"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.

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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.