Big Sky Big Grass
I totally forgot to take any pics of the shows, but I got some good mountain shots.
Bottom of the tram. Yes, I skied that shit.
Waiting for Thorn to come up the next tram.
I totally forgot to take any pics of the shows, but I got some good mountain shots.
Bottom of the tram. Yes, I skied that shit.
Waiting for Thorn to come up the next tram.
Did Telluride last year. 'Twas a blissfully awesome return, particularly since a year earlier I thought my music career was over.
So they pick all us rockstars up at the Montrose airport. I waited around for a bit because the other dude that was getting picked up (who turned out to be Michael Daves) got in about 30 minutes after I did. He showed up and I was getting ready to walk out of the airport when somebody called my name. I turned around to see an old neighbor of mine from Boone, who I hadn't seen since. Michael Jordan. That's right. MJ was my neighbor in Boone. Anyway.
Anyway, we're riding up, shooting the shit. Daves lives in Brooklyn, I live in Jersey. So he asks me, “where you from originally?” to which I replied “Atlanta”.
“Really? I'm from Atlanta. Which part?”
“Avondale. The next town over from Decatur.”
“Yeah, I'm from Decatur.”
So then it was where'd we go to school, and I went to Boone, so we knew a bunch of the same Atlanta born Boone musicians that used to go to a pick session at the Freight Room. This was before my time as far as bluegrass was concerned. My last paycheck cashing job, incidentally, was right around the corner 10 years later at the Raging Burrito. It didn't exist then, but it was pretty cool going back to the day. He went to Decatur High, right around the corner from my parents office. I bought my first several basses at Emile Barron in Decatur. Just found this old video of Bill – the man himself.
So after about 3 minutes or so he goes,
“So if you grew up in Avondale, you must've been on the Avondale swim team.”
Hell yes I was. Swim team and the Avondale pool was the best reason to live in Avondale, as far as I was concerned. God knows most of the other kids were fucking assholes just like their parents. I digress.
“Well, we must've swam against each other then because I was on the Decatur team.”
So anyway, that was cool. The I caught his set with Thile the next day and I've been a fan since. Definitely my favorite stuff from Thile.
It's a toy I've been wanting to build for a while. I stole the domain name from Book fair and square, and have been quietly honing the skills to actually build it.
What I'd ultimately like to have is a site that is basically a collection of all current, working bluegrass bands. When you come to the front page, you get a list of bluegrass shows happening in your area. It does this by roughly guessing via your IP address. It has a list of shows in the database that it scrapes from somewhere. I used to think Facebook would come in handy for this, but it seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor as a place that bands keep updated with their shows. I tried Artist Data after that, but they have the most nebulous docs imaginable for the their API, which I'm not even sure is open.
So that's the big trick. Everything else is basically – add band, enter facebook and twitter username. It then gets bio and whatever other profile info from Facebook, whose API is somewhat open, and tweets from Twitter, whose API is way open. Yay Twitter.
It basically an experiment in modern web scraping. My first. It's built on Sinatra, for those who care. the code lives here – https://github.com/JGrubb/sinatra-facebook
Anyway, the prototype – http://sobg.johnnygrubb.com/
It's easily breakable right now.
I'm just going to attach this note to a rock and toss it over the wall here. Maybe someone will notice it. Maybe it will even be read.
Hi. I'm one of the barbarian bluegrass players on the other side of the wall. I've been looking at your gated neighborhood my entire professional life, and it looks very nice from the outside.
A guy that I respect a lot also happens to be a member of your community. He and his band come outside the gates all the time to play for the masses out here, and we love them. I'm actually in another band that plays the same circuit out here in the world, and we have a great time. I've never really worried about whether or not I would be able to afford a house in your neighborhood because as far as I'm concerned, we've got it all out here. I just assumed that you guys would rather not mix with the riff raff (I say that with fondness) and that's fine. You're welcome to, but you shouldn't have to.
Please forgive me if I've got some of the facts wrong here, I've never actually been inside your neighborhood. But some things I've heard lately have surprised me. There are apparently some empty houses in there, and the number of houses that are being filled with new residents is not keeping pace with the number of houses that are coming up on the market. Some of those houses have been vacant for a while now? The tax base is dwindling, lawns aren't being kept and the neighborhood committee is starting to worry that this decline is accelerating. The idea of opening the gates has been proposed. To make the community inclusive rather than exclusive. To relax some of the requirements for membership. This guy I'm talking about is one of the most articulate proponents of this idea.
He has rightly figured that we make a lot more hay out here than you guys are able to in there. It's just supply and demand – there's more of both out here. The tax base you need to keep the neighborhood thriving is right outside the gate.
You all are more than welcome out here. That's the entire point of out here. We take everybody. There's plenty of land and having it worked rather than lay fallow only makes it that much more more fertile for the rest of us, which leads to more fans enjoying the fruits of bluegrass, which brings more young bands into the fold. A virtuous cycle.
I'm just not so sure about us coming in there.
