Matt

Hi, this is Matt, and you listen to Bluegrass Channel on the podcast for anyone and everyone who loves Bluegrass. Hey everybody, welcome back to Boograss Jamalong. This is the first episode in a set of three that I'm putting out over the next few weeks, and I'm really excited about these. They're to mark the 50th anniversary of the David Grissman Quintet first getting together. A lot of people love those first couple of Grissman Quintet records, and for me, they're alongside JD Crow and the New South's Rounder 00044 record, they sort of mark a watershed in string band music. It feels like a lot of stuff grew out of that period and those people and that music, and I really wanted to celebrate that, and so I'm delighted to be able to do that. First part is going to be Mike Marshall and Darrell Anger chatting about how they became part of the Grisman Quintet. Daryl joined first, Mike followed. We also talk about Tony Rice joining, the kind of changes that happen around the bass role as Todd Phillips switched to bass from Mandolin, Mike came into the band. Just a fascinating, fascinating chat. You're not going to hear from me an awful lot in this one. I let Daryl and Mike basically interview each other because they were there and they know what it was all about. And I chip in a bit now and again, but I largely lead into it, and it's a joy to listen to. It was just a really fun conversation to sit in on. Part two will be a chat with Todd Phillips, who was there from the start. And part three will be a chat with David Grisman, who was obviously there from the start. These three episodes have been a delight to put together. Hopefully, if you're fairly new to the Grisman Quintet stuff, there's something interesting in here for you. Hopefully, even if you know it really well, there's some stuff in here for you. I learned a lot and really enjoyed these conversations. Yeah, if you know any people who love the David Grisman stuff and maybe don't listen to podcasts, send them a link. Share this stuff around. Be cool to get as many people to hear it as possible, because it feels like some fun content around a really important, exciting, and more importantly than anything, enjoyable time in strong band music. That is it. I'm gonna let you listen to me and Mike and Daryl. As is sometimes the case with these conversations with people I've spoken to a few times before. We just sort of wander into the chat rather than being a structured opening. Um and I wanted to leave some of that in because it felt really interesting. We chat a little bit about the uh celebration of David Grisman's 80th birthday that it just happened that they'd been at, and there's some really interesting stuff in there too. So here we go. Here's my chat with Mike Marshall and Darrell Anger about joining the David Grisman quintet.

SPEAKER_02

It was great to think about David from all those years uh perspective. It was really a special feeling in the in the night. And especially that he would have gone uh so far as to insist on playing all this new music he'd written. Yeah. I mean, it's that he was always pushing at the frontiers of his own thing. Well, reaching back about as far as any of us in terms of knowing where the tradition comes from. I mean, he's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Huge, you know, expert. I think you know, he got a lot from Ralph Rinsler from that, you know, that idea of being a curator, you know, the curator creator. Uh you know, I think we might have talked about that last time. You and I talked about the you know, that interplay um where you kind of have to delve into something deeply enough to be able to you know stand somewhere to to move forward. You know uh you can't just be moving forward in a vacuum, it's like yeah, you're in that elevator in space going whatever direction, you know, that you're just bound to be repeating, you know, you know, reinventing the wheel a lot, you know. But if really starting from somewhere, and you know, David was such a great uh curator of of stuff and his knowledge of bluegrass and and other music was very deep.

SPEAKER_02

And uh I just about the fact that something wasn't popular had nothing to do with whether it was great. And uh he was gonna shine a light on it, you know, starting with his own band, you know, and and uh teaching us about having respect for your own art and respect for those who came before you and sort of demanding that uh the audience kind of get on board, you know. And he was a real teacher in that way, yeah. And still is, you know. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So that that was cool. Yeah. It was interesting the way, you know, his playing, you know, he's he's not really, I mean, he's not even leaving the house really that much, although he does, obviously. But uh you know, he's he's not uh touring or or playing gigs or anything, but he's he's just generating so much music and his playing has gotten so uh uh emphatic, you know.

SPEAKER_02

Um that's really struck me uh seeing him on stage, just uh it you know, I'm trying to teach his music a lot. People are presenting his music to me as students, and uh uh uh I'm often faced with the question of well, what uh what is making David playing these same notes different than uh all the hundreds of people who can play them? And it really is that emphatic uh uh placement of the note and the presenting of the piece in this super clear way. I mean, it still comes down to his gigantic tone. And also his sense of timing, you know, when he plays a melody, he his timing is sitting so deep in the pocket and he's really presenting it to the audience uh like the great singers do when they sing you a song, you know. Yeah, it's just and it's even more so now, you know, right?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, yeah, it's like he's like like Armstrong or something, like Pops or something now. It's like just he's cutting away, systematically cutting any away everything that doesn't sound like him, you know. And that's really an interesting thing, you know, because you know, you wouldn't necessarily think, I mean, obviously David and Stefan, Crippelli had an affinity, you know, uh for each other's music. But um that kind of real pragmatist, you know, I'm not gonna play anything that doesn't sound great, kind of attitude, is led Stefan toward the end of his life to play less and less. At the end of the last concert I saw of Stefan, he was playing the melodies of the tunes and letting the car player. Yeah. And those melodies sounded like Steph. You know, they sound they were perfect, you know. But he wasn't gonna let anything out that wasn't perfect. I think I you know, David seems to be going in a similar direction. You know, he's just he's not playing fast, he's just playing more, you know.

SPEAKER_02

It's just pure, you know, he's so deep into the sound and so deep into the uh rhythmic placement. Uh we always talk about what went on in the band. I mean, Tony was all about the three T's, you know, timing, tone, and technique and Tony. I remember feeling like I could play these same notes. They were not going to have that kind of emphatic, bold presentation. Uh and it does come with age, but it's something he always pursued, I think, huh?

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah. I mean I think you know that comes from Bill Monroe. People like you know, like that early middle period Bill Monroe when Monroe was like a kid, he was just playing through the instrument. It was like the instrument was you know, you could hear the back of the instrument, you know, just it was like gunshots. You know, and uh I think you know David really absorbed that and for some reason, you know, some magic, I don't know. He just um and I I talked to David about that. I have an old interview, I've been digging up old stuff in my basement, and uh you know, he never apparently he never really had a he could always just sort of get a sound out of the instrument, it just came naturally to him.

SPEAKER_02

So obviously he worked very hard, but I used to do these tone checks on mandolins at the Mandolin Symposium where everyone would trade mandolins, ten different instruments, three or four players. And no matter what instrument David played, it was the loudest mandolin in the room. You just kind of go, it's like trying to analyze Sam Bush's chop, you know.

SPEAKER_01

Right, yeah. What is it? It's the X factor that nobody can quantify.

SPEAKER_02

Tony Rice would say there are some parts of this that are just mysterious, baby. They cannot be explored. It goes beyond physics.

Matt

It's funny when I talked to David recently and we were talking about tone poems, and he was saying basically that was an exercise in playing all those different instruments just to show that it's the person that makes the difference rather than the instrument. And you know, he said people say to you, Oh, that's a great sounding mandolin, and he'd put it down to go, I can't hear anything.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's that's a funny thing. I think you might have gotten that from uh Heifetz, who also you know famously did. So, you know, I'm sure that people have been doing that for forever, and it's that's true, you know. I mean, it it helps to have a nice instrument that could you know that responds to your uh impulses.

