me. I was down and dirty. I told you like it was.”

In case you missed her earth-shaking take on “If Loving You Is Wrong,” here’s an small excerpt from her spoken-word piece in the middle, which she claims was extemporaneous (“None of it was planned...what came up, came out!”):

“There's a good side to being in love with a married man, and I like it, 'cause you see, when you're going with a married man, he can come over two or three times a week and give you a little bit. That means you're two up on the wife already, 'cause once you marry one, you don't get it but once a week. Another sweet thing is, on payday, he can come over and give you a little bread and I like that. But the sweetest thing about the whole situation is the fact that when you go to the laundromat, you don't have to wash nobody's funky drawers but your own -- and I like it like that!”

I admit that underdog love figures heavily in my music appreciation, and sometimes needs correcting for. But just about anytime a strong-willed person with a rude act gets into the music business and makes a small fortune by doing the exact thing that all the smart businesspeople insist can’t be done...I’m in! 

DAVE EVANS

A black lady born in Thomson, Georgia in 1944, meaning Millie, comes into the world with very little luck working in her favor. A banjo-playing cracker born in southern Ohio in 1950 could have, I’m willing to consider, even less. Anyway, terrific music and bone-chilling, incredible singing.

LOGAN LEDGER

Logan is my friend and I was delighted to work on some songs for his debut record. (They didn’t make the cut this time, but there’s always record #2.) His vocal instrument is crystal-pure and laser-sure, and the songs are tailored, or at least selected, to allow it to splash its suppleness, range and interpretive skill fairly freely across the arrangements. The sound is the sum of Dennis Crouch, Jay Bellerose, Russ Pahl, and Marc Ribot -- a meld of LA, NYC, and Nashville. I think Logan is now in rather a delicate position, comparable to k.d. lang’s after her first release (regardless of whether her first release had been her first record or, counterfactually, her second) -- how to follow up such a uniquely created sound environment and proceed with the career flexibility he will want. These are such specific players. Not a bad problem to have, for now.

SHELBY LYNNE

It’s been a long time since I heard any of Shelby’s early stuff, back when she had Johnny Whitaker hair and a cabaret-singer brand; and I hadn’t heard anything from the last 15 years either. Crazy how many years you can miss in the career of someone who means something to you. I went for a few songs from the early 1990s, followed by the first half of Just A Little Lovin’ from 2008. The comparison brought to light a stark difference in the way Nashville and LA musicians dress up a song, the way the industries and cultures intertwine in those two cities. On Shelby’s early records, like so many records issuing from Nashville since the late 1950s, you hear this thought inaugurating the project (they say “project” a lot there): Let’s get some of the best players and writers in town, roll up our sleeves, and get to it! That workaround pronoun, “it,” is the beginning of the trouble, for it steers thoughtlessly past the hard work of taking artist personality -- the fundamental, ineffable, and actual “it” -- into account. The default work methods continue, at a more granular level, in the tracking: fiddle fills verse one, steel on chorus. Stay away from the lyrics. Keep the story development clear and the pace moving. Let’s make a great one!

On Shelby’s 2008 record, you can hear quite different thoughts, more like open-ended questions, an approach that throws light on why (forgive my geographic chauvinism) singer-writers love working here. What kind of a record do we want to make? What tools will help to set the desired mood? Where can I not play? Just A Little Lovin’ provides qualities I can’t remember ever hearing on a commercial Nashville record -- empty space, unvarying trancelike repetition, playing that is egoless and unimposing.

I’m doing a little strawmanning here. Modern-day Nashville has any number of young players who can find a non-showy space in an arrangement. Further, it’s hard to argue much with great playing, I mean the kind of cartoon-crazy, farm-bred prodigy chops that Nashville abounds in and in LA are pretty rare. But the model that has a producer telling an artist, “You relax and sing, honey, and we’ll take care of the rest of the details” is so wrong for so many artists, especially one as self-determined and outside the pack as Shelby.

JOHNNY CARSON

Somehow, back in the 1960s, a man called Larry Wilde, described in Wikipedia as a standup comedian and motivational speaker and now still kicking at 92, got access to the top comedy people of the era and recorded long interviews with them that focused unjokingly on the fine points of their craft. Jack Benny, Woody Allen, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Ed Wynn -- a truly amazing assortment of icons, and all on Spotify for any who care to plow through. It’s plowing because you have to be more interested in it than I am to make it through any of these in a single listening -- and I’m interested! -- and because Wilde’s audio persona, though not grating or overbearing, is Gimpel The Fool meets Max Eastman.

Somewhere, sometime, to someone, Johnny Carson must have revealed a fully human personality. It doesn’t happen here. Throughout this repetitive interview, he manages, as he did on the Tonight Show, to be on-point and sincere-sounding without unbuttoning either brain or heart. But here and there he does disgorge some nuggets. His experience of ad libbing, for example -- sometimes he thinks through the words a second or two in advance of saying them, other times he just hears them come out, with no conscious understanding of the process that preceded the joke. He puts a strong point on the idea of “pre-conditioning,” the store of goodwill that a well-known performer has entering the room. He repeatedly abjures “tags,” meaning slice-and-dice labels stuck on performers. It’s melancholy to think that most of the men he cites in 1968 as universally acknowledged masters of the craft, such as Jack Benny and Red Skelton, are people no one laughs much at anymore, if they’re remembered at all. What makes something funny in year x and unfunny in year x-plus-50 (or, these days, x-plus-5)? A question that’s not explored here, but clearly, since many buildings from the 18th century remain beautiful and standing, the construction of comedy isn’t like the construction of physical matter.

GEORGE CARLIN

My first-hand impressions of Carlin as a writer and performer came, across many years, from “Hippy Dippy Weatherman” on the Dr. Demento show, Carson appearances, the premiere episode of NBC’s Saturday Night, and a 1980s standup special or two. Seemed like more than enough on which to base an opinion, which was -- see “Mitchell, Joni, longstanding opinion on” -- the skills were obvious but it wasn’t really my thing, and the chord that it struck in Sixties people was harder to hear after 1975 or so. But one day recently I was texting with a friend in comedy, who said he thought Carlin and Pryor were the two untouchables of the era. No surprise on Pryor, but I was immediately interested in the idea that re-appraising George could be worthwhile.

My friend linked me to the LP Occupation: Foole, from 1971. It only took a few minutes for me to be transported into the magic land of opinion-revision. George has got it all on this record. Over-the-top vocal talent (accents, impressions, warp-speed tongue), going-too-far comedy, lowbrow comedy, rambling stream-of-consciousness interludes, improvisation, snatches of honest autobiography. It’s a killer package, and it’s funny that between him and Louis CK on the historical timeline (not that Louis has Carlin’s voice-manipulating thing) there’s no one -- no one who toggles freely between high (God) and low (farts), takes deadly aim at social taboos, and uses standup comedy not just for laughs but as a vehicle for discursive, open-ended philosophical adventure.  

Since I liked Occupation: Foole so completely, I checked in on Toledo Window Box, George’s next release. Though decent, it made me suspect that ole George’s stay at the peak of Everest may have been brief.

Incidentally, I learned on the “Carson Show” podcast the next day, from the director of the 1970s late-night “Tomorrow” show, that Carlin had asked to come on the show to discuss his habit of being gonzo on marihuana in performance. He had seen John Lennon’s “Tomorrow” appearance, which focused on Lennon’s extradition order due to possession. The Carlin episode didn’t come to be, since the director was advised by higher-ups at NBC that airing it would end Carlin’s career. Great anecdote. Anyway, as someone who has been made mentally dazed by marihuana and has observed without pleasure the same effect in others, I’d be fascinated to know how George’s usage of the drug intersected with his professional arc. All George’s mannerisms and discernible mental states, from all the performances I know of, most especially Occupation: Foole, show him in complete control of body and mind. 

“5 ROYALES

More state pride for North Carolina. The Winston-Salem sometimes-quintet sometimes sextet is truly the most multifaceted of all the great R&B vocal groups, with two classic singers in husky-voiced Johnny Tanner (“Think”) and his thin-timbred brother Gene (“Dedicated To The One I Love”). The Royales also boasted a triple-threat genius in Lowman Pauling, who sang bass, wrote most of the group’s finest songs, and played killer electric guitar (Les Paul with distinctive attack and often distortion). I wish there more recordings around of their earlier gospel incarnation, called the Royal Sons Quintet. But I was also curious about their 1960s stuff. (Their commercial time was late-1950s and they disbanded in 1965.)

The collection Catch That Teardrop filled me in. I suppose the repertoire here shows a little falling-off, but man, the performances are as fine as ever, and it does sadden me to think of groups like this getting killed off to make room for the Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds. The highly hyperactive bass guitar lines on the first song, “Talk About My Woman,” put me in mind of the novelty of the instrument and the new possibilities it opened up for what goes on down there at the bottom of the song. Bass guitar hadn’t been on recordings for ten years yet when “Talk About A Woman” came out in 1962. Suddenly people’s ears are hearing frantic and fluid underpinnings that were physically impossible to execute (therefore never conceived and never missed) on a double bass, a tuba, or organ pedals. A lead-guitar mentality has invaded an austere domain, there’s a madman in the monastery!

It also occurred to me that tenor sax, which plays a dominant role on these 1960s records, may have had a period of waning in 1960s popular music, between for instance the Coasters and the era-defining solos and trademarks of mid-1970s hits such as “Born To Run,” “Baker Street” and “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Is there a missing term, does anyone know, between King Curtis and Bobby Keyes? Also, is there any wailing sax in the popular music of the last 35 years or so?

Oh, and has “Rock And Roll Music,” source of the coinage “wailing sax,” ever been recorded with a sax?!

PAUL CARRACK

I decided to take a break from the novel and luxuriate in an intimately known favorite. Suburban Voodoo offered me most of what scant joy I experienced in my 19th year, and has remained a sentimental milestone. These things are worth re-appraising every ten or twenty years, though, and it’s coming up on 40, incredibly. It was no surprise that I could see a bit more clearly into the gears of the machine than I could back in college. The players -- Martin Belmont, James Eller, Bobby Irwin, and Carrack -- sound like they were at a magic crossroads of historical awareness and youthful vigor in the year 1982. Thirty is evidently where it all comes together. Experience and energy intersect so as to grant you once-in-a-lifetime superskills. Loving American soul but not so obsessively that you can’t distill it with some personal humor. Designing exacting and elaborate arrangements, but playing them with as much grace as if this time was the first time.

This is the kind of record that sounds as though people went away overnight leaving things in place for the next day. A small group of men, playing an instrument apiece and sounding very consistent. My guess is that it was tracked in 5 or 6 days (which would be fairly fast given the detailwork in the arrangements). Then organ overdubs, and one or two days of backing vocal pads. Carrack’s voice is still thrilling to hear, both on old recordings and now. His singing is singularly ill-suited to pitch correction, I believe. In place of the melismas that most professional singers deliver, he glides over small distances with a casual blur that evokes poetic, Zeno-esque infinity. I discerned a couple just-off-center notes, wonderful little flaws that stand out more in our current insane era than they did in 1982, to my ears at least.

I still don’t like the one song I didn’t like then, “Call Me Tonight.” And I must say that the record’s shriek-of-the-mutilated EQ and clattery intensity began to weary my droopy old ears before the album was done. Headbanging days are done.

MAL WALDRON

Now here’s a mystical master! Waldron’s pianistic power mystifies me a little, because the road to his power runs through strategies that are opposite to those of many masters. His touch doesn’t sound refined, elegant, easygoing, or effortless -- not primarily it doesn’t; it sounds cool, watchful, reined-in, like the leash from brain to fingers is tight, as it were. The self-monitoring is scrupulous. There’s a lot of repetition, including repetitions of phrases that in themselves don’t always seem that fresh (“In order to be very clear in my mind where I am going I have to repeat it,” he said in an interview with The Nation.) There’s a strong awareness of sensibilities two generations and more behind him. I’m not a jazz player needless to say, but I know that this putting-your-money-where-your-mouth-is is rare and hard to achieve in bluegrass music, where there’s a lot of professed admiration for, say, Lester Flatt, or Benny Martin, or Josh Graves, and yet no one sounds like they’re seriously using those ideas to form a living style. If anyone really sounded like that, they’d sound crazy!

I think an embrace of the artistic past -- not just historical curiosity but an openness to simplicity and repetition, a humility before the ancestors and a willingness to bridge the distance of decades in order to take on the ideas and environmental influences of the dead -- relates, in Mal’s case, to the black consciousness of his era. 1917 to 1925 saw the birth of Mingus, Monk, Parker, Waldron, and John Lewis, all of whom seem/sound to me to have heroic arms outstretched linking the world of Jelly Roll Morton to that of  John Coltrane. None of these men leapfrogged self-confidently over the blues, but instead put their bodies and minds in its service. They found a way, against the odds and often at much cost and sacrifice, to balance needs that were unlike and often in conflict: innovating, honoring the past, displaying individual DNA amply but not obnoxiously, earning global respect, and -- ta-da! --making money. 

I picked Mal’s 1966 All Alone album since I had never heard him that way, only backing Billie Holiday or Eric Dolphy or leading small groups. Also because I was morbidly curious as to how he sounded directly after his breakdown and shock treatments. His incarceration destroyed his piano knowledge, which he regained over years by memorizing and transcribing recorded piano playing -- including, wildly, yet sensibly, his own. The pre-breakdown The Quest is a record full of thrilling and unique music that is hard to turn away from. The post-breakdown All Alone sounds to me like a slightly warier version of the same guy. He’s ensconced in a minor-key world, and plays as though fascinated by its fundamental elements, flatted thirds and sevenths and fifths, hitting them with precision and, as I said, repeating non-showy phrases whenever he feels like it. In fact his style is so non-showy that you’re 9 or 10 minutes in before you hear anything explicitly crowd-pleasing -- a speedy passage, a dissonant cluster. Suddenly I pictured myself walking past a building in (of all places) Malmo, Sweden, and hearing this piano playing as it escaped gently from a high window where a talented student was practicing. That may sound condescending or back-handed, but it’s intended as an admiring tribute to a player who made sure, as he progressed in the industry and grew his reputation, not to sacrifice the holy spark of the amateur.

