Download: David Serby “Don’t Even Try”

(from Honky Tonk and Vine out now on Harbor Grove)

David Serby was a punk kid in Orange County and then an insurance adjuster in L.A. and took a long time and a lot of lumps to become the country singer he is now. He performs monthly at dark bars with old photos on the walls and he has just released his third album Honky Tonk And Vine. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

If you wrote a song called ‘Blues For An Insurance Adjuster,’ what would it be like?
Oh good Lord. That would pretty much be if I wrote a musical for the movie Office Space. When I was doing insurance I had the back of my cubicle backed up to a big window and I went to my boss and said, ‘Can I take this back thing off because its got this big beautiful window here?’ He said no, so a friend of mine who was next to me brought his little Leatherman tool kit in and hung around ‘til everybody was gone and we took it off and put the back of the cubicle in the storage facility bin back behind a big crate and nobody ever said anything. I don’t think they ever noticed.
What was the most productive creative work you ever got out of those experiences?
I think that you figure out who you are by figuring out who you’re not. You put these clothes on and go, ‘This doesn’t feel right on me.’ When I started working there, my life was completely upside down and that job was really the only thing I had to hold on to. I was probably about six months into that job and my friend who I met there was quitting to go to graduate school back in New York—he said, ‘You hate this job—why don’t you just quit right now and we’ll take three months off and we’ll drive around the country? You can bring a guitar.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it—my life has been a mess for so long. I can’t.’ I was still hanging on to that cliff—I hung on to that cliff for another six years before I actually let go.
Are you more of a risk taker now?
Definitely. It’s a completely different world. I let go of that cliff and I just said, ‘You know what? The game is rigged.’ I don’t want to turn into an anarchist or anything but this whole capitalist system is not really set up to encourage freedom of thought and art. And if that’s what you want to do, as soon as you realize that the system is not set up to really help you or encourage you and that you’re going to have to figure out your own path and make your own rules—as soon as you accept those things, life becomes a hell of a lot easier.
Are these the same sentiments you were talking about in your old punk band?
Kind of. The things I was railing against then—being a cog in a machine and all those teenage things you’re pissed about, like having a number on a social security card and all that bullshit. But you do come full circle. You rail against it and then you graduate from high school—I remember feeling instantly ancient. Just old. And thinking, ‘How did this happen?’ And then it was another 10 or 15 years of realizing that just because I was older doesn’t mean I had to be older. I went to high school in Orange County so that was like in ‘78 and in ‘82 I graduated—there was a lot of great punk rock going on in Orange County at that time. I used to see Mike Ness hanging around. I saw Agent Orange more times than I can count! And the Adolescents and TSOL and all those bands—I saw them in high school gyms, I saw them in Elks Clubs, I saw them at the Lodge in Fullerton—I saw them everywhere. There was a lot of great art happening down there and all of that stuff was cool. But my family had country records and I remember I would play the Johnny Cash Live From San Quentin record all the time and I would listen to a band like X—I remember getting that first X record. I got the first X record and the first Blasters record on the same day and I went to my friend’s house and I put it on her record player and listened to it and just stared at the artwork and was completely blown away by that stuff. That stuff is completely folk music. It’s folk music like it’s people talking about what’s going on in their life and on the street. They’re talking about people who are making it day to day. They’re kind of like historians—especially a band like X, they were just brilliant historians. I love that band.
Guy Clark says you have to leave a space in the song for the guy who’s listening to be like, ‘Hey that’s me…’ Is that something you try to do?
One of the things that I love most about country music is that people identify with it. It’s very common language—a very conversational art form and I think people connect with it because they do see themselves in those songs. If you’ve done that and somebody can listen to a song and recognize themselves in it, then I think you’ve really managed to do something special. That is kind of what I try to do. The thing with country music is that people make fun of it because country music talks about ‘my girlfriend left me, my wife left me, my dog died, my pick-up truck’s broken down…’ But you know what? That shit happens to people! It sounds simple, but it’s not simple—it’s not easy to do that. I remember reading an interview with either Jakob Dylan or Tom Petty—a reviewer wrote about how the songs were all three chords and they were all conversational and how the songs were too simple and he said, ‘Look, if being simple were easy everyone would do it.’ Except for the ones about being in prison—although I’ve been in plenty of metaphorical prisons—I don’t think I’ve ever heard a country song that I haven’t identified with. That’s the brilliance about it.
What’s hard about writing a simple song for you?
