I’m not a musician or a musicologist and I don’t play either on TV, but I recognize musical genius when I hear it. David Grisman’s got it and knows how to use it. After more than four decades as a composer, performer, bandleader and producer, Grisman has become a legend for his finely crafted tunes and innovative arrangements in a broad spectrum of contemporary styles, all firmly rooted in traditions like swing, bluegrass, Latin, jazz and gypsy. Grisman’s signature on acoustic string instrumental music now bears its own name: “Dawg” music.
Grisman’s instrumental style found a home in 1974 when he formed the Great American Music Band with fiddler Richard Greene. “Nothing against singers,” he says, “but it became apparent to me that I could play 90 minutes without one. Besides, Elvis never called.” When Greene moved on to join a pop act the following year, Grisman met guitar wizard Tony Rice, who moved to California where they started rehearsing a new group, the David Grisman Quintet, which included bassist/mandolinist Todd Phillips and violinist Darol Anger. Today, nearly 30 years later, DGQ members include bassist Jim Kerwin, percussionist George Marsh, flutist Matt Eakle and Argentine guitarist Enrique Coria, in addition to Grisman.
In 1990, Grisman helped start Acoustic Disc, a San Rafael-based independent record label committed to preserving the integrity of acoustic music, musicians and instruments. Varied releases cover acoustic music of all genres. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead (who gave David the nickname Dawg) frequently recorded at Dawg Studios and chose Acoustic Disc as the outlet for his acoustic side, resulting in the acclaimed Garcia/Grisman, Not For Kids Only, Shady Grove, So What, Old & In the Gray, That High Lonesome Sound, The Pizza Tapes, Grateful Dawg Soundtrack and Been All Around This World.
To date, Grisman has put his artistic touch on over 60 productions for his blossoming label—five of which have been nominated for Grammys. Grisman’s latest discovery is a Charlottesville, Virginia group called Old School Freight Train that Boston Globe reviewer Scott Alarik says “may be the next big thing in bluegrass.”
Following the advice of the Wall Street Journal (“If you’re looking for something elegant, warm and delightful, go to the Dawg”), I caught up with Grisman at his Petaluma home a couple of days after he had returned from gigs on the road. Grisman’s son Sam, a talented bassist who occasionally performs with his dad, provided intermittent string accompaniment during the interview. Sam’s cell phone ringing with Miles Davis riffs rounded out the aural atmosphere in true Dawg style.
I’m interested in how a New Jersey kid fell in love with folk music in the early ’60s, when pop and rock and roll was all the rage.
Actually, pop music was in a particularly flat place around 1960-61. This was before Motown and the Beatles kicked in. The great rock and roll people who emerged in the late ’50s had all disappeared. Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, Elvis went to the army, Frankie Lyman overdosed, Chuck Berry was in prison, Little Richard got religion. These were people who had turned me on to rock and roll, and all of sudden it was all Lesley Gore, singing “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.” Not an encouraging era of American music.
But the Kingston Trio came on the scene with their brand of folk music. Two friends and myself, all in high school, gravitated toward folk because that music scene was very alive at the time. My friend Jack Scott had an FM radio. He was hearing this music he kept calling bluegrass. It happened that I had a favorite English teacher named Elsie Rinzler and we decided we wanted to have a folk music club and we asked her if she would help us do this. She said she had a cousin who was a professional folk musician, and we rolled our eyes. Elsie invited her cousin Ralph Rinzler into our high school English class and it changed my life. I’ll never forget him coming to class and playing guitar, banjo and mandolin. It’s safe to say our minds got blown that day.
You were already studying music, yes?
I was a borderline piano dropout at the time. I called my teacher and told him I was going to get a mandolin. His response was, “That’s not a real instrument.” It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I quit piano that day. My buddies and I decided to form a band. Banjo and guitar were already taken, so I decided to become a mandolin player. I bought my first one at a pawnshop on the Bowery in New York City, for 19 bucks. Every Sunday afternoon in Washington Square Park musicians would show up, blues musicians, bluegrass, old-time stuff, political protest, they’d jam and hang out. It was an amazing scene. We used to take the bus to the Port Authority bus station and then take the subway down to Greenwich Village and play music.
This story has a footnote. Ralph Rinzler had an enormous impact as a folklorist. He rediscovered singer, comedian and banjoist Clarence Ashley and discovered Doc Watson, who’s in a category by himself as an American folk guitar stylist. Ralph also engineered the purchase of Folkways Records for the Smithsonian and started the Smithsonian Folklife Institute. He did more to preserve American folk culture than practically any single human being in the 20th century. Ralph came to visit me in 1990 for a few days, and at that time told me that my mom, who was his art teacher in junior high, was the person who opened up his artistic side, just the way she taught art. I didn’t get along with my mom, so I didn’t get that from her, so I got my mom’s artistry from him, once-removed. That’s how I discovered folk music and took up with the mandolin.
