Rod Bellville AJ: Alan Jesperson

Home , Forget About It, John Herald, Trampled By Turtles

Alan Jesperson and Rod Bellville Narrators

Phil Nusbaum Interviewer

March 24, 2010

PN: Phil Nusbaum RB: Rod Bellville AJ: Alan Jesperson

PN: Rod Bellville is here. I’m Phil Nusbaum. Alan Jesperson. Rod and Alan are going to tell us about Bluegrass in Minnesota, and that is what this is for. This could be used as a resource for some article someone might write at some time. The logical place for this would be Inside Bluegrass, or could be any magazine. This is a primary document we’re creating, so, thanks for coming, and thanks for hosting. I’d like to get how you came into Bluegrass, first off, and when it was, and some of the particulars. Rod, would you like to go first, since Alan is pointing to you?

RB: I had a radio with a little light in it and a little box. It had a little wire that went up to, I don’t know where it went up to a little, something, so you could get reception. You could turn it on and hear a little bzzz bzzz, and then you could finally get Gene Autry at night.

PN: When were you born and where?

RB: 1951 or 2 or something…oh, I don’t know. I think I was born in Minneapolis in 1944. My folks were from Milwaukee, but somehow they came here just before I was born or what.

PN: Maybe they wanted you to be born in Minnesota for citizenship purposes.

RB: No. I think it probably had something to do with my dad’s residency or something. His medical school thing was winding up. But any ways, so, Gene Autry would come on and then they would sing and do that, and I thought, “Oh, that’s so swell.” So, about 1954 I went to Florida or so, and drove through Country music territory.

PN: So, you were about 10 years old at this point?

RB: ‘54, yeah. And we got to hear Country music comin’ out of the radio in the car ‘cause it was all over the place. And much to my folks’ dismay, I thought, God, this is just, with the combination of Gene Autry, and then actually getting into the country…and I can remember going on a trip with them one summer through Montana and I was sayin’, “Look at them cows!” and they’d say, “No, no, no! We don’t say ‘them cows.’” And I thought, “That’s what they say on the radio…” So then I started singing peculiarly, and we’d go to church and we had to sing all the time, o’course, you know. My grandfather was a minister then, so it was a big church deal.

PN: This was in Wisconsin?

RB: No, no. This was in the Twin Cities - southeast Minneapolis. But I can remember him sayin’ when I was a little kid, “You’ve gotta stop singin’! You’re gonna wreck your voice!” [Laughing] What did I care, you know? And actually, the first time I heard Bluegrass was in 1958 or 9, some friend of mine bought the Stanley Brothers’ record with the rainbow on it that’s got, “Mother’s not dead, she’s only sleeping”…the harmony. Actually, the first time we got a Country music sampler thing, must have been ‘58 or 9 again, had Skeeter Davis and who knows, but it had one cut off Foggy Mountain Banjo. I can’t remember if it was Ground Speed or Home Sweet Home now, anymore. The banjo thing was totally captivating, so… Then just after that we got the Foggy Mountain Banjo record, actually. I’d been playing in string quartets with friends of mine.

PN: This is Classical music string quartets?

RB: Yeah.

PN: What did you play?

RB: Violin. Almost immediately, I said, “We’re not going to play this anymore; we’re gonna play Bluegrass.” I had a guitar that my dad got, when I was a little kid, my mom bought him a guitar, which he never played. It was a mahogany guitar with horrible action. It had a neck - huge, and the action... like a Dobro ‘cause it warped. So I had to play that. My friends were…actually, this was Jeff Gilkinson, now he played at the Dillards, see, after a while. He’s actually in Nashville right now; if you look him up he’s all over the place. But, his mom used to indulge him in things, and I thought, “Well, you’re the one whose mom’s gonna buy you a banjo, so you’re gonna have to be the banjo player.” But he actually had a four-string banjo that she had played in college, which would have been a long, long time ago, and he actually got where he could play three-finger style picking on a four-string banjo.

PN: Wow.

RB: Pretty good…sounded nice. She bought him an RV-250, which at that time cost 225 bucks, arm and a leg, you know. Then he had to relearn everything with a five string. Then the guy who played with us was another neighbor of ours, a guy named John Hay, who was a talented musician and a cello player. He started playing bass on the cello, but he also played fiddle like an old guy, with the fiddle on his elbow instead of his shoulder. So, we started out on Oak Street and Washington, actually, it was around the corner from Oak Street.

PN: This is near the U [University of Minnesota].

RB: Oh, yeah.

PN: How old are you at this point?

RB: Oh, 17, give or take. I’m just talkin’ about starting out playing jobs for money, we played all the time. We’d go in Jeff’s house, sit down and play and it’d be dark when we’d get done. We used to play those Stanley Brothers records so much that the songs we liked would turn white on the LP. I can’t remember what the name of it was, it was the coffee house that belonged to two guys; it belonged to Mel Leslie, the guy who owned the Coffee Break, which was around the comer on Oak Street. That’s the place where Bob Dylan played, and Dave Ray played there.

AJ: I remember sitting there, the first time I saw Dave Ray; we went in late, to the Coffee Break, and this was a little house, and there wasn’t any room, so I had to sit up in front, and Dave Ray broke a string and the end of the string hit me in the cheek. That’s how close I was, about 25 inches away from Dave Ray… [Laughing] excuse me...

RB: Anyway, me and Jeff went and played that job, then somehow we got, I don’t how we got hooked up with Annie Olsen who owned the Scholar [Scholar Coffeehouse in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota] at that time. She’d been married to a Classical guitar player who died in a car accident.

PN: Which kind of guitar player?

RB: Spanish, or a Flamenco player. I think she had a famous Ramirez guitar that she sold finally. But anyway, so, we told her and she said she liked Bluegrass, so we started playing there, and we made 15 bucks a piece for Friday and Saturday. After Red Nelson bought that, Annie sold it, Red said, “You guys have gotta take a break, people want to buy stuff, you can’t just play for five hours.” So then we had to start taking breaks.

AJ: This was at the Scholar?

RB: This was at the Scholar in Dinkytown, where, actually, a Burger King was there, now it’s just a parking lot. It’s the parking lot next to Hollywood Video, which may have been tom down in the last while or too, I don’t know. That was a really neat place.

AJ: I remember that I had tickets to see the Greenbriar Boys, and that was in ‘64, I think, maybe ‘65 - I was still in high school, I think, I graduated in ‘65. I had tickets to see the Greenbriar Boys, and they were only going to be there Friday night, and Thursday night the Scholar burned down [chuckling].

PN: Oh my goodness!

AJ: Rod tells me they had a party, so I never got to see Greenbriar Boys.

PN: Al, what’s your birth date?

AJ: May 1947.

PN: Rod, what you’re describing is getting together with your friends when you first started out playing, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you’d get together, I mean what kind of occasion caused that, or…?

RB: We lived close together, so we just played all the time.

PN: Did you call each other on the phone and say, “Hey, come on over,” or, what was it like?

RB: Mostly I’d just go over to Jeff’s house and whatever he was doing he’d quit and we’d play. But then the same deal with this John Hay guy now, it just almost occurred, really, you know, it’s not like it was hard to…if there was any chance that we could go and play, that’s what we did. I mean, I don’t even know if we’d call him, or if he just somehow imagine that if it was a certain time of day he’d just show up or what...I can’t remember exactly, but, it wasn’t like it is now where you call people us and they tell you, “Well, I’ll get back to ya, or I’ll think about it...” They aren’t waiting to see if there’s a better opportunity, which is what everyone seems to do lately, you know. “Maybe someone better will call me.” That wasn’t that way then, ‘cause there wasn’t anyone better, or there wasn’t anyone, period.

PN: This was your little group of people that would get together to…I don’t want to put a word on it…

RB: No, we didn’t just play music. We went horseback riding; we did everything together.

PN: These were your friends from age 13-14, or…?

RB: Second, third grade.

PN: All the way up.

RB: John moved in the neighborhood later, actually, so he was a little bit later than that, but Jeff and his brother were friends of mine since ‘52, give or take, or whenever they moved in the neighborhood, so…a long time.

PN: So, Alan, you’re a few years younger than Rod; you’re three years younger. Talk about gettin’ together with friends when you first started playing, and when was that for you, Al?

AJ: Well, my parents were contract Bridge players, and they had a tournament in Toronto, so they dragged us up there; the only place we went was where they had contract Bridge tournaments. So I’m in Toronto, and they used to have kids work that, so I’d earn a little bit of money and I went to a pawnshop and bought a guitar for $13…I think it was $30, it was a nylon- string guitar. And so, that was my first guitar.

PN: You were how old?

AJ: I think it was ‘62…’61 or ‘62. So then I came back and didn’t know squat about playing guitar; I’d play the notes for “Onward Christian Soldiers” and stuff like that, ‘cause I thought that was cool. We had a keyboard in the living room and I thought that was a beautiful song. At that time, I remember in 1958, I sent for the words for - to WDGY - for the words for “Tom Dooley” and got a mimeographed sheet, so I was already listening to the Kingston Trio, and The Smothers Brothers. So, anyway, I was interested in playing guitar, and I wasn’t really necessarily interested in Bluegrass, but kind of Folk music, you know. Rod’s got a little more of a traditional approach to it than I did because I was listening to…my favorite group in the early ‘60s was Peter, Paul, and Mary. Then I discovered Ian and Sylvia, and I liked them because they were the real thing. [Laughing]

RB: …actually Canadians...

AJ: Then, on the record I noticed that John Herald was their guitar player, and I thought, “John Herald, I wonder who that is?” Then I bought, the first Bluegrass record I bought - well there were two, one was Back Porch Bluegrass by the Dillards, and then the other one was the first Greenbriar Boys record because it had that picture of that D-28 on the front, and there was John Herald, and I listened to him. He was the first guy that made me go crazy, and then Doc Watson. Then in 1964 I went and saw Doc Watson - that’s where I met Jerry Flynn, was at the Doc Watson concert in 1964, at the Guthrie [Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis]. Did you go to that?

RB: No. I was in Alaska then.