You have to pick out the little things. My friend said, ‘My husband is always on the street—he’s always working on his car and he should be in the house working on other stuff, if you know what I mean.’ And I thought, ‘That’s like a universal man-woman experience.’ And I came home and wrote this song ‘Better With My Hands’ about a couple that is falling apart—which I know something about—and a guy who doesn’t know how to talk about what he’s feeling—which I know something about. The fact that I was talking to this woman and she was saying the same thing was happening to her—well, you know, there’s something that I haven’t written about and if it’s happening to me and it’s happening to her then it’s happening to millions of people all over the world. The key is to try and tell it in a fresh original way—it’s tough to be simple when you’re trying to be different.
Harlan Howard would do the same thing—just listen to people talking in a bar.
There’s a song on the record called ‘I Only Smoke When I’m Drinking’ and twice in a week somebody tried to bum a cigarette off of me and both times I said I only smoke when I’m drinking. And the song ‘Permanent Position’—I was talking to my friend at the Cinema Bar about how great it would be if Rod—the guy who owns the Cinema Bar—would pay us to drink beer because that’s pretty much one of our favorite things to do. I’m not the only one who wants to sit in a bar and get paid to drink beer, I’m sure.
What’s the big story you want to tell? What’s on your mind that you want in a song?
That’s a good question. I’m in a good place in my own personal life so I’m kind of looking outward more. The first record had its own story, but for the last two records I kind of moved away from that—what I really want to do is look at other people and their lives. The world needs good art right now—it needs good stories.
What makes you say that?
Well, I don’t know—this place is a wreck. The middle class is disappearing and people are so hypnotized by pop culture that they don’t see it. I look at my sister and her husband who have gone through tough times. I watch people struggle and it seems that it’s people who shouldn’t be struggling. It’s people whose families that for generations, their lot in life has improved—and now this generation, everything has gone backwards for them. There’s a movie called The Interpreter with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman and there’s a line in that movie—‘There are no more countries, only corporations.’ And it’s that. The corporations don’t give a rat’s ass about the people in this country. It’s the death of the middle class, the Wal-Mart economic model—it’s all that stuff and it’s the effect that stuff is having in people’s lives. That’s what’s interesting to me.
What do you think about that strange kind of split in country? That part of it is so stand-up-for-the-little-guy and yet it’s used to market Wal-Mart and expensive trucks?
I know—I agree with that and I don’t think that it even registers with people. I really don’t and I think it’s the hypnotic effect of pop culture. I went off to Stagecoach a couple weeks ago and there was the Palomino stage and it had some big acts that drew some people over from the main area—the bands had a more independent aesthetic and were more country-based like Dale Watson and Jim Lauderdale. And there were sadly not big crowds for them. I spent almost the whole weekend in front of that stage. Late on Sunday night, the wind kicked up and it was kind of cool and I walked back through the main stage area in the middle of Kid Rock’s set and he was playing a Queen song—I think it was either ‘We Are the Champions’ or ‘We Will Rock You’ and there was supposed to have been 50,000 people in attendance but there wasn’t more than 250 people over at the Palomino stage. At that time I think it was Jim Lauderdale and Dale Watson headlining, who I think are just brilliant contemporary country song writers and the other 49,999 people were over in front of that main stage and it was like a drunken spring break over there. I’m not making a value judgement but it’s completely different from old school country and how that art form was historically approached. It’s more like arena rock and pop music and those two fan bases don’t really cross-pollinate.
Is ‘Get It In Gear’ really about helping a girl get naked photos of herself back from a drug dealer? What happened?
I have no idea what happened to that girl. I knew her many years ago and kinda had a thing for her—kind of like the moth to the flame thing. I met her in junior college. You see those things happening and the signs are not good, but there’s a fascination there and you get to a certain point where you either jump off the cliff or walk back to your car right away.
What’s something you walked away from that you’re glad you left behind?
There was a whole bunch like ten years ago. I chose to go a different way professionally—I chose to go a different way in my relationships and I chose not to wallow in self-pity and depression and to try and use that. There is a tendency to kind of wallow in your bad luck—I think as an artist you probably should do a little of that because that’s how you connect with things, but the key is not getting so destroyed that you can’t do anything. I read an interview with Oliver Stone and he talks about going through a period in his life when he was having substance abuse problems—he said even when he was his drunkest or his most drugged-out or whatever, he got up every day and he wrote. There is a real saving grace in creating art. If you can force yourself to do it when you’re down, it will lead you to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Whenever Harlan Howard went into a bar, he’d always take the barstool closest to the front door—what is your preferred barstool and why?
I would take the farthest barstool from the door—but the one that had the view. I like my bars as dark as possible but I also like to be able to see people come and go. I like to watch people when they don’t know they’re being watched—you get an honest read on what people are doing and how they’re reacting to folks. I love to do that. I told somebody recently that I love to sit in airports when the flight is delayed. I just like to watch people. I might sit by the door but then you gotta turn around—if you’re over there in the back of the bar where you can see the whole deal, that would be my place.

