Peter Rowan: Gather The Spirit

Listen to Peter Rowan on Rhapsody…

By: Paul Kerr

Peter Rowan by Paul Cheney

Peter Rowan is a bluegrass living legend, lighting up the stage for over four decades as an evocative singer, propulsive guitarist and rock steady mandolin player. His countless musical explorations have led him through rock, folk, country and even reggae music. He was one of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, formed a rock band with David Grisman that opened for The Doors in the late ’60s and joined Old and In the Way with Jerry Garcia to get back to their bluegrass roots.

Rowan’s recent travels brought him through Chapel Hill, North Carolina with an acoustic quartet featuring famed guitarist Tony Rice. JamBase sat down with Rowan before his concert for a wide-ranging conversation on politics, war, Garcia, Michael Franti and music as a healing force in the world.

JamBase: You’ve been playing with Tony Rice for a long time and decided to turn it into a quartet. What led to that decision?

Peter Rowan: About six or seven years ago [we] started being asked by different festivals to do workshops. I had known Tony for some years but we’d never really played together. He’d always had his own band and played with the David Grisman Quintet. People had told me Tony’s approach was that he had to hear music a lot before he figured out how he would play on it. And I thought, “Well that doesn’t sound like the Tony that I’m playing with.” Because I would just write new songs and he would jump right in and find a part and work on it.

I think the timing was right for us to do these things together. We were both in between projects and there began to be a call for what we were doing. So, I enlisted some young players from Texas that I knew to come out and play bass and mandolin with us and it was pretty cool, and it’s developed since then to be more of a quartet thing. We’ve done two albums. The first one’s called You Were There For Me. It was recorded right around the 9/11 time. It kind of has a melancholy feel. The new one is a little more hard driving. It’s called Quartet [released January 23, 2007 on Rounder]. It features all the people we’ve been playing with.

JamBase: 9/11 was a Tuesday and that’s the day records usually get released. Was it among that batch?

Peter Rowan: No, the writing was being done around that time and the time leading up to it, the year before. Just a sense in the world of a deep, deep melancholy and sadness and then, of course, [it] all broke out in the 9/11 thing. What I was writing during those times [had] a sense of foreboding and melancholy. I wrote a song called “Shirt Off My Back.” To me anyway, I relate it to this sense of malaise and melancholy that was in the air leading up to 9/11.

I was living in New York until two months before and someone said, “I feel spooky. I feel like something’s going to happen.”

Yeah, it was in the air. Things are in the air before they happen. Of course once it happened there was no thought of what had led up to it. I mean it was all…

…reaction time.

It’s still reaction time. I wrote this song called “Skyscraper” in Alaska that summer. [Starts singing] “Skyscraper, skyscraper, there’s a hole in your sky. Skyscraper, skyscraper, let me rest in your shadow, rest in your shadow before I die.”

What made you think of skyscrapers in the middle of Alaska?

I was in the middle of Alaska on the river and I was just laughing crazily because it was such strong nature, such strong country, that the opposite image came in my mind. I looked at a tall tree and I went “Skyscraper, skyscraper.” It was one of those things that just came out. So that happened before 9/11 and all the lyrics of that song are about what’s inside a building and its disappearance. Strange, I don’t know.

Can your music bring people together and help with this sense of melancholy?

I don’t seem to play in a militant style that’s trying to shake the foundations of the empire. I wouldn’t know how to describe it. I just write songs about what I see and hear and people I know. I don’t have an agenda really. I think music is a healing force and it helps people. It certainly stirs them up but you never know what people bring to the music, you know? It used to be, when I was a kid, people would go to rock & roll shows and there’d always be these gang rumbles afterwards. But I wasn’t in a gang. I just liked the music. So, it’s different people, it’s what they bring to the situation.

Peter Rowan

I have a full-scale reggae band with up to nine pieces, and when we play it’s like a gathering of the vibes. That kind of brings the people in because lyrically it’s kind of anthemic and spiritual. The lyrics are like, “Fetch wood, carry water, pull the Devil by the tail.” It’s kind of teasing and with that presentation, that kind of beat, and that kind of sound, it’s more body music. People get hit in their bodies. They move to it, they stand up, they dance. But what I’m doing in acoustic music right now is not based on drums. It’s based on acoustic guitars and rhythms that have developed in bluegrass music, and it’s a different thing. Just the pure facility that Tony Rice has on the guitar, the brilliance and the genius, just frees me up so I can sing with a full voice and not feel like I have to drag the band along with my rhythm guitar playing. So it’s a different situation.