AJ: A friend of ours, we had a mutual friend, a friend of mine introduced me to Jerry Flynn, so that’s where I met him, and we’ve been friends off and on since, so to speak. I remember going to the workshop the next day at the Walker Art Center [Minneapolis], and it was in the hallway at the Walker Art Center, and I actually handed Doc Watson his guitar out the case.

PN: Whoa!

AJ: Whoa! [Laughing] Big time! Anyway, but I was still a Folkie, and I didn’t really know anything about finger picking, I didn’t really know too much about flat picking at all, and then a few years later at Hopkins High School they had a Folk music club and that’s where I met my future fist wife and her girl friend. So then we kind of had a little three people playing music, and they knew how to sing harmony, and I didn’t know anything about harmony and they were better than I was, so it was fun to listen to them. So that was kind of what happened to me. That’s kind of how I got started. Then, my girlfriend and I got married, and we had a little Folk group, and we did “Coal Tattoo”. We used to do “Coal Tattoo”. Jerry played guitar.

PN: What year was this, by the way?

AJ: Oh, well, we got married in ‘67, so ‘66.

PN: You were 20 years old.

AJ: Yeah. I went to the Newport Folk Festival in 1966 with Jerry. He’ll tell you everybody who was there, but Jim and Jesse were there, Monroe was not there - he was there the year before, I believe. Anyway, I’m walking around with my red, Gibson J-45, when everybody’s got a Martin guitar, so...

RB: I had one of those red ones, though, I had a red J-45, too, a wonderful guitar.

AJ: My first good guitar.

RB: A wonderful guitar.

AJ: So, anyway, my wife and I, and Jerry we played in Mankato at a college, and we played over at Macalester [College, St. Paul]. I remember…

PN: What’s her name, by the way?

AJ: Her name now is Cindy Monson.

PN: What was her friend’s name - you had the trio?

AJ: Kathy Zempke…Kathy Lundgard, actually, at the time, and I couldn’t decide who I had the crush on, but it turned out to be Cindy. So, then when she got pregnant, she didn’t want to play music anymore, so, I wanted to play music real bad - I had the fever. So I was at The Podium, and there was a 3x5 card hanging up there and it said, “Anybody wanna play Bluegrass, call Ron Colby.” So we met at Sonneson’s Music, we played Little Maggie, I remember that.

RB: You and me went somewhere - did we go to Sonneson’s to talk to Ron, or when was that?

AJ: I don’t remember.

RB: Close to that time, though, because I remember going to play, we were going somewhere in the car and you asked me if I like Bluegrass, and I said, “Yeah.” I said, “I play,” and you said, “I don’t care about that, I just like to play guitar,” and you liked Joni Mitchell. “I don’t care about Blues, I just like to play guitar.” [Mimicking Al]

AJ: Sonneson Music…well, see but you were the big shot; you were the big shot musician. I don’t know if I’d seen you play with Dickson and Steven by then…because this would be early 1967.

RB: Too early.

AJ: You knew more about it then I did, and you knew Craig Anderson, CJ.

RB: Because he was a friend of Jeff’s.

AJ: Yeah, so CJ, and Ron Colby, and I started our band, the Middle Spunk Creek Boys in 1968, I guess.

PN: Now, about this time, the ‘50s into ‘60s that we’re talking about here, there’s a lot of music socializing that’s goin’ on…

RB: There were lots of parties, yeah.

PN: What are they like?

RB: I don’t know how to define ‘em. They’re different than the parties now, I think. The music and the guys who played music were way better. There was no such thing as thrash guitar.

PN: What is thrash guitar?

RB: Wanging. Loud wanging.

AJ: Boisterous, non-musical, boisterous…

RB: …yelling and wanging, mostly, yeah.

AJ: I think one thing you should talk more about, not to change your…I think you should talk more about the Scholar.

PN: I’ve not heard much about that, it’s a venue.

RB: Was a coffee house, yeah.

AJ: Right next to Vescio’s [Italian restaurant].

PN: Oh, sure.

RB: It was across that street from…

AJ: …The Podium.

RB: …well, that washing machine place. What was that called? It just left, my whole life as a washing machine, Laundromat…

AJ: And Virgin Don’s grocery store…

RB: Virgin Don’s, House of Hanson, what the heck was the name of that place?

AJ: The Washtub.

RB: The Washtub…gone now. God, I’m surprised.

AJ: Al’s Breakfast [legendary hole-in-wall breakfast spot in Minneapolis].

RB: Al’s Breakfast was just slightly west. Another interesting thing was, I think it was ‘61, Len started The Podium, which was a music store, a tobacco store, and a sheet music store. No one went into The Podium. Some days he would come in the morning, open it up, go inside, then at five o’clock he’d lock it up and go home.

PN: Wow.

RB: No one went in there. Actually, one of the first guys I knew who started shopping there was a guy by the name of Gene Uphoff, who was a folky guy. He was actually famous in the sense that his dad is the guy who lost to Joe McCarthy - Senator’s race he lost to Joe McCarthy, so they left Wisconsin. [Laughter]

AJ: Too bad he lost.

RB: Oh, God, he was dirty bastard, why’d he run if he was going to lose? Look what it did to the country?! [Laughter] Another interesting thing about them…there are two interesting things, one of them is that their older brother, Norm, was a flaming liberal guy, during the Vietnam war turned out to be a stooge for the CIA, and he was President of the student union at the University of Minnesota and he was spying on people and turning ‘em in.

PN: Wow.

RB: So that kind of wrecked their credibility. Actually, Brian, that guy was a gay guy that was a City Councilman for a while, Brian - what’s his name, lived with him for awhile, too, who was interesting. Another thing that I just heard about is Peggy Seeger’s gonna be back in town here, again, any day, and I remember talking to her for the school newspaper in 1960, and it was real exciting, and the first thing I asked her was if she’d ever heard of the Carter family. [Laughter] Which is so funny, ‘cause, I mean, ya think, “Yes, they’re my neighbors, my maid was Maybelle Carter.” What did I know, ya know?

AJ: You also went to Marshall High School.

RB: I went to Marshall High School…

AJ: Which is right on the end of Dinkytown there.

RB: Right in the neighborhood, yeah. But as far as the Scholar goes, that was a beatnik place, really. They actually had poetry readings in there and other obnoxious things like that, but it was actually a coffee house in the sense that, nowadays people don’t stay, they go get drunk, you know. People would go in there and have food and coffee, and actually stay there, which, I don’t know what’s changed, but something did.

AJ: I remember seeing Judy Larson playing there, and Steven Gammel backing up David Solberg, soon to be Starsky and Hutch.

RB: David Sole, yeah, he went out to California and performed with a bag over his head.

AJ: Yeah [chuckling]. That was later.

RB: Gammel had to tune his guitar for him, I remember… [Laughing]

AJ: Well, actually, Gammel went to California to make a record with him, and when he got there he found out the guy was just a putz and came home and wouldn’t play on the record. He did that to a lot of people [Gammel].

RB: [Garrison] Keillor’s third or fourth show [A Prairie Home Companion] he had Steve Gammel, with Judy Larson and Bill Hinkley, and then Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry were there. This was in the little, tiny basement somewhere, and Janet Davis, some little place at St. Kate’s [College of St. Catherine’s in St. Paul], I think, and the coordinating Engineer had to be on a different floor ‘cause the studio’s so small.

AJ: That was Park Square Court.

RB: I don’t know where it was.

AJ: It was upstairs at Park Square Court.

RB: That’s not where this is, this is somewhere else.

AJ: Oh, ok.

RB: It must have started out in even a smaller place, I don’t remember the first year, anyway, the first thing that happened was Steve Gammel said he didn’t like Garrison and he wasn’t gonna play. The second thing that happened was Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry decided they didn’t like Garrison and they weren’t going to play until they got paid ahead of time. [Laughter] Of all the people who really tried hard to pay musicians, it was Garrison. Bill Kling used to tell Garrison, “You don’t have to pay these people, they’d play for nothing. Why are you wasting $150 paying these musicians, they’d probably pay us to play!” Garrison said, “No way! We’re going to pay these people.” 150 bucks then was a lot of money, really…that would have been ‘73, we’re jumpin’ a head a long ways, but. It was ironic that the temperament of both Steve Gammel, and Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry was like rubbin’ him the wrong way. I always felt so sorry for him [Garrison] thinking about him ready to go on the air - he could have just played with Bill and Judy, I guess, he’d been doing that, so, that would have been ok.

AJ: You played at the Scholar?

RB: Yeah, we played there a lot.

AJ: And who’s “we”?

RB: John Hay and Jeff Gilkinson, and I, and then after a while the Streeter brothers would come and play with us: Kenny Streeter played Dobro; and Harold Streeter played everything, he played banjo with us, but, I mean, he’s moved to Colorado and you can still buy tablature from him online. He wrote tab for banjo starting way back when.

AJ: I think he lives in Arizona now.

RB: Oh, that could be. Last time I ever heard about him was 30 or 40 years ago.

AJ: He’s in Flat-Pick Guitar magazine sometimes.

RB: Could easily be that he’s moved since I heard about him, but, they were friends of Bill and Rose, and before they started playing with us they’d come to the job, and they always had black cars - Kenny always used to have these black Pontiac Bonnevilles, and they’d come dressed to the hilt, with some girls, like Mexicans, which was really cool. Mexican suits and shoes…totally dressed up, and their mom and Della would both wear those real flowery, full dresses - Mexican formal dresses! It was just so interesting. They’d all walk in together. It was really a kick! Their mom was just an amazingly dynamic person, she had a collection of instruments, and she had a collection of Derringers that she got from a place out on Cedar Avenue, which I forgot the name of…there’s some kind of, there’s a Rock-n-Roll club out there at one time, I don’t think it was Eatin’s Ranch, but it was some famous place, anyway. Kenny and Harold used to play with us, and then there was another guy whose name I don’t remember, but he was a Dobro player. He worked at a wood fire-proofing place, and when he’d come to play, his hands were always dyed yellow from the fire-proofing stuff he had to put on. But the Scholar was a long, narrow place, with the kitchen in the back. The staff at the Scholar was real nice, I don’t know if they were just nice to us, but it’s different from…there’s no separation between the people and the wait staff at that time.

