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Old Crow
Medicine Show
The morning after the Old
Crow Medicine Show made their rousing debut at the Grand Ole Opry two
years ago, I drove Ketch Secor, the fiddle player, who was twenty-two, to
an auto auction. It was a one-day temp job: He would drive the used cars
slowly around a dirt track while people bid on them. Ketch had not
showered, and his thick nest of dark hair shined. He had the unshaven
beginnings of a mustache, a bottom lip full of chewing tobacco, and some
unkind things to say about Nashville. "This town is shitty," he told me.
This town is everything that the mountain is not. This town is full of
money. This town has no kinship. This town has no brotherly love." He spit
into a clear bottle part-filled with brown, and shrugged, "But this town
is where we are, and we have never been in the wrong place."
It's not what most young musicians would think to say in the afterglow of
a professional breakthrough. On the face of it, he had little to be bitter
about. They'd lived in Nashville only four months, and Marty Stuart, the
president of the Grand Ole Opry, who met them at a music festival, had
helped them land some high profile gigs. They had opened for Dolly Parton
at the Ryman Auditorium, and had performed at the Opry's 75th-anniversary
celebration. No, they hadn't landed a record deal, despite some big label
flirtations (one crafty agent showed up on their muddy doorstep with pizza
and a case of beer; and yes, Ketch was working at an auto auction to make
ends meet. But listening to him talk that Sunday morning, you might think
he had a lot of nerve.
That's certainly true. But Old Crow's sass has served them well, as has
their homesickness for the past. Their old-time repertoire-the
pre-Depression banjo ballads, Appalachian Fiddle tunes, and jug-band blues
that the five young men (all but one are under twenty-five) thrash out on
well-worn string instruments-is matched bv a reactionary founding
philosophy that has prompted boldly archaic career moves: The two years
before Nashville were spent hoboing quixotically across Canada and back,
then living in self-imposed squalor in the mountains oF North Carolina.
They brought music nobody really played anymore to towns where no other
touring performer would stop to use the bathroom, and people embraced
them, fed them, sheltered them. This, in turn, fueled their sense of
cosmic destiny. They had come now to Nashville not to go glitzy, but
hoping that perhaps some space might remain for what once was country
music-hoping, they might say, that their medicine might sell in the
sickest place of all.
"At some point music went from being something people played to being
something that lives in a box in the corner of the room, like a toaster.
It's gone from being something from within to something that's given to
you. forced on you," Ketch explained that morning. "I feel like when we
play, people can feel the timelessness. They can feel that they're rooted
in something. Like we're able to play for a collective feeling that's
lost, that used to be a big part of everything."
Somewhere on the road in Canada in the fall of 1998, Willie Watson, Old
Crow's lead singer, scribbled a memoir in pencil, describing, in sparse
detail, the genesis of the group (punctuation added):
Ch 1. One day we left. We drove. We played. We drank. We smoked. We are.
We slept. We woke. We drove some more. We are a band. We play music. 8 of
us. We drive. We play. We eat. We smoke. We drink. We sleep. We drive all
night. We are all beautiful. We love each other. We are all real proud of
each other. We drive. We smoke. We dream about pretty girls. [Drawings of
bass, fiddle, guitar, banjo.]
Chapter two goes on to briefly introduce several major figures ("Ben-He is
tall. He likes trees. Kevin-He is 30. He is chill. He is wise...."), and
then abruptly concludes, "We are all beautiful. We love you [drawing of
flying crow]."
The drive was Ketch's idea. He had graduated in 1996 from prep school at
Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was nearly expelled for
smoking pot and where he learned to play the banjo. Instead of going to
college, he spent a year taking short musician-hobo jaunts up to Maine and
Canada from his home in Harrisonburg, Virginia, until moving to Ithaca,
New York, to be with his high-school girlfriend, Lydia Peelle, who
attended Cornell. She dumped him that summer.
"I was in a hard place. I was hurting," Ketch remembers. "All of us might
have been in it at that time, the same kinda rut." Driving alone one
night, crying, he says, he had a brainstorm, and the next day began
assembling a band. He asked along Critter Fuqua, his best friend since
seventh grade from Harrisonburg, Virginia, who had also just broken up
with his girlfriend; and Willie, a native of upstate New York and a
high-school dropout with the gorgeous voice of a pubescent Hank Williams;
and Willie's friend, Ben Gould, who had just procured a stand-up acoustic
bass; and an already-wandering folk singer Ketch had met while picking
blueberries in Maine, Kevin Hayes, who brought his girlfriend (they were
living in a van together). Ketch's painter friend, 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.
