The Bluegrass Blog has posted an excellent documentary about The Infamous Stringdusters called Four Days of Infamy. Produced by String Theory Media, Four Days of Infamy gives insight into the daily life of the ‘dusters as it follows them through a tour of Colorado this past March. You can stream the documentary in its entirety. Check it out!

There is an excellent documentary  called Years In Your Ears out about one of the best bands of the jam band era, Leftover Salmon.  The documentary features tons of live footage and interviews with Yonder Mountain String Band, String Cheese Incident, Sam Bush, Peter Rowan, Béla Fleck, John Cowan and tons of other musicians that admired LoS.  I can remember seeing these guys at Telluride Bluegrass Festival tons of times making the crowd go nuts for many Saturday nites at the festival.  The documentary even includes an appearance by Mayor McCheese!  Each and every Leftover Salmon show was a polyethnic Cajun slamgrass event that put a smile on everybody’s face and got even the most docile people in the crowd shaking their booty.  If you are a Salmon fan or if you just want to know what they are all about, check out this documentary.

I’m streaming the new Tom Petty solo album Highway Companion on Rhapsody. So far I have to say it rocks just like everything Petty touches. Highway Companion has a more honest, less radio friendly appeal to it not unlike his record Echo which is one of my favorites despite the fact that it was relatively unsuccessful in the market. Tom Petty has also done some great interviews lately namely this one for Harp magazine and this one for Rolling Stone. In these interviews, Petty talks very candidly about his marriage to his new wife, life in his Malibu home and the impending end of his carreer as an artist. He proclaims that the Heartbreakers probably won’t tour much longer which makes me sad because IMO they are one of the best touring acts in rock ‘n roll today.

Another thing that I find completely cool about Tom Petty is despite the fact that the Red Hot Chili Peppers blatantly ripped off Last Dance With Mary Jane for their new song Dani California Petty has said:

“Everyone everywhere is stopping me. The truth is, I seriously doubt that there is any negative intent there. And a lot of rock & roll songs sound alike. Ask Chuck Berry. The Strokes took “American Girl” [for their song "Last Nite"], and I saw an interview with them where they actually admitted it. That made me laugh out loud. I was like, “OK, good for you.” It doesn’t bother me.”

Petty is such a cool guy in adition to being incredibly talented performer/songwriter/rock god!

Stream the new Tom Petty album Highway Companion for free here.

One of my favorite bluegrass acts is Hotrize! They were so imensely talented and funny. Every second of their show was completely entertaining and fun. Hotrize is where I first heard the sounds of banjo virtuoso Pete Wernick (a.k.a. Dr Banjo. It seems like I keep hearing all sorts of things about Pete Wernick lately. He’s currently touring with his band flexigrass. He made public request to Craig Ferguson (organizer of Telluride Bluegrass Festival), to change the name of the festival to Telluride Newgrass Festival. And he recently wrote a very insightful piece about his experiences playing bluegrass with Jerry Garcia back before he was popular. Now I know that Telluride Newgrass Festival would be a much more accurate name for the festival but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Here is the ever so insightful piece that Pete Wernick wrote about Jerry:

Interesting to hear people recounting what they know of Jerry as a bluegrasser back in the pre-Dead days. I’ve never put my own recollections in writing, so this is as good a time as any.

I met and played a bunch with Jerry during the summer of 1963 in Palo Alto. By weird coincidence, I was out there with my family for the summer (my first time west of Pennsylvania), at the age of 17, due to my dad working on writing a math book at Stanford. I fell in with the bluegrass crowd, which I found surprisingly developed considering the distance from the source. Jerry, David Nelson, Eric Thompson and others were as deeply steeped in bluegrass records available then as anyone I knew back east. They’d been trading tapes with folks like Grisman and Mike Seeger, and would make long trips to Berkeley to a record store that carried bluegrass albums, and they studied them. Monroe had come to CA a few months previously, and Jerry, the most advanced banjo player there at the time, had studied Bill Keith’s technique and was working hard to develop that part of his picking. He had a lot of it pretty well mastered, at a time when few others did.

I was about the first bluegrass-playing easterner these guys had had a chance to meet and pick with, and they welcomed me and my banjo picking. Garcia and Nelson and Robert Hunter (later famous as G. Dead lyricist) had had a band called the Wildwood Boys. Their band photo was patterned after a shot of the Greenbriar Boys (wearing white shirts with vests, and Garcia posed just like Bob Yellin was on that first GB album cover), and were highly regarded. I saw their last gig, just before Hunter left for S. California to be part of supervised research on LSD. Soon after, Nelson and Garcia and I put together a little band we called the Godawful Palo Alto Bluegrass Ensemble. Jerry switched to mando since I could only play banjo. We did a few gigs at the folk club the Tangent and other places. I headed back for college in NYC before the end of summer.