SPEAKER_02

But I'd rather have the great player on the crummy instrument than the other way around. Yeah. Any day. Yeah. Totally, yeah.

Matt

It um it'd be really cool to kind of hear from you both about how you sort of ended up playing with David, um, because there was that sort of glorious period, mid-70s through to the beginning of the 80s, where that quintet sort of really coalesced through a few lineup changes into that classic sort of lineup we think of. Um and you you sort of arrived on the scene first, didn't you, Darrell?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Uh I was actually in the band before I was a band. Um you know, there was there were pr there were bands previous to that, of course, there's the Great American Music Band, which was the band that got me into it. I I had gone to see uh it was a double bill uh in San Francisco with the Country Gazette. It's Byron Berline and Roland White and uh Alan Mundy. Uh I was a big fan of Byron and uh you know tried to be like him. Uh never could because he's he was like you know six feet five. I'm five feet six, so it just didn't but um it kind of worked anyway. So and I I knew that I I was a fan of Richard, of course. Richard got me into fiddling in the first place, uh seeing him with that rock band, C-Train. But so I said, Oh yeah, Richard and David, that should that should be cool. But I'm really here to see country cassette. Well, I walked out of there, my life was changed again. Um I brought one of those little shoebox cassette machines to the gig. And it was the Greater Mercury music bands. It was like Richard, uh Richard and David, and you know, on the front line, and then the back line was John Carlini, and uh a woman named Ellen Carney just playing sock rhythm on everything, and uh Joe Carroll uh on bass. And that it you know blew my mind. They played the Greater Mercury songbook, they played David's originals, they had some of those symphonic arrangements already in place. And uh I'd had uh Dog's Rag, Thailand. Yeah, Dog's Rag, Thailand, and uh the other one. Dogology. Dogology, right. Yeah. So that was there. And uh so I took that. And that was Car Car Carlini had a lot to do with the orchestral side of some of that. Um, you know, kind of helped. They all had classical music backgrounds. Yeah, they they were all readers and writing. David read music, he he has some, you know, a decent amount, enough to um, you know, be functional, uh, for sure. Enough music theory could read and uh could write a chart. Um but I think you know that that sort of magic combination that kind of you know there's a lot of opportunities for solo, fiddle, and that, you know, I had to be Richard, right? You know. Anyway, yeah, so I walked out of there with a cassette of the show and I I went home and learned every tune, every, you know, every melody, um, made up my own chord changes because I couldn't really figure out what they were. Uh, learned all of uh Richard's solos and some harmonies, you know, to the melody. So by the time you know, that band was lasted about a month. They they did a tour with uh Maria Mulder, opened for them, and then couldn't get a gig because it was an instrumental group and you know, six people or whatever it was, five people, yeah. Um a lot of people in the group. And uh Joe, the bass player, was actually he just didn't kept insisting he was retired. You know, he was he was a guy that had played pit orchestras in Vegas for Frank Sinatra and all those, you know, just everybody. You know, he was kind of jaded and he's like, I'm out of this business, it's stupid. You know, I'm gonna be a gardener in Marin County, California, and play for fun. Oh, this is cool. Um I'm just I'm just in it for the pot. You know. And that that was he insisted that, although it turned out he actually was not in it for the pot. But um it was um, yeah, so that was what, you know, so I was prepared. See, um that band broke up, and David was teaching mandolin at uh a little music school in Mail Valley uh down the hill, you know, once a week. Todd Phillips, uh who you'll talk to and he'll be able to fill in parts of this story, had been playing bass and mandolin um with a group, like sort of a rival bluegrass band that uh uh we were both trying to get the same gigs at the pizza parlors in the San Jose area. Um but we were both interested in building mandolins. I had built a couple of mandolins. Todd was threatening to build a mandolin. Um he was the actual woodworker, he actually knew how to do wood. I was just uh I was just scraping on stuff, hoping for the best. But uh so we knew each other and uh Todd knew that I was really interested. In fact, I'd started a band to play some of that music in Santa Cruz, California, which is a little tourist, you know, like a little uh well, it was a university town. Um and uh so 90 miles south of where David lived, and then Todd's uh, you know, Todd knew I was into this stuff, and so hey man, just uh so the lessons, the man lessons, um turned into just jamming, you know, um, because Todd was, you know, David ran out of stuff to teach Todd, and and they were having a good time, and Todd loved the music too, and they were just playing those tunes and other tunes that David was writing. And Todd said, Well, you're into this stuff, you know, I'll just bring you up here and you can play some fiddle with with David. And um, and so I went up with Todd and uh, you know, I knew all the material and the harmonies and was playing Richard's solos. David saying, Well, hey man, it's it's okay to just improvise your own solos, you don't have to play Richard's stuff. I'm going like, oh yeah, okay, great. Love it. You know, I can do that. But um so I was, you know, I mean, this for me it was like I was born to do this. There was a definite feeling of like, this is my fate and my fate in life, you know. I was uh because I was young and dumb and uh just uh I'd say smart. Well good choice. It was interesting, you know, because really, I mean, there was any number of really great fiddle players in the San Francisco Bay Area who could have done the job maybe a little bit better than me at that point. But I was the only one that kept showing up. I would drive the 90 miles to uh David's house and back uh you know, two or three times a week until I finally wound up just living in his basement for uh just a few months. You know, yeah. So I went from, you know, like we were jamming, and it was like me and Todd and David and Joe. And um, you know, I think it was just nice for David to have people who were just into his stuff and would just show up and for free. And then, you know, David had a couple of projects, you know, he had the David Grisman Rounder album, uh, and he had just met Tony on Bill McKeith's record, something old, something borrowed and blue. And I believe that record, I'm not sure if did that record, Mike, did that record have Ron Carter on it? No.

SPEAKER_02

Well, that was a different record. But I think that that record was cut the same weekend as Tony Trishka cut his record for rounder. Okay. Didn't he use some of the same musicians? Probably did.

SPEAKER_01

They probably just, you know, tag teamed it in.

SPEAKER_02

And didn't the rounder record come out of that same batch of sessions, or did David go back and record his rounder record?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, he went back. Yeah, he had you know he had to, you know, he there were issues.

SPEAKER_02

So he met Tony on the Bill Keith session.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

That was when they first connected. And that's when uh David played him some of the stuff he got.

SPEAKER_01

Some of the great American music bands, possibly some of the jamming stuff that we were doing. Because David was recording everything at home. You know, we were just you know getting high and playing all day. And uh so that was that was cool. So uh Tony just is responded very positively.

SPEAKER_02

Um, you know, with the quote the unquotable quote.

SPEAKER_01

Give a body part to you know play this music.

SPEAKER_02

Play this music.

SPEAKER_01

But he was in J.D.