Bluegrass is obviously a big influence on your work. It’s not an easy thing to define. “Modernized old-time music”?
That’s one way to look at it, but one problem with using words like “modern” is they get outdated fast. It was modernized old-time music in 1948, but now what people call bluegrass is even more “modern” than what that once meant, in the sense of being more diluted. Bluegrass was an innovation out of old-time string band music, and a branch of the traditional American music tree, with instrumental roots in Scots-Irish fiddle playing, and in blues. It was a true American melting pot deal. Fiddle playing, banjo playing, minstrel music, old English ballads, ragtime and swing were also influences in old-time music.
In the 1920s, the only recorded music was opera and classical. Gradually, small independent recording companies started recording ethnic and regional music, blues, ethnic, Italian, Polish, Jewish. They found small regional markets. A guy named Ralph Peer, a young shipping clerk in Kansas City, 1920s, was the first guy to pitch this idea to a major label, RCA Victor. He supervised the recording of Mamie Smith, said to be the first blues recording specifically aimed at the African-American market. In 1927, Peer recorded both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in the same session at a makeshift studio in Bristol, Tennessee, known as the Bristol Barn Session. This was the genesis of country music as we know it today.
Now what was great about that was it was all regional and unique. There was one kind of music in Mesa Springs, Virginia, and then 10 miles away—a day or two hike—another style of music because people were isolated. There was no single style, there’s the Carter Family, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, Riley Puckett. Then the brother duets: Monroe Brothers, Blue Sky Boys, the Callahan Brothers, The Delmore Brothers.
Almost like little musical gene pools.
Exactly right—an amazing ecology of sound. And what we’ve seen since then is the gradual homogenizing of music. The underlying change from the music we love, the music we play on the back porch and at square dances, the music we’re known for locally, is to music that “sounds like the last hit.” The whole idea is producing music to sell, and what sells, rather than giving top billing to aesthetic factors like composition, arrangement, intonation, style, character, culture. We’ve seen a steady influx of the commercial influence that has helped to dismantle individuality, until now there’s hardly any individuality in music.
Michael Bolton…
Oh, the list is endless. It’s tragic; we’re losing our culture to mass identity. It’s being replaced by versions of the original thing that are so watered down that they don’t have the same meaning or impact, or replaced by “new” forms that aren’t really valid in the same way, or at least that I can’t appreciate.
What do you listen for in emerging bands? How do you find new talent these days?
Old School Freight Train sent me a demo. I was impressed by the fact that they had great compositional and playing skills, and the band has its own thing. Lots of influences as do I, but really good musicianship. I like the way they work as a band. Often groups are geared to one personality. The Stones is really Mick Jagger. There are fewer bands now with the style of a team working together, ensemble. That’s what I appreciate because it’s harder than just having one person to focus on. You go hear a top soloist, it really doesn’t matter what band they have. I appreciate a band with a style, because it’s difficult to find, say, five guys who can create something that’s greater than the sum of their parts. The Beatles weren’t just three guys backing up Paul: they all sang, they all contributed.
Even the best ensembles can get formulaic and stale. I always had the sense that your famous friend Jerry Garcia looked to his sessions with you as a way to explore possibilities beyond the signature sound he had with the Dead, their trademark groove.
Working with Jerry was an escape for me, too. It was unique for both of us, we had a similar outlook on a lot of things, knowledge of a similar body of music. We drew from the same well much of the time. The Dead was always a democratic thing, and it wasn’t what Jerry probably wanted to do all the time. What Jerry and I did together musically was something that didn’t have any real pressure on it, like having to do a lot of gigs or produce an album. Jerry would call me and say, “Hey, what are you doing?” and we’d record for our own amusement and at some point we’d have enough for a release. Our group, Old and in the Way, lasted less than a year.
When did you begin to discover jazz, as a musician?
Through the TV show, Peter Gunn, around 1958. That theme was the first thing I ever tried to play on a guitar. That was the first jazz I discovered but I didn’t perceive it as “jazz” per se. The first jazz record I ever bought was by a French bass player named François Rabbath, called “Bassball,” all bass and drums. Then my friend Eric Thompson turned me on to Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. A keyboard player named Bill Stevenson turned me on to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk.
What I liked about jazz was its integrity. I had already noticed that Flatt and Scruggs were getting pretty commercial by the early ’60s, when they recorded the theme for The Beverly Hillbillies. In early ’50s they were eating baloney sandwiches and riding around scrunched in cars and not sleeping much, and playing topnotch bluegrass. By the time they were doing TV theme music, the tempos were a little slower, Lester’s voice was more mainstream. Somehow this wasn’t happening with Reinhardt and Monk. There weren’t the same kinds of commercial pressures to sell out. Bill Monroe had that kind of integrity in bluegrass.