DAVID SERBY ON THUR., JUN. 18, AT THE PIKE, 1836 E. 4TH ST., LONG BEACH. 9 PM / FREE / 21+. PIKELONGBEACH.COM.DAVID SERBY’S HONKY TONK AND VINE IS OUT NOW ON HARBOR GROVE. VISIT DAVID SERBY AT DAVIDSERBY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/DAVIDSERBY.

Acid Wash: I caught up with some L.A. RECORD peeps at the Echo’s No Culture show last week, but not before catching up with Lucky Dragons, owners of one of my few whole-souled enthusiasms on the current SoCal scene. The rara avis duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sara Rara don’t so much give performances of their Minkowski Space postrock as collaborate with the audience and they did so tonight, passing out various tone-making apparatus to rapt ones sitting semicircle on the concrete floor. They view the craft of song the same way long-gone late-‘70s postpunk experimentalists the Swell Maps did—as a mere conventional pretext for astonishing ventures into the arrangement of pure skronk. The Luckies go even farther, since “Read About Seymour”, the Maps’ best-known joint, is at least a recognizable freehand caricature of a rock tune. Once this gorgeous directed meditation shut down, the room began to bulge with late-arriving scenesters who visibly dug on Rainbow Arabia. Their goofy little synth-dance tunes are like what might’ve happened to disco had the punk D.I.Y. ethic caught on around 1978 and the roller-boogie set began to manufacture its own thud. It was Hecuba’s night, celebrating release of Paradise, the band’s first full-length slab of minimum R&B. I hadn’t heard Isabelle Albuquerque’s winsome Ono coo since they opened for occultists Ya Ho Wah 13 back in late ’07 at the very Echoplex below our feet. Their new stuff is at once weirder and more commercial than before, putting them in the pocket for this giddy epoch.

Little Willie G. Would Be Proud: Rock ‘n’ roll was long gone from famed Whittier Boulevard by the time I decamped for Boyle Heights three years back, determined to have my Angeleno being physically close to downtown and spiritually far from Hollywood and farther still from Van Nuys. There was a time in the 1960s, legend has it, when bands like Thee Midnighters played stupendous music up and down this SoCal extension of Soul Street. That band’s underplayed swagger is still a fair match for the Yardbirds’ laid-back drooginess, with diminutive Willie Garcia giving Eric Burdon a brief run for mid-decade blues-shouter honors. What happened to shut down East L.A.’s branch office of the Life is a mystery to me, but the venues that supported it are shuttered or open now as charismatic churches, alive with a spirit vastly less playful and devilish. Hunter Thompson cowered behind locked SRO doors in this ‘hood, but I leg it up Whittier free of the monoxide-suffused air, with my only care being the occasional LAPD officer kind enough to inform me with Zagat precision exactly which part of town I’m walking my hillbilly ass around in. I’d noticed the recent uptick in amplified noise and freak traffic in and out of The Blvd., an elegant little bar loitering almost within sight of the art-boho ghetto across the Sixth Street Bridge, but didn’t actually cross its threshold until last Friday night. Onstage, UV Lights was making classic rock noise onstage in the deathless manner of Budgie and Ten Years After and an early evening crowd of neighborhood rockers and Warehouse District artisans milled as familiarly as L.A. locals ever do. I dallied a while and headed across the bridge to the Smell, where a much smaller and tenderer turnout had gathered for the woozy drone of Winifred E. Eye, Oakland cowpokes down here grazing the South Forty before driving on to Stagecoach.