SIERRA HULL

I filled with gladness from the very the start of this record. It’s far ahead of Secrets, Sierra’s 2008 record, which I liked but which in my view was too solidly staked to stylistic ground broken by Alison Krauss 20 years earlier. In a real sense Miss Hull has travelled farther these last 10 years than she did her first 18 -- and of course that was the period in which she went from diapers to the most accomplished young mandolinist in Nashville. Her latest release, 25 Trips, is crammed with startling rhythmic and dynamic inventions -- crammed with ideas, ideas that didn’t simply float into the room, ideas that are the rewards of committed engagement with fellow players and with music far from her nominal specialty.

People my age, as I’ve noticed from gossiping with them, can get confused by these younger players. Do they play “bluegrass” in any sense, or are they just fucking around with creative-writing-workshop songs and talent-competition speed chops? A loaded question! There is indeed some kind of line that runs from the hard-hitting wood-splitting Monroe Brothers, through the smoother second generation, and thence to the ecstatic free-soloing newgrassers, and ultimately to...now. But the line is twisting and hard to define, and the endpoint sounds so little like point A that using one name for all this seems bound to produce little but confusion.

That you can lose sight of musicality and communicative value in the almighty quest for speed is obviously true; but hearing this point made repeatedly by musicians getting too old to keep up also makes you suspicious. Maybe we’re just fading, envious cranks? Safer to say, most of us north-of-50 types have a very hazy idea of the kind of music that’s influencing young acoustic players these days, and so should be careful not to criticize their music for failing to achieve what it’s not trying to. 

OLA BELLE REED

I checked in on her 1972 Rounder record. Her vocal range is masculine and her songwriting is deep and ecumenical. A bias that needs correcting, including in myself, can sometimes creep into listening: All that person did was live hard then open her mouth, all the recordist did was throw up a microphone, and so on. As profound as the effect on the listener may be, the mechanics are obvious, simple, unyielding to analysis, and not all that relevant to artists with subtler minds and vaster resources. For some reason I recall a letter someone wrote to No Depression magazine about an anthology record in the early 2000s: “Of course Norman Blake made a fine-sounding Norman Blake song,” she said, contrasting him against artists that seemed to her more original and experimental. “That’s what Norman Blake does.” Like milk from a cow.

Something about this is true, but it’s not the patronizing dismissal. All of us in music should aspire to become the kinds of people that receive and transmit tone and rhythm and some specifics about our ancestry, without seeming to calculate, without straining lustfully toward “originality” -- an idolatry of our age. The humility we learn will, among other benefits, inoculate us against the assumption that impressive outcomes from previous technological periods resulted from less intelligence, labor, or skill. The vocal on Ole Belle’s record is as about as well-balanced against the instrumentation as Kacey’s is on her record, and, without further information, a good default assumption about both women’s writing is that the behind-the-curtain inspiration and editing drew on like proportions of feeling, experience, luck, and labor.

It hadn’t occurred to me that “Rosewood Casket” is the template for Wynn Stewart’s “Wishful Thinking.”

MARTHA CARSON

MATTIE, MARTHIE, AND MINNIE

JEAN CHAPEL

The young mandolinist Scott Gates tipped me off to some 1944 Charlie Monroe radio recordings, and I became instantly curious about the banjoist in the group, Helen Osborne, since it was good playing by someone I hadn’t heard of, and a woman. A few minutes’ googling led me to a fascinating piece by Mike Seeger, “In Praise of Banjo Picking Women.” Seeger surveys documentary evidence from the 19th century, and audio recordings from the 20th, to give a thumbnail semi-speculative sketch of the banjo’s journey from a handmade African tool to a mainstay of white hillbilly commerce. His account of lady banjoists winds through Elizabeth Cotton and Hattie Stoneman, into the radio era with Cousin Emmy and Lily Mae Ledford, and into wartime with Mattie O’Neal and Ms. Osborne, also known as Katy Hill.

The confusion within the story of “Mattie, Marthie, and Minnie” is hinted at in Mike’s sentence that begins: “Jean Chapel (Mattie O’Neal), one of the Amburgey (Amber) sisters from Neon, Kentucky...” Hillbillymusic.com offers an admirably detailed history of the sisters. If you care to pore over it, you can learn about their efforts to escape poverty via music, their years of fitful progress and setback, their many goofy name changes, and the various genre nooks they got snagged by. After reading Seeger’s piece I wanted to hear Opal Amburgey a/k/a “Mattie” play the banjo, and thanks to the excellent Internet I quickly lighted upon “You Can’t Live With ‘Em (And You Can’t Live Without ‘Em” b/w “Tennessee Memories” on youtube. (The video title and the sung lyrics are “we can’t live...” but the King label reads “you.”) Rockin’ clawhammer! And a cool song, in the direction of Maddox Brothers hair-down humor -- it doesn’t get all the way to that Maddox looseness, but there’s definitely enough charisma and strict-rehearsed talent to make you yearn for more recorded work, which evidently doesn’t exist.

Irene Amburgey a/k/a Marthie a/k/a Martha Carson (probably a/k/a either Martha or Irene plus Roberts or Cossé, the surnames of her two husbands) has been a figure of interest to me for a few reasons. Her duets with James Roberts (he plays an A model mandolin, she plays a Martin whose body size I can’t tell from the grainy photos and her comparative size) are outstanding. Her big song “Satisfied” is of course a classic, and a few others that have crossed my ears like “I Bowed Down” are yet wilder and hipper. Finally, I’ll be honest, she’s pageant-grade as far as looks. 

A major downside of Spotify is that it offers no information about what you’re hearing -- players, producer, publisher, lyrics -- and the little that it does show -- year of release -- has a capricious relation to reality, to put it kindly. Martha is represented by one album, titled Satisfied And Other Greats. It’s in large part an upsetting display of a vocalist flailing against intervals, pitch, and easy-read confidence. When is it from? Sometimes you hear Chet Atkins playing in his rocking 1950s style, and sometimes you hear close-up drumming that indicates a later year and hence a remake. Was she ill during a few of these sessions? Or have I misjudged her talent based on duo singing, a couple solid recordings, and an attractive timbre? Where’s Deke Dickerson when you need him?

Opal Amburgey found some rock-and-roll success under the name Jean Chapel. I listened to a little of this after Martha. Same strange and husky timbre as her sister (all else aside, that timbre is an arresting positive!), and surer pitch, from the recorded evidence I heard.

MERLE HAGGARD

If you’re young and reading this, I might recommend you do what I did -- purposely avoid listening to all the records of your favorite people until later in life, so you’ll have a few safe “discoveries” stocked away. My blind spot on Merle’s enormous discography has always been the approximate 1975-1982 frame. In those years there was a lot of contemporary non-country that strongly hooked me, mainly British new wave and American rock-and-roll. By the time I got smart enough to become seriously interested in country, the mid-1980s, I focused on then-current stars, like Dwight Yoakam, and the historically august figures, which provided the most efficient educational platform. Meanwhile, the 1970s got right past me, and so did some great Merle music -- MCA Records, Clint Eastwood movies, the fading of Roy Nichols and the appearance of Clint Strong, the Leona Williams drama. I knew a dozen songs like “Footlights” and “It’s Been A Great Afternoon,” and loved them so much that I felt sure I was delaying some serious gratification. So it proved. 

Back to the Barrooms is notable for its drumming: Larrie Londin, Jerry Kroon, and Bob Gallardo. Sadly, I don’t know who is who track-to-track. The close-mic’d intense grooves of “Can’t Break the Habit” and “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here And Drink” (and let’s credit Joe Osborn for completing the amazing rhythm section) make these songs’ power just undeniable. It’s easy to imagine the Strangers that participated in the sessions all raising their game in the presence of Larrie et al -- Norm Hamlet’s opening chords on “Misery and Gin” are some of the best pedal steel playing of his (or anyone’s) career. Reggie Young is another shot in the arm, and it’s wonderful to hear how he hints at Nichols’ phrasing, inserts his own eccentricities, and keeps his cool all at once. I suspect Reggie’s preference for the studio over the road contributed to the steady mental focus that his performances consistently show.

I should be ashamed to report, especially since I love Tommy Collins about as much as I do Merle, that I never listened to “Leonard” until last week. No surprise to say that it brought tears to my eyes and I had to pull over. This is writing that bowls you over with its lack of pretension. A dense (3:37 and no breaks), warts-and-all account of the talents and tribulations of a friend, Leonard Sipes a/k/a Tommy Collins (who knows, maybe his real name was Amburgey) with a modest public profile, the song is full of cover-preventative lines (“he wrote a lot of country songs for me”) and meta touches (“you’ll know which town I mean by the time I’m through,” “Somehow I had to write a song for old Tommy/If just to see the smiling faces in the band”). The privileging of the relatable over the autobiographically specific is solidly ingrained in country lyric-writing for clear reasons (reasons that aren’t discreditable simply because they align with commercial motive). The odd, intimate, and non-relatable details and subject matter that have insistently featured in the writing of the so-called outlaws have ended up as one of their most valuable contributions to the art. “Me and Paul”; “shot a man there in the head, but can’t talk too much about it”; “My name is Jerry Lee Lewis, come from Louisiana”; “we need some celery and a can of fake snow”; “It’ll all clear up in 11 months and 29 days”; “this song’s about the night they spent protecting you from me.” These aren’t exactly lyrics that plunge homo sapiens into a lukewarm bath of togetherness. Merle allowed the wild dogs of personal indulgence to roam unleashed through the forty-plus years of his writing. It’s the sort of writing that is a jolting antidote to blue eyes, pickup trucks, slammed doors, broken hearts, and other cut-and-paste depressants.

Then there’s “The Immigrant,” from I’m Always On A Mountain When I Fall. If your impression of Hag’s politics comes from the rabble-rousing of his first recorded decade or the where-the-hell-did-America-go grumbling of his last, you have to stop reading this and listen to “The Immigrant.” Not only is the point-of-view boldly anti-ideological, the rhymes are pretty astounding. The credited co-writer is Dave Kirby -- wonder exactly how he’s reflected here.

Save up some gold nuggets. You never know when you might be 57 and driving alone through the desert.

DELMORE BROTHERS

Of all the gut-tingling delights offered by music, one of the top in my book is hearing a flattop guitar pulled in close to a ribbon microphone, as part of a recording session in which mics weren’t dedicated to instruments one-to-one. For me it’s like when Cary Grant bursts into the frame and Ralph Bellamy and everyone else vanish into the background. I knew about 100 of the Delmores’ pre-1950s recordings but only 8 or 10 past that, so I got caught up. You can better appreciate their two voices in full on the later records -- there’s better gear, and they seem to be doing a bit more solo singing. “Mississippi Shore” is a song I wanted to learn at once upon hearing it, but I’m not sure what to do with the parts about pickaninnies and darkies.

BIG THREE TRIO

There’s not much of Willie Dixon’s cool launchpad trio on Spotify. Some of it is semi-controlled chaos but all of it has killer piano playing courtesy of Leonard Caston. I kept thinking about Willie performing forced cunnilingus on a fat prison guard. When he was 12 he spent a year at Ball Ground, a labor farm in Mississippi, as he recounts in his memoir, I Am The Blues. (Kind thanks to Robbie Gjersoe for texting me a link full of grotesqueries and brutalities.)

DOLLY PARTON

Dumb Blonde, her first record. Who is this close to finished at age 21? Witty wordplays, storylines hinging on compelling adult paradoxes, lyric structures and melodies hewing tightly to tradition but studded with the surprising little inventions and add-ons that extraordinarily fertile minds such as hers seem to manufacture with ease. And the pure voice -- and the humorous attitude -- and the good looks -- I mean, the whole package, fresh out of the backwoods. How the women of the Opry must have hated her!

Here’s the playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Ejy3Z5hMLH2bqjKW3SLd5

Die Dreaming, from Revenge of the Doberman

Here's another free stream. This one's from Volume 2. (Again, the 53 songs are semi-arbitrarily sequenced, and entirely arbitrarily divided into volumes.) The lyrics on this one are the kind that are enjoyable to sing 20 or 30 times, but tend to pall at 150. Beyonce shows up, and Chez Panisse, and tits are mentioned. You get the picture. I recorded it one afternoon at Vance Powell's place in the Berry Hill area of Nashville. Vance is a terrific engineer, and comes from the Springfield, Missouri scene of which Lou Whitney was a figurehead and where I have a couple roots of my own. I saw him at Lou's memorial in Springfield, and it occurred to me then that I should really do a song with him at the board, if he would consent, and he did.

Chris Scruggs plays most of the things: string bass, straight steel (he's the best living player on this instrument as far as I know), and L5 guitar. Buddy Spicher fiddled, Chris Brown drummed, and I just sang. I had Jesse Winchester on the brain, since he had recently died, and that's why I sang softer than usual. Working with Buddy was a dream come true, and I sure hope I get to do it again sometime! I told him how much I liked his playing on "Love In The Hot Afternoon" among other tunes; he told me a couple things that were so flattering that I can't repeat them. He didn't like the way his fiddle solo concluded ("so square!"), and I promised him I'd edit out the last two bars and put in something from an earlier pass, which I didn't do...so maybe I never will get to work with him again...

The only other thing I recall about this song is that I wrote it in a Holiday Inn in Evanston while trying to get away from a more serious composition that was hurting my brain. Whatever that was eventually hit the garbage can, while this featherier one survives, for now at least. Not an unusual outcome.

Revenge of the Doberman

My 53-song Revenge of the Doberman is (at last!) up on bandcamp. It's split into 4 arbitrary album-length albums, priced at $10 each; or you can buy the whole thing for $40. This mouthwatering digital bounty is in addition to Doberman's already-available format via the merchandise page of this site as a USB flash drive. If you're antsy about sticking a thing in your laptop port, as though you're Stormy Daniels and I the unsheathed president, pray lay your concerns to rest and go click on this shit:

 https://fanlink.to/RevengeoftheDoberman

In a brief while I will have some complete songs from the package up for streaming, so you can get a taste of what you're in for.