When you bring together the various genres in your own work, do you still recognize them as jazz, bluegrass, swing?
Playing on a mandolin or any other acoustic string instrument, you’re already departing from the jazz tradition. It puts it in another realm that real jazz lovers wouldn’t consider jazz. Most of my tunes are complex, more urban. Most of the tunes I play are tunes I’ve written, and they have a basis in bluegrass or jazz or gypsy or Latin music. Since they’re my compositions, the way I arrange is its own thing.
“Dawg.”
I figured if I created a generic name, I could get past the explanations. Jerry gave me that nickname when we were in Old and in the Way. By the way, his name was Spud-Boy. Around that time I started writing a lot of instrumentals, so the moniker allows me to be inventive: Dawgola, Dawgology, Bow-Wow, endless sources of tune names and categories. When I started my band, I was known as a bluegrass player. I had it in the rider of my contract that you couldn’t use “bluegrass” in advertising, because I didn’t want to disappoint people who were expecting something they thought to be bluegrass. I didn’t feel it was bluegrass, but something different. So “Dawg” struck me as an anti-name moniker. All the names for musical styles become way too general—like, what is “jazz”? Even with “bluegrass,” if you ask me, you ask Bill Monroe, you ask the man on the street—we’ll all give different answers.
It goes back to the idea that great music is produced by individuals, Duke Ellington, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe. Most individuals want to be recognized for themselves. A musician might get called a baroque composer but it’s not something he’ll say about himself. They’re composers, they’re Scarlatti or Brahms. It’s the marketing people and advertising people who want to have names. Bluegrass was a name invented by disc jockeys. “Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys” was the name of his band. When other bands started to imitate that, they began calling their music bluegrass. Nobody sets out to call something “bluegrass.” A particular sound gets widespread, popular enough, played enough so that other people call similar things that same name, like rhythm and blues, or swing.
But they’re all too general. It’s much better to say “Benny Goodman,” and then be more precise and say “Benny Goodman, 1938.” Or “Trio.” “Miles Davis 1956” or “MD 1968.”
There’s Picasso, and then there’s his Blue Period.
There you go. “Modern art,” what’s a phrase like that supposed to mean? How much information is there in that? But some people use phrases like that all the time. It’s inevitable. I got into it deeper than that. When I talk about Thelonious Monk, I don’t call it jazz. It’s Monk Music.
A lot of musicians give you credit for helping to advance the independent recording label movement.
Frank Sinatra did it in the ’50s with Reprise. I was basically without a record deal, having just gotten dropped by MCA. I was building a studio and my friends Artie and Harriet Rose wanted to relocate from New York. They were going to start a mom and pop CD store, back when CDs were just coming in. I was helping them research that. It became pretty clear Tower Records was going to win that one. I had just built a studio and I had been producing records since 1963, so we went into business together, along with my friend and manager, Craig Miller. That’s how Acoustic Disc was born. I never wanted to have a record company because I never wanted to have a garage full of records, and today my garage is not full of records, so I’m happy.
Who do you listen to these days, who’s got you excited?
John Coltrane, the Stanley Brothers, Miles Davis, Howlin’ Wolf and all the real stuff. There’s not an environment now that will create that kind of quality. Let’s face it—a lot of great music comes out of suffering. A lot of today’s musicians grew up watching Sesame Street, so they don’t have much to say to me. Too much of today’s music is just imitation or somebody’s effort to sell a record. If I want to hear jazz trumpet playing I’ll listen to Clifford Brown. If I want to hear bluegrass, Flatt and Scruggs from 1953 gets it.
Most bands are just too aware of their effort to make a record. That wasn’t the scene when the great music was being made. Modern life has turned into a strip mall. They are all the same wherever…the same stuff. It’s just a basic deterioration of culture. Culture comes from creative individuals.
What’s next for David Grisman?
I like what I’m doing. Hey, I’m a grandpa now. I have twin grandkids. I'd just like to keep going. I have three wonderful, talented kids. My son Monroe plays in American Drag, a newly successful Marin rock outfit, and my daughter Gillian is a filmmaker in New York. She just debuted her new film, Press On at the San Francisco Black Film festival. It's about sacred steel guitarist Robert Randolph. My youngest son Sam is a fine acoustic bass player.
People ask me, “Is there anybody left you want to play with?” And I say, “Who wants to play with me?”
The David Grisman Quintet will perform outdoors at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center Saturday, July 9 at 7pm. Call 415/444-8000 for ticket information.
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