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We're not trying to destroy the music or demolish it. We're trying to pass on the influences that gave us the ideas that have led to what we do. -Jeff Austin |
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Image of YMSB at Red Rocks by Tobin Voggesser
Austin's tone sharpens as he says, "We had stations who'd been around for 30 years and had never played a track with a banjo. 'We don't play that.' Why? 'We're not a country station.' Fucking ignorant bastard, go back to your Motorhead cover band concert. You don't have to be a goddamn country station, [just] put the song on. All of sudden they're playing one song and then another song, and now they're waiting for the next record to come out."
Jeff Austin
"That's the new challenge," Kaufmann adds. "The touring thing, it does what it wants now. We know about that but we don't know about these other avenues that are available to musicians to get the word out. We like the songs that we write. We think we are good songwriters [and] we would like to think it would be a positive addition to someone's playlist to add the music we write to it. People could like it, even if they don't own anything with a banjo or mandolin on it. Why not?"
After spending ten years behind the wheel of the machine, the inevitable question is where does that highway lead from here?
"I'd like to believe we can keep doing what we're doing, have it keep growing, get into the venues we would like to play, beautiful venues that hold the energy of what we are trying to do, are comfortable for the audience, that sound good to us," Kaufmann says. "I'd like to continue to see audiences grow and see if more and more people can like it. I guess I learned to stop trying to predict it because I've been proven wrong in every case. It's as unpredictable as it gets for me. I'm amazed that we are where we are. I always thought we could do it but it's just that blind faith that I seem to have possession of in spades. Good lord, I don't think anyone can predict where it's going to go. A couple Grammys, maybe a Volkswagen commercial. '40 Miles from Sizzler' was always one of our ideas."
Austin throws out "Hamsteak Rising."
"Something I would love to do that we've never done is to be asked to do a movie soundtrack," Kaufmann mentions. "I really like film and scoring music for film. I can see the next two years of our lives are going to be wicked busy, but I would love to find the time to do that. It focuses you in. You're scripting something down to the second with the visual image. I would like the chance to do that."
Aijala & Fishman by Tobin Voggesser
"I like the Grammy awards idea," Austin says, a mischievous grin spreading across his face. "That would be neat. I would wear it on a chain at all times. That would be the ultimate coup."
As he looks back at some of the high points of the past year, such as playing Red Rocks with Phish's Jon Fishman behind the kit, his excitement segues into self-reflection. "You know, I have gotten away with semi-medium level mandolin playing. I have suckered so many people for so long. Someone was saying the other day, people are talking about your technique or whatever, and it doesn't bother me anymore. Fuck it. I don't want to sound like anyone else."
It takes balls to be yourself in the face of criticism but to achieve a level of sustainable success with it is something only a lucky few experience. "Whatever success is, real success is only achievable through an authentic attempt to discover who you are," Kaufmann sums it up thoughtfully. "Trying to discover who you are as a person is hard enough, but then add three other guys and five, six, seven guys in the crew and you are all living together and trying to discover who you collectively are, that's even harder. But, unless you do that, any success you might have from gig to gig or money you might make is really marginal. That's not why we're alive in the first place."
"You get over a lot of bullshit in ten years and we had to climb the heap presented to us in the barnyard," Austin says. After a decade of wiping their boots, they are a band comfortable with charting their own course, be it musical or personal. "There's no greater satisfaction in life than making something that is truly your own," observes Austin. "I think I could fucking die tomorrow and be a genuinely satisfied guy that I hopefully had a role in something that was at least genuine, that didn't come out of contrived places."
Yonder Mountain String Band
A few hours later I am standing outside Stubbs. The first time Yonder Mountain String Band played this city it was inside the restaurant for a celebration of the local varsity cheerleaders - four half-jokingly self-described "RV-ridden lecherous men" tumbling on stage to play for Texas's best jailbait. "Their fathers were not happy to see us," Johnston notes with a chortle. Austin laughs, "We were much younger men at the time."
The scene is slightly different on this warm April night. Stubb's is packed, the crowd stretching back past the bars and merch stand, kicking dust clouds towards the city's buildings and the rumble of traffic on I-35 as the band draws them in with their unique inertia. But, time doesn't change everything.
"When I first met Dave there was a look in the eyes of hunger and of 'Come on, bring it on. Let's try.' Then when we met Adam and Ben, we were four guys who all had the same look in our eyes, and we still have that now," says Austin. "There's more gray in the hair surrounding the eyes and more lines on the eyes themselves, but it's the same look."
After this memorable conversation, a wide-eyed kid and I make small talk in the port-a-potty line. He turns to me with a toothy grin and says, "Yonder are like the international language of fun." Yes, fun but it's something more than that. Fun can only run so deep. This music is alive. There's something in its heart that speaks to a profound ache for home and the search for elusive back porches or mountain cabins of the mind. We all cannonball into that leap of faith. If Bill Hicks is indeed correct and "it's all a ride," then this is the joyous, cathartic soundtrack as we barrel down the highway, slapping the steering wheel in time, speeding past our share of jealous sheriffs towards the open range.
JamBase | Colorado
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