Phild0g Mourned and Shooter Remembered: Burner pals were having a beach party up near Pismo last Saturday, but a noon Sunday interview with Steve Priest of the Sweet kept me no farther away than a frozen desert hillside somewhere past Victorville. This was a private event, but we columnist types have our ways. There, some twenty miles off two-lane blacktop down a twisted, rock-jagged road pitted by erosion lay the Final Roll Call Party, already in progress as Kirsten and I staggered out of her car late in the evening. There were lights, a dance floor, a sprinkling of art, all the accoutrements of the kind of old-school rave put since the late 1990s by Phild0g, a near-legendary underground DJ and promoter who died last December 16th. I didn’t know the deceased and the Stormriders rave crew is but legend to me but the Ninja Skillz DJs were like Old Home. My friend was getting her first taste of rave culture while I helped tend the fire. While Phild0g was hymned between sets, my mind turned to a fellow writer named Caleb Schaber, a reporter I knew from his Burning Man incarnation as a hard-living gonzo journalist named Shooter. Caleb’s self-engineered exit happened two Fridays before, leaving a bigger-than-usual hole in another community of desert hedonists. As the music pulsed and well-bundled sweet ones swayed, I knew a moment of perfect peace as some dozen of us gazed around the fire at faces glowing with that rare contentment of shivering with the quick while chilling with the dead.

—Ron Garmon

Stream: Jerry Jeff Walker “Hairy Ass Hillbillies”

(available on many collections)

