It was late February, and WinterGrass beckoned. This late-winter oasis of eclectic music, col-legiality and love was the bright light that far outshone the lurking threat of a pandemic. I often combine projects to extract the maximum equity from travel, so I had set up a few interviews in the Seattle area and booked studio time in Nashville to turn a fun musical weekend into a week-long run of music production and research.
My plane to Seattle was strangely uncrowded. At least a fourth of the seats remained open when we took off, Silicon Valley glowing below in the morning sun. I opened my laptop and went through the charts for tunes that I’d be recording in a few days: Chord charts for the rhythm players, and lead sheets (melody with chords) for the melody players. I plugged the head-phones into the laptop and checked out my Pro Tools files, to be sure all was good for the stu-dio. I like to coordinate my chord charts, lead sheets, and Pro Tools files so that when I’m work-ing in the studio, the intro, verses, choruses, solos, bridges and outro all line up together. This makes it easy to check and make any edits when working in the studio.
My first stop was a reunion with an old pal in Seattle. We headed out for a brisk walk and a deli-cious lunch at a Cuban restaurant we both love. Fried plantains, black beans, rice. Mmm.
Day two: Off to the home of Vivian Williams to learn about the fiddling communities in the north-west in the days when Frankie Rodger’s “Ookpik Waltz” was first released. Since the late 1960s, Vivian and her husband Phil Williams enthusiastically performed, recorded, documented and preserved great quantities of northwest fiddling culture, generating an invaluable archive of a pivotal time in American fiddling. Phil is gone now, but Vivian continues to perform and work.
Vivian had kindly agreed to help me document the idiosyncratic cultural stamp that American fiddlers have used to essentially re-write Rodger’s spry mid-sixties composition into the slow and haunting piece that we know today. Much of that imprint took place in the fiddle contest scene within a few years of Ookpik Waltz’s 1965 release (“Maple Sugar” LP, Point Records P250, 1965.)
The azimuth of that scene was the annual “National Fiddlers’ Contest & Festival,” held in Weiser, Idaho in June. Vivian had attended Weiser in the late 1960s, and was happy to share her memo-ries and perspectives during an hours-long interview in her beautiful home.
Day Three: A distracted Uber driver takes me to the Seattle airport instead of the WinterGrass home at the Bellevue Hyatt. I love interacting with my drivers, most of whom are immigrants. I ask them about their histories, the cultures they’ve left behind, and how they are adapting to their new home. Our conversations are often stimulating and informative. My Djibouti immigrant driver was deep into giving me a history lesson when I noticed a sign for the Seattle airport. Oops. We rebooted, and after he apologized, we headed back north and then across the lake to Bellevue.
The reunions began in the hotel lobby – and of course, several involved playing music together. My favorite was with my daughter Katie Weed, who had brought one of her bands down to the festival. A musical weekend with my daughter rides high on my list of good ways to spend time. Our room at the hotel was a hotbed of jamming, and it was especially rewarding to get to meet and play with more musicians.
Bay Area pal and multi-instrumentalist Larry Chung is an avid attendee at WinterGrass and the Weiser festivals, and he knows many folks who have been going to Weiser since the 1960s. Larry shared several good contacts with me, and fortunately, some were at WinterGrass. So I was able to interview several during the festival, often in their hotel rooms.
Day Four: Morning interviews, and then help Ear Trumpet Labs with their microphone usage workshop in the auditorium. As I wrote last year, in the Ear Trumpet workshop, bands get live, on-stage guidance and learn to develop proper microphone usage techniques for working with one or two microphones. A side benefit is that the players become more focused on the overall band sound, and less on their individual playing. These are good things for presenting live mu-sic.
Back to the (almost) real world
Seattle traffic is among the nation’s worst. So my 6:30 AM flight to Nashville means that I’ll have to get up before 4:00 AM and still might not make it. A room at an airport hotel buys me hours more sleep and peace of mind. Good investment. On my flights, I again look at my music and ProTools files for the upcoming sessions. All good. I go online and check in with a world that I’ve mostly ignored while engaged heavily in the great escape of WinterGrass. Hmmm. Pandemic? Is there anybody ill on this plane? And what’s this about Seattle being a “hot spot?”
We land in Nashville and my thoughts go quickly to the work at hand. My Uber driver takes me to two wine shops so that I can surprise Missy Raines with a bottle of Argentinian Malbec, her favorite. Missy and husband Ben Surratt own The Rec Room, my favorite recording studio in Nashville. Neither shop even knows what Malbec is, so I finally settle on a good California blend. Missy is happy. Ben, always busy around Nashville, has left the studio all ready for me, with mics all set up. For David Grier’s dreadnought guitar, an xy pair of Neumann M582s run-ning into a George Massenberg Labs preamp; for Todd Phillips, a pair of condenser mics run-ning into the same; for accordionist Jeffrey Taylor, an xy pair of Russian cardioid condenser mics are plugged into a modern API preamp. My Uber driver swings by the nearby Mitchell Deli for sandwiches for the musicians. Good food means good music. David is already in the guitar iso booth, practicing. Jeff brings in a small collection of accordions so that we’ll be covered for any sound that Joe Weed might want. Todd brings in his dark red-brown bass, an important part of his sound. I had seen him three days previously at WinterGrass, playing on a fretless acous-tic bass guitar (easy for travel) in his set with the Appalachian Road Show.
We wrap in the late afternoon, and I head back to my hotel room to edit and mix on the laptop. The nearby “bistro” is clearly a misnomer. Its minuscule menu keeps me from eating too big a dinner. In the morning it’s back to the studio via Mitchell’s Deli again, and then overdubs by Rob Ickes (dobro) and Shad Cobb, fiddle. They add parts to a couple of tunes of mine, and then have breakout fun overdubbing onto rhythm tracks laid down by old friend John Lee Sanders in my California studio. John, from Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, had tracked piano on my stu-dio grand for a honky-tonk shuffle version of “Maiden’s Prayer.” Now it was time for the melody players. Neither had met John before, but both loved playing on his spirited rhythm track.
That spirit and love stayed with me as I flew back home to California the next day, my head filled with music and memories. I was definitely infected with love and spirit — and not any corona vi-rus. Thanks, everybody.
Copyright © 2020 by Joe Weed
Joe Weed records acoustic music at his Highland Studios near Los Gatos, California. He has released seven albums of his own, produced many projects for independent artists and labels, and does scores for film, TV and museums. One of Joe’s productions with British guitar virtuoso Martin Simpson was heard in “The Mayo Clinic,” a film by Ken Burns, which premiered nationally on PBS in late 2018. Also in 2018, Joe released “Two Steps West of the Mississippi,” a collec-tion of his original instrumental music based on American fiddle roots. Reach Joe by email at joe@joeweed.com, or by visiting joeweed.com.