Shortcuts: [ Early Days | Spectrum | NGR | Sam Bush | Tony Rice | Jerry Douglas | Mark O'Connor | Crossing The Tracks | Natural Bridge | Double Time | Inroads | Dreadful Snakes | Drive | Flecktones | The Future ]
- When did you first hear the banjo - how was that, when was it, ...?
It was The Beverly Hillbillies theme, sitting on my grandfather's bed. They let us watch TV in their bedroom one day - my brother and I were watching and it sort of jumped out and grabbed me. It had no impact whatsoever on my brother.
- How long did it take you to get a banjo?
A long time. I was, I'm guessing, somewhere between 5 and 9 years old when that happened. I was fifteen when I got one.
- Did you think of it in that time? Were you thinking "I must get one"?
I just never really ran across banjo music again, until "Duelling Banjoes" came out. Then I got excited again.
- So you went out and bought a banjo?
No, my grandfather went out and got me a banjo. He lived in upstate New York and went to garage sales a lot. He knew I was into guitar a little bit, and he went and just picked one up. Some cheap garage banjo.
- Were your parents trying to push you somewhere else?
No, no, they stayed out of it pretty much.
- Was your father much of an influence?
My father and my mother split up when I was one, and I never met him, so he was no influence at all.
- So at fifteen, you got a banjo. You had been playing guitar before then, but nothing vaguely bluegrass?
No, not bluegrass but folk stuff. I took lessons from one guy who was teaching me "the blues scale". I was just strumming the guitar. I then was taking lessons from a guy who was teaching me fingerpicking guitar. He seemed to think I was making really rapid progress as soon as I put on the fingerpicks, but as soon as I played with the flatpick it was really slow going. And suddenly I got into banjo and he was shocked at how fast I took to that. It was funny, playing guitar didn't happen.
- But you play guitar in some shows.
Yeah, well, I still play guitar and I seem to improve on it even though I never play on it. Every time I pick it up, I'm better on it - I don't know why. The same hands, the same motions. Usually fingerpicking, but for a while I got into flatpicking and did a bunch of it. My right arm locks up after about fifteen minutes of flatpicking, and I can't do it too fast, but I can play pretty well with a pick. I start getting into it and I don't have the muscles for it or something, but my elbow locks up and I have to stop.
- You don't have those sorts of problems with the banjo?
No, never.
- So, when did you go to High School?
Fifteen.
- But you had to take another instrument, right?
Yeah, they put me in on French Horn, and I flunked out of French Horn and then they put me in the choir because they had to put me somewhere.
- But really you were there to do what you could with the banjo.
Yeah, I was just practising all the time.
- So that's how you got that eight hours practise a day.
You know, that eight-hour figure - I don't know where that comes from. I guess you get out of school at 3pm, you have to go to bed at 10 or 11 .... I would play before I went to school and I would play after I got home. Pretty much, through high school I just played the banjo. And on weekends.
Eventually I started bringing it to school with me, and practising - cutting classes and practising out in front of the school and going to City College ...
- So you cut classes and just jammed with the other students?
Mostly when I was a senior. I didn't cut classes until it was about all over, and then I started.
- You had some other people you played with?
Not too much. For a while there were some college kids over at City College across from the High School, and I would play with them some, but then they all graduated.
- What kind of music were you playing back then?
The first year I was playing folk music, folk songs. Then I got Pete Wernick's book, "Bluegrass Banjo" and started learning those tunes. Then I took lessons from a guy named Erik Darling, who played folk banjo with a group called "The Weavers". He hooked me up with a guy named Marc Horowitz, and Marc really knows an awful lot about banjo. He taught me a lot and then I started really getting into what Tony Trischka was doing, and he lived in New York (which I didn't know at that time). I flipped on his music, with Country Cooking and his own records. Then I took lessons from him.
- Through what years?
That was in the second or third year I was playing. By the time I had finished my third year of high school, I was going out and making a living, right out of school.
