Danny Barnes: Fearless American Weirdo
By Team JamBase Jul 17, 2008 • 4:33 pm PDT

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“A lot of my poetry deals with that issue,” he explains, “trying to find dignity as an outcast, trying to bring some light to that situation.”
Barnes certainly has a wide range of friends and musical allies, but when it comes to the industry – which thrives on neat categorization and “Behind the Music” story clichés – Barnes has found himself working as the perpetual outsider, despite being well respected for his jaw-dropping banjo chops. And what a livelihood he has to show for it. I admit to him that I wasn’t quite sure where to begin in my questions. Barnes laughs, “It’s been pretty weird huh? Like I just worked on an opera, Wayne Horvitz‘s contemporary opera called Joe Hill: Sixteen Actions for Orchestra, Soloist and Three Voices. It all seems natural to me, but when I look at it sometimes I think, ‘This is a weird resume.'”
I’ve always found normal to be an over-rated concept myself, especially when that “weird” resume includes: a ten year stint heading the Bad Livers (a band of musical missionaries if there ever was one); a varied solo career with several fine albums of re-imagined Americana, collaborations with jazz greats like Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz; gracing stages with the likes of Robert Earl Keen, Tim O’Brien and Yonder Mountain String Band, to name a few; scoring films by Richard Linklater, Ed Herzog and even a silent film score in a collaboration with Robbie Fulks. Now he’s inventing a new lexicon for the banjo with a style he has dubbed “FolkTronics.” And that’s just hitting some major highlights.
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Growing up in Belton, Texas, about an hour north of Austin, Barnes was schooled in bluegrass and country from the emergence of memory. “My mother’s family was from Tennessee, around Sparta, the area where Benny Martin and Lester Flatt were from,” he describes. “My dad was from Alabama. They were into the Grand Ole Opry, had Jimmy Rogers, Ernest Tubb and Bill Monroe records at the house. So, I got indoctrinated into that music early.” His family’s love of traditional American music enveloped the adolescent Barnes, who began picking the banjo.
Seeing John Hartford play at the historic Armadillo (now Threadgill’s World Headquarters) in Austin – a venue that played host to a diverse schedule of everything from The Ramones and Van Halen to performance art and jazz – left an indelible impression on the fourteen-year old aspiring banjo player.
“It was the second concert I went to. When I saw him play at that time, one of the things that impressed me was that he had really done his homework in traditional music, but he was also aware of contemporary music at the time – Bob Marley and The Beatles and The Stones. Seeing him at the time was like seeing all music at once. Like when I went to see him years later, he had a Butthole Surfers recording in his van. I sort of model myself after that, to try and be aware of different kinds of stuff, try and get influences from different kinds of music.”
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With the present MTV (where the “M” rarely stands for “music”), slickness having taken over televisual representations of music, it’s easy for our culture to forget that there was a time not so long ago when legends like Hartford were calling us to gather around the electric glow.
With his middle brother a blues enthusiast and oldest brother a punk rocker who built a rough studio in the back of the house, Barnes found other strands being woven into his burgeoning musical consciousness. His continued zeal for the true grit and freedom of punk is obvious, as he recalls the bands he first dug.
“Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls, weird bands like Budgie and Diamond Head, some cool stuff was happening pre-punk, but when that Sex Pistols record came out that changed everything. I saw The Clash, The Ramones and Richard Hell. What I liked about them was they had this vision and a drive I really admired. A lot of those guys were really literate cats; they weren’t just knuckleheads.”
That DIY, do-or-die philosophy would form the foundation that has supported his career, as he left Belton for the University of Texas at Austin to study audio engineering, playing in various Austin country bands through college and post graduation to make ends meet while searching for fellow passionate music fans.
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“We weren’t a novelty band, although we could make you laugh. Really, what that band was was a bunch of music freaks,” Barnes reflects. “We just saw music as everything. We weren’t trying to draw attention to ourselves, we were trying to draw attention to American audiences about their own music – polka, country, bluegrass, old time, blues, folk – all that music that exists that is vibrant and still alive.”
The Livers threw themselves into the calling with conviction, excavating the American underbelly and infusing their findings with a joyous and, at times, irreverent nature. They managed to keep their overheads low by being self-reliant (they never hired a manager or a crew, instead cramming in a van with their instruments, including Rubin’s signature tuba) and seeking out a living as a touring machine between recording seven fantastic albums (four of which were produced by Barnes). Even if the early punk and metal covers were dropped, the ethos of punk remained strong. “Just that idea of bombast,” Barnes says, “of totally throwing yourself into a project.”
In 1996, Ralph White decided he’d had enough of touring hardships. He was replaced by Bob Grant (guitar, mandolin) and then various musicians who would hop on tour with the nucleus of Barnes and Rubin for the remainder of the Livers’ career. The band disbanded in 2000 in a mutual and amicable decision. Barnes had left Austin for Washington State in 1997, and he and Rubin both wanted to pursue other musical projects.