SPEAKER_02

Crow's group. It was the left one, not the right one. But he was in J.D. Crow's group and they were playing five nights a week at the Holiday Inn in Lexington.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that was their winter gig. That was to keep the group together, you know. That's I mean, that was bluegrass since forever. Really, you know, that was a step up in some ways, you know. Um you know, you play the festivals in summer and do those, and Mike, you can speak to that. Because I I really didn't do that uh old, you know, that original bluegrass festival thing, but they did. And then they come off the road in the summer, and then like, what do we do? Oh, okay. Well, we've got a six-night a week at the holiday outside of Lexington on the freeway interchange outside Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Well, yeah, that was how I met Tony, was he they were coming down to those festivals in the South in Georgia and Florida, where I was with my teenage bluegrass band, the Sunshine Bluegrass Boys would play some of the same festivals. And so I knew about Tony's other recordings, um, the stuff he'd done with Bill Keith and his own solo projects and the rounder record. Uh so we had met, and you know, like the scene is such that when there's some young hot picker, usually people know about each other. I'm sure I was hanging around. Yeah, we were hanging around, Tony and JD and all those guys, Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas, were in the band. Um, there's stories of us going over to their hotel rooms and getting to play the antique, even with my sunshine bluegrass boys and sort of drooling and freaking out that we got to hang out with these guys who we very much admire.

SPEAKER_01

Well, that's the beautiful thing about it. I mean, that bluegrass in those days, and still to some extent, you know, I mean, the there's not that much distance between the people at the bottom and the people at the top, so to speak. I mean, see now and the fans all play, you know. That's one of the most I mean, that's the most robust art form you could imagine, you know, with the you know, where you where you have, you know, supposedly, you know, the the performers and the audience. Well, the audience could just as easily be up there. Um although, you know, but many of them. But but you know, it's like, yeah, it's like really it's a situation where the performers are doing research and development for everybody that's in the audience, you know. They're just saying oh, here's something you might be interested in trying, you know, try this at home, you know.

Matt

Right. And then there's that sort of a sort of transition kind of because by the time Tony arrives in the band, then that sort of first album lineup's pretty solidified. But it's the it's sort of the bass role and the bass role changing, leading to Todd ending up on the bass that sort of changes the line through that.

SPEAKER_02

Well, that was when I showed up, I guess. Right. I knew that this band was forming before it. Formed. I knew Tony had moved out there. So I knew that something incredible was gonna happen. And boy, when I put on the needle of that first quintet record, of the top of my head came off, and my life changed forever at that moment, just like I guess it did for Daryl. I mean, there was a kind of religious fervor, no doubt about it. And David had the the magnetism to uh handle all of us crazies who wanted to be around it.

SPEAKER_01

He was very good at getting us to facing in the same direction and you know, kind of keeping everybody charged up about the about the material and what we were doing, you know. And that went, he had to because we didn't play a gig, you know, leading up to where you where you came in, we were uh we you know we went almost a year without playing a gig, just trying to get the music together. It was driving Tony nuts, of course. I was I had a two-night a week.

SPEAKER_02

He went from playing playing five nights a week to hanging out in David's basement learning all these.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I mean, I had a two-night a week gig at the pizza parlor in San Jose, and you know, I'd I'd invite Tony down to sit in with the band and like it was just a miserable experience for the other guys in the band because it was Tony Rice. You know what I mean? I gotta play next to Tony Rice. Like somebody could dance, you know. It was like I was loving it, but you know, but you know, I mean, everybody, you know, there's like that's part of the intimidation, the intimidation factor of you know, the guitar hero thing is so extreme. And uh, you know, I think Tony was just um, you know, he was just as intimidated. I mean, he, you know, he was a fragile guy, you know, a thoughtful guy, and you know, quite emotional. And for, you know, it was, you know, having that uh, you know, that thing put on him was very difficult for him and uh, you know, very ambivalent about everything, you know, as even as he bought bought bought into it, you know.

SPEAKER_02

So that was yeah. Well, I just speak I'll just speak to the walking in the room, you know, having spent a year with that first record and like you did, Daryl, learning everything I could from it.

SPEAKER_01

Then you sent that cassette of you playing a bunch of that stuff and your own material, you know, I'll play all the instruments um to David. And man, we listened to that and it was like, man, this kid, wow, he can really do this. This is great.

SPEAKER_02

I was freaking out. And then to walk in the room in Mill Valley in David's house with you and Todd and Tony there, that was that was the nearest thing to flying that I had ever experienced up to that point. I mean, the feeling of the groove. Yeah, I mean, everybody talks about it, what Tony provided. I mean, Tony and David together.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, those two, the gasoline brothers, you know, just amazing.

SPEAKER_02

Um, just it's a very powerful, explosive feeling. And all I remember is I get to be a part of this and I just don't want to fuck it up. It seemed like a very fragile thing, and it was arrived.

Matt

A unique sound in a way, because you've got the two mandolins and a fiddler that are all the same range. No banjo and a guitar. So the guitar's role in that band is a little bit different than your average string band, isn't it? There's a bit, it's got a bit more space around it at times.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Then in a bluegrass band. Yeah, since there's no banjo, yeah. Yeah, there's he could float uh through and sustain things. And well, it's very hard to describe, you know, it was just a magical thing, and we were all totally bought in to it. And that's what bands need, you know. It's like a you gotta be totally on board and functioning as a team, you know, like a good sports team. And that's where a good coach, a good leader comes in, you know, whether you talk about the Miles Davis, obviously had that, you know, uh great band leaders, Bill Monroe had it. Uh had a way of getting everyone to be serious about doing the best they could for this music, whether it was their music or some other music, it had to be perfect. Yeah and everyone was bought into that ideal.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah.

Matt

Well, all those that you mentioned there, so obviously David's band and Miles Davis and Bill Monroe, and all of them, you see the people that came out of those bands and benefits from that as a learning experience.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, especially early on, you know, you you it's it attract line like-minded people who might not be, you know, just you know, just trying to do something that uh really, you know, is uh yeah, you're looking for like a framework to you know develop yourself in.

SPEAKER_02

It's incredible how little we knew. Yeah. And yet how how determined we were. I mean when I think about how much I've learned since about a much broader music uh thing that was always there, uh whether you're talking about Brazilian music or classical music or jazz or all the things we've explored since, but how naive and and ill-informed we were in a way. I mean, even having arguments about what a minor seven flat five chord was and how do you play over.

SPEAKER_01

Why would you do that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

But uh and trying to figure this thing out through our own weird lens, you know.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's true. You know, and uh David had some, you know, kind of with breaths there, you know, just through being around Rensler and the Smithsonian, you know, stuff and that aesthetic. And that rubbed off on me a lot. That was really good for me. Um but yeah, we both all coming from a very different scene, you know. Like I think David and I might have been as closer than I mean, David was obviously you know nine years older, but um we were both just really had grown up uh with the Beatles, you know, that idea of like original eclecticism where you're just throwing everything into the pot. I think that you know that was definitely you know, very rich period, late 60s and early 70s, a lot of original stuff, a lot of people uh combining, you know, various kinds of folks' music.

SPEAKER_02

The whole jazz rock thing was happening with weather report return to forever.

SPEAKER_01

Starting to come up, yeah. Although, you know, it's so funny. We very we were for a while we were not listening to anything, you know, except ourselves. You know, it was wild. Like musical moonies or something, you know. I missed a whole It was kind of a religious fervor around listening to the I missed a whole decade of pop music, you know, during that time. I have no idea what what was going on, you know, on you know, the on the radio, AM radio for sure, FM radio, maybe, I don't know.