AJ: The stage was in the front window, so the door opened right alongside the stage. When it was 40 below [Laughter]…

RB: …the wind would blow in. But that was ok, the PA at least would stay on there. The other thing that was real interesting - there was a guy who came up from the southeast some place - these people would bring people into town. This was Jeff Espifia who was a Spanish guitar player, but he was real fast, a great finger picker and he sang all kind of really interesting songs - something about a monkey biting somebody on a motorcycle cop, I don’t remember the name of the song, but it was a comic number, ya know. Anyway, one of those places brought him up. The Scholar was in Dinkytown, and then there was this Coffee Break place we were talking about before that was on Oak and Washington. I think the guy from the Oak and Washington place brought Lazy Bill Lucas from Chicago - he’s a piano player. He actually played everything; I don’t think he ever understood that people weren’t interested in hearing him play show tunes or Rock-n-Roll. He was mostly an entertainer, and you’d have to go and sit and listen through these horrible show tunes and stuff, then he’d play some Blues a little bit sometimes - which was the

10 only thing anyone was interested in. But he was a nice guy; he actually wound up being a banker to the people in the neighborhood he lived in - they need some money, they go borrow from Lazy Bill. I used to play with him; one time we were talking about Ray Charles and he said, “Yeah, I know Ray Charles in Chicago, when he was searching for a style.” I thought it was such a good way to talk about Ray Charles - “searching for a style.” ‘Cause who would’ve thought - you think he had that style from get-go. The other interesting thing about the Scholar, I can’t really remember - that was the only place to play, really, some Folk act came into town and sometimes they’d play at the Unitarian Center, but…

AJ: That was that church…was that the church on the corner?

RB: That was that church, yeah.

AJ: I saw Dave Ray and Tony Glover…

RB: The Guthrie had a series of Folk things later - spread out, Sam, not Sam, but Kirk McGee was here - Sam was busy plowing, and all kinds of people. They had a Blues series and an Old Time music series; the Lilly Brothers were here…

AJ: Flatt and Scruggs were at one point…

RB: Yeah, but Flatt and Scruggs were later, though…way later. I took my brother and sister to see them, just because it would be too late pretty soon. They were still little kids, but I thought, “You gotta see these guys, they’ll be gone.” The other thing that was interesting about the Scholar is that occasionally, regularly, three or four guys with black overcoats, black hats, white shirts, black shoes, black pants would walk in, walk straight through the club, walk around the comer, and go downstairs into the basement. Twenty minutes later they’d walk up, walk straight through the club, walk out, and go down the street. I thought, “What are these Italian gangsters doing in the basement of the Scholar?” I asked Red about that one time and he wouldn’t tell me. [Laughing] This was Red Nelson, the guy ended up owning the Scholar, then for years, until it ended up burning down. So, it was real exciting. The people that came in there were real responsive. It was really fun to play.

Now we go to play at different places, the Arcadia and places like that, and people are drunk and they talk the whole time. I think, “Why are we playing here!? There’s nobody watching!” They’re all talking - they talk as loud as they can talk. I think, “You wouldn’t talk this loud if there was nobody playing, must be they’re talking louder on purpose because the music is annoying them!” [Laughing] I played there a year ago at the KFAI thing, and I just had to stop and start laughing right in the middle of the thing, “How could you possibly be so inconsiderate and rude?!” I mean, it was like playing for a bunch of barnyard animals. So that’s always…

AJ: That’s a good way to talk to the audience.

RB: Yeah, it’s a good way to tell ‘em what you really think. [Laughter]

PN: Might not have mattered, because they weren’t listening.

RB: You’ve got the microphone, though. [Laughing]

PN: That’s true. So this is what it’s like also when you play there earlier on in the early ‘60s, in these coffee shops, or did they pay attention to you then?

AJ: Oh, no, wrapped! After the coffee houses moved across the river, the…Mike Justin bought the Scholar, and it was in a building that was just preposterous - it was right on comer of the freeway exit. The whole roof leaked so much that actually, the second and third floors were full of huge icicles, which, for some reason, didn’t come into the room. He would stop and say, “This is a listening room.” You couldn’t talk, you couldn’t do nothing when the music was on in there. The funny thing about him was, which he kept through his whole career was, we’d play, then all of the sudden the lights would go off and the mics would go off, so all of the sudden there are no mics and you’re standing there in total darkness…with no warnings - BAM. Then Mike would go around and try to rewire whatever it was he had to rewire to get the lights and the microphones to come back on again. [Laughter] The last time I ever saw him he was running the sound for the Bluegrass Festival when it was still at St. Croix Falls, and Ralph Stanley stopped in the middle of his set and said, “Can any of you people hear anything we’re doin’?” And people said, “Well, no.” Then he said, “Well, it’s your money, but as far as I’m concerned, this is a waste of good talent!”

PN: This is at Taylors Falls or St. Croix Falls?

AJ: Taylors Falls.

RB: Taylors Falls. So that’s the last time I heard Mike Justin run sound anywhere…waste of good talent… [Al chuckling]

PN: But it was Ralph [Stanley] who made that remark…

RB: From the stage, yeah. Horrible sun, the sun was just excruciatingly horrible, which I was used to, that’s the way it’d been my whole career, essentially…more or less.

I was gonna tell you one other thing here right away is that, we used to talk to the Streeters about Bluegrass, ‘cause they had tried to play Bluegrass. They said that in the late ‘50s or ‘56, give or take, there’d been a Mexican guy who was playin’ three-fingered banjo with a flat pick. Never met him, and I don’t know who he played with, but I know there was some interest in it earlier. He listened to the records and thought, “How can I do that?” And he figured out how to make that sound with a flat pick. One of the guys from Trampled by Turtles plays banjo with a flat pick now, so, that was interesting.

PN: I keep turning back to this, but I’m not going to keep doing it if you don’t think there’s something to say about it. Other people I talked to reference these parties that used to - seem to

be a big Folk music party scene goin’ on. So I wanted to ask about who would go to it, and what it was like. This kind of casual socializing before there were a lot of clubs and when our generation is younger, 20-ish - teens to 20s, there seemed to be a lot of music played at partied around town.

AJ: For sure. I used to go to parties, take out my guitar and I’d go home, and everybody else had fallen asleep, and was drunk, and the sun was coming up. In the meantime, a lot of the Art students, a lot of English majors, and it was a big University crowd thing, but then there were beatniks, who later turned into hippies. Another interesting thing about that was, was that some of the people from Public Radio, who were not hippies or beatniks, I don’t know what you call them - upper middle-class people, that might be insulting, maybe they were rich, high-class people - were involved in that somewhat, too, and would occasionally have parties. I played at Dulcie Lawrence’s [Minnesota journalist and peace and civil rights activist] house on occasion, and one of these guys was a President or Vice President or some kind of deal for Enron. They used to have parties that were real nice, and their houses were real nice, and then all these scrubby people would come and play there, but they liked it. That was cross-culture in a sense, that way. The most places, that we played, at least, were at different places that Red Nelson had, and he was a rent-party-rag kind of guy: he’d have his pals and musicians get to go, and then he’d charge everybody else a dollar for a beer, so we didn’t have to pay anything, but we were like attracted to drink after hours, essentially. Those were wild - big fun. John Turner’s song, “The Boys, The Boys were Shooting it Up Last Night” is actually a true story about the police tryin’ to break into his club, you know, which was his house, and he had a guy named, Machine Gun Kelly, who hung around with him all the time who claimed to have been all kinds of things. But anyway, the door opened up, these guys, not in uniform, tried to break in, and Machine Gun Kelly said, “Watch out Red, he has a knife!” and pushed him out of the way, and they had a big stairway that had a big open fire that looked down on the door, and who all was involved I don’t really know, but they exchanged gunfire with these guys tryin’ to break into this deal.

PN: This is the police trying to break into the party house?

RB: Yeah.

PN: Wow.

RB: And the line in John Turner’s song which is, what I remember, too, is that they took ‘em downtown and the next day they let ‘em all out of jail and gave ‘em their guns back. The line in the song is something’ like, “something’ something’ will be just fine, the judge and the jury is friends of mine.” Which, you know, who knows about that. That was interesting, ‘cause, people talked about guns in school and guns everywhere later on; and there were guns all over the place in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, too, I mean, they say, “Oh, kids are bringing guns to school!” Yes, they’re bringing guns to school in the 1959, you know. They didn’t start bringing shot guns to Marshall High until in the ‘60s, at least I never saw anybody bringing shot guns in, in the ‘60s.

AJ: …zip guns…

RB: It may be an escalation.

PN: This is an after-hours kind a situation…

RB: That’s what they all were. No one would show up at the parties until 1:30 [a.m.].

PN: But were they all there for someone to make money at, or were some of them just, come over to my house? Or the party’s at so-and-so’s, or the parties were typically at certain people’s houses?

RB: No, there were a lot at certain people’s houses, and they’d have parties when stars would come into town, then they tried not to tell everybody where they were.

PN: That was so people you didn’t want to come wouldn’t come?

RB: That’s right. Extremely clannish, stratified, you know, boy, their imagination of what the talent level of different people was…

AJ: So this party where the Greenbriar Boys were, tell me about that a little bit.

RB: I don’t remember that at all.

AJ: Oh, you don’t. I remember you telling me there was a party.

RB: Yeah. No.

AJ: Oh, well, never mind.

PN: Well, where the Greenbriar Boys go when their coffee house burned down when they got to town.

AJ: I think you told me Red Nelson had a party.

RB: Could be, yeah.

AJ: Anyway…

RB: I don’t remember that at all…I know the Grateful Dead were here and they went to a party at Bill Teska’s house years later. So was Bonnie Raitt.

AJ: I used to have parties in the ‘70s…

RB: Al had wonderful parties - the best parties.

