Post by fogcitygal on Aug 4, 2007 0:31:22 GMT -5
from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:
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Bluegrass artist is cool -- now
Jeff Spevak
Staff music critic
"(August 2, 2007) — Perhaps his classmates and teachers should have intervened. "I'd wobble through high school and stumble into the walls. I was always really sleepy," says Jerry Douglas. "I missed football practice my senior year, so I didn't get to play."
Smoking grass? No, something that would have been much more surprising to his classmates at Warren High School, outside of Cleveland.
"Nobody knew what I was doing," Douglas confesses, "because bluegrass wasn't that cool."
Smokin' bluegrass! As it turns out, he was a man ahead of his time. Or behind it, maybe. Today, the 51-year-old Douglas is known as the world's finest dobro player (Source: Goober's International Dobro Pickers and Moonshine Ratings). He has a steady job with Alison Krauss & Union Station, which plays Friday at the Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center, but Douglas has also appeared on an estimated 1,500 albums. And, "I feel the lashes of every one of them today," he says with a sigh over the phone from his home in Nashville, Tenn.
As all of our readers who are fans of contemporary chartbusters such as Interpol and T-Pain know, the dobro is a guitar with a circular steel resonator box built into the body, providing a more powerful sound. It is a sound associated with the old-time acts of the 1920s and '30s: a legacy that Douglas began playing when he was 8 years old, and as a 14-year-old with his father's bar band. Until the Country Gentlemen, a top, progressive-bluegrass outfit, spotted him.
"When I was 16, they recruited me at a festival," Douglas says. "They asked me to go on the road with them and I said, 'You know, I'd love to, but I should probably finish high school first.'"
He did take them up on playing weekends, leading to some loooooong Mondays, before "I graduated from high school and left the same weekend."
Now Douglas is a bluegrass icon, playing with what may be bluegrass' biggest contemporary star, Krauss, herself a former child prodigy. He played on and produced her 1990 album, I've Got That Old Time Feeling.
"We put drums on the tracks" — bluegrass blasphemy! — "and when she heard it, she was beside herself," Douglas says. "She ran down the hall whooping. When the record came out, we got slammed for ruining 'The Bluegrass Diva.'
"She was just as responsible, but we took a lot of grief for it.
"At the same time, they bought 100,000 of them. Maybe they didn't think anybody would find out."
Grammy voters found out. I've Got That Old Time Feeling won that year for best bluegrass album. Despite those drums. Where do such crazy ideas come from? Well, Douglas says, they creep into your bedroom at night. In Douglas' case, it was the iconoclastic rock station blasting its way out of Cleveland in the '70s, WMMS.
"It was great listening to music then," he says. "You got a good cross section. You weren't force fed all this stuff you didn't like, like today. That ruins your whole musical palette. Go to any other station now and you're going to hear about the same thing. Thank God for XM and Sirius.
"Let's face it. The '80s were bad music. There were some good things, but you had to get into a secret cult to get it."
Krauss knew the secret handshake. "I listened to AC/DC, too, but not to the degree she did," Douglas says. "She and her brother Viktor, they were really into it.
"That's the thing she and I have in common. We both love traditional bluegrass, but we both feel that's been done, and really well. What we strive for is to bring something new to a genre. We're not trying to sway them into loving Def Leppard. We're just trying to broaden their palettes."
For Alison Krauss and Union Station, that might mean the "big viola, lap-steel, keyboard pad," Douglas says. A definite rock influence, "that builds this bed, this nice bed for everything to lay on."
And, of course, there is the backward stuff. "Like Sgt. Pepper, same concept," he says. No subliminal messages though, just slide guitar notes run backward, which Douglas reproduces onstage with tape loops and samplers.
"I think it keeps traditional bluegrass music intact," Douglas says. "The traditionalists are so afraid that their music will go away, the moldy figs of bluegrass. Staunch neo-traditionalists are afraid their music is going to be lost to the ages. Then some act like Old Crow Medicine Show comes out, sounding like they dropped out of the '20s, the 1920s, like Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers.
"I think what we're doing with bluegrass will make people find out who Bill Monroe is. They'll Wikipedia 'bluegrass' and find out it was invented by Bill Monroe, followed closely by Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers and someone else. And then, they find the essence of it."