Matt

It's really interesting you talk about that originality because it feels like um that sort of transition from old and in the way in the great American music band into being David Grisman Quintet, the composition played a really important part in that. That a big part of what made that a thing was that intent to have original, composed, instrumental, not just playing Blackberry Blossom or jazz standard, but that's original material thing.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, just the idea that you know you could have structure, you know, like real sophisticated structure, you know, with improvisation incorporated into structure. You could have, you know, you can have uh you know more than you know, parts, we had development theme variation, you could have uh you know long builds, you know, and and if it all falls away, then you're you do another one, you know, or all this stuff, you know, this long form.

SPEAKER_02

Everyone drops out and the fiddle player plays a little bit. It goes crazy, yeah. I mean, this kind of absolute freedom to go for it and do anything you can think up. Uh, and all of us were obviously throwing ideas into the pot. And but David had this way of cherry picking the things he liked and and keeping us on track in terms of no, we're gonna put a stop here, we're gonna you're gonna take three choruses there and things like that. You know, that he was that's the band leader part that he was able to kind of distill the best of all of our ideas into something very manageable and presentable. Rememberable. Yeah. We were not. But I still come back to this weird thought of like when we think of how much stuff we have access to right now and how little we had then. Yeah, it's wild, isn't it? You know, you know. Like it's there's just no comparison in terms of what kind of world we're living in.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, the amount of effort you had to do to to search out, you know, whatever you're interested in. But uh you know, that was why, you know, one of the things that was great about David was that he did have a big record library of stuff. And I was into, you know, he was like playing me, you know, Kodai cello concertos where the cello is tuned, uh cross-tuned, you know, and and you know, all these different versions of the Bach solo, you know. Um yeah, just yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um I mean he had gamelon music, Chinese music, Japanese music, whatever it was that he had in his collection. And we'd listened to Free J ornett Coleman.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, with Coltrane stuff, the live Coltrane stuff.

SPEAKER_02

Um that that was really, you know, that's it that played the bass clarinet, uh, the lawnmower going through the grass, Albert Eiler. Unbelievable shit. We did a lot of listening. Stereo systems were really big, big speakers in the room.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, both David and Tony were big, yeah, they were they're both big, you know, two just yeah, two amplifiers stereo freaks.

Matt

That's fine. Well, and then also kind of we've talked about this a little bit before, but then just recording this music as well and going into that studio on Art Street where you know you're kind of coming into contact with other people who feel the same and sort of Bill Wolf and Bob Shoemaker and people who are kind of you know looking to capture the sound in a way that will sound amazing on all this equipment as well.

SPEAKER_02

Have you been able to talk to Bill?

Matt

I have exchanged a few emails with him. I'd love to give it his perspective on it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. Such a, you know, yeah, real, you know, real introvert, but a great artist, and certainly, you know, um willing to share a lot of knowledge. I mean, they were, you know, David and Bill especially were like always going back and forth about just technical details, you know, during the production.

SPEAKER_02

And um, you know, I learned a lot. David had had a some experience with major labels that had huge budgets before.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that was an interesting thing. Finally, you know, you kind of dug stuff out, you know. Definitely stuff you probably didn't want to think about. That uh some gigantic failed project with the Rowan brothers, they were going to be the next Beatles, and they had this whole record, and it was like highly produced. I remember the you know, David played me, you know, under duress, you know, the first cut, which it was like you hear the sound of a needle dropping onto vinyl, and then it it's like four, you know, like 30s, you know, like uh like recording of you know, it's like all mid-range and stuff, and then that gradually turns into you know the Rowan Brothers. Yeah, modern yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So they had giant budgets where they could experiment with studio techniques, you know, inspired by the Beatles and overbudgets. So he had a lot. He had a lot more experience at that than any of them.

SPEAKER_01

Of course, that never that record never came out, it got crushed. You know, they just said, oh, we don't like this. Who knows? Maybe some, maybe something else. I don't think it ever, ever came out.

SPEAKER_02

But yeah, so he was very aware of like spending forever on mic placement and mic selection and things like that. Bill had a lot of experience, I guess, with that. And that that was a big part of what thrust that music forward, I think, compared to the bluegrass recordings that had been made before it was the sound.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that like the articulated, close mic'ed and yeah, a lot of that just very, you know, highly curated sound. And that that that was very cool. You know, that whole thing about you know, just the whole technical, the hobbyist almost aspect of that, you know, David was so into mandolin construction. David and Todd bonded over building alternative bridges for their mandolins. You know, they they um uh Frank Wakefield had famously made a bridge out of some fiberglass he found laying around or something, and and said, Oh, well, this makes a bunch of fiberglass bridges, and let's like change the bass, the size of the bass, do all that stuff. And Todd was really good at you know, um just building things, you know, and and uh fabricating stuff. And they that was you know what really got them into it. And of course, Tony, man, talk about being into that instrument. I remember doing some work on instrument yourself. Yeah, just every detail. Todd were always tearing it apart and putting it back together, kind of yeah. I put a bridge plate on in on butt under the bridge of that the antique and and actually put a strip of mahogany with this little lip where the binding of the neck was like hanging over the neck. I found a piece of yeah, we just yeah. It was fun. It was just that was a great way to make a new nuts for nut after nut, bridge after bridge, yeah. Just you know, tweaking out. Refreading and I think that's the where the whole idea like the Mandolin World News came from. You know, we were just so into every little aspect of it. Um, you know, David said, Oh, hey man, I gotta let's let's let's make a magazine about the mandolin. We can we can just reach all the Mandolin players and uh we'll just have a connection there. This is pre you know internet, right? So this was the only way you'd be able to, you know, get the opinions.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, Tom was actually the original layout guy.

SPEAKER_01

And um I know, yeah, Xactor Knives, all that stuff. And uh we got somebody in the Grateful Dead office to type up the articles for us. But uh yeah, that was laying them out. Yeah, we'll we'll fund the band with this magazine, of course. You know, the band it was the other way around forever. It never, you know, the magazine never made a dime, but it was so into it, you know, it's just a beautiful thing.

SPEAKER_02

You could still find copies of them floating around the short sides, like eight by four. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen those.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think there's yeah, I've got a couple. I think I've got every copy and bound or something. That was the thing. Something to be very broad. Yeah, yeah, it was it was super fun, and we got to you know connect with a lot of Mantlet players, you know, which was cool.

Matt

It's hard to you know kind of overestimate that in it like you were saying earlier, that it now everything is available to us. Just the effort you would have to go to to find some stuff, you know, that that is is people growing up now don't appreciate. You know, you I mean, you might find months trying to find just a copy of a particular LP and then you get it home and listen to it and go, Oh, I don't even really like it that much. But you but you worked at it. I would order it.

SPEAKER_02

In in Lakeland, I would order these things from a mail order company called County Sales through the local pop record store. They could get them, but have to wait like six weeks for an LP to come.

SPEAKER_01

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02

And I'd put that thing on and just play it forever, all day, every day, just one record for like three weeks.