- Were you busking or playing in a band?
I was in a band called "Wicker's Creek", some guys from Westchester and I would take the train after school up to Westchester. We'd go and do gigs, and they'd take me back and put me on the train at 2 in the morning and I'd go home and go to sleep, get up and go to school. My deal with Mom was that I could do whatever I wanted as long as I made it to school every day. I had rough days at school, but that was the price.
Then I moved to Boston. My Mom wanted me to go to school, so I enrolled at the Julliard Extension School, which is for people who didn't pass the test but want to take a course at Julliard - you pay them some money and then you can go over and take a Julliard class at the Extension School. Obviously there was no test I could take, but they thought it would be a good idea for me.
I went to the composition class, but it was just voice-leading four-part stuff. I went there with a good attitude, but there was nothing there for me - it was 'how to do it like Bach', trying to write fugues and do all the classical voice leading stuff. It was pointless.
So then I got this call to go and join this band in Boston called "Tasty Licks" - they needed a banjo player and I guess Tony Trischka had suggested me for it. So I went up and auditioned for it, and they asked me to join the band and I moved to Boston. I got a place right across the hall from Jack Tottle - there was an apartment open, so I moved in there and started making a living.
- So you were nineteen then?
Yeah.
- So how long did you play with them? What sort of gigs did you play?
We played all over the North-East. A lot of New England stuff, a lot of Connecticut, and Masacheusetts, New Hampshire - schools, clubs, coffee-houses, a lot of coffee-houses back then. And eventually, towards the end, we started doing some bluegrass festivals and stuff.
Mark Schatz joined the band, and then Pat Enright joined the group. It was always a good band, but it ended up being a pretty good traditional band. Eventually Pat left, and when he left, it pretty much broke the band up. And then I lived through a summer, just playing on the streets of Boston. That was a lot of fun - with Mark.
Then we went to Kentucky put together a group with Jimmy Gaudreau and Glenn Lawson. This was after three years in Boston.
- Spectrum then took you all over the place. How many albums did you record with them?
One live album, two studio albums: "Opening Roll", "It's Too Hot For Words" and "Live in Japan".
- What kind of gigs did you play? Was it mostly touring?
One of the things about Lexington KY is that they had this Holiday Inn where bluegrass bands would play for a month. JD Crowe used to play there all the time, and we were able to get booked in that place for a month at a time, several times. And once you had that gig, where you were going to get paid well for a month, that was enough for us to move to town.
I think that's the first thing we did is move to town and play there, and then we got added on for another month - I think we were there for three months. And by then the people at the Holiday Inn were such good friends of ours that after the bad was done with the gig, they didn't kick me out of my room, so I stayed at the Holiday Inn for free for several months, until I found an apartment. I had to get a car at that point.
See, I don't even know who it was - I don't remember having that good a relationship with anybody, but somehow nobody ever billed me. For a while I even had two rooms interlocking, when one of the guys left and nobody ever took it back. I remember one time one of my friends in town had a problem, a marital spat, and came over and stayed in the room until they worked it out. Actually, they got divorced. I can't name any names, but it's someone famous.
- So when you were learning, to skip back in time a bit, was it mainly the instructions you received in class or did you swoop on other books and suck up everything you could?
Well, it was lessons, and listening to all this bluegrass and trying to figure out everybody's banjo parts on records with the headphones on, and writing it down and then trying to figure it out. Whatever they taught me in the lesson, I would have it down and spend the rest of the week figuring out other stuff and then bring it all in.
- How did you go between Spectrum and NGR?
I got a call from Sam Bush. He started calling me relatively early, saying he was wanting to put NGR back together. I hadn't heard that the other guys had left. Jerry Douglas was the first person who mentioned it to me - he said "hey, you heard that Courtney Johnson left NGR?" and he thought it was a big opportunity for me. It didn't seem to have anything to do with me, because I was so loyal to Spectrum. And then Sam Bush starts calling you up ... It was very hard to do, though, because I love those guys.