I was planning to present some context about the package since it may appear an unusual product (not so unusual if you recall its 50-song precursor, 50-vc. Doberman, back around the turn of the decade) -- and when I saw the phrase "leftovers" appear in a Facebook comment, I thought I'd better hurry. These are not leftovers! Good grief. The big majority are songs I wrote between June 2014 and February 2018, then recorded, and that's the sum of it, wrote and recorded. In that time span, I recorded three other albums and released one, Upland Stories. Four songs from the Upland sessions, the four that seemed least suited to the mood of that record, are included; a couple I wrote for the Linda Gail Lewis collab that's out in 2 weeks are also included in earlier, variant arrangements and with different players. There are a half-dozen I wrote for Mark Roberts's play The Last Night of the Jabez Opry -- these are in the vein of hard country music circa 1978. There's one from my scuttled James Agee thing and one from my also-scuttled Flannery O'Connor thing, and though these all have a theatrical provenance they can be enjoyed without any particular explanation. There are a couple covers, which reflect my love for Stan Kenton among others. (I'm always having to explain how I love Stan Kenton, among others.) 

The other 33 or 34 songs are plain old songs, songs I tried my best to shepherd with care from spark-conception to sculpted track, and if you like my thing generally then I think you'll surely like these songs. If you wonder how they compare to a normal release of mine in terms of sound, performance, and composition quality, my guess is that they compare well. I didn't cut any notable corners production-wise. Most of the tracks come from Kingsize in Chicago and were engineered by John Abbey, and it and he are real good. I didn't fly in players expressly for these Kingsize sessions, but I did much more remixing than usual...anyway, in terms of per-song expense, it's really neck-and-neck with a release with a physical format and an outside label and a publicist...so there!

On the earlier Doberman I took advantage of the under-the-radar status to experiment with styles and sounds far from country and bluegrass. On this one, I didn't, so much, and I don't know why. There's a definite uptick in the number of melancholy ballads: the Reaper looms! There's more steel-driven C&W, and a bit more swampy kinda groove music. (Again with the Reaper?) Some of the higher-profile players include Buddy Spicher, Chris Scruggs, Jenny Scheinman, Duke Levine, Wayne Horvitz, Fats Kaplin, and Missy Raines. There are the guys that you know if you've been on my train long, since they've been playing with me for 10+ years: Nora O'Connor, Robbie Gjersoe, Kelly Hogan, Gerald Dowd, Scott Stevenson, Brian Wilkie, Grant Tye, Steve Dawson, Todd Phillips, Shad Cobb, John Rice, Scott Ligon, K.C. McDonough, Paul Carestia. Now I see I'm creating a false and rather invidious line between the prominent and the beloved. But onward with the spurious categorization. Some of my more recently-acquired but no less highly-valued Chicago friends who stopped by the studio to make my songs sound better include Eric Schneider, Paul Mutzabaugh, Larry Kohut, Liam Davis, Scott Tipping, Jason Narducy, Steve Frisbie, Anna Jacobson, and Beau Sample. That leaves about a dozen more people, and if I don't continue with the naming of names, it's only because I loathe those dozen people.

A little verbiage comes with the music. To repeat a sentiment from that: if you buy the package, you're totally helping me out in my effort to create and release more music in my remaining span of years. I don't do crowd-sourcing or other pleas for contributions; my recordings aren't cut-rate home-studio deals; and my audience size and consequent average performance guarantees are modest. I put out occasional radar-evading projects like this with the twin goals of upping my productivity and giving listeners who are most solidly in my corner a chance to put something directly in my kitty (while offering them value in return, I trust). Disclosure: as with the other Doberman, I'll likely mine this one for some good songs to anchor my next "official" record, which makes for the possibility that you might, somewhere down the line, pay for a few songs twice, in different versions. But you won't mind that, oh no, not at all.

a new one nears the finish line

Today I've been listening to the reference discs that the masterer, John Golden, sent me of my forthcoming cover album of Street-Legal. It's been an exciting day! It's true that the near-completion, shiny-mastered-mix, too-late-to-do-much, bask-in-the-memories phase of any project brings on a glow, and true that it fades quickly. Nevertheless.

The soft lacquer on a vinyl master bears playing only a few times, so you pick a couple promising environments and listen as hard as you can. I asked Gerald Dowd and Robbie Gjersoe, who both play on the record, to use their turntables, and, as for mine, I went to the audio shop for a new needle and a tone-arm recalibration. I noted the locations of a handful of soft pops and other surface noises, so I can see if they appear on the second listening at Gerald's or Robbie's place. I was happy to hear no s-distortion or other indications of groove-cramming or careless craftsmanship (and with side lengths of 14:27, 13:58, 13:09, and 10:22, there'd be no excuse for that stuff).

I was disappointed with the vinyl representation of my last two albums, which were the first and so far the only two albums in my career to appear in that format. In fact, one of my main motivations in doing this current record -- a semi-experimental reversioning of a 1978 Bob Dylan record that echoes approximately arrangements and approaches I used at my Monday-night residency a couple years back -- was to have one release I could point to in my life that had no audiophilic compromises. I don't view my catalog as a big hot mess of compromise (and if it were, I'd be loath to admit it after blowing a small fortune through the years on boxes of Quantegy tape, fancy-pants studios, and hoity-toity masterers), but, along with a number of tracks across several releases that were recorded on weird formats (one track on Very Best is from a cassette, and I defy you to tell me which one!), most of the catalog was released on CDs and MP3s, and the fraction that's on vinyl is suboptimal. I had a strong desire to create something that, as a listening experience of depth and seductiveness, would ring the bells. This translated to three on-the-ground guidelines. I'd remix or retrack as much as I felt necessary, to the point of practical unimprovability or mental exhaustion. There would be some analog component pre-mastering. And the finished thing would be available only as an LP, denying many potential listeners their preferred medium but assuring me that my efforts and expenditures wouldn't end at earbuds and laptops.

One and three are self-explanatory, so let me give some of my opinions about analog (such a nauseatingly sacred term anymore) in record-making. They're opinions I've arrived at slowly over my time in the game about how and whether to use tape, cost vs benefit, that kind of thing. Since I'm no specialist or audio engineer, rather the kind of person to whom audio engineers dispense information in the tone registered nurses use with late-stage Alzheimers patients, I'll gladly concede at the outset that my opinions aren't privileged, scientifically subtle, or highly fine-tuned. If you have different opinions -- based, I hardly need add, on knowledge, experience, and reasoning -- I'd be delighted to hear them, since I'm almost always delighted to have my opinions challenged and refined.

I started making little recordings of myself, at home and in the occasional "studio," in the 1970s, but it wasn't until 1986, when I came into Steve Albini's orbit, that these issues first entered my purview. I put the word "studio" in quotes because, then as now, some of the places I went to record were in people's houses, and some of the people were more hobbyists than men of the guild. Steve's tracking area was in his basement and his desk was two floors above, so there was an aerobic benefit to recording there; and if you liked unemployable freaks and exotic pornography, you could often feast your eyes on the one consuming the other while passing the first floor. In 1986 computers were coming into use at recording sessions (though I didn't know about it), and sound signals had been encoded in storage devices as numbers since World War II. To guys like me, making modest-budget music in urban hipster studios, digital was still pretty far to the edges of the picture, but lurking ominously there, like the oboe theme in Peter and the Wolf. 

Steve was, and remains, the fiercest and most eloquent partisan of analog recording in my acquaintance. Working with a small array of other badass audio engineers over the next dozen or so years, I learned that they firmly and monolithically opposed the aesthetics of digital. (With Steve it only began at the aesthetics.) The resolution was poor, and though bound to improve, would never reach infinitude. The absence of noise was a little unearthly. The gear was ugly and the recording platforms quickly obsolesced -- and when they did, what would become of the music stored in those DATs and discs-of-the-day? That music hit the ear in a way that was hard-to-define but harsh, and, at best, you might react as I did after seeing Unsane last week: intriguing, but it doesn't exactly top Vertigo. The pool of people transmitting these biases to me was, to be sure, small and unrepresentative; the guys that were orgasming into their lab coats experimenting with onsite classical recording, I did not intersect with. And so it was that I came to accept the doctrine of analog superiority, for much the same reason that I accept that the earth's temperature is warming, or that c is the maximum speed of matter -- it was the consensus of learned experts.

Lending credence to the learned experts was the fact that they could blindly and unerringly discern from which medium a given recording had originated. A happy memory of mine is playing a track from my Johnny Paycheck tribute for the first time for Steve Fishell of Sugar Hill. The playback was on CD; the recording, though it had begun its life on a RADAR (random access digital audio recorder) machine, had gone to tape for mix. The song I played Steve was an exciting dramatization of drunkenness and debauchery by Neko Case, but none of that seemed to register. "Tape," he sighed, entering a gentle ecstasy; "there's just nothing like tape." Boy, that's the A&R man you want!

I, however, couldn't always tell when costly tape (it's currently $320 for a reel of multitrack) was or wasn't used, on my records or others'. And I wasn't at all certain that the number of my listeners who could tell -- most definitely including the snobbiest and loudest audiophiles among them -- couldn't easily round to zero. Listening very critically, I guess I could tell 70-75% of the time; but is "very critically" necessarily the way you envision or prefer anyone be listening? Those $320 boxes, along with those other boxes of 1/2-inch, sum up to about $1500 in a typical recording budget of mine -- in the neighborhood of 10% of the whole budget. That added cost, not always prohibitive but certainly large, is one point against tape, and another is the sound and implicit standards of the marketplace these last couple decades -- that is, listeners' ears are increasingly adjusted to digital sounds, and evidently contentedly. 

It's really interesting, thinking about it now, how little has changed since 1986. Digital software is still reconfiguring and updating constantly, vinyl is still here and unevolving and pretty popular, the best engineers (as far as I know) still adore analog, and most of the best studios are still keeping their Stuters around and in shape. In audio recording nothing has come along that quite compares to wide magnetic tape and polyvinyl acetate for rocking the house and soothing the ear. As you read this, United in Nashville is pounding out platters as they did in the 1950s, on giant earthshaking pressing machines made in New Jersey in the 1920s. If a Bell Labs nerd from 1945 landed magically in Blackbird or Third Man or Electrical today he could get right to work and no questions asked. Analog sits serenely atop its perch, unimpressed by Moore's law.

Not that computers are going anywhere. The first time I came into contact with them in a recording session, I quickly came to hate them with all my heart. It was an extreme position, based on working with an engineer who monitored his work visually not aurally, which the flaming screen tends to demand. I thought this doltish -- certainly the musical outcome of this John von Neumann-ish way of recording a band, with amplifier heads taken from their cabinets and placed 30 feet down the hall, was limpdick -- and considered the assumptions underlying his methods a grave danger to all artistry. My records following that session (Let's Kill Saturday Night, 13 Hillbilly Giants and Couples In Trouble) were, by purposeful design, all-tape-and-no-bits affairs. (No buyers bit, either, ha, ha!) But as time went by, I found myself working alongside non-music engineers more, in commercial studios, and here my own assumptions were pushed into the limelight. These fellows were doing wondrous things with a mouse and keyboard that could be done with razor blade and tape only very time-consumingly if at all. The fact that ProTools didn't sound good had kept me from appreciating its radical resources. In the new era you could multitrack infinitely, store and recall mixes at your pleasure, edit more wantonly and complexly and seamlessly than ever before, experiment by move and reverse-move, change pitch and time and location of individual events and waveforms, and so on. The previously laborious or impossible was suddenly cheap and easy and, if you didn't let yourself get beguiled by possibility and choice, fast. All of this was of course a big "duh" to anyone who'd been keeping up, but eye-opening to one who had resisted computerization and so was several years late to the game.

My position, then, arrived at 15 years ago and held since, is that analog is for sound and digital is for tools, and that -- although I've done decently using just one or the other over the years -- the ideal in contemporary recording is to wed tape and software. I love to comp and, when necessary, to tinker with what I consider the DNA of the music (pitch and time) via digital. The mixing platform is whatever the engineer likes, and, while I love Albini's no-automation all-hands mix sessions for the principled care they encourage and for taking the stress off the eyes, I'm entirely at ease with in-the-box mixing at this point. So where does analog enter the process? My opinion, which may outrage the cognoscenti, is that it doesn't much matter, so long as it enters somewhere. It's the exact opposite of the axiom that one drop of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar: going to tape anywhere in the chain will have an improving effect. For Gone Away Backward and Upland Stories we recorded and edited on a computer then dumped onto multitrack tape for mixing. For the Street-Legal cover record we did everything onscreen but submitted files to the masterer that had been printed on tape. I've not done it, but friends who have tell me that recording onto tape then digitizing to mix works nicely, and I believe it. A confused metaphor: digital is glass, analog is butter. One offers transparent functionality, the other a singularly beautiful taste that, while you can cook good meals without it, there's no exact substitute for and perhaps never will be.

As for vinyl, I've always felt that it's the best-sounding format, and that to get very worked-up over it is silly. CDs sound just fine. Anybody that can't bear CD sound quality is a big baby or a crazy person. However, CDs are either fast-disappearing or gone (I have so much trouble keeping up; the line between "disappearing" and "gone" is very thick for an old person), and so we're left with sound files and vinyl -- an efficient medium and a quality medium. These last two vinyl adventures of mine have been educational. The realm in which acetates are made, molded, and pressed is ablaze with quirks and interest. Much of the interestingness is economically based. Most of the people making LPs are small-order boutique sellers like me, but it's the same plants handling our orders and those of the big-money players alike, so that our deadlines are apt to be distant and indeterminate. The market for vinyl as a whole isn't big enough that the record-issuer has very many competitors to choose from. Until it grows significantly there will surely be, as indicated above, a lot of aging machines in play.

Cultural factors add some small coloration to the manufacture of LPs. The people that turn the digital files into lacquer masters are epicurean, white-robed, science-besotted savants. They answer to a master -- excuse me, a masterer -- who, like Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty, is pleased to personify royal standards in a setting ever-sliding into brainless lassitude. The people at the pressing plants, to stick doggedly with the analogy, are like Bligh's merry crew of shirtless savages. If you take issue with some feature of the lacquer reference, you may receive from the mastering lab a patient explanation, spiked with hard-to-avoid jargon, of why it is you're not really hearing what you think you hear; the equivalent conversation with the pressing-plant denizens will get you a meaty middle-finger salute. Okay then, I exaggerate; but my advice is to choose a vinyl masterer with great care and to bone up on the subject before getting into the ring with him. Choose the pressing plant with like care (though there's not much choice), and forget about having much say after that. From the hour the plant receives the acetate, your chief remaining resource is prayer.