AJ: Yeah, it started in about 19--…when I moved into - I lived behind Ralph and Jerry’s, 4th Street and 8th Avenue, in southeast [Minneapolis]. I used to have parties, and I would just call up

everybody I knew and most of ‘em would come. And they got to be a really big deal, it was once or twice a year, and I would go out and buy a keg or two of beer. It was a great apartment, it was an upstairs apartment, and it had a full porch across the front - screened porch - and then a walk- up attic where people would go upstairs and smoke dope and stuff. It was a two-bedroom apartment, I had an actual job, and I’d buy tons of meat; one year Cindy made, like, 21 pizzas.

RB: It was just amazing! A mountain, a mountain of food!

AJ: Yeah, and everybody came - it was great. I remember your brother, John…

RB: A lot of famous people came to those things…

AJ: …I remember your brother, John, came in one time, and the whole dining room table was full of stuff…”A WE, CHEESE!” [he said] And he loads a bunch of cheese on his sandwich and takes a bite out of it and it was pepper cheese! [Laughter] just remember him going, “Ugh!”

RB: Oh, no!

AJ: Yeah, John Bellville referred to his brother and sister - John and Sally were the other two members of his family that were interested in music.

PN: Who would you invite to these parties, Al?

AJ: Everybody, including the guys I worked with. I had a truck-driving job, and I would invite them and they would all come ‘cause they wanted to see hippies, so here are all these guys in their golf shirts, with their wives…remember that?

RB: I remember the limerick you made up for the people at work. [Laughter]

AJ: [Laughing] I don’t remember that - is that printable?

RB: No. It’s significant of the culture clash.

AJ: The next morning, I’d sit down at the table and make a list of who all was there - all the people I knew, and it was like, 150 people. Which was a lot of people for that place. I remember when Rudy Darling had a going-away party, Judy Larson fell asleep on the couch, so when I got up in the morning and walked out, she was layin’ there, and I said, “Well, Judy, should we go get some breakfast?” This was Thanksgiving morning, it was Rudy’s last day - he was leaving that weekend for California. I said, “You wanna get some breakfast or somethin’?” No,” she said, “I’m cooking today, I have a turkey the size of a small child.” [Laughter]

RB: She used to fall asleep on top of the refrigerator at Red Nelson’s place. She was a small shadow of her former self at that time and she could get up on the refrigerator, and she used to fall asleep up there.

AJ: But yeah we did, we had the Country Gazette were there one time, I remember, it wasn’t too long after Clarence White died that Roland was at my apartment sittin’ on the couch; he didn’t play, but Byron Berline - and Alan Munde played Texas back-up guitar to Byron Berline for most of the night. We had great parties, and if there was a band in town, they would come to the party afterwards – if there was somebody playin’ at The Whole [The Whole Coffeehouse at the University of Minnesota], or somethin’ like that. I remember Special Consensus, they’re from Chicago, and they commented one time that there were more good musicians in my living room, than there were in all of Chicago.

RB: That was after that festival that I had in 1979 or 80, whenever that was…

AJ: Hmmm…

PN: Festival in 1979 or 80?

RB: I had the Minnesota Bluegrass Festival twice.

AJ: Yep, two times.

RB: You know, of all the parties, Al’s were by far the best, and he’s still doin’ it. The Memorial Day thing here is…people wait all year to go to that.

AJ: It’s fun, because you never know who’s gonna show up.

RB: It’s different every year.

AJ: Yeah, yeah. And people you haven’t seen for 15 or 20 years show up, ya know. It’s kind of fun.

PN: If we could jump to a couple of things which seem sort of major; you guys can create the agenda, too, if we’re missing something here, is having places to play, part of that is developing an audience. The era you’re describing, it’s Bluegrass along with other Folk styles, is sort of a players…people who play dig it, but you can’t really go out to see it from what other people say, because there aren’t that many clubs. But at some point, there are more places to play. Could you talk about that?

RB: Electric music and DJs put an end to that. People switched from acoustic music shortly after Dylan went electric, and a lot of people that were real interested in Folk music and Bluegrass switched over to electric music for years and years.

PN: That was the ‘60s, wasn’t it?

RB: The end of the ‘60s, yeah. They didn’t switch right away with Dylan, but you know…We used to go play at Carleton all the time, and after a while it got to be that the people weren’t

16 interested in acoustic music exactly, they were interested in what kind of electric guitar was in then - the Allman Brothers or what.

PN: What were some of these venues that people played in when it was going in the ‘60s?

RB: The Scholar, The Riverside Cafe, and then this Coffee Break place, The Cafe Extempore, yeah that moved up and down the street, they always had some…

AJ: It used to be down by Smiley’s Point there. That was when I first started going there, that was in 1965, ‘64, because that was…I went in there in ‘64 when it was upstairs from there…

RB: It was upstairs, yeah, we played up there.

AJ: …because I was there with the guy who later introduced me to Jerry Flynn, and so that was ‘64. That was just kind of a bunch of apartments, or something, that was strung together and there’d just be people playing in one room and people playing in another room…

RB: There’s Episcopal Church thing and that’s the people went back to The Riverside Cafe, too.

AJ: The old Riverside Cafe was across from the Viking, so that was up the street from where it ended up at the corner.

PN: So, all these places are around the University of Minnesota?

AJ: Right, because the college kids were interested in the music for the history of it, and, also, the skill level of it.

RB: The other place we haven’t mentioned is The Gopher Hole [referring to The Whole Coffeehouse at the University of Minnesota]. That was a great place for a while. They used to bring in national acts there ‘cause they had a budget and stuff. We played there a lot. Pretty soon they called it Hootin’ Annie’s, I played there with Josh White, Jr., all kinds of…

AJ: We opened for Norman Blake three times, I think…at The Whole.

PN: Oh, at The Whole?

RB: Vasser played there, Norman Blake played there.

AJ: …Country Gazette, Lester Flatt and the Nashville Grass played there.

RB: Sam Bush’s band played there, remember you tape-recorded their band down there? Because I remember after that show, Ebo Walker was playing bass, said, [mocking voice] “I just sure tricked this guy, he taped the show and I went and said, ‘Hey let me borrow the tape…’ and he gave it to me. Hahaha!” That was Al [who had taped the show].

PN: Could you guys describe the differences in playing the party scene as opposed to being in a band and giggin’ out? Being in a band and playing in a professional situation?

RB: The party scene was that you had to go and wait for all of the shit people to go home, really, that’s what it amounted to. It got to be late at night, they’d leave, and then you got to play with people that were any good.

AJ: Those parties at my house lasted until...

RB: Yeah but the thing is, your parties the people were good right from the start, that was unusual.

AJ: Kind of cotton-picked the people…

RB: …or [at non-Al parties] there were just enough good people there, if you just didn’t have to wait for these duds - people yowling and wanging with fake, wool-felt cowboy hats. They were everywhere for a while. Still are everywhere, but I don’t hang out with them anymore.

AJ: The thing about it was, there weren’t places to play when the Scholar closed. We used to go and see…I don’t know who was the biggest person that ever played at the Scholar, the one when it was on the West Bank?

RB: Couldn’t even imagine to say.

AJ: Keorner [Spider John], Ray, Glover, and Rod had a band called…

RB: Leo Kottke played there…

AJ: Yeah, Leo Kottke was a regular. He was there probably, like every month or so.

RB: He was completely unknown.

AJ: He was going to St. Cloud State, and he’d come down and play…

RB: …play and drool on his guitar.

AJ: Yeah, and he never said a word hardly on stage. He had no, absolutely no conversation at all, he just played.

RB: And what’s the name of the guy, I forgot already?

AJ: Who?

RB: The owner.

AJ: Mike Justin.

RB: Mike Justin, yeah.

AJ: Jeff Todd Titon, then there was a group called The Villagers…

RB: I don’t remember them at all.

AJ: …which was a guitar player and a banjo player, and they were kind of fun. I remember they did a song called “Jubilee”, which I always liked.

RB: I know that tune, yeah.

PN: “Swing and turn, jubilee.”

AJ: Yeah, it’s a cool song. Jeff Todd Titon, and I’ve got some of the calendars from the old Scholar.

PN: This, of course, is not all Bluegrass, this is....

AJ: No.

PN: …this is all kinds of roots music.

AJ: Folk. Right, right, right.

RB: Annie Elliot and Steve Gammel made hand-painted posters that were just beautiful for that place, week after week, after week, and mostly Mike wouldn’t give ‘em away. [Laughter]

AJ: I always wanted to get the poster that he did for us that he hung over the stage.

RB: Yeah, I guess, real talented artists. I don’t know what happened to Annie. Steve quit playin’ music and started bein’ and artist, so…Mike bought him a guitar, too. He had a crummy old guitar, and Mike somehow came up with enough money to buy him an Epiphone Texan, which cost 125 bucks.

AJ: Gammel. Yeah.

PN: It seems that at some point Bluegrass is starting to seem like it’s its own genre with its own audience that sometimes shares the stage with other genres, but also is kind of its own thing. Do you agree with that?

RB/AJ: Now it is.

RB: Wasn’t then, though. It was real unusual then.

PN: Bluegrass was unusual then?

AJ: Well, Bill Monroe would do package shows with the Opry, and he was just the country act.

RB: That what I was going to tell you about The Flame, when Monroe came to town and they wore southern plantation suits, ya know, and nobody was coming. And the guy who ran The Flame, made them go out and buy flannel shirts and suspenders and act like hillbillies. And the interesting thing was that Monroe did that. That was at a time when he was on the very bottom. It was before Ralph Rinzler put out High Lonesome Sound, which brought him back.

AJ: Yeah, he was starvin’ to death.

RB: He was strugglin’.

AJ: When the Scholar, on the West Bank, opened we used to go there all the time; that was the cool place to go, and it really was the only place to see any music at that time.

RB: When the Riverside Cafe opened it was the same way; there was nothing else there. And that was like an Old Time music scene that never came back again. I thought that had gone someplace else, but no, it’s just gone, there’s no place like that now. But that was more of an Old Time than a Bluegrass place; more Old Time players, maybe.

AJ: When the Scholar was open, it closed in late ‘68, early ‘69, and he had the Oblivion Record Store. By the way, my opinion of the Oblivion Record Store was he came up with that name because we used to pretend that we had this record album, this Gospel album, Oh, God, The Middle Spunk Creek Boys, and it was on the Oblivion label. And of course the title song, “Oh, God”. [Laughter] Anyway, but that was on the Oblivion label, so Leo Kottke’s first album was on the Oblivion record label. And so, I’m just 100% certain that that’s where Mike Justin got that idea.