Jerry Jeff Walker was the heat-seeking missile who tore up Luckenbach on Viva Terlingua and once got in a dust-up with Willie Nelson on stage. He has covered several Texas classics and written some of his own, too. He speaks now from Nashville. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Are you one of those guys who can write a one-liner down on a bar napkin and come up with a song the next morning?
Maybe—I don’t remember how I wrote ‘em all. The pieces of paper and stuff—I wrote one the other day. I just started strumming the guitar and wrote a song called ‘One True Love.’ It was just kind of a little idea I had about it and it came out pretty good.
One of those fall-out-of-the-sky songs you hear about?
I guess. It was three people sitting at the bar having a conversation—I kind of knew what I wanted everybody to talk about. I’ll keep the line if I think it’s interesting and use it somewhere in a song. I like to tell stories. Like the point of the song is one true love but it’s a story of three people sitting at a bar. This guy is sitting in the bar and he’s counting the stars or neon signs and there’s nobody there ‘til a lady sits down, orders a wine, and then he said, ‘I’m watching her there in the back bar mirror / when her eyes caught mine / I gave her a wink and she laughed / she laughed at that / we started talking about life.’ And then her boyfriend shows up and she has to go to the bathroom to powder her nose and he begins to tell me how ‘she’s a great girl but she’s got unrealistic sights / she wants a prince, she said. She thinks prince charming should be a knight in tight jeans, and he said I just wished she wanted me and I’d give her what I could.’ And then I said something about how life—love doesn’t always go the way you like. And the chorus comes easy ‘one true love, that’s all we’re dreaming of.’ But the story telling was the first thing—instead of ‘I miss you, boo-hoo.’
Can I ask how ‘One True Love’ ends or is that giving it away?
I had it pretty funky to begin with—I had him kind of salty. From a folk background it is telling a story.
I read you used to go to the dentist with the Holy Modal Rounders.
Pete Stampfel was the guy—we were sitting next to each other in dental chairs at a free dental college in New York City. He was getting a cavity filled. You could get a cavity filled for five bucks there but you had to let students work on you. And then after we got up out of the chair I guess we were so high on nitrous oxide we started talking and walking down the street and he came to my house—or apartment—for a while. We had a great afternoon.
As a writer, what draws you to a song?
When I hear a song it’s because there is an emotional immediacy—you’re not trying to cover it up with a bunch of gooky stuff and I think one guy on a guitar, if it’s gonna be a song at all, its gonna hold up pretty well that way. I like songs where—love songs are kind of tricky and they can all be true for a certain reason, you know.
What’s an example of a song that’s not true?
It seems like there is a lot of play on words. I can’t really explain one of ‘em. Well the bad ones, I don’t know—I don’t really want to say. I saw a reviewer once that went to a Kenny Rogers show and he said, ‘I heard sixteen or seventeen love songs and I left with a distinct feeling he knew nothing about love.’ They used to call that ‘I love to love to love to be loved,’ you know. But then there can be a pop one that cuts right through and you say, ‘That was a good one.’ The thing that probably makes them the sweetest is when they’re more like folk songs—like three chords, real simple but heartfelt, its fun to sing, people can sing it, it doesn’t take a great range to sing it—where certain songs have to be sung to you. I always try to please myself—I figure I try to get it as good as I could get it for me and then whoever got it would get the right message. I didn’t want to write songs for the wrong people. I had enough trouble with the wrong people as it is.
What do you think is your own natural kind of writing? What’s the most basic thing that’s gonna come out of you?
I have a clipboard and typing paper—no lines—and a guitar and I just play whatever comes to mind. Sometimes I play old songs, sometimes I play new songs, sometimes I just say stuff. You can’t say stuff all the time that makes sense. I mean—you throw out something and you go, ‘Oh yeah, there’s that line.’ ‘What was that line I thought about the other day?’ And you put it in. I just finished a love song the other day for my wife called ‘We Could Be What True Love Is All About’. It’s kind of like sticking it together through thick and thin and how we’ve come to love and trust each other and that could be what true love is all about. Somebody said you don’t write down stuff to write down what you know—you write down stuff to discover. You start out with a line or two and you think, ‘Where the hell am I going?’ When I started that love song I said, ‘By now you should have left me / cause I don’t know why you stayed by me this long.’ I was kind of questioning myself—why would you stick with me, you know? ‘By now you should have packed up and moved on / but I know that you believe that things in life work out / and that could be what true love is all about.’ You know—sticking together. Then it gets to be sticky. How can you say it simply without sounding too grandiose and still come to touch people wisely? I remember when I played it for my fans, one of the guys came over and said, ‘Wow, man—you were like going to a marriage counselor there, thanks.’ I dedicated it to him and his wife cause he’s an old pilot and he likes to play guitar and run around. He used to fly for Southwest Airlines so they come down when I’m doing my thing.
How simple is too simple?
You don’t want it to be so grandiose. There’s a way its kind of like street poetry and there’s earthy folk poetry and then there’s kind of ‘You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings’ or ‘Fly Me To the Moon’—you know all that kind of stuff. I was fooling around the other day with that song ‘Moon River’ that was in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics but it just has this neat little—it’s kind of a dreamy ghostly pleasant feeling thing of being out on a moonlit night, so it got me started writing another song about being out at night. We have these beautiful moonlit nights in Belize and if your wife’s with you, her hair will be all curly from the air. We take showers in the rainwater and walk along the beach and it would be like daylight almost. But that’s a case as a song where you can get too over the top with it—but that’s all right.
I read that at Spring High School in Texas they were studying your lyrics in English class.
I used to go play for my son’s class when he was in high school—not a whole lot but a few times. The kids pay more attention when it’s not something out of a dusty old textbook. I’ve heard them teaching Bob Dylan’s lyrics—like the song ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and asking what does it mean? Just to get ‘em interested. I was telling them about the sixties, I think—it was a social studies class. I talked to them about going to rallies and protesting the war. I’ve played everything there is. I’ve played the White House, Carnegie Hall a couple times, state fairs—I played the Us Festival. We just played Red Rocks with Willie during the Democratic Convention. Then there’s little stuff—I played in front of 85 people in Oxford, England. They were standing shoulder to shoulder in this little pub. A lot of them even less than that. You’ve gotta work everything differently—you’ve got to try to find things that they like. One time I played in Alaska in Point Barrow, which is the farthest north anyone had ever done a concert. I was three hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. We flew in and then we took a car to the end of the road so we could say it was the farthest north. I was playing for a bunch of Eskimos and drillers. I thought of this song ‘Hands On the Wheel,’ which is a Billy Callery song that he wrote at my house one time. And there’s a line in there that relates to them and I thought they’ll get that one. And then we ate at the farthest north Mexican restaurant.
How was it?
It was cold.