One of the surprising bits of knowledge I got on my first foray into vinyl manufacture was side length. 15 minutes is nice, 20 is starting to ask for trouble, and 24 is the outer edge of the possible. The narrower the grooves need to be, the worse the record sounds. When I learned this, my mind went straight away to Abbey Road, each of whose sides is well over 20 minutes. "Those old records don't sound as good as you think they do," one masterer friend told me. "These masterers are full of crap," was the judgment of another friend, who works as an artist but dabbles heavily in sound engineering; "they don't have the knowledge of the previous generation, and they hide the gap with theoretical assertions such as 'sides can't exceed 20 minutes'." I can't be sure how much credence to give either of these, and they might both be true. Listening to lower-weight records from the 1970s I can see the masterer's point -- while there's a lot of conditioning that makes it hard to dislodge the idea that it's great-sounding music, an unbiased and fresh listen might say otherwise. But in support of the other point, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: "Her Majesty" sounds just fine.

I cite that one specifically because it's a quiet song at the close of an over-twenty-minute side. Sound quality is harder to maintain as the circumference of the disc tightens ("quality" as determined by things like lack of distortion and maximum low and high frequencies). The masterers suggest that you avoid closing a side with a quiet song. They also suggest you not end a side with a very loud song. How do you like that? It would make a nice experiment to empty your shelves so that only the records you thought sounded best remained, then to separate out all the records that had soft ballads or clangorous epics as side-closers (come to think of it, Abbey Road's second side essentially had both, with "Her Majesty" as brief as it was), as well as all the records with sides longer than, say, 17 minutes. Would you have any records left?

Such a rabbit-hole. After finishing the last mix on my present record, I thought that I might avoid this particular heartache of side-lengths and loud-and-soft. The cost of making a two-record package was tough for me to consider, since it practically ensured that I'd lose money on the release. But...I'll add up the times and see, I thought. If the total time is longer than 48 minutes, or 24 minutes per side, I'll think about editing 4 minutes off -- or losing the money and making the extra LP. If it's 48 minutes, or a little under, I'll gird myself for some back-and-forth with the mastering man, and get out my little prayer-book. As it happened, the running time was 54 minutes, and I didn't have the heart to chop off 4 minutes of music -- that's so much! I committed to the extra LP and the expenditure. My kingdom for 4 minutes.

Well, today's sweet pill took some edge off that bitter one. My record has a lot of quiet on it. I love quiet as an element in music more and more, by which I mean not only soft playing and low signal but no signal: silence. Side one opens with a contemplative improvisation between me and Robbie Gjersoe. Side two starts with a long song on which my Collings is the only non-vocal instrument, and along with that austerity, there are brief silences here and there in it, where I stop the strings and things just hover. The grooves are wide, the circumference too, and I can't tell you how happy it made me to hear the absence of sound in my headphones, midsong at a pretty loud volume. The last song, on side 4, is decidedly clangorous. I detect no volume loss or quality reduction. We'll see what the other turntables say.

2017, a fan's notes

At the close of years past I’d occasionally adumbrate some high points and post them to my website. Meant in a spirit of reflective gratitude, surely it came off as so much bragging. Yet, as Martin Mull said of mobs chorusing “We Shall Overcome” in joyous unity -- if they undercame, they wouldn’t be singing. Ill-advised though I may be to sing my own praises, 2017 was such a terrific year for me, probably the best year of my life if I count the blessings in full and if the arbitrary January-to-December container isn’t too flimsy to hold heavy reflections, that I’m driven once again to the keyboard to hymn the gods who have granted me so much, perhaps subconsciously motivated by the silly superstition that my public declarations will encourage them to treat me just as gently in 2018, and definitely nagged by the thought that at my present age most of life’s rewards should, by biological logic and historical example, be waning, and that in every previous era a moldy troubadour such as I would not be stomping around like a lusty monarch but following the path of the sere and yellow leaves of early winter. (In that sentence -- its involutional length if not its emotional tone -- I salute Thomas Bernhard, whose Gathering Prizes helped make last August a lot funnier.)

The books, as long as I’ve brought them up, didn’t quite pull their weight this year. Way too much fluffy contemporary reading. I bought Letterman impulsively in a Seattle bookshop, along with Richard Russo’s Trajectory, to ease a longish flight, and I ended up gobbling both like a ravenous moron. But Rudy Rucker’s stemwinding The Lifebox, The Seashell, and The Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, The Meaning of Life, and How To Be Happy, offered more than ample nourishment. It’s a long, digressive, scrupulous teasing-out of the hypothesis that everything in the universe -- the laws of physics, the chemistry of life, the products of the mind -- is a computation. It has fictional stories, dense graphs, handmade illustrations, offhand autobiographical anecdote, and pages of equations and computer-science minutiae that I had to struggle with or skip altogether. It’s more like going through a bulging box of papers from your grandfather’s closet than enjoying a professionally edited book, but it allows the sort of acquaintance with a brilliant mind that the now-fading, pre-Internet age of high-powered editorial gatekeepers would have likely denied us.

On the lighter side, as Dave Berg would say, I checked in with two old favorite comic masters, Peter DeVries (Comfort Me With Apples) and Max Shulman (Rally Round The Flag). Peter the epigrammatical elitist and carpenter of durable phrases stained by a dark Calvinism, Max the wisecracking Jewish populist and master of streamlined ready-for-TV sentences. Close in age (Shulman was born 9 years later than DeVries in 1919 and died 5 years sooner), both were permanently amused by sex, American middle-class mores, and adolescence. It seems to me that I’m so fond of comedy in every form -- I’ve already namechecked Mad magazine, Peter & Max (an excellent cross-denominational deli), and Letterman and Mull, and might add examples as farflung as LaWanda Page, Bennett Cerf, Marcel Pagnol, Michael O’Donoghue, I Love Lucy, Martin Short, Jeeves and Wooster, Sandy Baron, James Thurber, Second City, and the Three Stooges -- that I can’t be said to have any actual taste in it.

Three books, Dreamland, Strangers In Their Own Land, and The Mandibles, clarified and deepened my concerns about America’s near future. Opiates, bizarrely unfit leaders, and reckless borrowing. If you’re trying to break [fill in the blank] you don’t have very far to go, USA.

On a professional plane, my year was studded with more braggable moments than any previous -- the Met in NYC, the Grammys, the Steppenwolf showcase of a musical-in-progress, my return to the Grand Ole Opry, and the Town Hall show in December with various SNL-ers, for example. If these things had happened to me 20 years ago I’d be so giddy with excitement that only pharmaceuticals could level me off. Being in one’s fifties is empowering and slightly sad: the level of excitement appropriate to outstanding personal landmarks such as the Opry and the Met is just metabolically inaccessible. If I was transported back in time to provide musical interludes at a live show between appearances by Gilda Radner and John Belushi, and to mill with them in the stage-left wing and upstairs dressing room at one of America’s greatest venues...don’t wait up for me to teleport back to now. Yet here I was, sharing a bill with their latter-day counterparts, brilliant and funny people, and most of what occupied my mind was, so to speak, points of order. How long till my next spot? Was the tuning doing okay amid the offstage temperature shifts? What time was it? How much sleep would I be able to fit in before tomorrow morning’s flight? And so on and et cetera. Although I occasionally get flustered by performance environments that are outside my comfort zone, this represents my mental state at most performances: practical, problem-gnawing, and composed. Being both 54 and nervous doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m a finished work, pretty much. Keeping form, from here on out, is the focus, not making strides. The difference between the moods I’m in after aceing a show and whiffing one (more on which below) is hardly ever drastic; nor is the difference between the after-show highs from facing 4,000 people or 40. Likewise, chatting amiably with Vanessa Bayer was a pleasure, but dishing with the Uber driver en route back to Brooklyn was fun too.

The aspect of the year that heated up my emotions the most was the musicians I had access to. On mandolin alone -- Scott Simontacchi, Jesse Cobb, Don Stiernberg, Matt Flinner -- holy Christ. In 2017 I also got to work live with Matt Munisteri, Noam Pikelny, Dennis Crouch, Anat Cohen, Patrick McAvinue, Yvonne Gage, Eric Schneider, and Duke Levine, to say nothing of years-long accompanists -- okay, basically, friends -- such as Shad Cobb, Robbie Gjersoe, Missy Raines, Redd Volkaert, Fats Kaplin, and Jenny Scheinman. That’s a partial list, and it reflects a satisfying variety of projects on my calendar, a conscious methodology of changing it up from trip to trip, and, again, being 54, since none of these people would have returned my 30-year-old self’s phone call. Singing a verse of a song I made up and then throwing Matt Flinner a solo is a dream with which, as Wm F. Buckley said anent Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency, I would never in my most unhinged moments have wafted my way to Nirvana. And here we are. 

I count 104 dates on my 2017 routing sheet. It sure felt like more -- maybe it was the added travel days. I also did a handful of Hideout Monday night shows, a couple sit-in-with-friends dates, a charity fundraiser or two, and a little radio on non-performance days. Hawaii, which has been my #1 dream destination for years, was probably my favorite work outing. It wasn’t all work: I arrived three days early, checked into the seaside resort generously provided by Chuck Gessert, the promoter, and rose at the next day’s dawn to go on a 6-man outrigger canoe race with Chuck’s private club. We were short a person on our canoe, but even with two of the five of us total novices -- me and a pretty young woman who shed progressively more clothing as the 90 minutes of aerobic labor wore on -- we won against 3 other more experienced boats. Between strokes, we watched the sun coming up over the island. At the halfway stop, at the edge of a Tom Sawyer-like island, the men and the woman stood waist-deep in the water alongside their boats and chatted, some of them dropping broad hints about how much money they had earned on the mainland before retiring. Later, I snorkeled, swam, hiked a long road with a gradient of as much as 37%, ate like a pig, hiked in the mountains, fooled around with wild ponies, and checked out four of the island’s nine climate zones. I did a music presentation for a public middle-school class, most of them natives. Our single point of intersection was Michael Jackson. 

During my week in Australia and New Zealand (also my first visit) I didn’t have much unscheduled time to myself, except for an afternoon in Melbourne, which I spent wandering rather aimlessly. The town is unlike any I’ve seen. Its population is almost 4 million but it has a non-corporate service economy that seemed to me like it would be unsustainable in a city four times as big. It takes 15 minutes to walk 5th Avenue in Brooklyn from 7th Street till it dead-ends on Flatbush. By contrast, I spent 90 minutes walking through and beyond the Fitzroy section of Melbourne, and another 90 walking back along different streets, and the Park Slope hipster-commercial terrain stretched on and on, ramen dives and bookstores and rock clubs and coffeehouses and jeans and shoe stores. The next day, in a neighborhood 40 minutes distant, Shad and I walked for a half-hour after soundcheck, and it was the same thing. There were graffiti, sidewalk vendors, pretty 100-year-old buildings, and happy young people on bikes (racially homogeneous young people) everywhere. One was left puzzled as to where the hipsters were stealing money from to buy their body oils and other uplifting non-essentials. We played at a theater, a dance hall, and a festival situated on the bay, and were left with the impression that Melbourne has it all.

In Auckland I landed a little before 6AM and had nothing scheduled until a 3PM soundcheck. I had left my phone at the gate at Vancouver, and so I really felt unattached. After napping, I walked around, ending up at an Israeli/Mediterranean restaurant called Ima and run by a kind lady called Yael Shochat. My meal was sabich, a chickpea and potato dish, with a mixed mezze-plate appetizer. I had a lot of questions for Yael about the prep, the ingredients, and the history of the food, and I forget all of the answers. I returned to Ima the next morning for breakfast before the flight to Sydney and brought Shad with me. By the time we left, I had the restaurant’s $50 cookbook under my arm, and when I’d got home I tried out its recipes for vegetarian couscous, Tunisian sandwich, and hamusta soup, then promptly ordered two more copies for Christmas presents. Part of the fun of working from a book unavailable in the west is decoding the list of ingredients. I already had silverbeet and capsicums in my refrigerator, to my surprise.

Visiting Sisters, Oregon for their annual folk festival and instructional camp will prove hard to forget. The town is cute -- a little too cute, if you ask me, more like a replica of a Western town, a la Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles. (“Now all we got to do is make perfect copies of ourselves...you men start workin’ on the dummies!”) Smoke from the not-so-far-off fires that were imperilling much of the west coast last summer was prevalent for the first two days of camp. On the third day, the promoter called off the rest of the event on the advice of certain lily-livered local health authorities. I spent the remainder of the cancelled event in a motor lodge, trying to work on lyric assignments from Logan Ledger, a dynamic young country singer, and Anat Cohen, the eminent clarinetist. Neither of them was in any way breathing down my neck, but I wanted to get something done, if only to please them. To no avail. I did get plenty of whiskey drinking and phone talking done, and, as the weekend rolled around, I rambled over to Bend to have an incredible meal at Ariana with my dear friends Frank and Sheri Cole. Sheri’s sister Kathy and brother-in-law Randall, from Kansas, were also along. With each new installment in the wine flight over the 3-hour dinner, Kathy got a little more red-state. “I just don’t want them taking away our guns,” she declared, after the fifth glass. “Who’s going to take away your guns?” I said, my own tongue loosened by the grape. “You don’t have a gun,” Sheri told Kathy, getting more to the point, perhaps. “But if I wanted to get one,” said Kathy, good-naturedly, “I don’t want them taking it away.”

These seven days in September seemed never to end. On Sunday night, I checked out an intermittently engaging movie called Wind River in a cute theater on the edge of town. On Monday I washed my clothes in a laundromat and read a book about the Warner brothers of Hollywood. It was September 11, 2017, but it felt a little like September 12, 2001, when I was also in Oregon and cut off from loved ones. Despite occasional contact with people, my feeling was of isolation and loneliness, which continued as I drove up to Portland to play a solo show. I went up to my little room above the bar after playing, poured a slug of whiskey, and sank into an intermittently engaging Philip Roth novel and an Edward G. Robinson movie.