- Did it start off with NGR that you were headlining?
Oh, clubs, theatres, you know, some festivals. Some good gigs - we always had Telluride. We used to open for some country acts.
- Yeah, you opened for the Dead as well.
Well, that was the only one we ever did, and that was our last gig. We always ended up opening for country acts. We opened for Don Williams, the Oak Ridge Boys one time, Ricky Van Shelton was one we used to open for a lot.
I met Sam when I was doing my first record for Rounder in 1979. I called him up and asked him if he would play on it, and he agreed to which surprised me. But he's always done sessions for all kinds of people. He came to town with NGR and the next day stayed and recorded with me, then went on. So that was pretty early, and he's been on every record I've done except the Flecktone albums.
I think it was the same record. I called him up - I had met him when he was with Boone Creek, but I wouldn't have expect him to have remembered me. But then I asked him to play on some of the tracks of the record, and I went down to Nashville with the tapes and got him to overdub on "Spain" and "Dear Old Dixie".
Tony I didn't meet him until a lot later. He was always this sort of Mystery Guy, because he'd moved to the West Coast just about the time I moved to Lexington, KY. He'd moved about a year before. He was one of my favourites, I loved the New South with him and then I loved the Grisman stuff he was doing. I thought it was really great guitar playing.
I'd always heard what great rhythm he had, and had felt really eager to play with him. So finally he called me up to play on "Cold On The Shoulder" but I don't remember if we had actually ever played together before that. There was a real feeling of something new happening that day, and we recorded about four songs. It was some of the best stuff I'd ever played on - it was incredible, the best bluegrassy feel that I'd ever felt.
It was the genesis of the Drive band - it was the closest I could get to that. I thought that would be an incredible band to do instrumentals with. Tony and Sam together are an incredible force and I felt like when I played with them it was even more of a lock - something special seemed to happen, I thought. It was hard for me to judge, beacause I'm not objective, but I'd heard them play all with different people but it seemed to me that when the three of us were together playing the sixteenth notes together, something really special was happening.
Even in a way playing with Tony, I felt something happened between me and him that didn't always happen when I heard him and Crowe play together. Sometimes they seemed disconnected, or whatever. I dunno, maybe I'm totally off-base - obviously they played incredibly well together, but something else started to happen with that group and then with Jerry Douglas and at that time I guess Vassar played on that record. I wanted to do a record one day with that group, and finally I got up the nerve to do it, called everybody and it came off. That was the "Drive" album.
- One of the best albums ever made.
Uh, no comment *laugh*. I'm proud of that record.
When did I first meet Mark? I met Mark at the Berkshires Bluegrass Festival which is now called Winterhawk. That was the beginning of our relationship. Later on we hooked up and I asked him to play on "Natural Bridge" and he agreed to do it - he was really excited. He did some of his best work ever on guitar then. He was really eager to play some fiddle again - he had just been paying guitar with the Grisman group then for a while, but again - he played wonderful. That was really the first time we played together - that was a great session, too.
- How did "Crossing The Tracks" come about? Did you pitch the idea to Rounder?
Yeah, I pitched them. I was living next door to Marianne Leighton, who is one of the head Rounders, one of the three. She used to say things like, "some day you may be a Rounder artist". I was like, "I'm ready now!" I had more tunes than I could throw a stick at - I had all these ideas and I was full of energy, but they were all "we think you should wait, we really think you should wait, just take your time".
So finally I got irritated and went down to New York and did a demo with Russ, Kenny Kosek, Barry Mitterhoff, and did five cuts of just stuff to try and get a deal with. I sent it to some labels, and then Rounder started calling me - "aren't you going to send us a tape?"
- Was most of the album done together in the studio? Was Jerry the only overdub?
We cut half the record before Sam got there, and then we cut four songs the day he was there, so he had to overdub on "how can you face me now", and he may have had to overdub on a couple of things. We cut some of the hard things first, some of the multichord things like Spain and some other hard ones. The ones we needed him for on the rhythm track were the ones that had a bluegrass feel, we felt like it would be better with him there, and it was.