RB: Sure, well, Gary [Garrison Keillor] did that, too, a lot of the stuff in his early writing was just stuff he stole from the lives of the people that worked on the Prairie Home Companion.

AJ: Garrison Keillor, yeah. He stole the name Stan Byerman from me. He asked me if he could use it, and I said, “Sure, give me a copy of the book.” And, of course, he never gave me a copy of the book.

RB: The movie that he had out had Lindsay Lohan, and the part she played was the part my daughter played in Nashville when she worked for him, and he just stole her whole thing, except for being depressed, which my daughter isn’t. I thought, “Wait a minute, he’s stolen Katie’s life to put in his movie!” and it’s no different than what he’s always did…he’s done it all along.

AJ: Yep.

RB: It’s an honor and a privilege, eh?

AJ: Anyway, so the Scholar, we’d go in there and watch ‘em, and the Bellville Smith Bluegrass Band, featuring Buck Ank, who was Steven Gammel. And so it was these three guys, and Dickson Smith was a left-handed banjo player. 20

RB: Which was really handy, because then you didn’t have to worry about the microphoning; you can both stand there and play.

AJ: Rod played guitar most of the time and Gammel played mandolin, so we went in there and watched them and those guys were hot stuff. And then we, our nasty little band, went out on an open stage on a Sunday night or Sunday afternoon and played, and Mike Justin liked us not because we were any good, but because we were funny.

RB: You were funny.

AJ: We were funny.

RB: Rilly used to do tricks with his violin bow, for God’s sake.

AJ: I listened to the Dillards, and they were funny, that second album of theirs. That was fun. We’d make up cheap gags…this was 1968.

PN: Who’s in this band with you, Al?

AJ: Craig Anderson - C.J. Anderson, and Ron Colby, and myself, and then Rudy Darling later on.

PN: So it’s an early Spunk Boys…

AJ: Yeah. And so he hired us and asked us if we wanted to play there, so we were playing on the same calendars with Koerner, Ray, Glover, and Bellville Smith, Leo Kottke, ya know, and it was pretty cool - and people liked us. Out in the audience one time we caught a guy taking notes, and walked over to him during a break, and said, “Oh, so you’re kind of interested in Bluegrass?” and it turned out it was Steve Block and he was writing down the jokes.

RB: He wasn’t interested in Bluegrass, he’s interested in the jokes.

AJ: So then we asked him if he wanted to play bass for us, because we didn’t have a bass player, so that’s how he became our bass player. He’s now playing bass with Randy Waller and the Country Gentlemen.

PN: There you go.

AJ: Yeah, but anyway.

PN: How much are you giggin’, then?

AJ: Not much, there’s hardly any jobs. Our first job, we always say, is at the Scholar, but actually, that’s not true. Our first job was at the YMCA the week before.

PN: When was it more possible to play in front of an audience for pay? When did that start to happen?

AJ: That was the Riverside Cafe.

RB: ‘70, ‘71.

PN: Well then, you’re adding one place, though.

AJ: Yeah.

RB: We used to play colleges, you could book colleges: Metro, North Metro, we played at Macalester. We played a lot of different college jobs. I went all the way to Mora, played Mora a couple times. The college they closed down in southern Minnesota, we played down there a couple times. They closed it for some unknown reason. I forgot the name of it was.

AJ: We did a Folk Festival in 1969, after the Scholar closed, before the Riverside Cafe opened.

We played the St. Olaf Folk Festival, and Doc Watson was supposed to be the headliner, but he couldn’t make it, so Mike Seeger was there. So that was Craig Ruble, Jerry Lee, Ron Colby, and me, and CJ.

PN: What’s the name of that group?

AJ: Middle Spunk Creek Boys.

PN: Oh, I didn’t know Jerry Lee was a Spunk Boy.

AJ: Well, yeah.

RB: One night.

AJ: Yeah, one night.

AJ: So, Mike Seeger called a square dance with us. So, I’ve actually got that on tape. I completely forgot about that when I was introducing Mike Seeger at the Festival a couple years ago, I forgot all about that. So then the Riverside opened, and we always played the Riverside, and hardly ever played the Extemp [The Cafe Extempore]. The Riverside was kind of our home base, and at one point…

RB: Two different kinds of people.

AJ: Yeah, it was. One was more, The Extemp was more…

RB: I always thought of them as nerds…

AJ: Yeah, more of a social kind of thing, and the Riverside Cafe was all your friends and musicians, and stuff.

RB: At The Extemp it didn’t matter how bad you were, you could get on stage.

AJ: [Laughing] That’s true. Then The Extemp got to be a place to go for people on the tour, national tour, so…

RB: Well, it got a lot better when Steve Alarik started to run it, they had some really good stuff come through there then, you know.

AJ: So, we played at The Riverside Cafe for four or five years, and at one point I know we were the biggest draw down there. We were just bringin’ in a bunch of people, and it wasn’t a whole lot of money, but we’d take in 100 bucks or something, and then we’d go spend it across the street at Mama Rose’s.

RB: It wasn’t much money, that’s for sure, yeah. When we played there there’d be no place to sit, we’d be packed, no place to stand even - we used to get close to 200 people come and hear the…

AJ: That’s my favorite Bill Hinkley story, he came walking in the back door there one time, and we’d just finished up with “I Wish You’d Knew”, and got off stage, and there’s Bill - this is pretty early, Bill had just moved into town, kind of by then, a little bit - and he said, “Boy, you guys are really tight on the third chorus of “I Wish You Knew”. [Laughter]

RB: [Laughing] Is that good or bad?

AJ: [Laughing] I don’t know. That’s a true story, though. That was great, Stevie Beck, and Bob Bovee played there, and you guys played there a lot, and that was a great place, Dave Hull…

RB: Flash Cadillac…

AJ: I don’t know what that is.

RB: Oh, that’s Blues guys played there a lot.

AJ: But anyway, that was the most fun place to play, and then The Extemp was.

RB: Really, it was really the most fun place to play, totally, I mean we would have played there for nothing, really - it was real exciting, but then again, we got the crowds. The people really listened and they really were wonderful applause…

AJ: It was more like a concert than playin’ a club.

RB: No, no, it wasn’t like playin’ a club.

AJ: And like goin’ to Dulono’s now, it’s a free-for-all in there, you got to be sitting right so you can hear.

RB: I took bands into Dulono’s and I thought this has ruined my band, I’m not going to ever come there again. Friends of mine came up and said, “Yeah, I know, it must be awfully hard to play here, ‘cause the band sounded bad.” It was like, whoa, wait a minute…

AJ: Well, the thing about Dulono’s was that when we first got our first Dulono’s job there, the cool thing about that was you knew how much you were gonna get paid. It wasn’t much, but you knew you were gonna get 110 bucks or whatever they paid ya for two nights or three nights at the time.

RB: Actually, it was better when it started, I thought, anyway. The last time we played there must have been ‘77 or ‘78, by then it was already a total zoo.

AJ: And then times were bad and they kept tryin’ to throw the music out and Wayne Anderson’s daughter said, “No, you can’t throw the music out.” He would have tossed us out a couple three times, because business was so bad.

RB: I didn’t know that. It’s packed now.

AJ: Oh, yeah, you go in there 8 o’clock on a Friday or Saturday night and everybody’s standin’ in the aisles.

RB: I mean, it’s full of people who don’t even come to hear the music.

AJ: Right, yeah it’s a hang-out now, too.

PN: Into the ‘70s, there are these bigger parties, something, am I right about this, there’s some kind of invitation only Bluegrass festival which led into the forming of the Bluegrass Association?

RB: I don’t know about that.

AJ: Invitation do you mean the audience - invitation for the audience?

PN: Yeah, but…

AJ: I don’t know about that.

RB: There was Tom O’Neill…

PN: Let me just ask you then, to talk about the forming of the Bluegrass Association and why.

AJ: Tom O’Neill moved to town from San Diego…

RB: He wanted a job. He wanted to be President and get people to give him money [Laughter] It’s true, that’s why he did it.

AJ: He actually had a job; I don’t remember what it is.

RB: He was a pharmacist.

AJ: Oh, is that what it was? He was a terrible bass player…

RB: He was tone deaf.

AJ: He didn’t know chord progressions…just a terrible bass player, but he looked the part, he looked like Mitch Jane, he had a handkerchief hangin’ out of his back pocket, and his bass’ name was Bessie or something’. There had been a Bluegrass Association in southern California, so he came here and he wanted to start one. So that’s kind of how that happened. He was playing bass with Buckacre, which was Bruce Jaeger and Paul Moe’s band, and so they gave him an office at the guitar store up on Johnson; one room where he could have the Bluegrass Association, so they got all the jobs. So it was decided one time at kind of a coup event at Dulono’s, that Tom O’Neill was gonna be ousted as the head of MBOTMA because it just wasn’t fair, so Jerry Flynn was the actual first President of the Association.

PN: So he joined The Spunk Boys, and then you got all the jobs.

AJ: No, he was…nooo.

RB: No he didn’t get all the jobs. Nothing changed.

AJ: Yeah! [Laughter].

RB: It’s really clannish.

AJ: Yeah. But that’s how it started, and that was in 19--…they kind of fudged on when MBOTMA started.

RB: It started after ‘81, ‘cause those festivals that I had there was no MBOTMA at that time.

AJ: They kind of moved it back a couple more years than it really was, but, they wanted to make it “25 years” that one time, when it was really 22 years or 23 years, but who cares, ya know?

PN: Why do you think…I’d just like to have your observations about the forming of an association…you guys have been playing Bluegrass for a long time at that point, and then suddenly, there’s an organization that’s devoted to Bluegrass. Now, what caused it, what kind of an impact, why was it necessary, other than for somebody to get money?

AJ: What it was…I don’t think it was to get money…

RB: It wasn’t necessary.