Now, about the whiffing. Anat Cohen had invited me to appear as her special guest and collaborator at the Logan Center on the south side of Chicago, where she and her ten-piece band were to unveil music from her style-straddling new record, Happy Song. I first met her at a wedding in 2003, where she was playing in one room and I in another. On break, I heard a pretty sound sailing on the air. Upon finding the source and listening a while longer, I thought, “This is about the best playing clarinet playing I’ve heard.” We jammed briefly at that affair, and played together impromptu years later at the Hideout and Fitzgeralds, but this official date of hers, with me advertised on the bill, was a sharp ratcheting-up. Her arranger, Oded, threw me a couple tunes to try to put words to, at which I pretty much failed. To the extent that this didn’t reflect on me, I concluded that there are strong melodies that are well-suited to the human voice and to literal meanings, and strong melodies that aren’t, and these were the latter. Arriving at the gig, we had a pretty long soundcheck and I had a good time hanging with the NYC hotshots in Anat’s band. Conservatory-generated jazz youngsters are intelligent, argumentatively resourceful (I don’t think the cellist appreciated my dig at Ron Carter, to which he responded quickly and firmly), reverently history-minded, and altogether sober. Not much like the cool-encrusted, slangy, half-drunk, hamfisted loafers of the Americana scene! At Anat’s show, I was achingly disappointed with my performance, especially of “Beaumont Rag,” which after all was me on my own turf, fiddle tunes, playing the Watson version that I had provided and Oded had meticulously transcribed. The sound was imperfect, and I was probably a little fatigued from some early-morning travel, but mostly I think I was ill-at-ease in the venue and intimidated by Anat’s fantastic playing. I evaded obloquy in the next day’s Tribune review, but I was mad at myself for falling into such an elementary mental trap. Apparently I forgot I was 54.

But that was nothing as compared to six weeks earlier, where I had the lowest performance point of my year, in a little town in the middle of New York state. At a private party in a barn, with a few hundred middle-aged lollygagging in the dark and setting bonfires and gyrating savagely, nothing was clicking for me. For once the players I’d assembled weren’t jelling. And the sound was miserable, making us even worse than we were. It was like hearing yourself back through your Wisconsin grandmother’s kitchen radio. The buyer was a great guy, full of cheer and hospitality, and he told me an inspiring tale about how his simple business idea had revitalized his struggling community, there two hours from Utica. Also I have to admit that the payout was good. But all I could think of, as the golf cart carried us across his acreage back to our rental van, was the distance I had come to sound so terrible. When you degrade yourself in public and have only the consolation of a check, you can feel exactly as low as a whore.

Wasn’t this supposed to be a positive essay? When I wasn’t traveling and playing, I was recording and writing. I brought three record projects to 90% completion last year; all three will be released this year. One is a large collection of new compositions that I’ll put out as downloads via my site, like my 2009 package 50-vc. Doberman. It might be another 50, or maybe a few more, I’m not sure yet, but my engineer friend John Abbey and I have about 50 tracked and mixed as of now. The second record is my next Bloodshot release, a duo record with Linda Gail Lewis. It’s completely different from my last couple of records, since it’s designed to reflect and enhance Linda’s personality and strengths, which are like happy hands around your throat. Finally, the third is a reimagined version of Bob Dylan’s Street-Legal, which has played around the edges of my mind since its release back in 1978. Orchestrally this was a record (Bob’s I mean) grand and ambitious in conception -- three lady singers, a highly focused eight-piece band backing Bob plus trumpet on one song, abstract lyrics about tarot and apocalypse and personal troubles we can only guess at -- but, like Bob’s other work of the period, a bit patchily and hastily executed. It’s hard to figure out why they didn’t bother with another pass or two at the songs so that the players could settle better into the arrangements, but they didn’t, and as a result, you can hear how masters like Jerry Scheff handle themselves in a tight spot. The patchiness invites you to fill in the holes in your imagination, or spin off into your own alternate arrangements, which is what I did.

Those first two projects kept me writing at a strong clip throughout the year. I also wrote for Logan and for Mark Roberts’s play The Last Night of the Jabez Country Opry; and I recorded a version of “My Brain” for an upcoming Mose Allison tribute that his girl Amy is putting together. (“Girl.”) I bought a new Martin guitar, one of the “sinkers” at George Gruhn’s shop, in the strange “quad” size. Some modest but real strides were made on the clawhammer banjo, as I toiled at the standards “Snowdrop” and “Cumberland Gap” and became obsessed with a wild youtube song in a weird tuning by Walt Koken, “That Gal With The Run Down Shoe.” I vacationed in Utah and Colorado. My youngest son totaled the family car, got a 30 on his ACT, maintained a C- average at school, socialized heavily, and may or may not end up at one the west coast colleges we visited in the fall, leaving Donna and me free to sell this 2200-square-foot prison and move on into the next chapter of our lives. My 2018 summary may be written from a luxurious loft in the sparkling city, or, who knows, a padded chamber provided free by the county.

December cameos

While I'll be absent from the hustings for most of the winter and into spring, just puttering around the house, shoveling snow, and fixing elegant lunches, I will have some limited exposure later this month for you, the public, to relish and savor.

On the 11th I'll sit in with the Flat 5, another of their Monday nights at the Hideout in Chicago, Ill.

On the 18th you can see me in New York City at the Town Hall where, once again, I'll join with SNL cast members and other hilarious humans in a benefit for the ACLU. If you don't like wearing pussy-hats, supporting the ACLU is a practical gesture and a way of saying, in this polarized time, "I'm right here on this side." Also it says to the progressives: "You will never build a bubble so strong that country music will not penetrate it somehow." I'll be accompanied for this show by the masterful Matt Munisteri, and I couldn't be more thrilled by the prospect.

On the 22nd I'll be at SPACE in Evanston, Ill. to perform a couple songs with Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen amid Dolly Varden's gala show. The three of us are fondly remembered by pious locals as The Jesus Christ Trio, under which moniker we delivered classic hymns at the Hideout in years gone by.

On the 28th through 30th I'll be a small but shining cog in Cathy Fink's annual Hank Williams Tribute. This year she and Marcy have lined up Robin and Linda Williams, Patrick McAvinue, Mark Schatz, and me to have at the Hillbilly Shakespeare. On the 28th we'll be in Harrisonburg, Virginia, at the Court Square Theater. On the 29th it's off to Chambersburg, Penn., where we'll be at the Capitol Theatre Center. (Why not "Centre," or "Theater"? Let's rub this lack of consistent adherence to huffy Anglophilic orthography right in management's faces!) And we finish on the 30th at that bastion of Washington, D.C. Americana, the Birchmere, with a final blast of the twangy klaxon.

Judge's great creation

“Tales From The Tour Bus” is necessary viewing for any halfway serious C&W aficionado. It presents wild anecdotes, told mainly by eyewitnesses, about the lives and misbehavior of classic country artists, in animated sequences that dramatize both the stories and the talkers. What might someone outside the fold make of it? I was swept away upon viewing the first episode, which focused on Johnny PayCheck (whose voice  does tend to sweep me away all on its own, I admit). Not since the early writings of Nick Tosches has such a skilled and sympathetic artist captured and communicated the peculiar attraction of hardcore country, its humility and humor, its heart-wrenching plain-spoken expressiveness, and above all, its usually hilarious and sometimes disturbing excesses. Like Tosches, Mike Judge unabashedly inserts his own voice (literally) into his work, amid the voices of the legends and loonies he’s documenting, although his persona is mellower than Nick’s and his portrayals are less acid-tipped.

I imagine the average consumer is welcome here. To find out better, I tested the Billy Joe Shaver episode on my 18-year-old, Tennessee. He seemed charmed and highly amused. Not that he would ever use such fey terms as “charmed” or “amused,” but his demeanor and non-verbal expostulations were those of a jungle savage enraptured by the tales of a colorful evangelist travelled from afar.  

To stand by that metaphor, the incredible content of the stories and the talent of the teller -- I mean Mr. Judge -- are what makes this show fly. Since I’ve never put together an animated show, I’m in no position to analyze closely how this one achieves its effects so well, but I’m going to take a couple stabs anyway:

Brevity/timing: When Billy Joe describes Hank Williams looking at him from the stage and his (10-year-old Billy Joe’s) intense feeling that Hank is singing right to him, the cartoon Billy Joe clicks into a sweet trance, which we see in close-up for about 1.5 seconds. Such a short cutaway effectively sacralizes the moment but avoids making one of those routine, unearned epiphanies in which TV comedies specialize.

Sources: The writer Jimmy McDonough, flanked by a creepy black cat on a desk, tells some stories on Tammy Wynette, and Billy Joe Shaver tells some on himself (which is fitting since he’s world champion at that). But most of the talking is done by close friends of the stars, by their hairdressers, by sidemen and road managers and cowriters and and codependents. In fact, the sidemen predominate, and this is a canny move, because these are the people who see the wildest shenanigans the closest-up and who can balance their suffering in the situations they describe with a deep appreciation of the inborn musical abilities of the people causing them to suffer. Also, musicians as a breed have an advantage over prose writers and maybe even hairdressers: they’re smart, worldly, salted-in-the-shell, and funny as hell. They’ve got the clearest from-the-trenches perspective. It’s frustrating that so much of the information we’re able to get on music artists we admire, and on the inner experience of creating and performing music, is filtered through corporate propagandists and dreamy deskbound pencil-pushers. And when the subject is alive, which is often when the interest is highest, protecting feelings and personal earnings is a priority. We’re living in a lucky sliver of time, in the sense that George Jones’s best friend, though aged, can talk candidly and completely on TV about being shot at by Jones at very close range, or his guitarist about Jones hurling a whiskey bottle hard at his head -- not to put too fine a point on it, but Jones’s aim was terrible.

Dramatization: I love watching stuff like “Country’s Family Reunion” (of whose existence we’re lucky, since, for among other reasons, “TFTTB” gets use of its footage), but animations are more animal-brain entertaining. The pace is brisker, and the stories are shaped and supervised by a first-rate dramatist. Scene recreations, such as PayCheck’s 1986 trial and sentencing for aggravated assault, lift the stories away from their narrators and thus let us bask in the amazingness of the incidents without worrying over the quirks and possible untrustworthiness of the tellers. Either Judge encourages his interviewees to do voice impressions or that’s the standard redneck way; whichever, it adds another layer of interest and wit.  Tastefully deployed props (McDonough’s cat, Linda Gail Lewis’s crucifix necklace), suspense-film tropes (Jones’s showpants-clad leg ominously padding through the dark on a drunken path through wet grass to beat up one of his players after a show), and a bevy of comic sound-effects (that same player creaming Jones with a metal door and Jones’s body hitting the grass) add to the fun.

Intercutting between storytellers: As we know from listening to nutty old war veterans, tales grow ever more danger-laden and bullshit-packed with the passage of years. Common sense says (and Jerry Lee Lewis, in a surprising moment, explicitly confirms) that there’s no way a lot of these events could have happened just as described. The participants would have been dumped into jail with no second thought, or maimed by Mother Nature, or shot by firing squad, rather than have gone on into old age enjoying esteemed careers as entertainers. But the intercutting, in which sentences within anecdotes are passed between separate interviewees, and details of anecdotes laid out by party A and commented on by a wholly-removed party B, does plant an insane seed of credence: maybe this shit is true!

Hyperbole eschewed: though the stories are exaggerated, the talents of the stars aren’t. Watching the show I’m reminded of how much empty folderol we have to wade through in trying to learn about the performers we love -- claims about who allegedly ranks where, and unconvincing efforts to pump up inert figures with gassy poetry. Actually, Mr. Judge slips once here, making a “best ever” sort of claim on Waylon Jennings that shines a little too hard a light on the showrunner’s own tastes -- and, after all, when the others on the shelf are Jones, PayCheck, Shaver, and Lewis, making merit-based comparisons is very silly. Besides that, though, no silly boasts mar the series at all. I finished the PayCheck episode thinking, “But they didn’t say anything about the main point and the reason anyone cares about the guy, which is how well he sang!” before remembering -- they showed him singing! They didn’t need to do more! Splendid.

Wiping from animated to non-animated footage at key moments: this is a powerful technique. Why, I’m not sure. Some of the press around the show has divulged the following incident, otherwise I’d feel I was spoiling it. PayCheck’s long-suffering manager, after disgorging a Decameron of bad behavior committed by his client, gets onto the subject of “Old Violin,” the post-prison composition in which Johnny goes head to head with The Distinguished Thing. The song is a masterwork, a privileged trip back behind the eyes of a man looking full on into the abyss that is surely devouring us all, and it’s made more powerful yet by the lack of artistic polish in the lyric -- on paper, it would be a pretty crude scrawl, but animated by the breath of the author, it springs into being with a pathos that is almost dreadful. Talking about it, the cartoon face of the manager emits a tear, at which point the animation gives way to the filmed face of the crying man. The power of this moment is as vivid as it is indefinable. If you’ll forgive an absurdly disproportionate comparison, I was reminded of the end of Schindler’s List, the old survivors in Israel at their families’ graveside, where the film quality goes to home-movie color -- the mask of art dropped to reveal humanity in its piteous, never-changing fragility.

Anyway: watch “Tales From The Tour Bus.”

mistah williams, he dead

Another day and another great passed into the darkness. This one's from my corner of the world, so, Steely Dan people, here's your chance to have at me!

Bill Friskics-Warren did the usual bang-up job in his obituary on Don Williams this morning, but he strikes a false note here:

"Singing in a warm, undulating baritone, he made marital fidelity not just appealing but sexy — as exciting, in its way, as the themes of cheating and running around that defined the classic honky-tonk music of the 1950s and ’60s."

Cheating was a subject in some 1950s C&W but, for a time in the 1970s, it was the subject; thus Don found his highly individualized niche. His brand, which was startlingly developed with his first solo record ("Come Early Morning," "Endless Sleep," "No Use Running," "Amanda," what a roster) stood apart not only because of its soothing moral wholesomeness. Where other country music of its era was, at one end, showily and densely orchestrated in the Atkins or Sherrill manner, or, at the other, apt to nod opportunistically at the guitar tones, kick drum weight, and machismo of contemporary rock a la Waylon or Paycheck, the sound Allen Reynolds and Garth Fundis achieved for Don was spare and as maximally reserved as commercial music can get. It turned the heat way down on the emotions, the image enhancements, the hot licks, the volume, and even the narrative drama. "Exciting, in its way" -- I guess; but I doubt many popular music listeners would find this music exciting in any way. It's so bold in its unexcitingness as to create a new category of fascination.