JERRY JEFF WALKER WITH RALPH STANLEY, THE KNITTERS, PURE PRAIRIE LEAGUE, JAMES INTVELD AND MANY MORE ON SUN., APR. 26, AT STAGECOACH AT THE EMPIRE POLO FIELD, 81-800 AVENUE 51, INDIO. NOON / $79-$499 / ALL AGES. STAGECOACHFESTIVAL.COM. VISIT JERRY JEFF WALKER AT JERRYJEFF.COM.

Earl Scruggs started out picking banjo for Bill Monroe but made his name and fame with Lester Flatt as Flatt and Scruggs until 1969. After that, he took his family and friends out as the Earl Scruggs Revue and covered Dylan and shared songs with the Byrds. He speaks now (with son and musician Gary) before his performance at Stagecoach. This interview by Dan Collins.

How old were you when you started playing banjo?
Earl Scruggs: Very small. My dad had an old banjo, and I loved music long as I can remember. I played before I even knew what radio was.
I guess you got your first big break when you joined Bill Monroe’s group. Why did you and Lester Flatt decide to quit and start your own group?
ES: We felt like if we worked for ourselves, we’d make more money. We did much better.
When the sixties hit, and the first big folk music wave came along, you and Lester embraced it in a way not all bluegrass musicians did. Do you think having sons who were young helped you find that passion?
ES: Oh, for sure. Aw, yeah!
Gary Scruggs: With the folk boom—some people call it the ‘folk scare’—my mother was instrumental in getting a lot of things done. Dad knew Joan Baez, and through that friendship, mother knew her manager, Manny Greenhill. And that helped Flatt and Scruggs get involved with the folk boom.
In ‘69, you and Flatt covered Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 and 35.’ Did you worry that this might be seen as promoting drug use?
ES: No, I just hoped it would be seen as promoting a good song.
GS: I’ve always thought of that song as more about being persecuted or criticized. The line, ‘They’ll stone you when you’re trying to keep your seat,’ always reminds me of Rosa Parks.
ES: That’s what makes Bob such a great songwriter—different songs can mean different things to different people.
And you also did a television special called Earl Scruggs: Family and Friends, and you played with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Byrds. Were they able to keep up with you musically?
ES: Well, they had their show, and we’d do theirs. We didn’t play together as a band.
But I have seen footage of you playing with the Byrds.
ES: Well, yeah. They were friends of ours. We had some songs we could do together.
Did you get criticism from the mainstream bluegrass camp for playing with rock and folk acts?
ES: That’s one thing I don’t pay any attention to. I do what I think’s best, and to heck with other people’s opinion! I respect their opinion, but I still gotta make a living.
Bob Dylan caused a lot of controversy when he ‘went electric’ at the Newport Folk
Festival in 1965. At what year did you start using electric bass and guitar in your band, and did it cause the same kind of controversy?
ES: In 1969, the year we formed the Earl Scruggs Revue—Gary played electric bass and Randy switched back-and-forth between acoustic and electric guitars, depending on the song we were playing. We also used a full drum set, and then added piano, so it was a big sound.
GS: You asked if it caused any controversy—there were some pretty harsh criticisms of dad from some of the hardcore bluegrass fans that didn’t like electric instruments and drums period. But the Revue wasn’t a bluegrass band, and we never claimed to be a bluegrass band. Overall, the positive response far outweighed the negative.
ES: Right. I never wanted to be categorized as just ‘bluegrass.’ The Revue played for a heck of a lot more young people than Lester and I ever did, and it was an exciting time. The Revue played on a lot of college campuses, and rock festivals, too. I gained a lot more fans with the Revue than I ever lost.
On the album that was released after that show, there’s a sound clip of your speaking out against the Vietnam War.
ES: Well, that’s way in the past now. I didn’t believe in what was going on at the time.
GS: I just want to be clear: Dad has never not supported soldiers and troops. He’s been a firm supporter of people who have sacrificed for our country. We were just against the Vietnam policies.
In fact, Earl, you supported the war effort in World War II by working in a factory, isn’t that right?
ES: Well… my dad died when I was four years old. I was left with a mother and a half-sister. I was making a pretty good living in the mill, so I worked in the mill because I had to make my salary every week. Then I learned I could make more money in the music business, so I left the mill and moved to the radio and the show business.
You invented a mechanism for the banjo, didn’t you? I was reading that there was a time when you would play with a big box over the neck of your banjo, so no one could steal your idea before you patented it.
ES: No, that’s what got out—that I was trying to conceal it. What it was was tillers. They worked like a cam[shaft]. I just took a brace and bit… you know what a ‘brace and bit’ is?
I don’t know what a brace and bit is.
ES: It’s a manual drill that you bore holes through wood with. I turned the banjo over and bored down through the inlay and everything, put two extra pegs on it—which were nothing but cams to push the strings—run it down to a D and then push it back up in the G position.