SPEAKER_01

I think about how lucky I was to be in the San Francisco Bay Area during that time, because there was there was village music famous record store, um, right down, you know, right down in town from where David was living, and they had all the county records. They, you know, they had all the weird, yeah, you know. They had all the rounder stuff. Dave Baker and Joe who who's it, all that yeah, every yeah. So that was great. I just didn't have any money. I couldn't buy the record. That was the problem there. Yeah.

Matt

And how like how did it feel being in the middle of all that at the time? Because it's really easy for somebody like me to look back at that period and see it as kind of a a watershed in string band music and sort of think that that started, you know.

SPEAKER_02

I knew that it was watershed, and I knew that I was really lucky to be in the middle of it. It felt extremely special.

SPEAKER_01

That was, you know, we go going back to what we were talking about with David being a great band leader and sort of really putting stuff that we were doing every day, all day, in context of, you know, why are we doing this and what are we doing? You know, he was very articulate about that and very clear that this stuff is you know the greatest. You know, it's like it's it's groundbreaking. We're you know, we're going somewhere. We're gonna, you know, this stuff is gonna do the he was the first one of us to have a manager, you know.

SPEAKER_02

He understood the music business and agents and how some of that stuff worked. And he also didn't take any crap from any of them. Right. I mean, he here he was with an instrumental band. There was nobody doing instrumental acoustic music at that point. Nobody. The solo guitar thing had not started, really, except for John Faye. Yeah, John Faye and Leocotkey was it. But I mean, this was there was no Baylor Fleck or, you know, a bunch of others. It was all like this was a very bizarre idea.

SPEAKER_01

I think about Windham Hill and how it's sort of kind of developed out of you know, this kind of quirky, you know, developed out of that.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, Will Ackerman was a huge fan of this first record. That's what he asked Darrow and I to do when we made our first Kiro Oscuro record.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we said, God, can you make a record that sounds just like the first DGQ record? We said, sure, man. We came up with what we did. Yeah, we can do that. Yeah. Here's competent switch. Here's our thing. Oh, but he was great too. But yeah, that that was a but yeah, you know, I think that we were just, you know, and like starting in a place like the barrier, which was it's it's uh it's a region, right? Um it's it's unique in the sense of you know, geographically, you know, it's a bay, right? A very large bay, surrounded by many um, you know, uh urban areas, you know, there's like towns all around. So uh plus you know, down the coast, up and down the coast, you know, there's there's towns. So you get San Jose area, you get Oakland, you get uh northern, like Vallejo and then up to Sacramento. And then you know on the west side, you get this huge uh you know, kind of a suburban area, which is little towns, and then of course San Francisco, Palo Alto. And so there was you can actually build you know a regional following uh by playing a lot of gigs uh that uh you know in a in a relatively small area, you know, because people wouldn't cross necessarily cross the bay.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you can play in Santa Cruz and the next night play in San Jose and play in San Francisco. You could do something.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, there's all these geographical features that that keep people, you know, even though it's the same region, it's a relatively small area, you know, you'd get these highly you know densely populated areas that uh yeah, you get groups of people working. So that helped a lot. And David's connections with old-time music business guys, the AR guys, you know, those guys that would like they'd they they'd you know, they'd they're kind of free-floating, you know, they'd work for one record company for you know a couple of years and then they'd get fired and they move to another record company. Yeah, old school. But they'd you know, they'd have the records in the trunk of their car and they'd drive all over the country, drive to their the radio stations, and they smoke a joint with the music director, and they say, Man, you gotta hear this. This is we can put this on.

SPEAKER_02

You know, he was aware of the whole world. He did come out of that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, a couple of guys, you know, Artie Rose was one of them. Uh these these folks that uh were very deeply embedded in you know in the record business and maybe sort of semi-retired, but they had the wherewithal to, you know, kind of work, you know, David's the that first record. They they actually there's a couple of guys that really uh got on board, huh? Sort of made it happen, you know. Yeah. And this that this whole network is it's It's gone with the wind, you know. It's gone and gone, gone. But back then it was still it was still pretty strong. A lot of us guys. You had to get it on the radio. Uh yeah, you had to know people. You had to know. Because this was weird music.

SPEAKER_02

This is instrumental acoustic music. Who's gonna play that?

SPEAKER_01

But you know, that's a beautiful thing, you know. Yeah, community radio.

SPEAKER_02

I guess the jazz stations would play one track per day or two or something. They would sneak it in.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I would love to have really heard the story of that. And the folk stations were on board, the bluegrass stations. There's like a bluegrass hour on a station like KFA. They might slip it in to the world music hour.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and again, you get a lot of community radio in the Bay Area and uh NPR, National Public Radio, that that kind of stuff. That was very strong back then.

SPEAKER_02

But it really grew out of just the grassroots passion. I mean, it sold like hotcakes and and it was there was a new sound that word of mouth spread.

SPEAKER_01

The word of mouth is you know ridiculous, you know.

Matt

Well presumably like the other musicians were hearing about this and wanted to come and hear it, and you know it it must have made some waves in that world as well.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, I think it really did, you know. That's funny. I mean, because you had the folks on the East Coast, you know, uh Donny Trishka and Andy Stab and um Glazer and and that whole crew, Russ Barenberg, um, and those guys were like doing very, you know, innovative, crazy, you know, uh you know, music, which was really reflected the like that urban megalopolis, you know, East Coast thing, which had kind of a crazy quilt of cultures. Like you'd walk down the street in Soho and you'd hear, you know, every kind of music from every country like blasting at you. You'd like walk three doors down and you get like Bulgarian music, and then the next one would be next door or down would be Brazilian music coming out of a shop front. And and that the way they played that stuff sort of reflected that crazy quilt thing. And what's interesting about you know, the the Charisman thing was that if of this stuff most of those same influences were there, but it was more digested, you know, it was like fully sort of, you know, it'd gone through a yeah, a digestion process where it was it was more because we were, you know, yeah, we were not in that kind of like uh you know intense urban um you guys were settled in that way that the California life settles people. I think so, yeah. You can speak to that, Mike, because I, you know, I mean I'd been there forever, you know. I I it was just for me, I was like just swimming in the world.

SPEAKER_02

There's a very special feeling to the San Francisco Bay Area, and especially as you get outside of the center and get up into the redwoods and go into places like Mill Valley and Fairfax and Larksburg. It's very hard to get any feeling like that anywhere but there. And I think that's for sure reflected in the music. Um when you think about the yeah, the difference between that and New York City, you know. God, it could not be more different than hot tubs and marijuana.

SPEAKER_01

Right. You know, yeah, there there's some amount of leisure to think, you know, and create, you know, and inspiration to create. You know, you think about people like Vince Giraldi, you know, a jazz guy, but he they had so much going on, extra, you know, other stuff. David, Dave Brubeck, you know, all these Bay Area people.

SPEAKER_02

Um Yeah, it's reflected, it's reflected in jazz music, the West Coast jazz sound versus New York versus Chicago. It's it's clearly environmental. It affects the music.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think there's a regional sound, you know, still, you know, like just like just Appalachian or, you know, East Coast or Northern East Coast. You know, you think about it like for fiddling, you know, and things like that. You know, there's all these regional styles. Well, I think there's regional styles and um just about every kind of music.