Our new bass player is going to be with us tonight. Catherine Popper was working with Ryan Adams and she said the bigger he got, the louder he got, the harder it was to play music anymore. And Sharon [Gilchrist], my mandolin player, and I just played with Yonder Mountain String Band and [when] we got off stage we looked at each other. It was like, “I was just acting. What were you doing?” I don’t know, I couldn’t hear a thing so I was acting like I was playing and playing notes and things but it wasn’t music because it wasn’t a musical experience. It was just a lot of people making a lot of noise and a big crowd of people making more noise.

That’s the kind of success that happens when you start playing these venues, and you deal with it however you deal with it. The band, they’ve got their thing together. They’ve got their in-ear microphones and everything. But for us, it comes down simply to an acoustic instrument over a microphone, and it really keeps you honest from a musical point of view ’cause we’re just going to be playing whatever sound we can make from the instrument. There’s nothing plugged in. I don’t feel like it makes us better. It does keep you from getting too caught up in a sense – it keeps you from being too successful actually is what I could say [laughs].

Continue reading for more with Peter Rowan…

Who can say what music really is? It’s a formless energy that moves people. It’s a good place to put your head. Whether it’s from stuff you’ve heard or whether it’s from stuff you want to say, you just put your head in that space. -Peter Rowan

Photo by Todd E. Gaul

JamBase: Playing acoustic music?

Yeah. It keeps you humble. You can do the electric thing, it’s fine, but you end up simplifying. You’re no longer into the subtleties. Now a guy like [Jerry] Garcia kept all that in his playing, and on the other end of all the electric music, you heard his jazz records he did with Dave Grisman. You can’t deny that all that stuff that was in his playing acoustically was behind all his electric playing, you know? But, there is a magic moment of connecting with the audience. There is for sure a sense of picking up on the vibe of the audience. Heck, the audience gives as much to it as we do really.

Is there a crowd size where that becomes harder?

Peter Rowan & Tony Rice by Paul Cheney

Any more than 600 people for us – well, we do festivals of more than that but it depends on the theatre. If it’s a good 1000-seat venue, that’s fine. The Variety Playhouse in Atlanta has good sound and I think it fits 1200 people and we’ve just about filled it. Had no problem, it was great. Other places might be more difficult because of the hall, because of the concrete floors or brick walls or something like that. We are really bound by our approach but that’s okay.

There’s an intimate nature to acoustic music that could be lost on a giant stage.

You can still have fun though. If I do a larger festival I like the freedom that using a rhythm section gives me. You can be more expressive in a broader way. I’m a vocalist so whatever kind of backup is going to give me the lift to relate to a bigger crowd of people, that’s fine with me. But an acoustic quartet has got its own special charm. MerleFest is big, but the thing is that people now are more educated about music. I think something started to change when Jerry Garcia played with Old and in The Way and suddenly there was a bluegrass band. Nobody ever thought we were going to be on the charts, and then people started listening and started paying attention to where that came from.

Then in the 1980s artists like Nancy Griffith came out playing pretty acoustic. It’s the people hitting the road playing acoustic music that set that framework and it comes in waves. A large part of the audience [that] used to listen to the Grateful Dead now is aware of all [the] music that the Dead used to listen to, and that goes back into history and then they bring that to our concerts. We have a good time playing to an audience that has some sense of where it comes from.

One of the great things about bands like that is if people want to look deeply into it they can be exposed to the whole rest of the musical spectrum.

Well, they’re so documented, too. I mean everything’s footnoted now with the Grateful Dead, right?

I think they’ve transcribed the stage banter at this point.

Tony Rice by Todd E. Gaul

Right. If they play some song then they’ll footnote it and they’ll say where the song came from and then which song it was taken from before that. I don’t know if there is a sense of a new wave of American spirit. It’s got to be the beginnings of something with this whole change in the government right now. I mean some of those guys are standing up and saying [something], but they’re so polite, the Democrats, you know? They don’t have the whole Cold War spy technology behind them like the Republicans. Patrick Leahy gets up and he’s very polite.

Today in Afghanistan is the first music festival since the Taliban ruled. They were saying it was an amazing scene. People were just flocking to this thing because they were just so starved. Most music was outlawed there.

Okay, so now there’s a different thing, right? There’s where music is the lifeblood of the people. It reawakens in you the dream, and I guess we could say that it does the same thing here. As jaded as our audiences may be – cause nothing’s keeping anybody here from hearing music – when you balance it against Afghanistan it brings you back to what music is for – gather the spirit of the people for sure.

It’s an old festival. It went on forever but the Taliban did away with it. Now it’s coming back.