After working for two weeks picking 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 to drive across the
continent and earn their keep busking on the streets, playing for gas
money and food. It's the type of ten-thousand-mile joyride every desperate
or idealistic band tells itself it will do. Most lack the requisite
live-free-or-die instinct or zeal for North American nowheres, but these
boys are touched with both. Ketch fondly remembers waking up one early
November morning in a hay field near the border of Manitoba and Ontario
with frost on his bedroll. They drove in to Winnipeg that day and bought
then usual groceries: lunch meat, cheese, white bread, mustard, peanuts,
and a jug of water. They played all day and drank free coffee and made a
hundred dollars, and a television crew stumbled upon them and put them on
the six o'clock news. They spent the night at some college party, where a
kid with a beard sang Phil Ochs songs and Ketch kissed a girl who'd seen
him on TV. Three months of this, Ketch says, and they never went to bed
hungry.
This impromptu barnstorming strategy, not often employed today, worked for
hundreds of years, of course, before radio and records made music a
business of mechanical reproduction and marketed distribution. In fact
"old-time" music is so called because it predates the recording industry
that named it. To the modern ear, old-rime sounds a little like sped-up,
drunken children's songs-it plunks and scurries and trips. It's a little
dirty, clumsy. It falls apart just enough. If bluegrass is a sturdy,
groomed horse, old-time is a mule. (New hot country would be a painted
carousel pony.) It's akin to punk rock; it has the same sophisticated lack
of refinement, the same defiant authenticity.
Most of the boys started out playing in punk or punk-country bands, and
they play old American music as if they'd invented it in their garage,
without the stale stiffness of academic preservation that so often turns
people off. This century-old pre-anarchy punk energy, particularly when
delivered unexpectedly on a street corner, drives people giddy.
"Especially in these little farming towns," recalls Hascup, who sat on the
sidelines with his sketchbook. "People just went nuts." To this day he is
astonished at how they made it through Canada. "Everyone had this
reaction, like they'd never seen music before."
When the boys finally made it to the Pacific, they were asked to play with
the house band of a newly created Internet radio show called Testing
Testing on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound. The Old Crow boys were ideal
guests. "There was just a magic vibe. They were drawing it out of me and
all the musicians," says Derek Parrott, a fifty-five-year-old
singer/songwriter and guitarist who started the show with his friend
Gordon Coale. "They took us along for the ride, really. That's how I felt.
They were just full-tilt boogie. You know, they're young, but they're old
souls. They've got to be."
The boys made it home for Christmas, and in the spring they moved into an
old white farmhouse on Beech Mountain right outside of Boone, North
Carolina, with a chicken coop, goats, and a tobacco field out back that
they could work for cash. Studying from the Foxfire guides, they grew
their own food, and made their own corn liquor. Their house became a
commune, of sorts, for the weird and wandering. It can be said that
natural living did not translate into healthy living. They were embraced
immediately by the Appalachian community, and their repertoire of old-time
songs grew exponentially as they played with local musicians. One
afternoon, when the band was busking in front of the drugstore in downtown
Boone, a middle-aged woman stopped to listen. As she was leaving, she
asked if they'd be around for a while, she wanted to bring her father over
to hear them. Halt an hour later, she came back in her red Jeep Cherokee,
got out, and opened the passenger door. Doc Watson, the virtuoso flatpick
guitar player, who is blind, stepped out of the car, and let his wife,
Rosa Lee, lead him to the drugstore's porch. Stubbled jaws must have
dropped. The boys struck up "Oh My Little Darling," a well-known old-time
song they thought Doc would like, and when they finished, Watson said:
"Boys, that was some of the most authentic old-time music I've heard in a
long while. You almost got me crying." He put some money in their hat and
mentioned that he'd like for them to play at Merlefest, a four-day
festival held every year at Wilkes Community College in honor of Watson's
late son and collaborator Merle, who died in a tractor accident.
