Open-G November 2010 1 Old Crow; New Tricks By: Matt Dellinger Photos: Douglas Mason How the Old Crow Medicine Show, a bluegrass band from Ithaca, N.Y., who started with just a few hundred dollars, a rusted black Volvo and a dog, are finding their way in thisBig Iron World. 2 Open-G November 2010 The band showing their stuff on the streets of Nashville. he morning after the Old clear bottle part-filled with brown, beer; and yes, Ketch was working at an Crow Medicine Show and shrugged, “But this town is where auto auction to make ends meet. But made their rousing debut we are, and we have never been in the listening to him talk that morning, you at the Grand Ole Opry wrong place.” might think he had a lot of nerve. two years ago, I drove It’s not what most young musicians That’s certainly true. But Old TKetch Secor, the fiddle player, who was would think to say in the afterglow of a Crow’s sass has served them well, as twenty-two, to an auto auction. It was professional breakthrough. On the face has their homesickness for the past. a one-day temp job: He would drive of it, he had little to be bitter about. Their old-time repertoire-the pre- the used cars slowly around a dirt track They’d lived in Nashville only four Depression banjo ballads, Appalachian while people bid on them. Ketch had months, and Marty Stuart, the president Fiddle tunes, and jug-band blues that not showered, and his thick nest of of the Grand Ole Opry, who met them the five young men (all but one are dark hair shined. He had the unshaven at a music festival, had helped them under twenty-five) thrash out on well- beginnings of a mustache, a bottom land some high profile gigs. They had worn string instruments-is matched bv lip full of chewing tobacco, and some opened for Dolly Parton at the Ryman a reactionary founding philosophy that unkind things to say about Nashville. Auditorium, and had performed at the has prompted boldly archaic career “This town is shitty,” he told me. This Opry’s 75th-anniversary celebration. moves: The two years before Nashville town is everything that the mountain No, they hadn’t landed a record deal, were spent hoboing quixotically across is not. This town is full of money. despite some big label flirtations (one Canada and back, then living in self- This town has no kinship. This town crafty agent showed up on their muddy imposed squalor in the mountains of has no brotherly love.” He spit into a doorstep with pizza and a case of North Carolina. They brought music Open-G November 2010 3 nobody really played anymore to towns Old Crow’s lead singer, scribbled a Maine and Canada from his home in where no other touring performer memoir in pencil, describing, in sparse Harrisonburg, Virginia, until moving would stop to use the bathroom, and detail, the genesis of the group: to Ithaca, New York, to be with his people embraced them, fed them, Ch 1. One day we left. We drove. high-school girlfriend, Lydia Peelle, sheltered them. This, in turn, fueled We played. We drank. We smoked. We who attended Cornell. She dumped their sense of cosmic destiny. They are. We slept. We woke. We drove some him that summer. had come now to Nashville not to go more. We are a band. We play music. 8 “I was in a hard place. I was glitzy, but hoping that perhaps some of us. We drive. We play. We eat. We hurting,” Ketch remembers. “All of space might remain for what once was smoke. We drink. We sleep. We drive us might have been in it at that time, country music-hoping, they might say, all night. We are all beautiful. We love the same kinda rut.” Driving alone that their medicine might sell in the each other. We are all real proud of one night, crying, he says, he had a sickest place of all. each other. We drive. We smoke. We brainstorm, and the next day began “At some point music went from dream about pretty girls. assembling a band. He asked along being something people played to Chapter two goes on to briefly Critter Fuqua, his best friend since being something that lives in a box in introduce several major figures (“Ben- seventh grade from Harrisonburg, the corner of the room, like a toaster. He is tall. He likes trees. Kevin-He Virginia, who had also just broken up It’s gone from being something from is 30. He is chill. He is wise....”), and with his girlfriend; and Willie, a native within to something that’s given to then abruptly concludes, “We are all of upstate New York and a high-school you. forced on you,” Ketch explained beautiful. We love you [drawing of dropout with the gorgeous voice of a that morning. “I feel like when we flying crow].” pubescent Hank Williams; and Willie’s play, people can feel the timelessness. The drive was Ketch’s idea. He friend, Ben Gould, who had just They can feel that they’re rooted in had graduated in 1996 from prep procured a stand-up acoustic bass; and something. Like we’re able to play for school at Phillips Exeter Academy in an already-wandering folk singer Ketch a collective feeling that’s lost, that used New Hampshire, where he was nearly had met while picking blueberries in to be a big part of everything.” expelled for smoking pot and where he Maine, Kevin Hayes, who brought learned to play the banjo. Instead of his girlfriend (they were living in a omewhere on the road in Canada going to college, he spent a year taking van together). Ketch’s painter friend, Sin the fall of 1998, Willie Watson, short musician-hobo jaunts up to Jacob Hascup, would come along as a traveling companion and muse. They had a few hundred dollars between them. a big brown van, a rusted black Volvo with flame detailing, and a dog. fter working for two weeks Apicking grapes for gas money, they gathered in Critter’s bedroom to record an album that they could sell on the road-a cassette of ten songs, called Trans:mission. It was the first time they had all played together. “Kevin had never played old-time in his life,” Ketch remembers. “Critter had been playing the banjo for, like, four months. And I was a shitty fiddler.” The plan was Leaving a hat for tips, Old Crow plays an to drive across the continent and earn impromptu set at Coachella Music Festival. their keep busking on the streets, playing for gas money and food. It’s 4 Open-G November 2010 the type of ten-thousand-mile joyride preservation that so often turns people every desperate or idealistic band tells off. This century-old pre-anarchy punk itself it will do. Most lack the requisite energy, particularly when delivered live-free-or-die instinct or zeal for unexpectedly on a street corner, drives Grassy Roots A few of our favorite North American nowheres, but these people giddy. “Especially in these little boys are touched with both. Ketch farming towns,” recalls Hascup, who sat albums from Old Crow’s fondly remembers waking up one early on the sidelines with his sketchbook. music library November morning in a hay field near “People just went nuts.” To this day the border of Manitoba and Ontario he is astonished at how they made it with frost on his bedroll. They drove in through Canada. “Everyone had this to Winnipeg that day and bought then reaction, like they’d never seen music usual groceries: lunch meat, cheese, before.” white bread, mustard, peanuts, and a When the boys finally made it to jug of water. They played all day and the Pacific, they were asked to play drank free coffee and made a hundred with the house band of a newly created dollars, and a television crew stumbled Internet radio show called Testing Greetings from Wawa upon them and put them on the six Testing on Whidbey Island in the Puget o’clock news. They spent the night at Sound. The Old Crow boys were ideal some college party, where a kid with a guests. “There was just a magic vibe. beard sang Phil Ochs songs and Ketch They were drawing it out of me and kissed a girl who’d seen him on TV. all the musicians,” says Derek Parrott, Three months of this, Ketch says, and a fifty-five-year-old singer/songwriter they never went to bed hungry. and guitarist who started the show with This impromptu barnstorming his friend Gordon Coale. “They took strategy, not often employed today, us along for the ride, really. That’s how Big Iron World worked for hundreds of years, of course, I felt. They were just full-tilt boogie. before radio and records made music a You know, they’re young, but they’re business of mechanical reproduction old souls. They’ve got to be.” and marketed distribution. In fact The boys made it home for “old-time” music is so called because Christmas, and in the spring they it predates the recording industry that moved into an old white farmhouse named it. To the modern ear, old-rime on Beech Mountain right outside of sounds a little like sped-up, drunken Boone, North Carolina, with a chicken O.C.M.S.