SPEAKER_02

But again, uh I I would draw it back to David, his uh uh experience with pop music, recording production techniques, and then you combine that with this intense focus of Tony Rice and what he brought in terms of timing and tone that comes right out of JD Crow and Bill Monroe and that looking for perfection, which was not those guys together. Yeah, that was not something that the East Coast guys were so focused on, you know, they were more into this patchwork of wildness, uh Andy Stappen and the guys. Um I mean Rud Russ Burenberg has has a beauty and a delicateness to his whole thing, uh, which was real different. Yeah, but I think yeah, I think Tony gave all of us this kind of intense laser beam focus towards the fire, you know.

SPEAKER_01

He brought the fire and and yeah, and him and David together, you know, that that rhythm section, you know, it's like it was like Alvin and Peter Erskine or something like that. Just like, you know, it's David, you know, two very different ideals. These yeah, and yet, you know, they were just in love with each other's rhythm thing, you know, and these these things would develop over there. I mean, yeah, right? I mean, you like have a sixteen, you'd have a 16-bar cycle of where you know David had started with a boogaloo and just you know, and and Tony was like playing, you know. Sometimes Tony's playing sounds like it's backwards tape, you know, he's got that, you know, where like you know, each musical phrase is like ends, you know, and so he's doing that, and David's like all over the place, and then David, and then Tony kind of starts um you know, you know, pulling, and then David's like goes into chopping, and he's like just really whipping, you know, whipping forward, and these things happen over, you know, uh these long cycles. So I have eight bars, sixteen bars, thirty-two bars. Yeah, Mike, you were dealing with that. You know, you were like, you know, oh, just I mean, it never really got said, right? But you know, you had to play whatever David wasn't playing, right? Whatever David was playing, you had to play the other thing. And you just had to that's the rule second mandaloon.

SPEAKER_02

Todd had a great way of doing it, and I had to find my own one. But yeah, well, you're what you're trying to shine a light on is this, especially a lot say somebody's taking a long solo, like if some violence, if you're taking a long solo uh 20 times through a series of chords. I mean, those guys had a way of building there was I mean, David especially had a way of constructing that link so that the whole thing built. It wasn't just hammering the same groove for the whole time, it was really building this beautifully uh uh constructed developmental thing that might start it might start with not playing at all for the first two.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think that was one of David's most you know effective, you know, brilliant things for some getting people to not play.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. That was something that was never done in acoustic music to that point.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, like you know, blue gas, you gotta, you know, I mean, there's no drums, you just gotta keep everything going, you know, keep them dancing.

SPEAKER_02

If you look at the Django and Stefan stuff, it was the same philosophy. I mean, Django insisted on having two guitars, he insisted on having a third guitar because he said, Hey, when I'm soloing, there's only one guy behind me. And when you're soloing, there's two, and one of them's me. So I want another guy.

SPEAKER_01

He was right. He still couldn't get couldn't get another Django. Now, of course, there's like a hundred and thousand Djangos.

Matt

And you get those sort of glorious moments in something like um dog's ball when you've got the harmonies like just popping, like you know. Oh yeah. And it's it's such a glorious sound. And you it's not something, you know, even now it's um I imagine at the time it was totally new sounding, but even now there's nothing else that sounds like that, like 50 years on, and 50 years of people taking that sort of orchestrated yet improvised approach to music, and there's still nothing that quite sounds like that.

SPEAKER_02

Well, that's because Daryl, I mean, I guess David has a voice, you know. That uh when it comes down to it, it's a compositional voice, it's a tonal voice, a rhythmic approach, uh, all those things that give a musician a personality, you know, and that that shines through all of us. We can't escape our sound, you know. And uh that's the beauty of it. You could try to sound like somebody, but you're better off sounding like yourself in the end. Even if you try if you get all as many of those.

SPEAKER_01

It doesn't mean you can't model yourself on some, you know, like stuff. You gotta start somewhere, right? You gotta start with something great. And you know, I mean, you came into the band sounding a lot like Sam, you know, Sam Bush, because you had that incredible, super powerful legato, every note kind of how do you do that? How do you connect all those notes together? You know, like notes were funny, like overlapping on the manland. How do you do that? That's impossible. Nobody could do that. You did it, you know. So and Sam used to do that too. That was beautiful. That was a you know, that was a sound that was you know kind of missing, you know, there to some extent. And that, of course, that changed. I mean, you just kept developing like very quickly, and you know, we're but that's a great place to come from.

SPEAKER_02

But I remember consciously saying to myself, well, I can't not keep playing like Sam. I how do I stop? You know, so that's the first step is to okay, I'm not gonna play that lick right there that I know works perfectly.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, so many fiddle players went through a short period of Vaster Clemens worship, you know, where they just play it all. I have space, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I'm still working on that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I remember, yeah. Like with the Mantanita record, actually, it's funny because like uh Ricky just came in and he had been playing like you know, he had been copying Vassar. Oh, yeah, he was playlists. Apparently, if he had like and he'd been playing with Amy Lou or something. Right. And the producer, Amy Lou's producer, hey man, just cut cut the Vassar shit out of the body. We didn't like the stuff. He said, Well, if we want Vassar, we'll get Vassar.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, that's funny.

SPEAKER_01

It's so recognizable, you know, somebody like that who, you know, I mean, if you play that. It's the same with David, you know, if you play it, David Grisman Lick, man, it's you know, that's that's dog. Yeah, that's dog music right there. It's it's pretty funny.

Matt

Oh, and Tony's Tony's the prime example of that, isn't he?

SPEAKER_01

As Todd says, Todd's so funny. I mean, you you're gonna love talking to him. He's yeah, we got like 300 phony races. You know, you know, there are worse people to copy, you know. I mean, that's the thing.

Matt

Yeah, but it's interesting what you were saying about like the that the builds of some of the solos and learning to take stuff and kind of shape it over time. I was listening back, there's that um Live in Dog's Living Room that was recorded at like the end of 1975, and it's fascinating hearing that versus like the records or some of the later live tapes because you can almost hear Tony learning how to do that. Yeah, playing playing on some of those solos and the longer, more extended bits. You can you can almost hear him thinking, How do I, where do I because he's still Tony and it's still the same, but it's not quite where he was two years later. It's fascinating to that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, the development thing, yeah, that that's beautiful. You know, we all you know bad things.