AJ: It was a club. The thing, I was very uninterested in that Association, because it seemed like it was just a bunch of people who wanted to have a club, like the Lions Club, or The Moose, and it didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with music, really. It was clannish in a different way, it was all the suits, kind of thing, it seemed to me - that was the way I felt about it. So, for many years I was pretty stand-offish as far as that’s concerned. Now I’ve decided to be involved with it.

RB: I had nothing to do with it all. I had no use for it. I didn’t need it. The people who joined it were no good. The other interesting thing is that after all this time and all these parties, the little kids then, actually are wonderful players now.

AJ: Yeah, Brian Wicklund, Matt Thompson, I can’t even think of ‘em all.

RB: There are a lot of them, boy.

AJ: That just grew up with it.

RB: Got to go every weekend, or all the time…

AJ: They were little drip-nose kids, you know, but it provided a focus so they would put on a festival. I booked the first couple of festivals up at Taylors Falls, and it was a deal. Nobody knew if it was going to work or not; it was a pretty rag tag operation. I don’t know if we used our sound system for it or what…

RB: I don’t know…

AJ: But what it did was it provided a focus, and then they started having jam sessions, and they had at the hotel up on Osseo Road and 694 was where they had the first weekend thing. That didn’t work too well ‘cause it wasn’t really setup for that. That went on that way for a couple years before they moved to…where did they go next?

RB: I don’t know.

AJ: Anyway, it provides a service for people who don’t know anything…

RB: …can get started.

AJ: And now there’s all kinds of things that the Association does, as far as education and that kind of thing.

RB: Well, as far as bringing famous acts into the area, too. For years they’d just bring the cheapest acts they could get.

AJ: Also, the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association is one of the reasons that there’s a Laughing Waters Bluegrass Festival, because we got sick and tired of them controlling the music. I decided in 1999, they’d just opened that pavilion thing - the stage area at Minnehaha Park [Minneapolis] and I booked it for our band, then I said, “Hey, how about if we bring in like three bands and we have a little festival thing?” Pretty soon, I think we had five bands that first year, and it’s our 12th year this year and it’s huge.

RB: Who’s the guy - who was the drunk guy who was the president of MBOTMA over and over and over?

AJ: Larry Jones.

RB: That was really a bummer.

AJ: Yeah, and a lot of people think it was great at that time.

RB: All the bottle people think it was great.

AJ: Yeah, he was a drunk, and he and his wife were drunks.

RB: Plus, they were like ruling stuff with an iron hand, excluding certain people.

AJ: Colby, yeah. I had nothing to do with it at that time, I couldn’t stand it.

RB: I didn’t hear anything good either, I just heard what happened to people, and I think, “Geez, why do you go?!” But, that’s the problem, I guess, groups can be taken over by tyrants.

AJ: At some point before that, all it was was a club for people to have a club. The theme of it really wasn’t…it was more like a couple of attorneys on the Board and stuff like that. I remember when I first tried to get money in the late ‘90s for Laughing Waters, they wouldn’t give me any money, and I thought, “Well, kiss my butt, we’ll do it anyway.”

RB: Right.

PN: What do you mean it was a club for people who wanted to have a club?

AJ: That was the feeling I had.

RB: They weren’t like real Bluegrass players. They’re just some guys.

AJ: A lot of the people that are on the Board now aren’t…there are very few actual musicians on the Board, other than you and me, and I don’t know who else, really.

PN: The President is a player.

AJ: Who?

PN: What’s his name? The guy from St. Michael.

AJ: Yeah, but he’s not much of a player. He knows how to play, sort of. Malischke’s a decent picker.

RB: Just ‘cause they have a guitar doesn’t mean they’re a player, especially Bluegrass players. Bluegrass players can be snotty.

AJ: Hey, Dick Nunneley is moving, by the way.

RB: To where?

AJ: Sioux City, Iowa.

RB: Oh, God! So he’s going to be down there with Bobby Black, huh?

PN: Are you serious?!

AJ: Started this week.

PN: Wow.

AJ: There’s a loss.

PN: Yeah. Is Bluegrass Folk? Is it Country? Is it its own thing?

RB: It’s not Folk in the sense that it’s something Bill Monroe started so he could get on the Grand Ole Opry and make money. That’s where Bluegrass came from.

AJ: He was already on the Opry.

RB: Yeah, but that was the deal, keep the…I just talked to some people from Nashville about that. That was his main goal, was to establish a place on the Opry and have a national…

AJ: That’s your advertising…

RB: Yeah, absolutely…

AJ: And it still is.

RB: Why do you want to be some bumpkin playin’ at supermarket openings, if you can play broad, national venues Saturday night? Why else would any drive 1000 miles to get back to Nashville on a Saturday night? [Laughing] So it’s not Folk music in the sense that it’s 300 years old, but it’s not Country music compared to what was Country music, not counting Bluegrass. There’s a lot of Old Time string bands…that’s more like that, it’s like a New Times string band, in a sense, but it’s not like Texas Swing, it’s not like Ernest Tubb, it’s not like Patsy Kline or Jim

Reeves, and it might be if Chet Atkins hadn’t taken over. He actually destroyed Country music. Who knows, if he hadn’t, Bluegrass might have been more mainstream Country.

AJ: Yeah.

RB: There are a lot of people that are famous like Dolly Parton and Ricky Skaggs who would rather play Bluegrass if they could make any money doin’ it. Tom T. Hall, he played with Jeff, they’d go play Bluegrass jobs. He did it because of the fun! He loved to do it.

AJ: Even now, the big Bluegrass names don’t make that much money. They do ok, but…Alison Krauss is the big money-maker.

RB: She’s just short of elevator music.

AJ: Except when she plays live, it’s a Bluegrass band. The records are all engineered with all kinds of strings and crap like that, but when she’s on stage, it’s a Bluegrass band.

RB: I got that CD Forget About It, and I thought, “Ok, you want it, no problem.” [Laughing] You seen her play with Robert Plant or heard that stuff?

AJ: Yeah, T-Bone Burnett produced that.

RB: [Laughing] Talk about rarified atmosphere, huh? But I mean, some of that stuff is pretty good, in a way.

AJ: I went to a party about five weeks ago, out in Los Angeles - my brother’s label, Crazy Heart - the movie [Crazy Heart] soundtrack is on his label.

RB: You’re kidding!

AJ: No.

RB: I saw that two days ago.

AJ: Isn’t that a great film?!

RB: Wonderful! The music is wonderful! They actually let the guys do the songs! I can’t believe it!

AJ: It’s my brother’s birthday, and I called him up, and he said, “Well, thanks. There’s a party in town, here, next Monday, it’s Academy [Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences] members’ party promoting the song. Jeff Bridges and T-Bone Burnett and all these guys are gonna be there - you wanna go, you’re invited?” He didn’t think I’d…so I thought about it, and mentioned it to a couple people…

RB: You better go!

AJ: …So I flew out there and went to this party where there were maybe 250 people, or something like that, and shook hands with Robert Duvall…

RB: What a kick!

AJ: …he got up on stage and sang “Red River Valley”…

RB: His was a good part, I thought, in the movie, I mean.

AJ: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there were a lot. Elton John got up and played piano with Jeff Bridges.

RB: Don’t say! Really!!?

AJ: There’s actually a video cut of him playing at this party, but it was cool, Jake Gyllenhall and Maggie Gyllenhall were there, and Peter Fonda, and Elliott Gould.

RB: Wow. They invited people who were just peripheral.

AJ: It was an Invitation Only thing in a little club about the size of the Fine Line.

RB: Huh!

AJ: Boy, that was a kick! Anyway…

PN: I had a couple things in mind…

RB: Well, John is a friend of the Dillards, they used to open for him. Jeff and the bass player would go in somewhere and say, “I want you to stop in and say Hi.” And Jeff thought he were kidding, he said, “No! C’mon, let’s go see him!”

AJ: T-Bone Burnett’s producing something with him…that’s…

RB: Well, anyway, he’s using them for a front act, and he said, “These people are friends of mine and want you to be nice to them.” they were.

PN: Rod, are you still playing?

RB: Yeah.

PN: What’s your group now, if you have one?

RB: No, not playin’ with one. I’m playin’ with my brother some, and my daughter some, playin’ alone some. Mostly I’m playin’ National, Tricone guitar now, so I’m playin’ a metal guitar most of the time. I started playin’ fiddle again a little while ago, and boy it’s hard to get that to come back smooth - I’m still workin’ on that.

PN: Is that your main instrument over the years - fiddle?

RB: Guitar.

PN: Oh, the guitar?

AJ: And mandolin.

RB: I play guitar and mandolin, but mostly I play guitar. Years ago I used to play everything - like the New Lost City Ramblers did, and then when I started playin’ straight Bluegrass, I thought I’d just play one instrument. When my brother, and my sister, and I, and Mary Du Shane were playin’…we’d just switch around and play everything. Why we quit, I can’t remember.

AJ: Yeah, that was a really fun band. I got you guys on tape, of course, I’m sure.

PN: What’s the name of that band?

AJ: Bellville String Band, wasn’t it?

PN: When did that band play?

RB: ‘69, ‘70, ‘71. Went to Bean Blossom in ‘71 we were gonna join the talent contest, but I thought we weren’t really a Bluegrass band. That was the dumbest thing.

AJ: Yeah, you played with us.

RB: Everyone was so disappointed.

PN: That was the year the Bluegrass Alliance played. I was there.

RB: That was a good show.

AJ: I remember handing a Lloyd Loar mandolin to Sam Bush standing at the back of George Gruhn’s sedan; he had a Lloyd Loar. I chopped on it a little bit, I was playing mandolin at the time, and then I handed it to Sam Bush.

RB: How old was he then, 17 or what?

AJ: Somthin’, yeah. Tony Rice was the guitar player.

PN: After this band, The Bellville String Band, what was your band after that?

AJ: The Sundowners.

RB: Yeah, I played with The Sundowners String Band, that was Ron Colby and Craig Ruble, my brother, and then Jerry Lee played bass for a while…

AJ: But then who else played bass?

RB: No, Jerrod…Ruble, his brother…

AJ: …yeah, and then who else?