Merlefest is a big deal. Every year, tens of thousands of people show up
in April for four days of music on a dozen stages. The boys were given one
short set on the first night, but they had free food for three more days;
so they stayed, and the next morning they set up by a concrete fountain in
the center of campus, stood around an open banjo case, and busked. It was
a hold move, crashing the already tightly packed, corporate-sponsored
programs. But Old Crow poached a crowd. Ten people. Then fifty. Then a
hundred. People sat on the edge of the fountain pool, or on the ground. A
few removed their shoes, giving in completely.
Critter was in his boots and a cowboy hat and mini-lambchop sideburns, his
mouth full of dip, the face ot his banjo stained like an oil rag. Kevin
seemed intensely bored, with layers of second-hand clothes between him and
his guitar-banj0, a dumpy knit winter hat on his head (covering, I later
discovered, a short Mohawk). Willie and Ketch were next to each other,
their hair unwashed and held in place by its own grime, skinny Willie
singing in a high drawl alternately sweet and scratchy, his chin cocked
and his face turning red, while the bow of Ketch's fiddle stabbed
dangerously close to his face. Ketch harmonized, swaying back and forth a
bit, his eves a little glazed. Tall Ben leaned over his upright bass, his
shoes off and toes poking through his socks. A piece of duct tape fell
mid-song from his plucking finger onto the ground, next to a nest of
strings that had broken off their various instruments from the relentless
abuse.
People danced. The normal folk-music separation between hippie and hick
disappeared. Here was a nose-ringed, dreadlocked, barefoot guy next to a
large, bearded older man in overalls. There were two thirty-something
girls from Brooklyn who'd just bought cowboy hats. Everyone was smiling,
or had their heads cocked with warm, bemused expressions. Charmed young
women whispered to one another.
There were big-name acts at the festival. Willie Nelson and Nanci Griffith
among them. But on the front page of the next day's local paper, it was
the Old Crow Medicine Show in the color picture above the fold. "We were
just doing it because we had to get attention, because we had to sell
records, because we had to make money," Ketch says. "And it ended up being
a lot bigger than it was intended to be."
Sally Williams, an event manager for the Grand Ole Opry, saw the boys at
the fountain that day. "Old Crow's very engaging." she said. "They're
good-looking guys. That helps. People love them because they're cool. But
people love them because they're retro. And they're very unassuming. But
you look at them play and you think, 'The music is alive.'" Williams soon
invited Old Crow to play weekly Friday night parties at the Grand Ole Opry
Plaza in Nashville-not on the stage, but in the plaza between acts. "I
wanted to offer the opportunity to get up close to them and actually
interact with them." So on weekends, they would drive the three hours to
Nashville in an old beat-up Cadillac limousine they had bought on the
mountain, and check into a hotel. The weekly access to plumbing afforded
the boys much needed showers, shaves, and tooth-brushing. "It was really,
really funny," Ketch says. "We all came to the capital city in a limousine
out of the poorest county in all of Tennessee. We were such stars on the
mountain." They were becoming stars in town, too. On Saturday afternoons
they would busk in downtown Nashville for extra cash, and more than once
the police had to ask them to stop because the crowd was spilling out into
the street.
Old Crow's musical tastes evolved slightly that summer as they delved into
Gus Cannon and Will Shade's Memphis jug-band repertoire, urban black music
from the 1910s and '20s that was an early melding of Appalachian folk
music, Mississippi blues, and early jazz. There is a strong, sloppy
harmonica and kazoo presence, and the banjo and guitar are strummed
(sometimes violently), not picked in a flurry. A clatter of homemade
percussion instruments drives the tempo, which is slow
and sultry. And, in keeping with the decadent Beale Street life it came
from, its lyrical themes creep further than before into sex-and-drugs
territory. It was a big step closer to Elvis's rock 'n' roll. Nowadays,
pop country, aimed at a Middle American mainstream, tries hard to be a
family show. Part of what detractors find unsatisfying is this attempt to
rock and roll while still projecting a folksy wholesomeness. But in this
respect, too, the Old Crow Medicine Show is a blast from the darker past,
when songs about death and drinking and murder and cocaine were prevalent.
Around straighter-edged tans and older performers, the Old Crow boys have
to tone down their penchant for filterless cigarettes, other smokables,
and great quantities of very cheap beer. They routinely ignore seatbelts.
There is the sense that living like you might die young is part of the
medicine. It's all very soulful, this abuse, and paired in their minds
with an empathy for the down-and-out (yes, steal a beer from the
convenience store if you can. but give that homeless man outside a dollar
bill) and a high regard for the artistic contributions of long-forgotten
and less genteel Americans.