Continue reading for more on Danny Barnes…
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“We lived in a van for ten years, did a lot of shows each year,” Barnes explains. “We started over like three times depending on how you count it. It was really intense. Being in a band you are there all the time, this distance [he motions across the picnic table to me]. You go to eat, you go into the van, you go to the gig, you live like this all the time with passionate guys who are into their music and have a lot of ideas. But, I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world. You learn so much just doing that. It’s a real education.”
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“It makes you feel great,” he grins. “We struggled. We felt like we were preaching this gospel of music to people because here’s all these old folks that play everywhere, if you throw a dart at a map and it lands in some town in Iowa, somebody there plays the banjo, somebody there plays the fiddle, you can’t get away from it. There’s a whole thing now where a lot of punk rock cats are way into square dancing up in Portland. I’d like to think we had something to do with that. We brought acoustic music to the attention of a lot of people who wouldn’t listen to it. And we brought other kinds of music to people who were just into the acoustic part; we were bridging several different forms.”
The band will be reuniting later this year at Pickathon Roots Festival in Oregon and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, featuring Barnes, Rubin and Bob Grant. We’ll have to watch this development. “We haven’t played in eight years,” Barnes says. “We’re just going to play and see what happens.”
The Livers disbanded as the Internet was beginning to reshape how musicians operate. Barnes has embraced technology whole-heartedly. His website is frequently updated with musical freebies.
“I like to give stuff away,” he declares. “If the idea is to get your music out there, boy you can really do it. On archive.org I have something like 30,000 downloads. I’ve never sold 30,000 records of any of my albums! But to have 30,000 downloads, that’s really cool. And with those live shows, you get all that stage banter, so you get this other information.”
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“The records, you make ’em because you have to clear off the desk,” says Barnes about his songwriting process. “Typically, you’re always writing and you go, ‘There is a thematic unity in this batch,’ so you play around with it, like scenes in a movie. So, you think this scene would go with that one [and] you cobble it together from tiny pieces.”
Pages could be written about these solo records but Barnes’ latest material, as reflected on last year’s self released Barnyard Electronics, is drawing upon his continued musical study – he constantly takes technical and theory lessons – as well as his gadgetry and sonic hardware know-how. He calls it “FolkTronics,” but to describe it as a mash-up between electronic and acoustic music is shortchanging the idea.
“It started on the last Bad Livers record, Blood and Mood [2000]. I was really getting interested in found sound and electronic music, manipulating and recontexualizing things. When I first started doing it it was this song on Hogs on the Highway called ‘Falling Down the Stairs With a Pistol In My Hand.’ It’s the whole idea of electronic music and sound being generated. So I started looking at the banjo as a tone generator, it just makes the raw sound and then you can make millions of sounds with it.”
“I’m really into low-fi, using old radios and stuff like that to get sound, because the dials aren’t digital,” he delves further. “With a digital setup you can remember all your settings. When you go to a new venue everything can be the same, but with dials you are kind of going, ‘Somewhere in here is the sound.’ It’s like making a stew, where you got too much salt in there so you put a little sugar and a little pepper to soften it up. What’s really cool about it as a musician is it keeps you from getting worn out on your own music because every night is a little different. With the sampling technology, I’m playing along and if I do something I like I grab that, and then loop it and play it backwards. Maybe I’ll shift it down and make a bass part out of it. Then you’ll have these little textures with my pedals and effects, and then the atmospheric samples of people talking and the soundtracks from movies. I’ve been really interested in spoken word lately.”
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Seeing his set the night before our interview at the Cactus Cafe was a lesson in organic musical chemistry as he set to work with his equipment alongside Steve Schwelling, an Austin-based drummer, grinning and thanking the cozy, rapt crowd between numbers that roamed from the chilling “Pretty Daughter” to the comical, yet strangely sweet “My Baby Works for the TSA.” Barnes’ voice can have the warmth of a cabin fireplace in a snowstorm or the unhinged mental shadows of the stalker outside, vocally embodying the outcasts he dignifies. From where I was sitting, I was simply trying to figure out where he was pulling those sounds from – the banjo sounded like a growling bass or a distorted guitar at points, far beyond the assumed tonal range of the instrument. But the technology is woven through the acoustic forms in such a way that the essential rural sound is not lost, only copper wires running through a rustic heart.
Citing everything from DJ Shadow‘s Entroducing to serial music as an influence, Barnes’ excitement about what he’s creating is infectious.
“I’m used to working where I’m the only one who’s really into it. I’m okay with that, but if I’m going, man, I can’t hardly sleep I’m so excited. If you make a set of parameters and if you start working in them, you think of other ways to set those parameters” he laughs. “I just hope I don’t run out of life you know? Cuz it seems like I already have too many things in this life I’m hoping to get done, but just being able to access that and work with it on the banjo is really kind of cool.”
For those of you attending this year’s Northwest String Summit, you will have the fortune of seeing Barnes grace the Horning’s stage again, as he sits in with YMSB, duets with Frisell and hosts the Superjam. “Those guys [YMSB] have been really good to me,” Barnes says. “They do some of my songs. [Dave Johnston] comes and sees me about once a year. We sit around and play for three or four days. That’s amazing. It feels great to think you’ve had an impact.”