RB: That was a different band.

AJ: Wasn’t that The Sundowners?!

RB: No, The Sundowners was Colby’s band. Jerry Lee refused to play bass. He wanted me to play bass on the guitar, and he wanted to play guitar on the bass. So he had to quit.

PN: About what year is this we’re talkin’?

RB: ‘73ish

PN: And after that?

RB: After that, then it was The String Drifters. Dickson Smith played the banjo. That’s when Tim O’Brien played bass...

AJ: And Hinkley played fiddle…

RB: Bill Hinkley played fiddle. I thought I’d be mean to make him play bass, and let Tim play fiddle. Go figure.

AJ: Yeah, well…Then Tim moved to Colorado and started Hot Rize.

RB: That was a good band.

AJ: You guys warmed up for Larry Sparks.

RB: Larry Sparks in Rochester, yeah. I was just thinkin’ about walkin’ in there and you were all ready to go on stage, ‘cause I didn’t know how far it was, so we got there about three minutes before show time. Got there just in the nick of time.

PN: Some of the other bands?

RB: No. I played with these guys one night.

AJ: He joined our band, but then he wasn’t gonna drive in from Wisconsin just to play at Dulono’s, so he quit. I think there’s a picture of him up there.

RB: What’s funny is the picture is so funny because Jerry’s the photographer, and at that time he was being an assistant to Cheryl Walsh, who, at that time, I was married to. He’s trying to take the picture with a big 4x5 camera. He’d set the camera up, we were down by the riverbank, then he’d come over to be in the picture, but when he left, he’d kick the tripod, so then he had to go back and set the tripod. He must have done that four or five times - it’s amazing, but finally he did.

PN: I wanted to ask you a few other questions to kick around…there are many Bluegrass players

AJ: Powdermilk String Band, too…we were the first guys that we toured with Garrison in ‘70 some year, me and Rudy, and Sean Blackburn.

RB: ‘74.

PN: I recorded a later version of that group.

RB: That wasn’t the boys anymore, though, that was the Powdermilk Biscuit Band.

PN: Yeah.

PN: How do you deal with some people say that Bluegrass is a southern thing and northern people shouldn’t try. You have an attitude about that?

RB: It’s none of their business. I don’t let people tell me what to play. Anybody who wants to say that, my response immediately is, “F--- you!” What do they know about it? I spent 50 years studying it.

AJ: I think that’s nonsense, also. Mike Snyder on the Opry, about a month ago I was listening, he said one of the guys in the band is from like, from Austin, Minnesota, or Owatonna, and another one of the guys is from Detroit or somethin’ like that, and he says, “I’m getting’ so old, I can only get Yankees to play with me anymore.” [Laughing]

RB: Early Bluegrass, a lot of those people came from New York. New York and D.C. were, for years, the seminal hotbeds of Bluegrass.

AJ: Yeah, D.C., of course, D.C. is pretty south, too.

RB: It is south, but it’s not Nashville!

AJ: We’re in the Polka belt here. We had Country, we had The Sunset Valley Bam Dance, I mean, we had that stuff up here, too. That’s a traditional music.

RB: Closer to playin’ Bluegrass here then it would be to playin’ progressive Jazz, and people never complain about that.

AJ: It’s always been a shirttail relation to Country music, but it is now, enormous. I always like to say that everybody likes Bluegrass, they just don’t know it. Listen to a Menards’ commercial and what do you hear: a five-string banjo - it’s like a neon sign, it’s like a neon clock. It catches your attention.

RB: It’s like those flags in front of a car dealer.

AJ: It catches your attention because it’s got a life to it.

RB: It’s really compelling, yep - can be really annoying, too, though.

PN: So many of the people who play it and the fans, too, are just very loyal to it. Why is that?

RB: I don’t know exactly…you say why it is, except that you could change the question around and say that people just love it, but still you don’t get back to why they love it, exactly. Part of it is the rhythm, and part of it is the melodic intervals, I think, are extremely compelling. You know, like they say, if you play Mozart in your dairy bam, the cows do better. If you play progressive Jazz or you play Acid Rock, the cows do worse. Intervals are more compatible with your brain chemistry in some ways. Whether anybody else thinks that, I wouldn’t say. If you listen to Stuart Duncan play fiddle, it drives you and drags you around. Not all fiddle players do that.

AJ: I think Kenny Baker is probably, I mean he played with Monroe in his career for 20 years, 25- 30 years, something’ like that, and he’s gotta be responsible for more people wanting to learn how to play the fiddle than anybody else in history, because it was beautiful. There was nothin’ he couldn’t do, he was…

RB: …smooth.

AJ: Yeah, just absolutely beautiful. His roots are…he has Django Reinhardt roots, Stephane Grappelli…

RB: Swing fiddler…

AJ: He played, I think he backed up the comedienne who was married to Rhett Butler [perhaps here he means Carole Lombard - she was married to Clark Gable who played Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, and she perhaps sang in USO shows for the troops during WW INSTRUMENTS, when Kenny Baker would have musically backed her up], what was her name? He backed her up when he was in the service; he was in the Navy. He knew how to play the violin. He was more of a Swing fiddle player. Then he came along and Monroe would take a song like, Jerusalem Ridge, and say, “Ok, here’s this song…” and he’d hand it to Kenny Baker… he hand this raw material to Kenny Baker, and he would take the fiddle and turn it into this unbelievably beautiful thing; not that the mandolin part wasn’t beautiful, but he would turn it into a fiddle tune that just makes ya melt. Monroe was right to use the fiddle as the main instrument, with the banjo as the “dessert.”

RB: The fiddle, when it was invented, was supposed to replicate the human voice. Fumati and those guys were first developing it, so that’s good - hundreds of years of tradition. The other thing is, I was in Chicago in ‘63, and there were two banjo players at the most, in the audience. That year Jim and Jesse were there, no that was the year Monroe was there with Bessie Mauldin, actually. By ‘65 banjo players were everywhere, and I can remember seeing two people carrying

fiddle cases. Since then, if they still had them, there’d be thousands of ‘em. It was real interesting.

AJ: Monroe was there when Ike Everly was there; I was there that year.

RB: Ike Everly was there, oh yeah.

AJ: He must have been there twice then, ‘cause I was there in ‘63, and he was there, then, and also, McKinley Morganfield was there, that year.

PN: Muddy Waters. I thought you were asking, like you had forgotten Muddy Waters, but you remembered his…

AJ: …real name. [Laughing] That’s pretty weird…

PN: A friend of mine, a little older than this group, who’s not around anymore, he who had witnessed the Bluegrass movement before the festivals all came in, and then witnessed it once they came in; he had reservations about the festival movement because - and the Bluegrass lifestyle - he said, Well, I like Bluegrass, but it’s not my religion.” I’d just like to get your comments on that.

RB: I think the festivals are what perpetuated Bluegrass. I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Al were the only Bluegrass players in the five-state area if it hadn’t been for that. And as far as religion goes, the neighbors up north were calling about having a Gospel group or a singing choir, and they tried to call me up. I told my kid and she said, “Don’t worry dad, they don’t understand that music is a religion.” [Laughing] “They think it’s a social thing, and they don’t understand that they’re offending you by suggesting that you to sing with them.” [Al laughing] I agree with that. I mean, not that his saying that it isn’t a religion…as far as I’m concerned, it is. Half the stuff is the voice of God, ya know, at least. And the stuff with all the feeling…they always say the Monroe put more feeling into his Gospel music than he did into his other tunes. That’s the only reason I ever listened to him…I’m not religious, in the sense that they are, but the depth of the feeling…there’s not a lot of ways you can access that just walking around. That’s why they don’t play it on the radio, it gets people too excited, it annoys them. When they started with the sound bites on MPR [Minnesota Public Radio] in the morning, it was all mandolin licks at first. Then somebody must have complained, because they started playin’ this schmuck, horrible schmuck crap in between everything now. Whose ever idea it was to start that, started with mandolin licks. It was wonderful! I said, “Oh my God, listen, these people aren’t a collaboration of stooges!” But I was wrong.

AJ: I’m not a religious person, either, but I love playing Gospel music. It’s an art form.

PN: What my friend meant by, it’s not his religion, he meant that he didn’t like Bluegrass enough that it would be his lifestyle, the total everything to him, which is what he saw at Bluegrass festivals.

RB: Yeah, but again, a lot of those people aren’t players, they’re fans. That’s two different things. It’s not my lifestyle, either.

AJ: When you walked in I was playin’ Bob Wills, you know.

RB: Yeah. I just bought The Rise of the Violin Quartet in Northern Italy. It’s three CDs, you know. The last thing I bought immediate after that was the six Bach unaccompanied cello concertos.

PN: I wanted to ask Al, you have a unique role in the community, because you, for decades booked Dulono’s. It just would seem this would give you a unique vantage point on the bands. Some are attempting to be professionals - they all have a little different attitude, and you play a large role in shaping the taste of the community from what you put up there. So, I’d just like you get you to talk about that.

AJ: Well, I’m mostly fussy about what I listen to, and yet I don’t feel that it’s my job to exclude people because they’re not exactly what I like. I used to hire the Upper Mississippi Bluegrass Band, but they were not of any interest to me at all [personal taste-wise]. But I’ve always felt that I don’t want to superimpose all my taste on people. I won’t hire somebody that I think is really crappy; and sometimes people that were good get crappy or they take a left turn somewhere. I have had to put the hook on a few people over the years; Bill and Judy [Hinkley] couldn’t play there for a long time because they were drunks. I was told not to hire them at the time. I mean, they were friends of mine, but I couldn’t hire ‘em anymore. Yeah, I’ve always kind of tried to be…I used to do the radio show - the Bluegrass and Company on KFAI - and I always tried to not play the hits, because I thought you can hear the hits when the other guys do the show. It’s kind of like the way Craig Ferguson interviews people, he tears up the blue sheet of paper and throws it away, and asks them if they like to play poker, or if they like naked women or something; he asks the questions other people don’t ask. So, I’ve always tried to not impose my personal taste level on bands, because I understand that I don’t like everything that’s good.