"Everybody that played music in the '20s...they're people that had
something really, really lovely and loving and powerful to say, but
they're just bums," Ketch told me once, when talking about the
unappreciated contributions to country music made by rural blacks.
"They're just trash ready to be assembled into the category of trash. But
they're people that recognized what they were doing was something bigger
than just themselves."
His father was an Episcopalian headmaster, so Ketch grew up in a series of
Southern and Midwestern towns as his father moved from school to school.
But he acquired his musical facility at Exeter, in lessons with Ryan
Thomson, a middle-aged adjunct professor who also taught mandolin and
fiddle. Thomson is accustomed to overtures from students wanting to
fortify their rock bands with old-time instruments, and tries to point
them in the right direction. "Someone will come in and they'll say, 'Well,
I heard the banjo in Old and In the Way,'" Thomson says. That 1973 record,
a Jerry Garcia side project with the mandolin player David Grisman and
several other bluegrass musicians, introduced many rock fans to old-time
and bluegrass music. "And the first thing I usually tell them is, 'You
know, David Grisman didn't invent that. He got that from Charlie Poole and
the North Carolina Ramblers. And, of course, Charlie Poole got his stuff
from earlier stuff.' There's this progression. I always encourage people
to go backward."
Ketch recounted Poole's story to me recently, how Poole was a top country
act in 1931 and got invited out to Hollywood to play in a motion picture,
a real sweet deal, but then went on a big drunk and died. "They find his
body at ten-thirty, the train leaves at one," Ketch said dramatically. The
lives of old-time musicians are the Crows' mythology, and Ketch, who reads
CD liner notes like scripture, is their priest. He tells his music
parables slowly, annunciating all the names of people and towns, staring
into your eyes to make sure you understand what you're hearing. They end
with a moral, this one being about handling the pressures of success,
about facing your thing and doing it, and who's meant to be there, and
who's not.
When the band moved to Nashville in October of 2000, they occupied an
inexpensive two-story house on a dead-end peninsula squeezed on three
sides by highways, where the drone of passing cars was constant. A
billboard towered over their back yard, promoting a Ronald McDonald Circus
presented by Gaylord Entertainment, the Opry's corporate parent. They had
made this their home. Inside, on the mantle of a fake fireplace, were
ribbons from fiddlers' conventions, and pictures of friends and family. An
old electric organ took up one corner of the living room, a Victrola 78
phonograph sat in another. The walls were decorated with taped-up
photographs of the mountain bluesman Dock Boggs and Blind Willie McTell,
and paintings of Jesse and Frank James, and a banjo on which Willie had
painted a sunset. The place was sparse but somehow cluttered, homey but
temporary-as if at any moment they might hitch it up and drive away. But
they were compelled to stay. Weeks after rolling into town, the boys
landed a guest spot at the Grand Ole Opry. The weekly live radio show,
still the premier showcase for country, began in 1925 as the WSM Barn
Dance, and its members now include both blue-chip legends like Loretta
Lynn, Ralph Stanley, Charlie Louvin, and Charley Pride, and such younger
stars as Garth Brooks, Travis Tritt, Patty Loveless, and Alison Krauss.
Old Crow's debut would take place at the Ryman Auditorium, the "Mother
Church of Country Music," where the Opry was held for decades before it
moved to the newly built Opry House at Opryland 1974. The shows
celebrating the move were emotional events-President Nixon sang, Minnie
Pearl cried. The old brick tabernacle was restored nine years ago. and now
hosts the Opry during the winter months, when tourists are more scarce.
They were tense, pacing the hallway, the living room, picking up
instruments and putting them back down again. Matt Kinman, a
thirty-year-old friend who had actually grown up playing old-time music,
lived in an unheated room off the kitchen, and occasionally played with
the band. He picked out a plaid shirt and denim overalls for the show. The
rest of the boys chose coats and vests-dapper, like Elliot Ness and the
Tennessee Untouchables. I hadn't brought any such attire, but Ketch
insisted I dress up with them. He handed me a brown sports coat, with
wrestling medals dangling from the breast pocket. He'd wrestled at Exeter,
he told me, and one time got pinned in front of the writer John Irving, an
alumnus who still attends many of the matches. "I wanted to cry," he said.
"That's pressure, man."
