(The following text is an excerpt from the book “High Lonesome Below Sea Level: Stories and Faces of Bluegrass Music in the Netherlands” by Loes van Schaijk and Marieke Odekerken.
The book can be ordered in the webshop of the Bluegrass Music Museum or the official webshop of the book itself, www.bluegrassportraits.nl. I am sad that I won’t be able to go to the IBMA World of Bluegrass this year. However, the “I” in IBMA will be represented by several bands from outside the USA (Cardboard Fox from the UK is one of my personal favorites), by international IBMA representative Angelika Torrie from Switzerland, by chairman of the European Bluegrass Music Association Eugene O’Brien from Belgium, by organisers of the wonderful bluegrass festival in La Roche-sur-Foron Christopher Howard-Williams and Didier Philippe from France, and by producer Pieter Groenveld from the Netherlands. Pieter is the one who suggested my name to Rick Cornish when he was looking for somebody from outside the US to write welcome columns for the CBA blog. So now is a good time as any to put him in the spotlight… if you happen to see him at the IBMA, send him my warm regards.!)
The European World of Bluegrass Festival, EWOB for short, is praised as much as it is criticized. One thing is for certain: for the past twenty-five years, after Fred Reiffers stopped organizing the Dutch Bluegrass Conventions, almost all Dutch bluegrass musicians empty their calendars so they can meet at the EWOB. Some people spend the full three days jamming on the camping grounds, never to set foot inside the community center where the official program takes place. Reversely, Pieter Groenveld hardly sees the sun during the festival, because he does the sound for all the bands on stage. About forty of them, spread out over three days, from noon till night. “Well, actually the microphones and the musicians do all the work; I’m a lazy sound engineer,” Pieter grins. “A good microphone will bring out the specific character of all the different instruments and voices you place in front of it without any equalization. If you interfere, you only distort the sound.”
Sheer annoyance drove him to start doing sound, Pieter says. “The people who organized bluegrass concerts in the 1980s didn’t have decent-sounding equipment, they just used what they could find or borrow: microphones that came with tape recorders, crappy speakers….” Pieter, who played mandolin in the group Jerrycan at that time, worked for Sony. He made some good deals with his employers and assembled a sound system for Jerrycan. “All of a sudden, everybody wanted to book us, so the other bands could use the PA as well. The downside was that I was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and we were the only band at the festival that didn’t have a soundman. I realized I had to focus completely on sound. Paul van Vlodrop took my place in Jerrycan and played much better than I ever did.”
Pieter works with a digital recording set and has done so since it was introduced by Sony in 1982. He recorded performances by American bluegrass artists and released some of them in the series Live in Holland under the label Strictly Country Records. Recording teams for the Dutch national radio network NOS, who scoured the country with trucks full of expensive equipment to record live country and bluegrass music, listened to what Pieter had recorded and said: “You know what, just give us your Left and Right and a cup of coffee and we’re done here.”
Among the American bluegrass artists that Pieter recorded is Bill Monroe, a man he considered a friend. Their first encounter was an interesting story. “In 1978, when I just got back from Australia, I wanted to see for myself what was happening in the States. I did some traveling and met up with a lady friend at a festival in Kentucky. On Saturday night, we had been drinking and didn’t feel like going to the hotel, so we thought it was a good idea to just zip our sleeping bags together and sleep under the stage. The next morning, we heard footsteps over our heads—it was Bill Monroe, setting up for the gospel show. He gave us a look of disapproval…that might just have been because he was jealous,” Pieter says with a knowing smile. “We snuck off quietly without upsetting the gospel crowd too much and had a fantastic Sunday. I was fortunate enough to speak with Lester Flatt for half an hour—that was great.”
“Whenever I was asked to do the sound for a nice girl, I’d offer to take them on a tour of the city. Sometimes they’d stay for a day, sometimes a week, and one of them stayed twenty-seven years.” Pieter met Liz Meyer when she performed as a singer-songwriter at one of Rienk Janssen’s early festivals. It would grow into a solid relationship as husband and wife and as promoters of European bluegrass music. Liz and Pieter did a lot of producing together, were both on the board of the EWOB, and got European bluegrass played on American radio. When I first entered the bluegrass scene myself in 2005 and met Liz at the EWOB festival, she was already fighting cancer. I asked for her advice on band issues many times and always got a reply, even if she had to send it from a hospital bed. After her passing in 2011, the EWOB established the Liz Meyer European Innovation of Bluegrass Music Award to honor her memory and keep on encouraging European bluegrass musicians. Her husband received a Pioneer Award from the European Bluegrass Music Association in 2013: not bad for a lazy sound engineer.