RB: Another thing that’s interesting about that is that the mainstream stuff, like you say, can get overplayed to the degree that it gets to be really boring after years of play, and the further afield you look, the more interesting, thrilling stuff you can find that no one ever heard about.

AJ: The other thing about it is that I want to keep it goin’. So, like I said before, there’ve been a couple of times where we just about got thrown outta there. When the two Anderson brothers bought the operation from Wayne, when Lonnie and Monty bought it from Wayne, Wayne’s wife, Sue, had been doing the advertising, and she was just advertising in the Minneapolis paper, and I got real nervous, because I thought, “Oh! These guys are gonna come in here and don’t know anything about this, and they’ve been runnin’ a pizza joint…they’re buyin’ a restaurant, they’re not buyin’ a music joint!” The first couple of months ahead of time, I started gettin’ all the free advertising in all the City Pages and all the different places, to try and get a higher profile - sending it Public Radio and stuff like that. The first night it changed it hands was New

Year’s weekend, and Lonnie and Wayne, and Monty were standing at the back of the room, and the place was packed, I mean it was people pourin’ out the doors. That’s the way that weekend was, and the next weekend was the Christensen sisters, and it was the same thing. That sort of set the pace.

RB: It was just in time, too, it seems like. He was on the verge of thinking, “Wait a minute, what’s this got to do with me?” wasn’t he, it seemed like.

AJ: Yeah, yeah. So, I’ve always tried to hire bands that maybe I wouldn’t go listen to, personally.

I mean, there aren’t too many of the local bands that I really like to sit down and listen to that much. Right now there are some really powerful local bands. I always hire us, because there we are. I’ve never not hired us, but not too often.

PN: You’re talking about The Spunk Boys.

AJ: Yeah. We have been good, and we have been not good, and I’m aware of that, but I still hire us, because we can be good.

PN: You, because of this position, if there’s an evolution in the band styles, you see it. I want to get you talking about if you think there’s an evolution, and what that is - the different tendencies for the period you’ve been booking. You started booking about when?

AJ: 1973, I guess. There really weren’t enough bands to fill it at the time, so there wasn’t always Bluegrass, there was Bob Bovee and Gail Heil, people like that - and they probably aren’t interested in playin’ there anymore.

RB: They’ll play anywhere if they paid ‘em.

AJ: There are bands from Eau Claire [Wisconsin], and bands from La Crosse, and I don’t know if there are any Mankato bands, yeah River Basin Bluegrass…

PN: I mean a stylistic evolution.

AJ: Yeah, well, it was more traditional, there wasn’t anything I would consider too avant-garde at the time, the mid ‘70s; we were probably doing more radical stuff than most bands were. What was the name of the band, the three-piece group from Eau Claire, with Gordy Bischoff?

RB: I don’t remember their name.

AJ: Anyway, those guys were real hot. They were kind of off the charts style-wise.

RB: Modern.

AJ: Real modern, yeah. Then of course, the Bluegrass Alliance came along, and there were bands trying to do that kind of stuff, but you had to be good to do that, so there wasn’t a whole lot of that.

PN: What you’re describing, Al, as far as the evolution, is the local band evolution follows what’s going on nationally. But, what’s going on now? Locally, there are all these New Time groups: Pert’ Near Sandstone, The Roe Family Singers, and Trampled by Turtles…what’s your reaction to what’s goin’ on now?

AJ: Well, that’s string band music, I think. It’s kind of the Grateful Dead thought process, I think. They’re jam bands, kind of, and there’s nothin’ wrong with that, but that’s what’s makin’ the young kids sit up and pay attention. And some of them are good pickers, that’s for sure.

PN: What do you mean they’re jam bands? What’s a jam band?

AJ: A jam band is a…

RB: They don’t have arrangements, they just wang away at whatever comes into their minds, whether they’re actually qualified to be playing or not - you couldn’t necessarily tell from what comes out of ‘em .

AJ: It’s more like string band music, front porch kind of…

RB: It’s not like string bands we know of. The Roe Family Singers are a string band, they’re not a Bluegrass band at all. But it’s two people and they get nine volunteers to come down, it’s just phenomenal. If they ever got a record or made any money, they could get at least six or seven better ones.

PN: They do have a record now.

RB: Yeah, but I mean a real record…get promoted.

AJ: Once again, one of the things I like about Bluegrass is the precision of the instrumentation, which I think is lost. It’s not even how proficient or how technologically proficient they are, but Bluegrass trades off, it’s Dixieland kind of, you take turns - you may do double leads sometimes, but mostly it’s…that’s kind of what interested me in the first place, to it, was the technology of it, and not necessarily being a superstar - I hate it when you hear two or three bands in a row that are playin’ as fast as they can and pitched it as high as they can…did you see the Chapmans?

PN: I wish I had, I was playing your club that night.

AJ: They sang it as high as they possibly could. The lead was about where the tenor would be, and then they had two parts above, and the last tune they did must have been about 200 beats a minute. But they were really, really good, but it’s like white noise. I don’t enjoy that. I like stuff

like Tortoffin our band now, can play fast, but he likes to do stuff kind of medium tempo where you can actually hear what’s goin’ on, and it’s not a flurry of notes. That’s kind of what I like.

RB: There’s two things about that, one is that when you get somebody that’s got the talent and the experience to flourish within their medium, which is what you’re talkin’ about. That’s the thing about jam bands and these new guys, is they don’t know the genre and they don’t know how to play the instruments. You can particularly hear that with the banjo players, a lot of them purposely never learn to play banjo. The other thing is, you can really see that, I think, the most, right at least, is with guitar playing. If you watch hot shot guitar players, it’s annoying! It doesn’t sound pretty, a lot of ‘em aren’t playing except a bunch of licks, that has really nothing…they change the licks according to the chord changes. I listened to a guy tryin’ to play “Daybreak in Dixie”, and it doesn’t sound anything like “Daybreak in Dixie”. You can’t tell what song it’s supposed to be, and it doesn’t capture anything of the lilting beauty of that song the way we learned ever so long ago - 40-50 years ago.

AJ: Practically any banjo player you would talk to would say that one of the best banjo album, if not the best banjo album in the whole world, is Foggy Mountain Banjo. The guys all go back to that whether you’re Bela Fleck, or whoever you are, they go back and they listen to that because that’s it; that’s the deal, and that’s where it all came from. It’s also like Monroe’s mandolin playing; before Monroe it was [making oral sounds like Viennese violin]…

RB: Viennese violin.

AJ: Yeah, then he came on and played it fast, and was technically kind of hard to understand for a first level musician, but truly a genius. There’s no question about it.

RB: Mandolin playing has improved more than anything else I think, though.

AJ: Yeah.

RB: Sarah Holland, I know Stephie and those people are playin’ stuff that you just can’t believe they can play; it’s just so beautiful.

PN: Either of you guys want to address anything that hasn’t been addressed?

RB: Bluegrass is like Dixieland, there’s all different levels of people who play it; a broad spectrum of levels of interest, expression, and experience, and talent involved. The famous Jazz piano player Chic Corea said, “If I find something I like, I like to play it a whole lot.” Which is nice. But then on the other hand, one of those also said that 90% of the music is shit. You listen to what you like, throw out 90% of that, and then you’ll have something’ that worth payin’ attention to.

AJ: I think, I’m of the old school guitar style-wise, and Rod is too, I’m not a chordy guitar guy, that’s something that Tony Rice sort of started, I guess. I’m not denigrating Tony Rice, believe me…

RB: You could, though, for that…

AJ: Yeah, the full chord thing has changed, and I’ve been criticized for playing more bass on the guitar and runs and stuff, and that’s the way I remember - that’s what I learned. To be doing the upstroke chord stuff is not what I play. I enjoy hearing the old style guitar playing more, myself, but that’s not what’s goin’ on these days…

RB: …not with everybody, anyway…

AJ: …not with everybody. Now the High 48s are a terrific traditional Bluegrass band, and also Sawtooth. Those guys, I mean, just watching Sawtooth play…the guitar player is 16, maybe 17 now, he won the flat-picking thing at the Fair [Minnesota State Fair] last year, and I mean, the kid’s unbelievable! Two or three years ago I was sitting there watchin’ him and saying that he was unbelievable, but he hadn’t reached that level yet. He beat everybody; he beat Chris Silver and all those guys. He’s being a pretty traditional guitar player, but that’s one thing - I like the older style music, so I’m kind of, but I understand that this is where it’s kind a going, and that’s fine.

RB: If you learn music from scratch you get so far, but if somebody shows you, you can save 20 or 30 years of learning, if somebody just shows you how to play. A lot of these guys that seem unbelievable now, didn’t have to start at the beginning - it makes a big difference. Tony Rice did a couple things, one of the other things he did was he couldn’t sing high, and he couldn’t yodel, so he got the people singing in this low, smooth voice thing - that went on for years. That was a real poke in the eye for real Bluegrass fans, I think….loved him, but he’s not a Bluegrass singer.

AJ: He’s a crooner. Lester Flatt was a crooner, too.

RB: But not Roy Lee Centers, go listen to him if you want to hear the best Bluegrass singer that ever lived, there you go. You don’t need to say anything else about anybody else. He’d be the same age I was if he hasn’t been killed - he was 29 when he was here, and now he’d be 65.

AJ: I think Bluegrass is alive and well, and Dulono’s has become a hangout now, for people who don’t even go down there to listen to the music, but they’re hearing it anyway. So they’re down there havin’ beers and sittin’ there with their friends, but they’re listenin’ to Bluegrass. So it’s almost becoming an indigenous music. These people are immersed in it, and it’s packed down there, and there’s a reason. That’s the best barometer, I think, of what’s goin’ on is that it seems to be workin’. We get 4000 people at Minnehaha Falls; that’s like the State Fair there. That’s a lot of people! Laurie Lewis is going to be there this year.

PN: This is March 24th, 2010. We’re at Great Northern Vintage Radios, at 5200 Bloomington Avenue South in Minneapolis. We’ve had Rod Bellville, Al Jesperson, and me, Phil Nusbaum. I’m satisfied.

RB: Sure, thanks.

AJ: Thank you. That was very interesting.