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I go into weird spots and come out of it providing hope.
-Grayson Capps |
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Interlude 2: Kids
Grayson Capps: I have two really young children. For me, it's the most wonderful and horrible thing to happen in my whole life.
JamBase: My wife and I just had our first child a few months ago.
Capps: It'll seem like hell at first but there's a full circle. You start losing the narcissistic part of yourself. It was a great realization to me that I needed to get my head out of my ass [laughs].
Grayson Capps & Theresa Anderson |
Little ones really shift your whole sense of priorities. And they're so fun so much of the time.
I notice at shows I'll have 18-year olds all the way up to 60-year olds. They'll write me and say their four and five year olds love my CDs. A little girl in Pennsylvania got her parents to drive hours to see me and she's about five years old! She was singing "Poison" [a rollicking, juke joint rumbler on Wail & Ride].
It's strange but if you don't dumb it down children are capable of absorbing more sophisticated music than the stuff officially intended for them.
It's amazing to listen to the stuff actually intended as children's music. There's this one lady who has a big couch and she acts like a young kid and she just fails miserably. Then there's this Australian group called The Wiggles who sing things like, 'Fruit salad, yummy yummy.' That one gets the kids dancing. Then there's Taj Mahal and Doc Watson and the kids really love that.
I've noticed at festivals kids absolutely love bluegrass. And bluegrass pickers, who are already more interested in interacting with the crowd, really delight in kids' reactions. If a little boy dances in front of the stage they'll lean down and fiddle in his face.
My daughter loves bluegrass. My two-year old son has Elmore James in his [music] box and plays him a lot. One of his first words was "Elmo James." He loves that [scats a scratchy diddly-diddly-diddly slide guitar riff]. We just gotta make sure we give them the good stuff.
The Highway Kind
Grayson Capps & The Stumpknockers |
"It's hard to leave the house when you have kids but it's the life I've chosen," laments Capps, who spends a good chunk of each month doing solo and band gigs both Stateside and in Europe, where he's found an appreciative audience alongside rootsy American gems like Richmond Fontaine, The Handsome Family, and Neal Casal. "I have to heal from the life I lead on the road when I get back. I'm usually in bars and my clock switches. When I'm home I'm usually in bed by nine, wake up by seven."
"I go out with the band a lot, especially since Hurricane Katrina. Everybody had gigs in New Orleans and we spent seven or eight months in a van trying to support everybody. A friend said, 'Whoever you were sleeping with on August 28 you're married to now.' That's the case with my band [laughs]. It's more true to the recordings and it's very much the energy that I love. We'll go from a cappella acoustic to full-fledged Hound Dog Taylor fuck up. We run from Tom T. Hall to AC/DC in our mentality."
Out amongst the people is where a hirsute troubadour like Grayson Capps belongs. His well-spun tales of the rough and sweet sides of life are subtly inspirational.
"One thing I heard my father say a long time ago was, 'If you cannot provide hope by the end of your work then you should not be an artist.' That's been one of the biggest things that's stuck with me," muses Capps. "I go into weird spots and come out of it providing hope. Sometimes I seem gloomy but there's always an out."
JamBase | California
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