SPEAKER_02

You've got to hand a lot of this to David, because I mean to get guys, think of the guys that were in his band, to get them to not play, you gotta have you gotta have some big conies. Hey man, could you lay out for the first four times through the guitar solo? You know, it's it's uh you gotta have a big personality and he has a strong strong musical concept and yeah, and and yet gentle enough about it to not piss people off.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Matt

Sorry, Contaro.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yeah. It was interesting. I think, you know, everybody, you know, developing a sense of of um ensemble, you know, was is so important. Um I think that I was, you know, even though I I was kind of challenged as far as just you know certain fac execution factors, I think I was uh in some ways a better choice than some other fiddle players because I spent so much time playing the last chair second violin in my school orchestra and playing inner parts and kind of getting to know you know what goes with you know the what's on top, you know, what's what's what what's needed here, you know, ensemble-wise. Um so I I always felt a lot more comfortable playing um you know backup and stuff. And I you know, and when I look back, I listen back to that stuff and I I still was playing too much. I was playing all the time, even though I was trying to play background lines and things like that. Still, you know, just excess, but having a real, you know, sense of well, how you know, how is the entire sound of this thing gonna how what I play, how is that gonna affect what's happening on top, the lead, and so in that way, I think. You know, there um that was probably uh, you know probably why I still stayed in the band, actually. Why I didn't get fired.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I think a a lot of what that music presented to all of us was this idea of looking at the music uh sort of horizontally like a score, you know. Yeah, if this is going on right now, you shouldn't play. If there's a hole here, maybe there's a place to play there. And that was not the way of thinking about old-time music or bluegrass music necessarily, except the violinists do when they back up a singer, you know, play fills.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. You know, bluegrass has a has a has a structure that's built set in stone, and it's it's kind of beautiful. I mean, it's beautiful, it's perfect, it's like Mozart or something like that, but you're really locked into that formula pretty much all the time, you know. And we were really trying to, you know, open that up and experiment, you know, with with other things. And uh I think yeah, not having a banjo kind of helped because the banjo sort of has to play all the time in order to be the banjo, right?

Matt

Well, also if you're you're playing the fiddle and Mike and David are playing the mandolin and you're all basically playing something with the same range and the same tuning, then that thing of getting out of each other's way becomes really important. Otherwise you're not gonna hear anybody.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, you guys spend a lot of time, you know, looking at voicings, you know, how complimentary voicings, you only have four and us to deal with. Some of these complicated chords, you know, you could fill in for each other and make these really beautiful.

SPEAKER_02

Well, that's another thing that David brought to the music was extended harmony. And we should shine a light on the the introduction of the major seventh chord to bluegrass or six sharp nine or major nine. That was the first time any of us were hearing those sounds. Yeah, major nine. I don't know if David, you know, where was he getting that stuff?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You guys were playing jazz standards to a degree and working at some of those harmonies.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, you know, John Carlini was helpful, you know, there. You know, he's he was really he was a real jazz guitar player and he read music and he wound up, you know, after the Great American music band broke up, John conducted, he went and became the conductor for the ice capades orchestra for like years. Uh and John really knew his stuff, and actually um he would come back and and uh you know he worked with Tony a little bit, you know.

SPEAKER_02

Um this was a period when jazz was just beginning to be taught, right? Berkeley Square, yeah. I don't know how long it had been in business, but there was no real book, or the real book had just come out or something.

SPEAKER_01

Right. That was just happening, and and people like you know, the Jamie Abersalt and that crew were just getting started, they were starting to do these play-along things. That was exciting. The jazz jazz pedagogy was just starting to form. And uh that you know, that was helpful. I was I was uh I remember like one of the things that really probably did more for my vocabulary for decades was um one 12-bar minor blues exercise that Joe Carroll gave me out of a uh Joe uh Joe Pass guitar book. Wow. Like 12 bars of very dense uh jazz material that I built a whole style on.

SPEAKER_02

Really? Come on.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Oh, I could play it for you right now. Yeah, by memory, it's just yeah, it's burned in my brain. It's like it had a you know, it had a whole tone scale in it, it had a diminished scale in it, it had you know a minor, you know, it had a major minor.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, you were the one studying that stuff more than any of us.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, because you know, in some ways, I mean it can be played on fiddle better than mandolin. You know, that stuff is a little bit more, it's it's liquid, you know, like the saxophone players. You know, Matt Glash and I used to joke that you know, even the greatest jazz violin player is only as good as sort of a medium good saxophone jazz saxophone player. But you know, that's just the nature of you know what can be done on the instrument, you know, I think technically. But I was I was really into that stuff. And um to some extent. I was yeah, I was working that stuff out as best I could. Because it seemed, I mean, you know, with the minor, um a lot of that stuff was in minor keys. So you know, you really could lay a lot of stuff in there. The minor sort of opened up a layer of of you know gravitas to the music. I mean, if you take a tune like minor swang and put it in major, it sounds pretty dumb. It's like, whoa, really?

SPEAKER_02

You know, and David wrote everything in D minor. So much was in, you know.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, yeah. The stuff that was in major uh usually had like a really beautiful, complicated, you know, kind of mandolin technical trick to it.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I remember asking you about the tune uh was it Janice?

SPEAKER_01

If you or was it Blue Midnight? Well, both of those were really interesting, some really chordal things.

SPEAKER_02

It's like there's this mandolin solo where no, it's like what almost like nobody's soloing.

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_02

You know, it's like David's kind of trimoloing a little note here and there, and the groove is unbelievable, and Tony's making these beautiful cool sweeping chords.

SPEAKER_01

It's like it's just an ensemble solo, right?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and I was like, What who's supposed to be soloing here? Yeah. And I remember you saying that it was a time when you guys didn't really know how to blow through changes like you do now. And you just found notes that worked.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Yeah, yeah. And that was that was happening, you know. I mean, I mean, yeah. Yeah, I think that you know, that was, you know, there was a lot of serendipity in that first record, just stuff that I remember. Didn't I have a I think I had a solo, I think it was Blue Midnight, right? Where I had done like an overdub solo and I did a like three passes or something, and we played the last two, and like by accident they left both of them up. And they you know, I'd had some kind of structure. Yeah, I had a plan, rough plan, you know, changed. But and so when we played it back, they've reviewed amazing. Yeah, it was just like this beautiful sort of, you know, kind of very, you know, stochastic kind of just cool assemblage of stuff. So yeah, hey man, let's do that. That's great, yeah. Um, so that kind of you know, the found uh you know, sound thing, you know, just yeah, things that that was really, you know, being open to that kind of stuff, you know, was really great. And it's you know, to some extent a function of marijuana, but you know, not always. I mean, it was just really um just just being open to unexpected, you know, things that were beautiful.

Matt

And what um what of the I mean there's so much you've talked about in terms of the things that you sort of learned from playing music with David and with Tony and just with each other as well. But what do you think came out of that? Because you know you look back and it's a fairly brief period, really, that band was together. It's so funny, you know.

SPEAKER_01

We were so young, it seemed like years. Yeah. It was, maybe two. Yeah, maybe two. Maybe three.

Matt

Well, I was just I was looking back, I was talking to Tim Stafford the other week, and we were just talking about that like the mid-70s period where you had the you had the J.D. Crow and the New South record. And then a couple of years later, that first Christmas Quinty Alcan. It felt like those two records changed the course of string band music in some ways.

SPEAKER_01

I think so, yeah. Certainly, yeah. Boy, that yeah, that New South record, man, that just, you know, that's the fight, it represented the final victory of of you know the Jimmy Martin school of bluegrass over everything else, you know. Um but uh wow, yeah. What is it about that time? You know, it's a time, it was a time that uh, you know, a lot of stuff was just um, you know, there was like we had an education system in this country that was working really well, and um there was still a lot of you know just uh uh you know financial, you know, flushness hangover um, you know, from from the post-war era, you know, it's just a lot of stuff was just kind of coming to fruition.

SPEAKER_02

You could actually live in the Bay Area as a musician, for instance.