Matt's truck was full of instruments, so the hoys piled into my rented car
to go downtown. Birds were singing. The sky was turning all sorts of
colors. Nashville was starting to look almost pretty. I asked if there was
a good radio station I should turn on. "Do you like hot country?" Critter
asked.
"Not really."
"You're in hell, then."
We arrive at the Ryman and schlep the instruments up the stairs to the
dressing room, only to find it packed with RCA Records artist Andy
Griggs's backup band and their equipment. Everyone crams inside and
exchanges pleasantries. The guitarist for Griggs, who wears a black
leatherette coat over a shiny red rayon shirt, admires Matt's overalls. "I
wish I could wear those," he says. "This plastic jacket sucks. And when it
gets real hot my guitar sticks to it. Well, it's show business."
The Griggs band goes off to play their set. The boys discuss what they
should play. They'll have only eight minutes, if lucky, so there will be
no patter between songs. Kinman wants to play an old fiddle tune, but
Willie disagrees, preferring instead a singing jug-band tune.
"It was an old-time band that started the Grand Ole Opry, and they were
playing fiddle tunes then," says Kinman.
"Stop talking about the beginnings," Willie snaps.
All the while, a speaker in the ceiling plays what is coming from the
stage, a slow, twangy pop ballad by Vince Gill. Things are a bit tense.
Ketch realizes his fiddle is missing, left in the truck. He goes to get
it. Critter spills coffee on his pants. "Does it look like I peed myself?"
he asks repeatedly. Ketch comes hack with his fiddle, complains about the
heat of the room, and strips down to a tank-top undershirt. Willie and
Kevin realize they have only one guitar pick between them, so they
scrounge one up down the hall. The Griggs band comes back. The boys ask
them how it went. "I don't even know." the guitarist says, taking off his
plastic jacket. "It just goes like that."
It's getting close to stage time, so the boys head downstairs. The hallway
to the stage is crowded with people. Slick hair and sequined suits abound.
A fleet of tap dancers in green-and-white checkered tablecloth-like
outfits pace back and forth. At the far end of the hallway is Rosa's
cantina, a folding table where an old black lady offers fruit punch and
coffee for tips. Behind her is an emergency exit. The band heads out to
the alleyway for a last smoke. They've just been told that they'll have
only four minutes onstage.
One song. They settle on "Tear It Down," a singing jug-band romp about
punishing infidelity. They file back inside, through the hallway, past a
gauntlet of "Good lucks." Kevin puts on a pair of glittery sunglasses. The
announcer is introducing them. Willie assumes a Normandy stance. "See you
on the beach," he says, and they walk onstage.
Something strange happens backstage, in their wake. The entire hallway's
worth of people, heretofore inattentive to the show, flood into the wings.
One musician squeezes up to the front of the crowd: "I gotta see this."
The song begins. It's dirty. It's fast. The boys are swaying in sloppy
time to the music, convulsing almost. They're rolling like a freight
train. People backstage start clapping, laughing, shouting joyous
profanities. Before the song is even over, some people in the audience are
already on their feet. When the song ends, the whole house jumps up,
erupting in applause.
After leaving the stage, Kevin asks if there's an applause sign. There is,
an admirer says, but it wasn't lit. "That was full-on, deserved applause."
It is also the only standing ovation of the night—until their second set,
just before Marty Stuart comes on and asks them to stay for an encore,
which is a pretty big deal at the Grand Ole Opry.
Everyone wanted to know where the boys were going to go to celebrate
afterwards, which bar, but they just wanted to go and drink together at
home. "It would be great if we came in and played that show we played
tonight," Ketch said in the car home, "and then went back to our hotel
room, and then left." As we drove back past the warehouses and low-income
housing along Dickerson Pike, Critter introduced me to a game they play
whenever they travel that stretch. It's called "Bleak Seek," and to play
you keep your eyes peeled for depressing Nashville sights. All-time
winners include a burning baby carriage, and a woman crying as a man
pulled her by the hair, lighting a cigarette and laughing. "Nashville is a
place you come to to leave. Shania Twain did it right," he said, referring
to the vivacious singer's move to Switzerland with her husband. "She came
to town, made a bunch of money, and disappeared."