- Was it daring doing Spain? Did you feel like you were on the edge there?
Yeah, we were all excited about it.
- I notice you play it completely differently now.
Probably. Well, I had Jerry playing the melody then, so I could just play chords. I think it sounds a lot like Tony Trischka on that album, on that version, the way Tony was playing it.
- Tony was playing the same tune at that time?
No, just the way he played and the sound I was getting was very bright and hard, with lots of suspensions.
- Did you get the banjo you now play before or after Natural Bridge?
Natural Bridge was the first album it was on.
- How did Natural Bridge come about, because there was a bit of a wait ...
Well, it was probably about two years. Rounder had a deal at that point - there deal is you always owe them the next record. Instead of owing them seven records, you just owe them first refusal on the next one. Maybe I had a three record deal, I don't know. I don't remember too much about it, but it was a big deal because Mark Schatz and I were going to fly out to L.A. and record with Grisman and Tony Rice and Mark O'Connor and that was quite a big deal - it was our first time playing with those guys.
- So that was your first time playing with Grisman?
Yeah. I just called him up and he agreed to do it. He was easy.
- How did "Double Time" come about?
I think that came out of when Sam got cancer. The band had to take hiatus while he was getting chemo. I hung around and I'd go to see Sam every day, but eventually there was nothing for me to do in Nashville. So I decided to go - Pat Flynn and I drove across the country in my Toyota Celica and I dropped him in LA for Christmas. I went up to San Francisco to do benefits for Sam with those guys, Grisman and Rice. That's where I first played with Tony, and I asked him if he'd play a duet with me.
While I was up there, I recorded some duets with all those guys - a duet with Darol Anger, a duet with Mike Marshall. Then I hung out with Mike Marshall for a few days, wrote a lot of stuff in just a couple of days, and then came home and had all these duets on tape. I started thinking about who else I'd want to have.
I was kinda working on this record at the same time as Deviation. I can't remember if Deviation was recorded before Sam went into hospital or after, but they were being worked on sort-of simultaneously.
- "Inroads" has a softer, jazzier feel to a lot of it. Was that conscious and deliberate?
Yeah, it was a band. It was my first try at my own band, called "Banjo Jazz". It was Kirby Shelstad on vibes, Kenny Malone on drums, Tom Roady on percussion and Mark Schatz on bass. We played some gigs in Nashville - we'd come to my house and rehearse a lot. We got a bunch of stuff together and went and played some shows, just in Nashville. And having put in all that work, I figured maybe we could record it and that would be my band. It didn't work out because Kenny Malone really couldn't leave town, so we did one gig and that was pretty much it. I wanted to go ahead and record the stuff, so we recorded some of those tunes as part of the record, then Newgrass did a tune and then I brought them all together for some.
- Is it fair to say that "Dreadful Snakes" was a pet band? A fun thing to do?
Yeah, that happened because when I came to Nashville, one of the draws of coming to Nashville was that there was a lot of great bluegrass musicians there. I was going from Spectrum which in some ways at that time had a lot of bluegrass roots, to Newgrass which was real wild and not bluegrassy and modern. So I really wanted to do some traditional bluegrass while I was in town.
I talked to Jerry Douglas and we decided to put together a sort-of 'dream band', just do some gigs - go play at the Station Inn. We put together a band that we thought would be great. It was Blaine Sprouse on fiddle, Mark Hembree from Monroe's band, Pat Enright (I'd played with him in Tasty Licks), Roland White and Jerry. So we played one gig, and I had a cassette of the gig and I sent it up to Rounder and they said "yes! We'll take it!". So on the basis of one gig, we made a record. We only played the Station Inn two or three times.