SPEAKER_01

Gasoline cost 29 cents a gallon, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, people could afford to live and you know have you know leisure time to you know work on whatever, you know, have a hobby, you know.

Matt

And then so from that from that group, you two pretty much moved on at the same time, didn't you?

SPEAKER_01

Uh yeah, we did. And yeah, oh I th I don't know, we can't quit. We were fired, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we were thinking about quitting, and then I think, you know, but it sounds like you guys kind of want to go your own way, I think was how it was presented to me.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I was like, you're right. That's exactly what we want to do.

SPEAKER_01

You're smarter than us. It was you know, it's very difficult, you know. I mean, it's hard to make a decision to leave a group like that. Um you know, it at the same time you're like kind of busting at the seams, like, oh, we got all this stuff that we, you know, all this material that we can't play, you know, we can only fit it into the cracks between these other gigs, and we don't want to get in the way of you know, other tour, you know, band tours, you know, where are we gonna play? You know, our first, yeah, Craig, our uh Davis manager booked us a you know a tour in Alaska. That was our first tour in Alaska, just get them as far away as you possibly can. We're up in the up in the you know, in Alaska somewhere.

SPEAKER_02

Or we could book gigs like two months out, uh, but nothing further out, you know, David was commitment and we were getting offers to do things further out than that. Yeah. So natural frustrations of being in the band and growing up.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, you know, this amazing opportunity, yeah. And that was, you know, that and by that time it was just the quartet, right? It was you and me, David and and Rob, and and you know, there was a I mean, we were ripping on us, and we knew that material backwards, forwards, sideways, up and down. You know, it's we're you know, it's almost like I mean I wouldn't say it was boring, but you know, you know, like what more can we do with it? You know?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And yeah, we were we were writing our own material and wanting to play it out, you know. We put out some records of our own and like the natural growth.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, Tony had already, you know, split. He he was doing stuff. Um and then yeah, so uh there's a lot of interesting, yeah, just people coming in out of the group.

Matt

Well, and you think of sort of what you know what Tony went on to do next, and you think just you know, you look from that and you thread out towards Tony's stuff and Manzanita and Church Street Blues and Batwaters might use totally different but incredible records. You think about you know something like Turtle Island String Quartet that grew out of having had that experience.

SPEAKER_01

Modern mainland quartet, you know, all the Brazilian music that Mike's been doing. Yeah, there's you know, we really you know we had a great platform to launch from, you know, that was incredible. We knew, you know, we'd met presenters all over the world, you know. We'd like to be able to do that. Record companies, radio people, you know, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_02

Daryl's first record came out on the same label, Kaleidoscope, which was David's label. And I think then we did one for Rounder, our duo record. Because we meet these people when we were touring, you know, they would all always come to the gigs. And because we were in the band, we had a certain amount of uh people knew about us, so if we put out a record on one of those labels, you'd actually get airplay, and then you'd possibly get a gig someplace across the country.

SPEAKER_01

So that used to be the standard path to you know having a career. You know, you get somebody else's band, play their stuff, you know, learn their stuff, make it make it easy for a leader to do their job, you know, and then you know, meet everybody that's involved in the whole network and you know keep yeah, then start your own thing.

SPEAKER_02

I don't I don't know how people do it today, but it's a different world for sure.

Matt

Well just all the music that has fanned out from that that period and those those people and you know the the things that you guys did. Um there's such a wealth of stuff. That's you know, it's not necessarily a direct line through all of it, but there's this whole you know somebody should do a music. Family tree, new acoustic family tree. Don't ask me to do that.

SPEAKER_02

No, you'll get in a lot of trouble, man. Oh man, yeah, no good deed goes unpunished. But yeah, I think you can draw a line through a lot of stuff, and then it goes back, you know, and it goes forward and it goes sideways.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, you know, if that's really true. I mean, you you look at I mean, even like well, yeah. I mean, you look at that the great day in Harlem photo, you know, all those people they all knew each other. There it's like a tight, you know, it was a community. And it's the same with this, you know, acoustic, you know, bluegrass and acoustic music. People I don't even know knew, you know, I go to an IBM A conference, and you know, I these these great, you know, older bluegrass musicians come up to me and say, hey my. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm I'm blah, blah, blah. You know, I really like that that David Grisman, that doggum record you guys made back then. That that really that really did a good job for me. Yeah, I really like that. You know, I'm going, cool. Can't believe you're great too. You know, you're amazing. You know, yeah, it's so surprising. And you know, just to have somebody like Ronnie McCurry come out and do play, you know, pretty much that whole first record was with Dominic. That's incredible. It was really cool, you know.

SPEAKER_02

That Ronnie was at that level.

SPEAKER_01

He listened to that thing every night when he was 15. He'd put it on and fall asleep to that record.

SPEAKER_02

I was like, wow, you know, and but what brought me to tears, man, was Alex Hargraves playing your solos. I mean, I just came apart backstage.

SPEAKER_01

That was yeah, you think you came apart, man.

SPEAKER_02

I was like, what an honor, what a thing to do.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I know. It was so beautiful, and uh, of course, like he I I and of course he fixed everything, you know, like all those little you know, little little rough spots and corners. He just go to hell. It's just the first they're so perfect, yeah. Alex is, you know, I couldn't love that guy any more than crying backstage while they were playing. Yeah, it was highly, highly emotional. It was so funny. Um with Ronnie, you know, Ronnie's fifty-eight, and all those guys are like what, late 30s, maybe early 30s. Yeah, you know, like Todd said, Well, how what Ronnie, why'd they have you at the kids' table? Oh god. But you know, they needed somebody, you know, to hold things together. That's the beauty of it, you know, that intergenerational Yeah, Billy was man, that guy, you know, I just can't have enough respect for him. He's he's just you know, the guy's doing an amazing thing. He's totally himself. He can, you know, he can get a whole, you know, he can get uh you know, 30,000 people standing on screaming, and he's still just as serious as you could be about music and trying to, you know, just learn. Just learn and every day. Be part of the community, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah.

Matt

Very humble and very respectful of those that came forward and direct line through to what we started talking about, you know, about looking back and looking forward. And you know, it's that thing of to progress, you need to know what you're progressing from, and yeah, that whole where we started this conversation really is that idea of respecting what came first.

SPEAKER_02

And if you could say the same about all those musicians, you know, whether it's Sealy or Sierra Hall or Molly Tuttle, I mean, they're all I think they all know where they come from, and it's yeah, it's very cool. Whenever we're around them, it's really neat.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Matt

Well, it's been it's been huge fun getting to talk to you about that time and that music because it's you know, it's for a lot of people it who discover it now and will discover it in the future, it's just such a fresh, exciting thing still. And um, it's just been a treat to get to talk to you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

Oh well, man. Who doesn't love talking about themselves? I just yeah, thank you for asking. You know, for totally fun and and uh really, you know, just great hang.

SPEAKER_02

You know, so and everything you do, man, you're great at this and you're bringing a lot of shining a light on a lot of cool aspects and always have a great angle with it. So thanks.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful thing.

SPEAKER_02

Cool.

SPEAKER_01

Well, thank you so much, but thank you.

SPEAKER_02

It's been a blast. See you later.