I have 2 young kids and they're loud and a lot of times their toys get left in the yard, and admittedly it doesn't look that great but we live on some land where you can't really see the house from the road. Sometimes the grass gets a little shaggy. I still have part of a tree down from that hurricane, but I'll get to it.
If I move in there, then either I'm going to have to hire someone to keep my grass in line with the neighborhood covenant or I'm going to get dirty looks from my neighbors. Now, I refuse to pay someone else to mow my lawn, and you most certainly shouldn't have to be aggravated every time you look outside your window. Part of the reason you live in that neighborhood is because everyone there keeps their grass a certain way, and I can appreciate that as much as you can.
If the new committee does away with that covenant then it might make it easier for me to be who I am, but what about all the people that have lived in that neighborhood for a long time because they like it the way it is?
Where are they going to be able to go?
So here I sit, at the end of another brief tour, watching the sky get lighter outside the windows at the St. Louis airport. Listening to a bit of the new Bon Iver record, which is beyond terrific to the point of being maybe the record of the year for me. We'll see.
It's not that I haven't had much to say (though I haven't had quite as much to say), it's just that the time in which I used to say it has been filled by the consequence of my prayers for work being answered. I've been very, very busy this year and not a moment too soon. I jumped off my last gig in desperation; desperation at a job that I just wasn't feeling anymore and that finally qualified itself as being the wrong path. To wander that far down a path such as that one and then decide to bushwhack my way back up to where I could see the landscape again was a life/career move I'd probably have considered a bit more carefully had I known just how hard it would be. The undergrowth was dense. The way was dark. Had I not found the way back to be already overgrown I'd probably have turned around and asked for my old job back. Or maybe not.
Forgive all the flashy metaphor, but I've just driven 4 hours to the airport after a gig in the middle of Nowheresville, Missouri and I've got the perfect balance of coffee buzz, time, exhaustion, and an itch to write.
So anyway, I get the title question a lot this year. In short -
I split RRE with grand ideas and a grander mouth to broadcast them. The crusade was to put together the solution to the music industries problem. Because there weren't enough smart, capable, connected people working on the issue already, apparently. Part of last year's journey was a pretty extreme pruning of my ego, and it hurt. I had (and still sort of have) a pretty good idea about an open source angle to the music business that hasn't been done before, in my opinion because it explicitly doesn't make anyone any money except for the artists who implement the solution. I had a few other people convinced it was at least part of a good idea, and a few of them were kind enough to trot me in front of business types who could give me some feedback. The conversation generally ended shortly after they asked me “so how does it make money?”. Well, the idea is that it doesn't make you money. Kthx.
I understand of course, and learned a hell of a lot about early stage startups in the process of all this. Chiefly, I learned that I was seriously lacking in the ability to implement any ideas that I might have, either now or in the future. So I decided to fall back and work on what I could work on, which I chose to be the technical end of the equation. Always was good with computers.
I picked up a very few clients last year, those who were desperate enough to hire me. I went to a few networking things, mostly centered around Drupal, and went to several job interviews. I received some fairly harsh smackdowns at these interviews, typically during the technical part of the interview, and did not receive any jobs.
Somewhere around last November I was pretty damn close to the edge of “all I could take”. That's when I saw the ENB gig up for grabs, so I grabbed it. It wasn't much (by design) but it was a direction, it was good music with guys I already knew, it was at least a tiny bit of income. I started in February.
About 10 days into my tenure with ENB, I got a couple of emails on the same day that have turned out to be all the work I need. But it didn't stop there.
Somehow in the process of all this, I've become a fairly well-rounded, intermediate programmer, and one who has a pretty good sense of how to figure out the infinite number of problems that he's never encountered before. I've learned more programming languages, acronyms, protocols, tools, toolkits, best practices and shortcuts for being an effective (hireable) programmer than I could've guessed I'd be capable of. In April something amazing happened. I had a technical interview for a freelance gig based out of Austin TX that went astonishingly well. We talked about Git and Drupal and Ruby and handwriting SQL for half an hour. It was fun. I got the gig, and that was the little gig I got that month. I've been getting gigs left and right all year. It's insane. It's wonderful.
So basically, I'm making about 90% of my income on this computer here, and I do the ENB thing for fun and to stay connected and relevant to the scene I really care about. I've been in technical woodshedding mode all year, but I sense that it's about time to start trying to crack the nut that beat me this time last year. I've had a few things fall in my lap in the last couple weeks that are pointing me in that direction again, to try and see what I can come up with that could contribute to the music scene. I'm not trying to “save” it anymore. I'm not really sure that “saving” the music industry is what needs to happen right now anyway. As much as I am completely in LOVE with Spotify for the last month, they pay the artists about 1/10 of a piece of dog shit for royalties on the tunes that they stream. Nobody could make a living on what they pay out. Excuse me, no artist could ever make a living on what they pay out. I hear the labels have found a way to keep making nice profits in the midst of all this supposed bloodshed. So the brass ring is still sitting there, waiting to be grabbed.
It occurred to me over cooking lunch for my boys just a minute ago that, a week before my 33rd birthday, I've been in the music business for half of my life. I'd like to share a couple of things that I've come up with.