I felt like I was underachieving at the time. I felt like what I should be doing is going to the next step with the banjo, trying to find what crazy new thing/wild unusual thing was out there for me to find. But I didn't have anything ready to go, and Rounder was always like "do a bluegrass record! do a bluegrass record!" And finally, I called everybody up and made a record. It was a three day session, and I think there was a fourth day. Four days altogether in the studio. Then we mixed it in a couple of days, pretty fast.
Everybody is just so good, especially when they have something to sink their teeth into, it's going to happen pretty fast. There were some tunes where it was hard. Tony had to write stuff down, he didn't really like doing that. He's really pretty quick, and usually he can remember stuff so fast that he won't remember it a week later but at the session he can do it. So he had to write down some changes, and he really gave me a hard time about "Sanctuary". On the new album, he came in and played and on one of the songs he said "damn, Bela, this is almost as hard as Sanctuary". Tony loves to do that stuff - he loves get challenged and play rhythm on stuff in odd meters. He just doesn't do it so much any more on his own.
- So did you have to shop the Flecktones to Rounder as well?
No, I have to say it was nice. When they asked me to do that record and I did it, I said "you don't have right of refusal on the next record, this is a one album deal if you want it".
- It was a good time to put a full stop in.
Yeah, to me Deviation was a long way from bluegrass and so was Inroads. It was almost like an aberration to have that record in the middle of all that stuff that was going *that* way. But when I got it done, I was like "this is good" and I was really proud of it. I still am. I like to hear that record.
I hear any of them and they always sound better than I expect. In fact, one of the ones I don't have a great impression of is "Inroads". When I look back and hear "Natural Bridge", I hear a lot of people playing at their very best and in a lot of ways every bit as good as "Drive" in terms of feel and song-writing and all that stuff, and a very fresh and exciting period. And "Deviation" has a lot of spunk and joy, and "Double Time" I'm very proud of. "Inroads" I'm probably less -- I think the vibes made it seem smoother than I would have chosen in retrospect.
I liked them at the time, I was very open to it - every instrument sounds good to me, it's just a matter of finding something to do with it. But then I've heard cuts and thought "that's very valid".
- How did the Flecktones come about?
This is '88, when Victor called me up and played bass on the phone. He came over to the house and we jammed for an evening - had a wonderful time playing together.
- What kind of stuff?
Jazzy stuff, funk, bluegrass - everything. Just jamming, playing some standards, teaching him tunes of mine. Just a total jam. Really fun. Very exciting.
Howard and I had met in, I think, '87. I'd met him in Chicago a few times - Jethro Burns used to open for us, for Newgrass, at the Holsteins club, and one time Howard came in and sat in with Jethro and then came out and played the encore with us. It was like, wow - this guy's a heavy. But we didn't really connect until Winnipeg, which is a festival where there's a lot of jamming at the hotel after the festival. Someone put us together - Freda Epstein. Is that her name? Somebody from the group Trapezoid. And she said "you guys really need to play together". And we got together and played, played for a long time that night, and really it was very exciting.
Concurrently I got a call, just after I met Victor, from Dick Van Kleek from the Lonesome Pine Specials, asking "would you do a banjo show for me, and what would you do if you did a banjo show for me?" "Do you have any ideas?", that was really the question. And I said, "well, I've been writing this piece for string quartet and banjo, and I've just got this sequencer and I'd like to write something for banjo samples and stuff, and that would be something that would force me to that. And could have a jazz group, maybe put together this jazz band, just to show the group in all these different contexts." He said "ok, sounds good, you got the gig, you do it."
So I was trying to come up with a band for this, and Victor I had just met so it was like, "hey, let's give it a shot, this guy's great". And Howard, I'd been looking for something crazy to do with him, he was obviously brilliant. And I was looking for a drummer, and Victor hooked me up with his brother, to make that story short, who was working on this new drum experiment. And so we all got together for that television show, and people loved the whole show but when we started playing it was really something. People loved it.
- How long did it take from that show to making an album together?