Wow, now there’s a destination.

It’s another market for grilled cheese sandwiches. A lot of people feel like art has to be political, and then there are people who feel like it has no place. Is there an obligation on the part of an artist to speak out?

I don’t know. We provide what’s called a good time. A good time. There’s goodness in the musical experience that makes people feel this goodness in themselves, you know, the positive qualities. And you can take it from there. There are people who ramp it up all the way up to saying, “Positive qualities! People, we must be positive!” I don’t know, man. I don’t know if it changes anything. I mean you could sell a lot of records by being a political act, for sure, but I do think music in itself spreads the message.

If you can spread joy that sort of takes on its own political meaning.

Peter Rowan by Todd E. Gaul

Yeah. The people feel the joy inside themselves. The music is just a little key into the locks of the people’s hearts. It makes them feel good, have a good time. Then there’s an artist like Michael Franti who is overtly political and the music is a world-beat kind of sound. Well, the audience isn’t pondering his words but they’re just sort of rocking out dancing. And I don’t know if those people are conservative or liberal, they could be anything. And he says some sort of political thing and everybody gives a big cheer but what it means ultimately I don’t think you can say. They’re just having a good time. Republicans will dance to the same music [laughs]. It’s all a theatrical display, you know? You never know the motivations.

Franti’s actually out there doing more than a lot of folks to organize.

No, that’s a great band. His drummer Manas [Itene] is the best guy on that stand. I mean he is really good. I just tried to get him for a recording session but unfortunately he was on tour. He’s played with my reggae band before. He’s the major guy in that band. He’s a very powerful guy.

A lot of the musicians from Africa really have a thing. I’ve been listening to Ali Farka Toure. He has a record called Savane – King of the Desert Blues. African music has such a strong spirit to it, especially with these individual artists. But then you look at the liner notes, you realize, wait a minute, there were a lot of overdubs done in Paris. So it’s a French connection. Oh, it was a French colony. Oh, okay. It’s very clever with what they’re doing with what the world music market is, but you’ve got to love it for what it is.

Continue reading for more with Peter Rowan…

It comes down simply to an acoustic instrument over a microphone, and it really keeps you honest from a musical point of view ’cause we’re just going to be playing whatever sound we can make from the instrument. There’s nothing plugged in. I don’t feel like it makes us better… it keeps you from being too successful actually is what I could say. -Peter Rowan

Photo by Paul Cheney

It’s the same in Jamaica. A lot of those guys get their backing from somebody in England because if you’re Jamaican you can live in England because it’s a former British colony.

Peter Rowan by Paul Cheney

So it’s the time of reciprocal colonization from all these former empires, and the music reflects that, comes back and forth. The British in Jamaica put in a whole school system. It was the educational system that gave rise to the first generation of great horn players and studio musicians. The ska players, they were all educated in the British school system, and, in fact, if you wanted to learn a trade, music was part of a trade school. So here’s a colonization of a country that gives them what they thought was the best of the imperial educational system and it gave rise to reggae music, which always ended up talking about slavery and anti-colonialism. It’s weird, man.

Everything is colonization. You work in a restaurant in San Francisco and you go in the kitchen and you make a dessert from Charleston, South Carolina and people are loving it, right? It’s the importation of ideas. Music, because it’s so fluid, is a great place for the importation of ideas. Music is feelings. You don’t have to really pin it down very much. It’s just a vibe. I think the challenge is [deciding] what feeling you’re going [for]. Are you going to form a band that’s like a Neville Brothers band and just up the dance part of the show? Or are you going to have a subtler band with hand percussion and more of a mystical kind of sound? A lot of ways to go in music.

Someone like yourself, who could call on a lot of people to play with, it must be hard to decide.

Oh yeah, that’s all I do is I just go, “Hmmm, whom in my galaxy of musical heroes can I pick now?”

Is there anyone left that you haven’t played with that you really want to?

Peter Rowan by Paul Cheney

To me, it’s always back to the drawing board. A thing comes up in me that I have to let out. It can be any kind of subject. It can be political. I wrote a song about these Iraqi kids fleeing the bombing of Baghdad and this American soldier who sees them coming across the desert like a mirage. His captain tells him, “Lock, load and fire when ready,” and he’s like, “Oh shit.” There are kids on a camel and he has a split second to decide whether these guys are suicide bombers or kids. So there’s this suspense in the song, and finally he takes the chance. He doesn’t kill them, he doesn’t shoot them, and they come riding through on this crazed camel and that’s the comedic part of it. That’s political, but it’s political from the point of view that we understand the human dilemma. Unfortunately the real dilemma is now – that was written three years ago – and now the dilemma is so much more. Nobody knows who to trust. Everything’s blowing up.