Shortly after their Opry debut, Old Crow signed with the powerful booking
agent Bobby Cudd at Monterey Peninsula Artists, whose roster also includes
Robert Earl Keen, the Dave Matthews Band, Chris Isaak, Aerosmith, and
Fiona Apple. Old Crow's first real tour was that May of 2001, opening five
shows for the Del McCoury band, the preeminent bluegrass act. The Medicine
Show was getting much more professional. Morgan Jahnig, a bass player they
met at the Opry Plaza, had joined the band after Ben moved upstate with
his girlfriend, who was pregnant. Morgan is computer-proficient, so he
built a Web site for the band, and on the road he charts the fastest
routes between cities with the global positioning software on his laptop,
a job previously handled by Ketch, a geography whiz since high school, who
would trace routes in an atlas with his finger, naming quaint stop-offs
that weren't on the map.
Ketch told the crowd in Houston that the band had recently had the
pleasure of playing on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium. "And I don't
know if you've been there to Nashville lately, but they don't play so much
of that-what do they call it?-country music anymore." This got laughs. The
crowd in Austin loved them too, as did Little Rock, but the reception in
Memphis was colder, which the boys found particularly depressing: They
played Memphis jug-band music, and Memphis, it seemed, didn't recognize
it.
In the car home to Nashville, Ketch and Critter railed against pop culture
("the most boring sex you can have, but at least you're getting laid"):
"Everybody in America wants to look at something for five minutes,
understand what it is, and go home, take a dump, and have sex" and be done
with it, and go to sleep."
"They need to put it where they put all their other stuff," Critter said.
"They want a box set. Everybody and their mother says. 'Have you seen 0
Brother, Where Art Thou? George Clooney sings the Ralph Stanley song!,'
all that crap. The record industry has latched on to that. And they're
gonna water it down, just make it worthless, just like hot country is now.
But you don't have to become a clich? and have everybody talk about you
like a clich?, like overalls and banjos and hound dogs and crap."
I asked how they felt about this tour compared with their first one across
Canada. For one thing, he said, in a week's time they'd made a good four
hundred dollars each, after taxes. "And now we have this weird booking
agency out of Nashville that we talk to on cell phones," Critter said. "We
have a set place where we're going every night and a set pay, which feels
really good in my head, because we've always talked about something like
this."
"But the Canada tour, we were so young then. Everything was fresh to us,"
Ketch said. "Now all of a sudden there is an Old-Crow-Medicine-Show
c-with-a-circle-around-it, when before there was a bunch of kids. Now
we're an entity."
In Memphis earlier that afternoon, the boys had been strolling down Beale
Street, the main drag of what had been the black business district where
jug-band heroes like Gus Cannon and Will Shade made their mark. It has
become essentially an open-air mall for tourists, full of souvenir shops,
theme bars, and chain clubs like Hard Rock Cafe and B.B. King's Blues
Club. I scoffed at a historical marker honoring Cannon. "No," Ketch said.
"Those poor guys are laughing their butts off. They would have sold out in
a minute if they'd had the chance."
Later, in the car, Ketch elaborated. "Gus Cannon knew how to play two
shows," he said. "He knew how to play to people that really wanted to get
happy and have a good time and party and snort cocaine and be happy in
Memphis before the Depression. But he also knew that it was important to
play to the white people that owned all of those buildings on Beale. When
he played black dances, he got fed and played for free. When he played
white dances, he got paid."
A year ago the band was flown to Los Angeles to play at the post-Grammy
party at the Biltmore Hotel. They opened up for the country star Ricky
Skaggs, whose History of the Future had been nominated for best bluegrass
album. Skaggs first heard the band when they were booked on tour together
the summer before, and was insistent that they accompany him to
California. The gala took up the entire first floor and the basement of
the hotel, and featured nine rooms of live entertainment. A rock 'n' roll
jam band played in the biggest ballroom, where a steak dinner was served.
The bluegrass room, a small conference room off a secondary hallway near
the restrooms, offered a folding table of finger cakes. The nearby
bathrooms and the relatively short line at the open bar attracted people
the music might not have. They would walk in, get drinks, and stand for a
respectful few minutes before exiting with a condescending "Yee-haw!" In
the back of the room was Norm Parenteau, a Nashville agent who has worked
with Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss, and who had recently become Old
Crow's manager. "I don't suppose there would be any way to stop people
from doing that," he said.
Someone proudly mentioned to the band that the 0 Brother, Where Art Thou?
soundtrack had won five awards, including album ot the year. "For the
first time since 1927," Ketch mused. "it's cool to be in a string band."