Well, that was in '88. At the end of '88, we got back together (this was in summer). We did like three club dates. We played the Station Inn, we played the Ella Guru's in Knoxville, and we played the Down Home. We rehearsed a couple of days before it, really got a mass of material together fast. We did really long shows, had a great time, and thought "we ought to do this again".
Then I thought, "well, I'm about to make another record, so this will be that record". It was like Banjo Jazz - here's this band that knows all this music, let's go in and record. I was aiming for a deal with Blue Note, that was my hope, but I also knew that Rounder would take it if nobody would.
- So how did the album end up on Warners?
They [Blue Note] passed on it. I went up and played the stuff for them, played them the video, and they said "well, not at this time". I was very disappointed, but Warner Brothers all along had been putting out Mark O'Connor's records and had been clamouring for me to sign a deal with them, long before the Flecktones.
MCA was doing records called "The Master's Series", I didn't want to have anything to do with that. Something about it just bothered me. But I thought that what Warner's were doing with Mark was really classy - the records looked good, they were in the jazz bins. So I thought "okay" - they wanted the record. Not only did they want it, they were crazy for it. So we did it and have been a bondage slave ever since.
- Any dreams for the future? What are you going to do after the live album?
Well, first I have to learn how to play backwards. I am changing my whole thing - it's really hard. I can do it, kind of, but it's really hard. But we're doing some stuff with the orchestra, doing something with the Boston Pops, orchestrating some of the band's tunes for that. So one of the things we might conceivably do is come up with a few more charts and stat doing some gigs, writing some pieces for orchestra and Flecktones or orchestra and banjo, which is starting to seem more within my grasp now to do.
Edgar Meyer and I have plans to work together again and do more stuff.
- Are you two going to release an album together?
A duet record, some day. We've recorded some stuff.
Well, really just to continue to play with wonderful musicians and have new experiences that refresh.
- Like taking Chick Corea to the Ryman.
Yeah, that was an incredible experience.
- Is that ever going to be released?
Some of that's going to be on the live album, if Chick agrees to it.
- What is going to be on the live album?
Well, assuming everybody agrees to everything .... There's a great cut of "Cheeseballs in Cowtown", with Chick playing, and Sam and Stuart and Jerry and Vic. There's an unplugged version of Hippo, with bass clarinet, with Paul. There's some cuts with Howard - a great Blubop, Slipstream, and UFO TOFU and some other things. There's a song John Cowan sang with us. A lot of stuff with Sam and Paul. Solos from each of the trio members.
- Who are some of the big names who have played with you and the Flecktones?
Let's see: Al di Meola, Sam Bush, Tiger Okoshi, Grover Washington, Howard, Branford, Stuart, Stanley Jordan, Michael Hedges, Chick, Bruce Hornsby, Chris Brubeck, .... There were a lot more.
- Did you play any of Al di Meola's stuff?
We played "Spain" with Al di Meola.
- Did you actually receive a Grammy for the thing with Asleep at the Wheel?
Yup. This is the first time I've ever won anything. Newgrass stuff - "7x7" and "Bigfoot". Drive, then the Flecktones. Two for the first album, two for the second. One for the third. I don't think we got any for the next record. One from the new one. Then there was the one that I won. What am I forgetting? There's two more. The Amy Grant thing - that's 11. I'm forgetting one, because I remember this was the twelfth nomination.
- So when are the tab books coming out?
The Solo Banjo Works is almost done. The other ones are far from done. "Tales" is far from being anywhere.
- Have you thought about chart books?
Yeah, we're doing a Hal Leonard book, about 25 Flecktone songs written out. You'll have to figure them out from there - it won't be banjo tab, just charts.
And then we're doing this movie, this Demi Moore movie. We did a couple of days of it.
- Are you providing *the* soundtrack to the movie?
We're featured in the soundtrack - there'll be a couple of places where you'll hear us. Most people won't even recognise that it's us.
- Do they have a specific sound they wanted?
There's an orchestra, and we're buried in there. I think that'll be neat.
- Whose idea was that?
The composer's.