I did see something interesting. I think for the first time on the front page of the New York Times they showed a body. It was the other day. They showed a guy, a suicide bomber. He was still in the car but they showed it. It was shocking. We haven’t seen them. During the Vietnam War, they showed you six months of photos of dead people and the people were on the streets [protesting]. But even the New York Times – that’s pretty critical of the administration – they’re not showing [it], whereas in Europe they’re showing it all the time, in color. You go to one of these international bookstores and buy a German magazine [and] it’s shocking. Here, everything is kind of nice, you know, it’s not too shocking.

Today we have a volunteer army. Vietnam, when the soldiers came home, they were spit on, thrown rocks at, and those people didn’t volunteer to do that, they got drafted. You either shot yourself in the leg, moved to Mexico, or you went.

No, what you did in those days was you put peanut butter under your arms and you went in for your Army physical and they would just take one look at you and [say], “You’re out of here, buddy.” I lost good friends in Vietnam. You’re only in that age group once in your life, and kids you grew up with go off to war and die. Could war ever be justified? That’s the big question. Who would you stand up to, if they’re coming down the street, and I’m going to save your life? Am I going to sacrifice myself or am I going to defend myself? It may be something stuck in people’s heads. Maybe this is the way we’re born into this life, with a predisposition towards certain types of activities. And those people, in their heads, think that the nobility of war itself is a good cause or that you’re fighting for your country. Cooler heads have to prevail really.

Let’s shift back into music. Do you think that traditionalists like Bill Monroe would enjoy today’s progressive bluegrass with the new directions it’s taking?

Peter Rowan

Yeah, but Bill enjoyed all kinds of things. He liked good music, you know? He appreciated craft and inspiration in other people but when it got too close to his territory then he’d pass judgments about whether it measured up. It was almost impossible to tell when Bill was pulling your leg or not ’cause he’d say some pretty funny things about people’s attempts. You know what he liked? He just liked music. He referred to it as “music that people could follow.” It wasn’t too challenging. It was a high level of accomplishment in the playing of music that brings you along into it.

Tells you a story.

Yeah, brings you along, tells you a story, involves you. It’s like why he said the band wore white shirts because he wanted the country people to know how much he respected what he was doing. It was unusual. Musicians in those days, well, early on you see photographs in the ’30s of even blues players like Robert Johnson in a coat and tie and a snappy brim. All the old-time music guys from North Carolina, they never appeared in overalls ’cause that would be like playing the fool to their own people. When you play onstage in overalls it’s either an act or you’re being obtuse to the fact that people wear overalls when they’re working the ground.

So, these old-time players would dress up a little bit. When Leadbelly got out of prison, Alan Lomax had him in overalls playing up around New York City ’cause he was part of the people. Finally Leadbelly demanded that he got paid. He went out and he bought himself a tailored suit and he never appeared in overalls again. He wore beautiful gold cufflinks and it kind of blew the scene a little bit because it was no longer the convict Leadbelly in overalls. He wasn’t going for the Negro image. He was like, “I’ll take that fine cut suit, thank you very much.” That’s really thinking outside the box of stereotypes, you know? Then again, he just wanted to feel grand, and it disconcerted the Lomax people. They were like, “Well, I don’t know. He’s just going out with his people after the show and getting drunk, and he won’t wear overalls anymore.”

I just don’t think you can tie music down like that. I think that it’s a free, spontaneous and energetic expression of, really, joy, underneath it all. If it has to come through a painful disguise then it does that. If it has to come through a jubilant disguise it’ll do that. If it has to sound dark it does that. There’s an audience for every single kind of sound you can imagine. I like things I hear from all over the world that just spark you. Who can say what music really is? It’s a formless energy that moves people. It’s a good place to put your head. Whether it’s from stuff you’ve heard or whether it’s from stuff you want to say, you just put your head in that space. Sometimes you pick up an instrument and it does all the talking for you. It just leads you, and you end up writing the songs that feel [of] the moment.

Somehow it seems to connect you with other like-minded people.

Yeah, man. It brings people out. It’s a joy.

Best concert you ever saw, if you had to pick one?

When I was 14 years old, Chuck Berry, standing up on stage grinning in his green tuxedo and black tie going, “Heh heh, this is my foolishness suit,” and playing “School Days.”

This interview features contributions from Libre Brousseau, President of Deep Blue Ripple, an international tourism and aid organization.

JamBase | Worldwide
Go See Live Music!