Lloyd Green said that when he arrived at the studio to work on that first record, Reynolds and Fundis worked with the players to take away more and more from the playing. They kept at it for two weeks. "Just when it seemed the architecture would collapse of its own insubstantiality, that's when we said: 'stop there -- that's our sound,'" Lloyd recalled, if I remember his words very closely. The story may seem slightly too pat to credit, but no one could doubt listening to Don's music that his settings were fashioned with tremendous care, that they sounded like nothing else out there, and that these guys were bucking the trend.

One of my favorites is "I Believe In You," written by Roger Cook and Sam Hogin. The rhythm section groove is positively wild in its lack of pizazz. It's hard to find a more descriptive word than "white" for it. I suggested to some songwriters the other day (they were all white, of course) that they should consider aping the slang and cultural eccentricities of their own tribes, whatever they may be, rather than taking the easy and common path of mimicking black language and vocalizing. No one's likely to take that advice, since it means turning away from so much verbal invention and, really, so much of the best that American musical history offers. "I Believe In You" runs at whiteness full-force and without apology or equivocation. It cuddles up in its pajamas, settles back in its Barcalounger, pats its little paunch, raises aloft its cutely stencilled ceramic cup of hot cocoa, and smiles serenely, "I believe in Mom and Dad, and I believe in you."

Two more of my faves are "It Only Rains On Me" and, as I slyly mentioned in the liner notes to Georgia Hard, "Good Old Boys Like Me," both from Portrait. Songs like these established Bob McDill's writerly voice in country. McDill's breakout, "Come Early Morning," made a good complement to Don's minimalistic aesthetic, because its lyric held back any sparkling details. The narrator was running down a back road and feeling kinda lonesome; other than calling his girl "honeydew" he risked no fancy, or even specific, disclosures -- the scene in this song could be Maine or Cuba or the inside of your head. ("Some Broken Hearts Never Mend" and "It Must Be Love" were just two subsequent DW hits to follow this austere template. One adjective less and the building collapses.) I'd guess this was a conscious application of songwriter diction to production and vocal style, because old Bob had a lot more methods up his sleeve. "Good Old Boys" has as much exquisitely chosen detail (Tennessee Williams, the upwardly-mobile sloughing-off of the Southern accent, John R., the type of tree and the type of whiskey) as any country song ever has had, and it marshals these details in the service of an artistic effect as total and profound as any has attained.

Among the what-a-grumpy--old-man-am-I propositions that I audaciously offered my songwriting group the other day was: "Popular music emphasizes bragging more than ever before; I miss humility as a dominant shade." The bragging of course goes way back, but how many contemporary analogues to "I'll Be True While You're Gone," "Are You Tired Of Me," "Blue-Eyed Elaine," "Till The Best Comes Along," "Before The Next Teardrop Falls," "Let's Say Goodbye Like We Said Hello," or "Walk Through This World With Me" can be drummed up? To this roll any number of Don's forty-five top-10 hit songs can be added. "Amanda" expresses tender and genuine regret that the lady was robbed by Fate of finding a more gentlemanly beau than the singer. "Lord I Hope This Day Is Good" finds him apologizing to God for feeling a touch blue. 

Not that self-crafted humility can't ever get cloying, or that the Don Williams show wasn't an "act," but given that it was presented so skillfully, and seemed so in tune with the natural personality of the singer, this music made itself globally felt, expressing some of the finest attributes and governed emotions to which all of us -- especially we men -- can aspire. My friend Don Lewis was in a remote Ethiopian village when he happened to overhear two men arguing almost violently over whether a voice on a boombox was Don Williams's. "I have all his CASS-ettes," said one, fists clenched on the table, "and that is NOT Don Williams!" It seems Don made a big noise in Ethiopia, and possibly other African countries, by presumably the same means as Jim Reeves in Nigeria -- a smooth slow singing voice and a record label that had too much product on its hands. But the connection goes wide and deep; I had a cab driver in Denver a few years ago who was Ethiopian and also so crazily fond of DW that he exulted for 15 minutes nonstop. 

Like Fitzgerald's Jazz Age short stories, or Horton Foote's plays about Texas, this music, I believe, will long retain its quality of somberly and photographically capturing a particular time and place (the 1970s in white middle-aged middle-class America) while, by mysterious contrast, seeming timeless.

my little town

I was walking the dog a couple weeks ago when the title popped into my head for some reason. It's been a while since 1975, and so I decided to see how much I could remember of "My Little Town." I'm sure I must have heard it now and then since the 1970s, but it wasn't a big hit and I haven't spun the Still Crazy After All These Years LP since at least the early 1980s. "If this is a masterfully-wrought song," I thought, "I'll be able to bring back most or all of it," and so I did -- but only the words. The words, because of their inherent emotionalism as well as, I suppose, some random and distant memories they evoked, brought a chill to my neck. It's a beautiful and exquisitely sensitive American landscape, a picture of every boy's life in every small town, drawn by Norman Rockwell with Charles Whitman lurking behind the trees. 

For all that, though, parts of the melody escaped me. The contours I pretty much retained, but without a guiding instrument, I was led into some dead ends where I had clearly aimed too high or too low. Once home I picked up a guitar and tried to tamp down the bumpy spots -- "And he used to lean upon me" and "Flying my bike," for instance. Couldn't nail it down, put the guitar away and forgot about it for awhile.

Sometimes when I'm working on a song and hit a wall I sneak away from the notebook and do other things that are related to music and so in some way justified activities, but are really just time-killers delaying my return to the dreaded page. In fact that's why I'm writing on my blog now! Last month I was stuck while songwriting in a hotel room and I suddenly decided to chart "My Little Town" off of youtube. The results are very interesting. The Nashville number system wasn't made for songs like this but I'll include it (omitting compounds and altered bass roots for simplicity) with the chord names below just to buttress a point. Here's the first 1:42 of the song:

E (II)                

In my little town...

Em (ii)        Asus A (V)          

I grew up believing

D (I)                 Bm (vi)    Am (v)

God keeps His eye on us all

F (bIII)               C (bVII)         C+                  E7  (II)                  A (V)

And He used to lean upon me as I pledged allegiance to the wall

Bm (vi)   E (II)                A (V)

Lord I recall, in my little town

                        A/G#  F#m (iii)          

Coming home after school

Am (v)     D (I)                                  G (IV)       E (II)      F (III)

Flying my bike past the gates of the factory

Bb (#V)                   F (III)  F+                 A7 (V)                   D (I)

My mom doing the laundry, hangin' our shirts in the dirty breeze

                   G (IV)                                                                    D (I)

And after it rains there's a rainbow, and all of the colors are black

      A/E (V/II)                         D (I)

It's not that the colors aren't there

                  G (IV) Dmaj7 (I) E (II)

It's just imagination they lack

                           Em (ii)      A (V)            D (I)

Everything's the same back in my little town.

Hello, Berklee School of Fucking Music! First off, look at the numbers. The system presupposes a stable key center but nothing stays stable for more than several seconds here; calling C flat-7 when it's really -- briefly! -- the new I or at least quasi-tonic, et cetera, makes an absurd hash of the numbers. People (like me) who lean on numbers or at least have them somewhere in mind at all times while composing are thus at a disadvantage in some styles of writing; the system, too ingrained, can be a roadblock. I've always tended to think of popular-music compositions that baffle the number system as veering away from the guitar, as likely having been composed at the piano, but that's not obviously true here; in fact my strong suspicion is that the song was written on a guitar, using two nice tricks that facilitate all this modulating. And by the way, just how much modulating? The key center in "My Little Town" changes 6 times in its first 1:14!  Since Barry Beckett's intro takes a little time, that sums to 7 key centers in 49 seconds. (Specifically: E to D ("God keeps"), to C ("lean"), to A ("wall"), to G ("factory"), to F ("laundry"), back to D ("breeze").) It has to be a record. $20 to any intrepid reader who finds a song with as many or more in a shorter span.

One of the tricks I'm referring to is easy -- changing a major I to a minor that becomes the supertonic or ii of the new key (formerly bVII, now I). That's exemplified in the first mod: piano chord on E; vocal "in my little town; piano chord E-minor; we're off to the new key of D. The other trick is extremely fantastic and not nearly as often used. ($9 to any reader who....) This is modulating I to VI via the augmented-fifth over the first of the keys. We're in C at the "lean upon me" lyric. Now the G# is added to the C to augment the 5th. At this point the chord is composed of three tones: E, G#, and C. Do you see the genius here? We are a hair's breadth away -- a half-step, which in western music is a hair -- from an E triad (E, G#, B). E serves as the V to the A, and voila, we're now in A. (Making the E an E7 is only slightly less subtle, and the whole-step and half-step parallel shift are crazy-beautiful.)

The above is less than half the song in length but is the section that delivers the point, and the point is -- where is the popular music of similar complexity and harmonic ambition these days? I resist these old-man outbursts and try to recognize them as a perspectival limitation, almost a neurological flaw...but in the case of elaborate harmony invention I think a lot has been lost in the sphere of -- let me stress -- commercial popular music. As the above illustrates, the era from Revolver to punk music might have been if anything more harmonically adventurous than the Great American Songbook era. With Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson at the wheel, a lot of radio music in the late 1960s started sounding less like rhythm changes and the blues and more like symphonies. Then it stopped. 

I really should get back to my writing now. More on "My Little Town" in a day or two. As usual any terminological clunkers or blind-spots in my reaches for a technically precise language are attributable to my complete lack of formal education, and I welcome corrections.

opry

Thanks to all who listened to the show tonight on the radio, and to all who suggested songs to play via Facebook and Twitter. I truly did not expect that volume of titles. The number of people who pulled for "I Just Want To Meet The Man," "Needed," and "Katy K" got me thinking hard on those three as alternates to the two I had in mind, "The Buck Starts Here" and "Long I Ride"; and Katy won out due to: vocal harmony, tempo, overt goofiness, recent-album promotion.

I'm in bed now, post-show, thinking about the people I should have hobnobbed with and didn't: Jeannie Seely (who deadpanned a fascinating and spiritually depressing number, nominally satirical, about old people, namechecking Mylanta and pretending to almost say the word "fart"), Eddie Stubbs, Bobby Osborne, Connie Smith, and the blonde members of a visually intriguing group called "Post Monroe." On the other hand, I did get around to some brief but qualitative time with Darrin Vincent and Jamie Dailey (real good guys), George Gruhn (who tried superhard to get me to buy a new Martin dreadnought made of Adirondack spruce and some weirdly rare Central American mahogany), Mark Wills, and King Williams.

Tomorrow I'm writing songs with Logan Ledger and David Grier, and either writing the sequel to "Cocktails" with, or simply having cocktails with, Bill Anderson, it remains to be seen and I will fill you in shortly, keep tuned....

southbound

A quick reminder, as I'm on my way out the front door, that I'm off on my more-or-less annual southeast jaunt this week. Joining me will be Scott Simontacchi on mandolin, Dennis Crouch on bass, and Shad Cobb on the 4-string fiddle. We'll hit Greer SC tomorrow, then Durham, Charlotte, and Decatur, and wind up on Saturday at the Opry; further microdetails on bandsintown and Facebook and et cetera. Since the southeast US is the historical wellspring of my music these occasional trips pull a little heavier on my heart -- and, ahem, a good turnout is especially heartening for those same sentimental reasons.

After that, a little writing in Nashville, including a session with one of my favorite guitarists on the planet, David Grier. David's writing vocal numbers for his next record and I couldn't be more thrilled to lend a hand, or see if I can at least. Then I'll be back home in about a week and in touch about whatever subject comes up next....

riding with the kings

As I mentioned at the City Winery show in Chicago, people kept dropping me lines last week, the week of my Flinner/Pikelny/Crouch/Cobb dates. My brother was the first one, texting me the day before I left home, "Have fun with that sick band!" He's a concert violinist, which puts him at a decided distance from the F/P/C/C idiom and language, but prodigy playing translates easily across idioms. I took him to SPACE in Evanston a couple years ago to see Noam play bluegrass with Barry Bales, Ronnie McCoury, Luke Bulla, and Bryan Sutton, and his jaw was knocked off by Noam's soloing. "I didn't know that could even be done," I think was his remark. Those were my thoughts exactly on hearing Doc and Merle Watson's sped-up version of "Black Mountain Rag" on their 1971 live record, or Tony Rice's solo on "Dawg's Bull" seven years later, or any of the four members of the reconstituted New Grass Revival in 1981 at the Bottom Line... 

That was as clean and fast and thrillingly fresh as playing could be, back then. Now, thirty-some years on, I had players of like prowess at my service, challenging my hands and mind and enacting my scripts. Along with our good-looking soundman, Pierce, we were: Shad Cobb, Robbie Fulks, Matt Flinner, Dennis Crouch, Noam Pikelny. If you write songs (I thought this to myself in the form of universal advice one day at the wheel of the van) you should imagine that one day they'll be played by the most amazing players living, just to goad your creative powers and sense of quality control to the nth. As the changes in my songs went past during performance, especially on the older songs, I perceived them from the minds of those around me and thought, "Hmm."

The Hegelian idea of the self-aware consciousness among others, each calling itself by the same letter, "I," recurred during the week. On Friday my friend Kevin in North Carolina Facebook-messaged, asking how the shows were going. I replied that from my personal POV, it was like making love to both Naomi Watts and Myrna Loy. "What a crude and perfectly unilluminating response," I thought the moment after sending. But later I reflected that the comparison contained an offshoot which was a little illuminating. The awkward fact of having to appear naked before a hotly desired stranger is a contingency that is usually overlooked in the heat of pursuit. My keen anticipation of the performances obscured the inescapable fact that I would be a member of the quintet myself. In that role, standing there at the helm, I would be hearing myself play with them -- crucially, hearing myself not only through my ears but theirs. Away from the stage I would also be seeing things through their eyes: scheduling and quotidian administrative matters, interactions with venue personnel, my parallel parking skills, green rooms.