So it would sound like a slide almost. You could detune a note while it was resonating.
ES: Right. Very good!
I think that speaks to one of the qualities that’s unique to you, regardless of what genre we’re talking about. You’ve got precision, and you’re fast. But there’s a certain amount of soul as well. Do you think you cut a good line there between playing fast, but also having that spirit?
ES: Well, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ bout, ha ha.
I mean, I was reading about Todd Taylor, who has the Guinness World’s Record for playing the fastest banjo…
ES: I don’t participate in ‘speed.’ I think speed is alright, as long as you control it. But you can get it so fast you can’t pick it yourself.
Who do you think, out of all the musicians you’ve gotten to play with, is the person you’ve looked at and said, ‘Wow, that’s one of the best people I’ve seen play that instrument?’
ES: Well, let’s put it this way. All musicians—most of ‘em—are good. Even those musicians themselves are better on some tunes than others. So that’s what makes the world go round. They’re all good, but they play different tunes well.
What was the tune of yours that you thought you played the best?
ES: ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown,’ I guess would be the most successful one.
That was the one that was in the movie Bonnie and Clyde.
ES: That’s right. I recorded it way on back, and then I had a request to do a music score for the movie.
GS: It was Warren Beatty Dad’s referring to.
ES: …and he found that record I’d recorded earlier, and told me, never mind, he’d found what he wanted. So he used the old recording of ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown.’
Did that open a lot of doors for you, and increase your popularity?
ES: It sure did. It was like The Beverly Hillbillies. It went nationwide.
You’ll be playing in Indio, California at the end of this month, at the Stagecoach Festival. Will Steve Martin be in your touring band this time, playing second banjo?
ES: I don’t know if Steve will be around or not.
GS: Dad did a re-recording of ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ in 2001, and Steve was one of the featured performers on that, including Paul Schaeffer, Vince Gill, Leon Russell, and a bunch of people.
Did you see Steve Martin perform back in the late sixties and early seventies? I know he opened for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band quite a few times.
GS: We did quite a few concerts with the Dirt Band, some of which we opened, some of which they opened. It was co-billing most of the time. And Steve was involved a couple of times then.
ES: Steve Martin at the time was a stand-up comic. I don’t know if you remember that—he had a thing with like an arrow stuck through his head. He did real well.
I’ve got a recording of you playing with the Dirt Band, and you’re covering Mike Nesmith, who’d been in the Monkees. Did you like his music a lot?
ES: Well, I liked what we was doing at the time. I didn’t care whose music it was. If it sounded good, I’d say ‘Let’s do it.’
GS: That was ‘Some of Shelley’s Blues.’
That’s right, and Gary, you sang on that one! How long have you guys been playing as father and sons?
ES: Oh, since they were in school. We had Earl Scruggs, Family and Friends, on the road about eleven, twelve years.
What was your relationship with the Carter Family?
ES: Mother Maybelle Carter was my musical hero early on. I loved the way she played guitar and I was a big fan of the Carter Family. She moved to the Nashville area and lived near where we lived. We became friends and visited one another quite often. I never met A.P., but I got to know Sara a little from when she was in town to visit with Maybelle.
GS: Flatt & Scruggs recorded an album with Maybelle in 1961.
ES: We sure did—Songs Of The Famous Carter Family was what it was called. My wife, Louise, was also a big Carter Family fan and she suggested we do an album of Carter Family songs and I asked Mother Maybelle if she would like to record with us for it. Maybelle had pretty much retired from music and was working in a nursing home, sitting with people who needed some help or needed some company to help pass the time. Anyway, we recorded the album and did some shows together. I was glad to see Maybelle back at it, singing and playing her guitar and autoharp.
GS: And you got Maybelle involved with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s original Will The Circle Be Unbroken album.
ES: Yes. The Dirt Band had asked me to take part in it and also to help get some of the other artists involved—Mother Maybelle, Roy Acuff, Jimmy Martin, and Doc Watson. It was a lot of fun for me to be back in the studio with her.
I was interviewing Chris Darrow from the Dirt Band a few weeks back, and he was saying that he and Steve Martin and a bunch of people who went on to be in popular bands later all got their start playing bluegrass at Disneyland when they were really young, like it was a boot camp for musicians. Now Disney pushes out people like Britney Spears. Do you worry that there’s no place for young musicians to learn to play bluegrass or banjo?
ES: No, no no, there’ll always be good banjo pickers. We may not be as many at times as others, but as long as they play well, they’re gonna get out there!