First of all, to get anywhere in this business, to get anywhere sustainably that is, takes a really long time. There is no short circuiting this process, short of selling your soul to the devil. Even bands like the Black Eyed Peas who are on top of the world right now in 2011 have been doing this since I was just getting started. Acts like Ke$ha stand out in my mind as pure product, and this post isn't addressed to acts like her. This is addressed to bands like the Dusters or Yarn or any of the other top-notch acts out there busting their asses in a van every day of the year.
There is a sustainable livelihood to be made in this corner of the music business. What it takes more than anything is time and hard work. I've seen and worked with other musicians who acted as if their success were a God given right, that their talent would ensure them a livelihood whenever the proper magic hit-maker type came along and granted them the keys. These musicians are generally bitter, bad drunks and best avoided. You may be able to shave a certain percentage of time off your ascent by being smarter and by putting forethought into your career path, but by and large it's game of patience and being pleasant to work with. “If you sit at the table long enough, you will get fed.”
Second, and this primarily applies to sidemen, it's good to cultivate an aspect of your playing that is considered mainstream. That is to say, if you are a bluegrass bass player with a penchant for Airto-era Return To Forever, it's okay to slip those leading samba-type Stanley grace notes into your 1-5-1-5. Just make sure that you don't do it all the time and if the very well respected banjo player that is sitting in with your band looks at you funny, that's a clue. If you are a classically trained musician turned bluegrass player, by all means slip as much of that style in there as you want, but know how to chop that thing, too. Keeping this in mind as you make your rounds will render you much more hirable for your next gig. You are thinking about your next gig, aren't you?
Fin for now.
Regarding Pandolfi's recent pot stirrer:
It's pretty much all been said out there, but I'll tell you what gets me going to the point that I have to write about it. It's when I read comments like this one -
Bands like Railroad Earth, Green Sky, Yonder Mountain, Infamous Stringdusters, etc. are going to be labeled bluegrass and I think that's fine....as long as they understand where the roots of the music came from and they have an understanding and respect for that.
Get stuffed. We're all out here working as hard as we can to live doing what we love. You are the armchair quarterbacking internet dweller. For us to care about whether or not you approve of our reverence for tradition or the lack thereof would render us unable to do our jobs.
Same dude, same comment -
The only thing I wish is that these newer grassy bands stop all playing solely through pickups and get some high quality mics, like the Punch Brothers or the Jaybirds. I went to a Yonder Mountain show 2 weeks ago and I cringed every time I heard Jeff Austin solo with his pickup-burdened Nugget. He might of well had a Michael Kelly or something as it would have sounded the same. Sorry if that's harsh...just not a big fan of his style or sound, I guess.
We've already established our freedom to an opinion, but had you ever done any touring you'd probably have realized the technical and acoustical limitations of playing with live microphones on loud stages. They don't make the sound better. Period. Ever. I've never heard of the Jaybirds, but I'm guessing the crowd that the Punch Brothers primarily plays to is a very quiet crowd. Good for them. Obviously some of us prefer a different setting.
By the way, Andy Hall came to the Nashville show last night and helped us destroy the place.
I might as well ditch this blog. I have no idea where to start another post. Is this a technology blog? Is this a blog about life as a musician? Is this still my rallying cry against the music industry? So much has gone on the last month/year/decade I don't even know where to begin.
I've joined a band. I didn't think I'd be doing that ever again. I actually thought my career as a professional player was over. I thought I'd seen the top of the mountain and that was that and it was time to move on into the next phase of my life, whatever that would be. I sort of had to jump out of the last phase of my life so quickly and so definitely that I didn't have nearly the prep time I'd have liked to have had for that kind of thing. The result? Last year was one of the roughest of my entire life. The roughest.
Then last year's November surprise ended up being another bass player in a band that I fit into pretty neatly.
So here I am, back from the musical dead. I just had the most righteously good time in Big Sky MT at a bluegrass festival called Big Grass, and I'll tell you what feels the best of all – feeling like part of a musical community. It's no secret that I'm a born-again Stringdusters fan, so I was actually nervous when half of them were standing stageside while we were getting out set going last night. It was more an acute awareness that people were there and were listening, which is how nervousness tastes to me. But then we got some of them up, and a few more of them up, and a KILLER time was had by all.
Afterward we went back to the main lodge where everyone was staying and there was a giant picking session going on in front of the giant fireplace until about 4:15 or so when it broke up to take care of other duties. Right about then Vince and Chad and the rest of Great American Taxi showed up. It was just so cool to me, because the last time I saw those dudes was my last gig in CO with RRE. It's cool to be in a band where I already know everybody, so I can relax about all that. It's cool to be in a band where we take days off to go skiing with the lift passes that are thrown in with the gig. It's cool to be in a band where load-in and setup takes all of 15 minutes and there are only a dozen inputs to check. It's cool to already be up toward the top of the bill at a bunch of the festivals for which we're booked this summer. It's cool to play bluegrass.