No one complained about this stuff. Nor am I bad at parking or planning. (Nor, I hasten to add, and implore you to remember as I continue these tales, is prodigy playing the worthiest sort of playing!) I'm a conscious being, however, sometimes cripplingly so. When you add the observing minds of fellows you admire onto a hitherto thoughtless routine, you may feel ice forming in your veins. It's Myrna Loy in your arms -- deliver the goods, meathead! Personally, I had mainly onstage ice. My soloing throughout the week was much more inhibited and clumsy than I had counted on from having exercised pretty rigorously for two weeks leading up to the dates. My hands had adequately limbered but my head threw me a little. Of the useful lessons to derive from this, "Be more secure in your own abilities" is probably least implementable, since I've been insecure for 54 years now -- and to some degree it's helped me to be that way. "Get more comfortable with those exact people by playing with them more" is a better way to go. That aside, I like to remember that creating intentional discomfort or challenge for yourself is a piece of the puzzle too. I'm always on the lookout for stimulating new people to play with!

When you're young, that goal is pretty cheap and easy. No more. An outing like last week's -- six men with established careers, 3 wives and 5 mortgages among us, traveling hundreds of miles and sleeping in places where rodents don't lurk -- I couldn't afford to do too often, even if the players' schedules allowed, which they wouldn't. But I was more than happy to consider the cost not only a payment for a delightful experience but a kind of educational camp for myself, or weeklong lesson. I hadn't had a lesson in some time, and I knew I'd gain all sorts of invaluable nuggets: practice techniques, recording strategies, names of artists to seek out, philosophical chew-toys.

The first time I met and worked with Dennis was in 2003, on the Johnny Paycheck tribute record, Touch My Heart. At the end of the four days of tracking, as he was packing up his bass to leave, I thanked him for what I'd learned from him. For instance: be more attentive to the marriage of the bass pattern and the left hand of the pianist on a country shuffle. The simple things can get away from you. When they do, or even when they don't, it's good to hear them stated aloud from the mouth of a wise musician. In that vein, Dennis told a story in the van about a producer sitting alongside Allen Reynolds, the distinguished producer of Don Williams's and Garth Brooks's innovative recordings among hundreds of others. The man asked Allen, "Do you prefer that a song fade out or have a formal ending?" Allen answered, "I like music that feels good."

Not to overexplain, but the point of that story is that most of the nerdy questions you can ask in working on music -- and they are beyond number -- are reducible to much simpler questions, and the ultimate arbiter being the subjective mind or heart, none of these questions is answerable with technical precision.

Already my week's expenses are being recouped.

On Monday, after meeting one another at Matt's place in Nashville and rehearsing for a couple hours, we tracked a song at Sound Emporium.  Amy Allison, my dear friend and the daughter of the late great Mose, had asked me to do a song for a tribute record to her dad. After weeks of waffling, I went with "My Brain." It probably wouldn't make my top 5 list of Mose Allison favorites, but it's a delightful tune with a transparent 8-bar structure that I thought would lend itself to the situation: an ad hoc ensemble blowing at a quick tempo and getting decent unforced-sounding results in an hour. (Despite that reasoning, I did end up altering the chords slightly in the direction of complexity.)

I had asked for a close-circle set-up sans headphones, which is always my presumptively favored set-up with acoustic string instruments. When I wasn't paying attention, Dennis plugged in, augmenting his miking with a direct line. I noticed on the first playback that we weren't as locked in as we could be, and Dennis remarked that the sound in the room had been hitting him a little late. All of this proved to be related, and Dennis and I talked about it briefly the next morning. I said I was surprised he'd admit a direct input into the situation. (In fact, I would have argued with it if I'd known, but the main reason I didn't know was that so little of it was used in the mix, not nearly enough to sully the listening experience.) Dennis said that the room's set-up (close-circle, a dozen or so mikes) called for two courses of action, both of which were to me strange and outside my thinking. First he needed to use more than just his ears and time-sense to play accurately in the room, since without headphones the information was getting to him late in the time it took to travel across the room. Second, he needed the pickup to help give his notes a "point," given that the many other mikes were registering his sound at different times and effectively scattering his attack. "So going without the headphones..." I said. "That's kind of a myth," he replied, "because in the classic era they tended to use headphones. People tend to think they didn't, but they usually did."

All of this is very easy to understand. It's understood, for instance, by terrible players and terrible engineers! And it's knowledge that, if used very dogmatically or without reference to how things sound in the moment, perpetuates a lot of mediocre music. If a lesser player had used these ideas to make the case for a direct line to me, I'd have quashed them with little consideration. There are reasons, I believe, beyond bass tone subtleties to perform without headphones, and they're good reasons (comfort of most of the players, creating a normalized playing space recognizably related to real life outside a tracking room). There are also good reasons not to have some players on headphones and others off. But I always feel it's foolish not to defer to master musicians on points like these, because there's a good chance they're right. Also, I always have the solid insurance that anything played by a Dennis Crouch, regardless of the fine points of instrument or room or gear or miking, is going to sound better than the same thing played by almost any other string bassist.

The experience gave me a few more small ideas to chew on. Dennis knew without my saying that our shared mental reference point was the excellence of small-group acoustic records from the 1950s through the 1970s. Something about the clarity of his point and the speed with which he delivered it made me think he had delivered it many times before. I'm very curious to know how fully true it is. Was Hartford's Morning Bugle recorded with phones? Skaggs's Bluegrass Rules? Doc Watson's Two Days In November? What about the classic records by Jimmy Martin, Jim and Jesse, et al? Probably Dennis has the answer to all these questions, but if readers do, please let me know.

On Tuesday morning, after our session, Shad texted me that he was suffering greatly from toothache and had scheduled a last-minute root canal for the following morning which would probably make him a little late for practice. I was sitting in a squalid resort hotel near Opryland and had minor aches of my own, having had too much cheap beer the night before at a dinner with a recently-fired member of Dwight Yoakam's road band. I had gotten back to my room a little after hours and was having trouble getting out of that cocooned zone where you disdain physical exercise and guitar practice in favor of meaningless emails and Isabelle Huppert movies on Amazon. Some of my emails were more artful and involving than the lousy Isabelle Huppert movie, which put aside plot or character or ideas in order to flatter non-French people with portrayals of French life as dull-witted non-French people might conceive it. 

In the event, Shad did show up on time for rehearsal. His endodontist had advised that instead of root canal, the molar, which was cracked in half, needed pulling. Shad was quietly in pain through that night's show, and he hadn't slept much in several nights. In the green room afterward, he said he might miss the drive to Cincinnati next day if he couldn't schedule the extraction first thing next morning. This precipitated a small lapse in my bandleader skills, for I replied (after an appropriate expression of concern): OK, then I'll arrange the rental car and I'll see you, fingers crossed, after soundcheck tomorrow but in time for our set. What I should have said was, Who among us can drive a fellow human being who has just had his tooth pulled to Cincinnati? Luckily Noam piped up: "I'd better drive him to Cincinnati, because he'll just have had his tooth pulled." And he deftly made the rental arrangements with a few simple strokes. 

One result of that was that the Thursday drive, Cincinnati to Columbus, was the first one with all six of us together. It was then that the mesh of personae assumed focus. Shad kept his own counsel. Matt was laid-back and soft-spoken. Noam laid if anything even farther back and, when he wasn't doing private listening on his laptop, spoke with the almost comically relaxed yet sharply logical authority of a commercial airline pilot. Dennis was the dominant personality, and he did his talking largely in the mode of wide-rambling, earnestly rendered, Arkansan anecdote. The anecdotes featured singers and players behaving in memorable ways and were in no hurry to get to the end. It was lucky he was there because without him the rides might have gotten a little sepulchral.

People who read books by people like Keith Richards to get an insider glimpse of the machinery and minutiae of popular music would be better advised to read books, if they wrote them, by guys like Dennis and Noam. Marquee figures have seen music only from one very particular angle; their personalized and protected aesthetic, and their often limited knowledge of musicmaking as a craft, hobbles their judgments and opinions. A prodigious player who works a variety of sessions and road gigs, in support of the marquee names, has a more Olympian view of the game, having ventured deep into disparate musical mindsets; and s/he has a much more concrete and nuanced understanding of everything from leading tones to standing waves. If I'd had Elton John in the van I'd have gotten a deep look into the mind of Elton John, but with Dennis in the van you can get passing looks into the minds of Elton John, Jerry Reed, Ralph Stanley, Sting, Hoot Hester, Tom Petty, Bobby Bare, David Mansfield, Diana Krall, Don Henley, Stuart Duncan, just on and on. That's a better -- more educational and entertaining -- bargain, and with some of those names, I mean the rockstar ones, a passing glimpse is all I want, if that.

Dennis and Noam were the two of us who had spent the most time in the stratosphere of wealth and acclaim and abundant on-the-job amenities, and I thought that it showed in their imperturbable relationship to the world of sensation, their stolidity against people who threw meaningless complications in their paths, their easeful talent for concentrating on unsexy essentials. If you make it to a certain stratum in the business, and have mastered your instrument, and have strong raw intelligence, things are a lot less likely to get to you. The line of Bob Dylan's, "I've dined with kings, I've been offered wings/And I've never been too impressed," has stayed with me through the years both because it sounds starkly true and because the shrugging non-poetry of the second line is daring in its way. The thought came unbidden to me, after the first day with my quintet, that nothing I could conceivably say would impress anyone in the van. It was a healthy reminder not to try to impress people generally, or rather, to impress them only by virtue of your simple clear language and your polite refusal to be drawn into anyone's bullshit.

Then the thought came to me that success in the arts might come at the cost of never again being credibly able to say things like "Oh my God!" and "Wow!" But that's a small price to pay. Most grown-ups who say those things are probably insincere, and definitely annoying.

As I wrote in another post, I'd never met or played with Matt, had played with Noam only three times at shows across several years, and played on two records with Dennis about 15 years back. So these three were my wild cards. I had various musical impressions of them through the week. I think that Dennis might take the prize for sheer attentiveness. He seemed to have listening skills that were closer to a lower animal than a civilized human. After the first show, one of the quintet (I'd better not say who because he works with other bassists) said to me, with what passes for awe in a man who abjures "Oh my God": "I think Dennis has to be the best bassist I've ever played with."

On the one hand, the bassist enjoyed and employed space. He'd ground a chord with a pillowy fat note, then lay back and let the note die as the rest of the measure ambled by. On the other, it gave him clear and consistent pleasure to do the grounding in mediants and dominants, and to make cocky, lightly surprising moves that let you know he was alert and unworried.

Matt proved to be one of the best I've heard at on-the-spot composing. Give him 16 bars and he'd respond with a story, one so thoughtfully structured that it sounded impossible to have done on the fly. He may have had the most ingrained melody-love of any of us as soloists; and his light right hand, I supposed, had the effect of masking any effortfulness of thought.

About Noam, I can hardly add much to the record, but I could repeat an earlier proposition I put out about his frequent collaborator Chris Thile, that he sounds like he strives to tax his own ingenuity, to paint himself deliberately into tough corners -- via bright tempos, journeys to the nether-reaches of the fretboard, displaced 32nd-note filigrees from which an ordinary man could hardly recover. He also has a way of reflecting and honoring the recent American history of his instrument (Scruggs, Reno, Keith, Trischka, Fleck), showing equal love of, for instance melody and roll, old-school drive and mellow impressionism, diatonic and chromatic, and -- I'd say "speed and space" but, fuck man, ain't no equal there, he likes to go at it fast.

There was a small moment in a bar Wednesday night with Noam that interested me. We were hungry just before midnight, but it was Cincinnati and local authorities had put provisions under lock. We ended up at a filthy joint that served five kinds of "steamed sandwiches," which were prepared by an angry person to the beat of a modern song titled, if memory serves, "Bitch Suck My Fuckin' Dick Or I Kill U." People in the iron grip of whiskey and black tar heroin were passed out along the sidewalk, and Noam and I felt that a nightcap was fitting. Our bartender was a stout bald beady-eyed man with bad knees who was still agitated over the whole Ronald Reagan thing. He left us alone for minutes on end, then would catch some stray word in our conversation, such as "Trump" or "music," and, as though he were an improv comic and we an audience providing prompts, begin a long rant. I had just said "Beautiful" to Noam, in lieu of "Wow," in response to something or other he'd said.

"Beautiful!" the bartender bellowed, materializing suddenly. "Everyone goes to Beautiful! Not me. It starts at 7, I'm working at 7." Then he zoomed away on those knees of his.

"I do want to see that," I said to Noam, "because I'm crazy about Carole King." But, guess what -- he hadn't heard about Carole King. "She's a songwriter, just a great fabulous songwriter," I said, forgetting for a moment that nothing was impressive. Noam waved his hand near his head to show that much of popular culture flowed around his person like water and there was no sense trying to dam it all just to examine a few shiny fragments -- I think that's what the wave meant. A tuned-in musician, alert to a hundred styles and historically aware, who only now heard about Carole King! I felt some excitement on behalf of my friend, for there are certain music experiences I've delayed for years, like Don Byron's tribute to Mickey Katz, in the certain knowledge of future pleasure. No one can keep up with everything, probably in previous times and certainly in these times; and where musicians' blind spots are is at least as interesting as what they're deep into. Anthony Wilson and Gregory Porter were two of my blind spots, by the way. During the week there was excited talk about them, and I made sure to note the names. Also Matt strongly recommended Butch Robins's record, The Fifth Child. 

We were soundchecking at the bar in Indianapolis when Noam mentioned that the noise from the refrigeration unit sounded untenable. It was making a weird vibratory clash with the Bb notes off our instruments. "Would it be OK not to do this show at 440?" he asked. The notion was sufficiently foreign to me that he had to show me how to reset my Snark clip-on tuner to another pitch standard. We tried 441 but the clash was still there. 442, not much better. Meanwhile, I couldn't even hear the noise in the room that was so offensive to the others! Songwriter deafness. (And actual deafness, as my ears have dulled over time, regrettably.) At 443 we were in the clear, and so we all tuned to that. Stepping off the stage, I finally heard the hum that was bothering everyone else. Once I heard it, I couldn't stop hearing it. "Now I'm really in Indiana," I thought, "because if I don't either leave or play some real loud music, I'm gonna go bonkers." Anyway, we did our show in 443, one more unique feature of the week. I thought my throat would detect the difference, but that's really bonkers. There are no doubt people out there who record in pitch centers that are off-standard a couple cents, in the blatant hope that it will arrest the public's unconscious ear. Screw them.