EARL SCRUGGS WITH THE REV. HORTON HEAT, REBA, THE CHARLIE DANIELS BAND AND MANY MORE ON SAT., APR. 25, AT STAGECOACH AT THE EMPIRE POLO FIELD, 81-800 AVENUE 51, INDIO. NOON / $79-$499 / ALL AGES. STAGECOACHFESTIVAL.COM. VISIT EARL SCRUGGS AT EARLSCRUGGS.COM.

LIMITED NUMBER OF RESERVED SEATS JUST MADE AVAILABLE FOR STAGECOACH: CALIFORNIA’S COUNTRY MUSIC FESTIVAL

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY, MARCH 27

A limited number of reserved seats have just become available for STAGECOACH: California’s Country Music Festival, Powered by Toyota set for Saturday, April 25 and Sunday, April 26 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA. Beginning this Friday, March 27 at 10:00 AM (PT), STAGECOACH fans will have access to these reserved seats starting at $299. Beyond a guaranteed spot at the Mane Stage, these seats also include access to the VIP area with all the amenities (extra shaded areas, couches, additional upgraded restrooms, and food and beverage vendors including a full bar), along with a commemorative STAGECOACH chair.

STAGECOACH: California’s Country Music Festival–set for Saturday, April 25 and Sunday, April 26 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA–will once again play host to an impressive lineup featuring some of the top talent in the country music world today including headliners Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Reba and Kid Rock.

The updated STAGECOACH line-up (as of 3/25) is as follows: Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Reba, Kid Rock, Little Big Town, Miranda Lambert, Poco (Richie Furay, Jim Messina, Rusty Young, Paul Cotton), Charlie Daniels Band, Darius Rucker, Earl Scruggs, , Lady Antebellum, Reverend Horton Heat, The Knitters, Jerry Jeff Walker, Ricky Skaggs, Ralph Stanley, Kevin Costner & Modern West, Pure Prairie League, Lynn Anderson, Doyle Lawson, Jim Lauderdale & The Dream Players, Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band, Danielle Peck, Dale Watson, Zac Brown Band, The Duhks, Waddie Mitchell, Randy Houser, Hot Club of Cowtown, James Intveld, Sacred Cowboys, Maxim Ludwig and the Santa Fe Seven, John Linn Band, Christ Stuart and Back Country, The Infamous Stringdusters, and Greensky Bluegrass.

Reserved ticket prices start at $299 for a full weekend of entertainment. In addition, a limited number of general admission tickets, camping and RV packages are also available. To view a complete breakdown of available ticketing and onsite camping/RV options, please visit www.Stagecoachfestival.com.

STAGECOACH is produced by Goldenvoice, The Messina Group and Moore Entertainment Group. For up-to-the-minute information on STAGECOACH, visit www.stagecoachfestival.com. STAGECOACH is sponsored by Budweiser, PlayStation and CMT.