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Very
------------------------------------------
Bluegrass artist is cool -- now
Jeff Spevak
Staff music critic
"(August 2, 2007) — Perhaps his classmates and teachers should have intervened. "I'd wobble through high school and stumble into the walls. I was always really sleepy," says Jerry Douglas. "I missed football practice my senior year, so I didn't get to play."
Smoking grass? No, something that would have been much more surprising to his classmates at Warren High School, outside of Cleveland.
"Nobody knew what I was doing," Douglas confesses, "because bluegrass wasn't that cool."
Smokin' bluegrass! As it turns out, he was a man ahead of his time. Or behind it, maybe. Today, the 51-year-old Douglas is known as the world's finest dobro player (Source: Goober's International Dobro Pickers and Moonshine Ratings). He has a steady job with Alison Krauss & Union Station, which plays Friday at the Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center, but Douglas has also appeared on an estimated 1,500 albums. And, "I feel the lashes of every one of them today," he says with a sigh over the phone from his home in Nashville, Tenn.
As all of our readers who are fans of contemporary chartbusters such as Interpol and T-Pain know, the dobro is a guitar with a circular steel resonator box built into the body, providing a more powerful sound. It is a sound associated with the old-time acts of the 1920s and '30s: a legacy that Douglas began playing when he was 8 years old, and as a 14-year-old with his father's bar band. Until the Country Gentlemen, a top, progressive-bluegrass outfit, spotted him.
"When I was 16, they recruited me at a festival," Douglas says. "They asked me to go on the road with them and I said, 'You know, I'd love to, but I should probably finish high school first.'"
He did take them up on playing weekends, leading to some loooooong Mondays, before "I graduated from high school and left the same weekend."
Now Douglas is a bluegrass icon, playing with what may be bluegrass' biggest contemporary star, Krauss, herself a former child prodigy. He played on and produced her 1990 album, I've Got That Old Time Feeling.
"We put drums on the tracks" — bluegrass blasphemy! — "and when she heard it, she was beside herself," Douglas says. "She ran down the hall whooping. When the record came out, we got slammed for ruining 'The Bluegrass Diva.'
"She was just as responsible, but we took a lot of grief for it.
"At the same time, they bought 100,000 of them. Maybe they didn't think anybody would find out."
Grammy voters found out. I've Got That Old Time Feeling won that year for best bluegrass album. Despite those drums. Where do such crazy ideas come from? Well, Douglas says, they creep into your bedroom at night. In Douglas' case, it was the iconoclastic rock station blasting its way out of Cleveland in the '70s, WMMS.
"It was great listening to music then," he says. "You got a good cross section. You weren't force fed all this stuff you didn't like, like today. That ruins your whole musical palette. Go to any other station now and you're going to hear about the same thing. Thank God for XM and Sirius.
"Let's face it. The '80s were bad music. There were some good things, but you had to get into a secret cult to get it."
Krauss knew the secret handshake. "I listened to AC/DC, too, but not to the degree she did," Douglas says. "She and her brother Viktor, they were really into it.
"That's the thing she and I have in common. We both love traditional bluegrass, but we both feel that's been done, and really well. What we strive for is to bring something new to a genre. We're not trying to sway them into loving Def Leppard. We're just trying to broaden their palettes."
For Alison Krauss and Union Station, that might mean the "big viola, lap-steel, keyboard pad," Douglas says. A definite rock influence, "that builds this bed, this nice bed for everything to lay on."
And, of course, there is the backward stuff. "Like Sgt. Pepper, same concept," he says. No subliminal messages though, just slide guitar notes run backward, which Douglas reproduces onstage with tape loops and samplers.
"I think it keeps traditional bluegrass music intact," Douglas says. "The traditionalists are so afraid that their music will go away, the moldy figs of bluegrass. Staunch neo-traditionalists are afraid their music is going to be lost to the ages. Then some act like Old Crow Medicine Show comes out, sounding like they dropped out of the '20s, the 1920s, like Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers.
"I think what we're doing with bluegrass will make people find out who Bill Monroe is. They'll Wikipedia 'bluegrass' and find out it was invented by Bill Monroe, followed closely by Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers and someone else. And then, they find the essence of it."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Very