Of course, it was nothing to get too excited about. The niche's sudden
spike in popularity was sure not to last. And becoming famous as a
bluegrasser probably means, at best, making as much as a major-label
publicist. The boys certainly weren't treated as stars that night. The
five of them shared one small room at the Biltmore. with one bed and a
fold-out couch.
Old Crow was set to begin work on their new album that spring, with David
Rawlings, the partner of songwriter Gillian Welch, as their producer.
There was pressure to record more originals, since the ones they'd been
playing live had become crowd favorites. It's also a better way to make a
name. But the old heroes loom large, and Ketch in particular remains
romantically insistent that folk music belongs to the cultural collective.
He tells the parable of the harmonica player DeFord Bailey, who was a
premier star of the Grand Ole Opry until 1941.
"So some whippersnapper meets with DeFord Bailey," says Ketch, "and they
say, 'We want you to play some new material, because we're gonna he able
to make more money if you're able to play stuff we can copyright.' And
DeFord's like, 'Man, to hell with that. They want to hear 'Fox Chase.'
They want to hear 'Pan American Blues." And they did want to hear that.
But the Opry wanted to hear the change jingling in their pockets." Bailey,
who was physically deformed by infantile paralysis, was eventually fired,
and opened a shoeshine parlor in the back of his house. He died in 1982.
"And why should DeFord change?" says Ketch. "Those guys were so shocked to
have a market for doing what they'd been doing just on their intuition. So
even though they all died broke, they still had a hell of a great time
being rich for just a little while. And it was probably worth it." He
paused to consider this. "But longevity and career are the words now.
That's what I want. I want longevity and a career."
A few months before the Grammy gig, Ketch married Lydia, his girlfriend
from Exeter, who arguably instigated the whole Medicine Show endeavor by
dumping Ketch in 1998. It was a big change for the boys, not least because
they would no longer be living together. Their domestic situation became a
little more real-world (a little less Real World). They no longer share
one pot of money. Instead, after tours end. Ketch figures out the booking
agency's take, their manager's take, and taxes, puts expenses into a
ledger, and writes a bunch of checks. He often does this in the car with a
cold beer in his hand, but it is nevertheless a very mature scene. The
boys have even joined the musician's union. Tax write-offs are discussed.
"This is more of a grown-up challenge, how to be a business man, how to
keep track of your stuff, balancing all the pieces of your life." Ketch
told me recently, sounding slightly melancholy. "Whereas before it was,
You have to understand how to fix the alternator right now, or else you
freeze. You have to go into this bar, act like you're really friggin'
pathetic and get some work. Right now. Or else it's peanut-butter crackers
for dinner!"
When Old Crow drove to New York several months ago to play a showcase for
some intrigued record executives, the cozy 9C bar on Manhattan's Lower
East Side filled to capacity during the first set, and the bouncer had to
keep a line waiting at the door. Parenteau said soon after that they were
discussing a number of potential deals from record companies big and
small. But nothing was put on paper. And months have passed. "I think one
of the best things that's happened to us," Ketch says optimistically, "is
that nothing has happened to us that can't be undone."
Around Christmastime, Ketch went out with his banjo to sing for tips at a
shopping mall. The street's better, he says-you don't get kicked out as
fast. But it was cold, and Ketch was wearing just a Santa suit. One
wonders where, exactly, these minstrel instincts come from, and what
rewards they bring. Ketch once explained how he liked to surprise
telemarketers: "She says, 'Hi, my name is Trisha. I'm calling with AT&T.
We have some beautiful rates for you.' And I say, 'Well, Trisha, tell me
what hospital you were born in, and at what time? And what do you think
about the President? And do you have a boyfriend? Are you in love?' Just
to bend it a little bit. People are so used to hearing a copy-right
hashed-out version of the way things are. They need to have the very basic
of human interaction in order to see that it's bigger than just, 'Here's
what I've called a country song. It's on the interstate on the radio right
now and this is what country is, so deal with that and there you go.' I
think people would prefer a more personal relationship with art, if they
knew they could get it."
If the Old Crow boys didn't understand this when they fled into Canada
from the humdrum of Ithaca, they understood it by the time they got home.
One day, they left. They drove. And for three months in the middles of
nowhere, the simplest of pleasures were exchanged for the simplest of
necessities. That's a lesson in the rudimentary economics of music that
they don't teach in Nashville anymore.
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