At this time Jerry had recently married. His wife was pregnant, and he was making his living mainly giving lessons at a music store in Palo Alto. He had quite short hair and interestingly, was rather scornful of people who used pot. I clearly recall him arriving for a band practice, noticing that one picker was not straight, acting disgusted, and turning right around and leaving. Imagine my surprise when a few years later he had turned into Captain Trips, with long hair and a top hat.

Jerry was already great musician then, with a real spark for the music. He sang a lot of Stanley material and was always strong and soulful. He was very fired up to develop his music, and wanted to know everything I could tell him about the scene around New York City.

I later found out that the following summer he took off for points east, on a bluegrass quest that others on the list have recounted. I know he and Grisman met that summer, I believe at Sunset Park in Pennsylvania, and started an alliance that in many ways was pivotal for the development and popularization of bluegrass.

The whole “taping” aspect of the jam band culture today is an outgrowth of the Dead’s open policy toward “tapers”, and I assume this in turn grew out of the eagerness of that early west coast bluegrass scene to hear any tapes of live shows they could get hold of. There were very few bluegrass LPs back then, and live show tapes of Monroe, Jim & Jesse and other important bands really expanded their knowledge of the music and who was making it. Monroe was at that time possibly the only eastern bluegrass artist who’d performed in California, so the tapes helped fill a large gap.

The last time I saw Jerry was ten years later, summer of ’73, when I spent a day with him at his house, picking banjo, reminiscing about those early days, and talking about all sorts of subjects. This was around the time of Old and In the Way, and he was up on his banjo chops and wanting to learn new licks, etc. He was a very special person, a complete music devotee, very well informed on a lot of different kinds of music.

It had taken quite an effort to reach him, as there already was a wall of protection around him as a celebrity, but when I finally did make contact, he was eager to rekindle our friendship, as he said he felt most comfortable with the people he knew before he was famous. Later that night I went with him to a recording studio and saw the Dead attempt to record something they wound up finding too complicated, and gave up on.

I would make it to Dead concerts now and then up to that point, but when they started drawing huge crowds, the security became so tight, it seemed too much of a challenge to try to penetrate that, just to say hi. So I stopped trying, stopped going to see the Dead, and never did see Jerry again. Seeing him and Grisman in the sweet movie Grateful Dawg gave some touching tastes of Jerry as an acoustic musician, and I recommend it for anyone curious about this very important musician, one of the most influential ever in America.

Hard to imagine what might have happened had there been a place in the world for Jerry as a full-time bluegrass musician.

Pete Wernick DrBanjo.com

The big question on every deadhead’s mind lately has been will The Dead tour this summer and if so, in what formation? Well sorry to be a debbie downer, but there will be no reunion this summer according to this interview with Bob Weir. To be honest, the best post Grateful Dead shows I’ve been to have been Ratdog and Phil and Friends shows. The reunion shows I’ve seen have always left me thirsty for more of this or that. They have these killer all star lineups with so many great performers that none of them get enough time to shine. I’d rather see Warren Haynes with Govt Mule than with The Dead because I know that I will be able to see him really whale with the Mule. Same with Derek Trucks, Steve Kimock, Chris Robinson and Joan Osborne. Don’t get me wrong, The Dead and will see them any chance I get, its just that Phil and Bobby have both done such a killer job perfecting their own flavor of Grateful Dead music that the void is filled.

As always, a related offering of must hear musical nugs (thanks nugs.net):

Last night on my favorite radio program, Dead to the World, Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann and his son Justin Kreutzmann gave an interesting interview. In the interview Bill talks about his approach to drums and his style. He also talks about meeting Pigpen, Jerry Garcia and playing with Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon (as Serial Pod). Bill also spends some time describing his digital artwork which you can check out here. Mike Gordon calls in for part of the interview as well.  You can stream the show here or read the transcript from the interview here.

Here is a great interview with the singer of Wilco, Jedd Tweedy in which he discusses music piracy and file sharing on the internet. I think he hits the nail on the head. The whole point of making music is to be heard. Making money is secondary. Don’t get me wrong, an artist should be properly compensated for their work but I think that its the music industry’s problem and not the artists. Most artists see very few royalties on their albums and they don’t see any profits untill years after an album’s release. The majority of musicians make most of their money for touring. This was the case for Wilco. They released their album Yankey Hotel Foxtrot as a free download on their website and grew to a household name overnight. My favorite quote from the interview is:

“Shutting down music file-sharing is like closing a library.”

I think that as great recording technology becomes available to the masses record labels will play less of a role in the music industry. I’m always more willing to purchase an album if I know that a significant portion of what I pay is going to the artist. That is why I buy albums off of CD Baby whenever possible.

And for your listening pleasure I give you:
Wilco – 2004-05-20
Otto’s
DeKalb, IL

Download the MP3 or stream it here.