After our Chicago show I noticed a kid, about 15, with long shaggy hair, hanging around Noam. You got the feeling some inside stuff was going on. I saw my fiddler friend Matt Brown and asked who the teenager was. "That's the next Noam Pikelny," said Matt. What a thought. Evidently the kid had learned "Waveland," the first tune off Noam's latest record, by heart and had performed it in public flawlessly. This is the thing about Chicago, for the acoustic/country-ish devotees, and it's the same thing as in Wheeling W.Va. or almost anywhere else. You learn the ropes the only way you can, by transcribing records, reading books, practicing alone, going to see whoever passes through town. Then you have to move somewhere else to get into the business of music and to shake off your bondage to other people's styles. If you don't move where the other musicians are, it's really tough to progress, to shake off the chains.

I want to close these rambling thoughts with two points, based on my observations of these high priests. They're more or less addressed to an imaginary young person who's attracted to this scene. They're both simple obvious points, but again, it's good to say them aloud.

Get used to the idea that the real-world economic hierarchy that exists in the arts isn't your "real world." When one of the guys in my van told a story about a famous rock star he'd worked with, the story might center on the character's acting like an ignorant jerk, or on his turning out to be a swell smart guy. But then the next story would be about an obscure hillbilly picker with one of the same two attributes, and would be related with the same intensity. The interest wasn't based on the flimsy status of star but the honorable status of musician -- and, those categories aside, good playing is always good playing and asshole is always asshole. The terms in the above series, running from Elton John to Stuart Duncan, are of equal potential weight and interest -- right up to the point where one of them plays something stupid or throws a talkback mike at your head. You need to live in an imaginary land where you can't read the pricetags on the names, where your immersion in music that almost no one else values doesn't cause you a moment's perturbation. Once you create that land it can actually exist, sort of. It did for us all last week.

You should maximize your daily engagement with music. Performing and learning songs don't make a complete day of work. Shad and Noam wake up in the morning and start playing. Then in the van they listen to, talk about, and think about music. (The thinking is a crucial part of the regimen.) Arriving at the venue, they play music some more, up to soundcheck and, after dinner, up to showtime. Then, for all I know, back at the hotel, instead of zoning out to the charms of Isabelle Huppert, they play some more goddamned music. If you're playing 6 or 7 hours a day, then the hour or two you're on stage won't loom quite as large, and as a result you'll play better in the gaze of an audience. Honestly, the time commitment is a factor that impedes my own development, because my work hours are divided between writing and playing, and each one really demands that 6 hours.

"Practice constantly" and "Free your mind of economic valuations" are attractive dicta that blithely overlook the practical necessities of living among others and making money, needless to say. But no one said making a living off of music, or off of religious devotion, which the practice of music resembles, was easy. Another thing I just realized about these dicta is that they're superseded, like the fade-out versus natural ending question, by a simpler, three-word precept: It never ends. Music's like any other deep discipline -- say poetry or math -- in that there's no finish line, never a place where you can smile, eat cheeseburgers, coast happily, jingling your honorary pendants, sharing your complete wisdom with those clamoring on the ground below. Well, all right, that's worked for a few people. But they have ended up, by and large, seriously unhappy people, and on some level I think they're aware that they are the pathetic figures in comic stories told by happier people riding around in vans.

early may shows

So I'm a little hazy on what a meme is, at least I know what a dream is. A dream band, that is. That's what I get to hear behind me more often than not these past few years, and it's a constantly shifting bunch of yokels. Back in my late-1990s-early-and-mid-00's incarnation it was a steady cast, which I believe is what is usually meant by "band," though, like "meme," it's possible the new generation has taken a once-stable word and given it reassignment surgery. I wish the word would just go away, "band." It's a very juvenile word, smacking of suburban garages and posed photos with deadpan expressions and vows sealed in blood and never any money. When promoters say, "Are you bringing a band?" I think I know what they're getting at, but I'm never totally sure. Are people I've never met a band? Is a group of players without a bassist or drummer a band? What about three people, is that a band?

Switching it up constantly is an enjoyable and energizing MO for me at this time, which is why you often see me with different personnel, show to show. Since I'm old and pretty established, I have entree to some astounding players, some of the best in acoustic music, most of whom I could never have worked with 15 years ago. Bassists alone: Mike Bub, Missy Raines, Todd Phillips -- holy Eucharist! You just can't do any better than people like that.

In a week I'm going out with a fresh bunch and don't blink or you'll miss it. Dennis Crouch I've known casually for years and recorded with, but never travelled with or played a note in front of an audience with. I wonder what that'll sound like? Noam Pikelny, same as far as friendship, and I've gigged exactly three times with him; never have I sat in a stinking minivan for hours on end with him. There goes the friendship. Matt Flinner I've never met. Just a fan. Me of him, that is. And Shad Cobb...well, he's the odd man out in the group, we've actually had sex with each other. Great, great sex.

I wonder if the newness of this quintet will show, especially the first time we get on stage together? If you're reading this now and are there on the 9th, let me know what you think. Back when I might be doing my 400th show with the same 3 accompanists, with whom I crisscrossed the country year in and out, I'd sense strongly that our longevity allowed us to offer a positive good to an audience. They were aware and appreciative of the fast easy communication between us. On the other hand, though, I often encounter genuine disbelief when, after someone asks post-show how long I've been playing with so-and-so, I say truthfully, "We met for the first time just yesterday morning!" So I don't know how audiences consciously perceive that stuff, I only know it's a very different experience for me in those two performance scenarios. With the old-timers I relax and bask, with relative strangers all neurons are at attention. When you're old, an increased attentiveness is quite valuable.

These are the 5 -- and probably only 5 -- shows I'll be playing with Noam et al:

May 9 City Winery Nashville

May 10 Memorial Hall Cincinnati

May 11 Refectory Columbus

May 12 Birdy's Indianapolis

May 13 City Winery Chicago 

30-day movie challenge

The missus and I plunged into this irresistible meme...

Your favorite movie:

Me: Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges)

Wife: It's A Wonderful Life (Capra)

The last movie you watched:

Me: The Swindle (Chabrol)

Wife: Forbidden Room (Maddin)

Your favorite action/adventure movie:

Me: North by Northwest (Hitchcock)

Wife: Brazil (Gilliam)

Your favorite horror movie:

Me: Night of the Living Dead (Romero)

Wife: Rosemary's Baby (Polanski)

Your favorite drama movie:

Me: Tokyo Story (Ozu)

Wife: Late Spring (Ozu)

Your favorite comedy movie:

me: too many ties, but let’s go with Bringing Up Baby (Hawks)

Wife: The Lady Eve (Sturges)

A movie that makes you happy:

Me: My Father’s Glory (Robert)

Wife: My Father's Glory

A movie that makes you sad:

Me: My Mother’s Castle (Robert)

Wife: The 400 Blows (Truffaut)

A movie that you know practically the whole script of:

Me: Blazing Saddles (Brooks)

Wife: It's A Wonderful Life

Your favorite director:

Me: Preston Sturges

Wife: Alfred Hitchcock

Your favorite movie from your childhood:

Me: Paper Moon (Bogdanovich)

Wife: Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Stuart) 

Your favorite animated movie:

Me; Beavis and Butthead Do America (Judge)

Wife: Spirited Away (Miyazaki)

A movie that you used to love but now hate:

Me: Killing Kind (Harrington)

Wife: Manhattan (Allen)

Your favorite quote from any movie:

Me: “We gotta get outta here!” - any movie

Wife: "Why don't you kiss her instead of talking her to death?"

The first movie you saw in theaters:

Me: The Love Bug (Stevenson)

Wife: The Aristocats (Reitherman)

The last movie you saw in theaters:

Me: Get Out (Peele)

Wife: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Zeman)

The best movie you saw during the last year:

Me: Talk To Her (Almodovar)

Wife: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

A movie that disappointed you the most:

Me: Love and Friendship (Stillman)

Wife: Author! Author! (Hiller)

Your favorite actor:

Me: Chishu Ryu

Wife: Jack Nicholson

Your favorite actress:

Me: Ginger Rogers

Wife: Katharine Hepburn

The most overrated movie:

Me: Last Tango In Paris (Bertolucci)

Wife: La La Land (Chazelle)

The most underrated movie:

Me: Firehouse Dog (Holland)

Wife: Walking and Talking (Holofcener)

Your favorite character from any movie:

Me: Edith Massey as Cuddles Kovinsky in Polyester

Wife: Melissa McCarthy as Megan in Bridesmaids

Favorite documentary:

Me: The Last Waltz (Scorsese)

Wife: The Jinx (Jarecki)

A movie that no one would expect you to love:

Me: Tougher Than Leather (Rubin)

Wife: Midnight Run (Brest)

A movie that is a guilty pleasure:

Me: Mr. Deeds (Brill)

Wife: Bridesmaids (Feig)

Favorite classic movie:

Me: Night of the Hunter (Laughton)

Wife: Citizen Kane (Welles)

Movie with the best soundtrack:

Me: Elevator to the Gallows (Malle/Miles)

Wife: Vertigo (Hitchcock/Herrmann)

A movie that changed your opinion about something:

Me: National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (Miller)

Wife: Static (Romanek)

Your least favorite movie:

Me: Whiplash (Chazelle)

Wife: Forrest Gump (Zemeckis)

It's a tribute to either our innate compatibility or the levelling hands of time that I'd gladly change my choice out for hers in almost any category. I haven't seen Author! Author! and can hardly believe it's so insulting to the intelligence of a 13-year-old that she would leave the theater in disgust after the first reel, as Donna says she did. So there might lie a difference of sensibility, but I can't see us coming to blows over it. And speaking of blows, the 400 don't make me sad. Any movie that well-made and deeply felt, regardless of its content, makes me happy that someone took the trouble, got the money, and carried through, despite all odds.

Needless to say some of these categories are kind of stupid -- guilt, why guilt? Under- or overrated by whom? What kind of dummy lets a movie change his mind about something? Well, I began changing my mind about the sacredness of the National Lampoon trademark upon attending its second filmic release (after Animal House, which I also didn't like too much, but didn't get around to seeing until later), Class Reunion, starring Gerrit Graham with a special assist from Mr. Chuck Berry. I was dismayed to such an extreme that I wrote an offended letter to the magazine, which was at that time edited by Fred Graver. Fred graciously wrote back, admitting the film was a grievous embarrassment (!), apologizing (!!), and refunding my $5 (!!!!!!!). Try that with Grown Ups 2. Grievous embarrassments are now just another day at the office in LaLa Land.  

April begins

The month just past was one I'd hotly anticipated, since I'd be serving Jenny Scheinman's musical project for the first three weeks and Mark Roberts's play the last week. From time to time I wish I got a little more sideman work on the calendar, so that I could step away from the center and stare at my fretboard awhile. And set my mind to absorbing musical ideas coming from other brains, with different quirks and vocabularies. And have a stronger excuse to sit and practice playing. And not meet/greet after, or settle with the promoter; and get into the back of the van and sit quietly while someone takes me to the hotel they've bought for me, and so on. While we were out with Jenny, every time some little issue came up, like where to eat or which road to take, I whispered obnoxiously to Robbie Gjersoe, "I'm a sideman! I don't care!" 

That wasn't, strictly speaking, "blessing the leader," which is how one friend of mine who does a lot of sideman work speaks of the job. (He's a Christian.) Still, I was keeping the mood light, enjoying the ride, and -- a minimal expectation -- resisting any urge to complain aloud about anything whatsoever. Celebrating someone you appreciate is an easier and maybe more pleasurable pastime than organizing and pulling the caravan. When you add in the obligation of promoting your own work via performance and salesmanship, the role starts showing its heaviness. Also there's the gloomy fact that the money can be better, off to the side.

You can never not play like yourself, and it's good to have a leader who understands that and values it too -- anything less makes for second-rate music and a boring time onstage. So, given a smart leader and a context that allows a primary focus on music quality, the variance in expressive freedom between him/her and the supporting players is narrower than many onlookers probably suppose. On projects like Jenny's and Mark's I enjoy the freedoms, for instance, of using my own microphones, offering arrangement suggestions, influencing timefeel, and letting some impulsiveness loose on the music as it rolls by. That the material wasn't created by me or that my name's not on the marquee drops the intensity only a few percentage points, and not being the consistent center of attention and the dude-in-charge is a real relief.

But I'm guessing, after a month of sidemanship, that those percentage points gradually accumulate for the guys that do this work all the time. That little drop in intensity is a short-term gain in comfort but ultimately it reduces the payoff too. I'm about as eager now to return to the spotlight as I was to cede it a couple weeks back. The longer you live the more elaborate and (regrettably) rigid grows your set of values, and, childishly demanding though it may seem, curtailing as little as 5% of your impulses while you're on stage chafes -- ever so slightly but more insistently as one date follows another.  A full performance isn't only a display of skills you've learned but of values you hold. Those values are of course embedded in the composition or layout of the music and in the lyrical storytelling, and are reinforced by the common effort to lift and love the central personality and the blueprint he/she brings in. It might be too shiny a gloss to put on a human activity with both ego-enhancing and money-making aspects, but I think the desire to move for a little while from side to center comes less from tiring of all the lifting and loving than itching to show in full what you yourself feel is beautiful and right.

I'll be leading my dates, me me me, all of them, from now through the summer, by which time I'll no doubt be ready to shift to the lift. Right now though, I'm excited to play my songs once again with my handpicked people, which I'll be doing in the coming week in Texas and Louisiana. A little more activity later in the month in the midwest, and in May things really get underway and stay underway till October at least, maybe through year's end. Upland Stories has been out a year as of yesterday, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm not playing in 2017 to move copies of it, but to play across my records, work on some new tunes, and experience a variety of players. There's a couple guys on upcoming dates that I've long dreamed of travelling and working with -- okay, that sounds smarmy, and I didn't actually dream about it, not even once, but I can honestly say that thinking about working with people you admire a lot and know only a little raises your pulse. It's probably the main reason I stay happy on the job year in and out. More specifics later, meanwhile come see me if you can.