Speaking of Frisell as a musician and friend, Barnes has nothing but the highest praise and admiration. Frisell is indicative of the musical folks in the Northwest that helped spark Barnes’ musical evolution.
Continue reading for more on Danny Barnes…
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“He’s one of my biggest heroes in music really, and I try to emulate him and his work. When I lived [in Austin] I was working with people who were playing kind of roots based music and not very much was written down. It was mostly head arrangements and you learned the music through rehearsing. But in Seattle, the musicians I am working with typically write everything down. And the cool thing about writing it down is it gives you a chance to sort of molecularly alter and to edit and to look at patterns in a piece.”
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Frisell had originally contacted him for lessons. Barnes self-deprecatingly exclaims, “I know, it sounds ridiculous! He just wanted to learn some traditional American tunes. We ended up recording a lot of that stuff on The Willies. But I really consider him to be one of my teachers. Like Pat Cloud, this really amazing jazz banjo player who lives in Long Beach, California. Just working with these people and picking their brains, asking questions, it might take years to find the answer. But I typically work on theory, orchestration and arrangement, or just learn about other musicians I may not know about, records I may not have heard of.”
Touring with Tim O’Brien for periods between 2006 and early 2008 and his continued work with Robert Earl Keen have provided yet more learning opportunities for the eager musical student.
“I grew up listening to those Hot Rize records,” he recalls. “It’s just fascinating to be around a guy like that. [Tim’s] written so many great songs. He really knows bluegrass and good musicians all over the country, young people or people that don’t play professionally that are just really good. Then playing with Robert is so amazing because Robert is such a pure writer – he has an amazing amount of songs. He will talk about how much editing goes into the songwriting process. I fancy myself a songwriter, so it’s good to interact with people you admire. One of the things that’s cool about being around those guys is that it makes you not feel so weird. You spend a lot of time working and writing songs and you think, ‘I’m 46 years old. Am I nuts?'”
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“They are all positive guys – I’m a reformed pessimist. I realized we all make our own reality by how we think and how we treat people. The guys who do really well in the business are really nice guys. They make sure everyone’s happy and everything’s cool, have good energy to be around. They really bring something to the party instead of ‘What am I going to get out of this? How much do I get paid? When do I have to stop? What kind of billing do I get?’ Of course, they have managers that can do that for them,” the self-managed musician laughs, “but that’s what I try to emulate myself.”
It’s hard to imagine Barnes being a pessimist, but he is honest about his former bitterness.
“I was guilty of that cynicism for many years,” he admits. “I couldn’t understand why I was unhappy but I realized I wasn’t making other people happy. That was a real awakening in that regard. Jung talked about how you have to go through the fire. Then you go through it and you learn and you hopefully help other people learn. There’s a lot of suffering and pain you go through to be a musician, but a lot of it’s self-imposed. You realize the more you talk about it the worse it gets. Like I have a friend of mine who’s down on the whole download thing, always talking about how evil downloads are. But downloads have been great for me because they have helped me get my music out. It’s a free way of doing that – for a guy like me that’s been an asset.”
“They complain that things aren’t what they used to be for musicians, that things are really hard. Well, it’s always been hard in a way,” he continues. “It wasn’t easy for those early bluegrass bands. For example, they didn’t have highways, so they were driving around on the muddy roads. And Bill Monroe, he embraced technology. Ed Haley didn’t want to make records because he was like, ‘Why make a record if you’ll give me five bucks to play and I’ll never see the money from that record?’ But Bill, he embraced it. Radio was new at the time and he made it work for him.”
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“After you get established [locally] you should only play where you are about three times a year, otherwise you are sort of playing against yourself. I think you have to travel to make it work. When you have a scene you have to toe the line in that scene. If no one’s looking you have more freedom,” says Barnes, offering enlightenment on how to avoid getting stuck on the industry’s barbed wire. “You can make your own scene, form alliances with other bands. If you are looking at the beast and saying, ‘Why isn’t it doing this other thing?’ you’re going to be unhappy. But there’s ways around it, ways you can control the parameters.”
“Somehow it works,” Barnes muses, “but I have to work hard and be willing to hustle. I think with age you get that wisdom [about] what battles you can win and what battles you cannot win, where your strengths are, when someone is pulling your leg.”
Our conversation wraps up around the concept of faith. Barnes puts incredible stock in “The Great Magnet.”
“We’re a very analytical society and there’s so much irony in everything, and that’s a missing link in our culture – having faith – because a lot of times when something’s not working out it’s not working out for a reason. So many times when you are working towards a goal, you are trying to get there and it doesn’t work. But then this other thing happens and its cooler than you thought it was going to be. You sort of take this little path and it just keeps getting better, you know?”
We are skimming across the surface of some mighty deep water. Watching Barnes’ continuing evolution, particularly with FolkTronics, is persistently intriguing. In the musical culture we surround ourselves with it’s rare to find a musician you can describe as original. His career continues to be, as it always has been, reflective of his constant inquisitiveness, genuine humility, fierce independence and persistent enthusiasm for the living sonic cultures that give color to our years, keeping up the good fight against that which would cast us all in shades of condo beige.
You can check up on Danny at his website and his FolkTronics site. Download Danny’s music at the Archive.
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