Some Pretty Smart Tunes
PortFolio Weekly
July 17, 2007
by Jim Newsom

Peter Rowan called me at 9:30 the night before the Fourth of July from
his cousin's house near Cape Cod.

"I'm watching the fireworks across Buzzards Bay," he said, "the grand
finale of the fireworks at Marion. It's been a wild three-week run and
I've got a couple of days off over my birthday."

A Yankee Doodle Dandy born on the Fourth of July himself, Rowan would
celebrate his 65th birthday the next day. He's fit a lot of living and a
lot of music into those 65 years, and he'll be at Chesapeake City Park
Saturday night with the Peter Rowan and Tony Rice Quartet to headline
the Todi Music Festival's Bluegrass at the Bagley concert. I first heard
his music in 1969 when I bought an album by a band called Earth Opera, a
group he led with mandolin master David Grisman.

"You're kidding!" he cried when I told him. "You're a part of the
brotherhood, man!

"We weren't fully aware of what we were doing at the time, and
consequently were not sure that we thought what we heard on that record
was what we felt when we decided to play together. We believed in it at
the time as a transcendent thing, and I think both David and I have had
to buckle down since then to some practicalities. But at this point, I
think maybe it already was transcendent. And if it didn't sell too many
records, it doesn't matter. We were trying to make music that we thought
was beautiful.

"I've actually heard, in odd moments late at night when somebody's given
me an Earth Opera tape, I'll put it on and I'll be transported because I
don't recognize it as anything to do with me. I'll just hear it as music
and I'll go, what the heck were those guys into, man, I don't understand
it but it's nice. Then I'll suddenly go, oh that's me!"

Earth Opera was one of those exploratory groups of the late '60s whose
music was difficult to categorize. But Rowan and Grisman had come
together from mutual backgrounds playing bluegrass. Rowan, in fact, had
spent three years as one of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys. The
Boston-born singer/guitarist was the first vocalist born north of the
Mason-Dixon Line to play with Monroe.

"Remember this," he replied when I asked how a Bostonian became a
Bluegrass Boy, "after World War II, and through the '60s, the Boston
Naval Yard was a huge disembarkation for the troops from Germany, and
there was country music all over Boston. In fact, as a child, I listened
to country music and bluegrass. As soon as I was old enough to go out,
the first thing I went to was the square dances. So I was dancing to
bluegrass music every weekend without even being aware of what it was. I
think that's really my connection with Bill Monroe-he was a dancer
before he was a performer.

"He came up and he needed a band. I was working as a paid musician for
Jim Rooney and Bill Keith. Keith had already been with Monroe, and Ralph
Rinzler put together this tour for Bill as a solo artist to be exposed
to the college audience because he felt he and Doc Watson were ripe to
have this audience. The first show was on Doc Watson's birthday at
Jordan Hall in Boston, and I was hired to play guitar. My introduction
to Bill Monroe was onstage, and he just laid it down strong and I
understood right away. And he understood that I understood and said,
'you ought to come to Nashville; I can help you out.'

"So I went down to Nashville and I hung out there and lived in this
little shack. I asked him if he wanted me and he said he was going to
have to let this other guy go. I had never stopped to think that
somebody was going to lose a job because of this ambitious and eager
young guy from the north.

"When I went to work with Bill Monroe I got to see those first
generation players-Mac Wiseman, the Osborne Brothers, the Stanley
Brothers, Jim and Jesse McReynolds. The first bluegrass festival that
Carlton Haney put on in Fincastle, Virginia, in '65 had every one of
those bands. I was lucky-I got to be exposed to everybody from Roy Acuff
to Minnie Pearl to Cousin Oswald, the old-time fiddlers on the Opry and
all the bluegrass guys.

"One of my friends down in Nashville said, 'Pete, you're not really a
yankee are ya?' I think I had the same kind of upbringing as a lot of
people did, with the emphasis on a kind of decorum, a family heritage
kind of thing."

After his stint with Monroe, he wanted to carry on in the same vein.

"I wrote to all the record companies in Nashville," he recalled, "and
they didn't know who I was. I had these beautiful rejection notices: 'We
appreciate your work with Bill Monroe, but right now we're not
interested in any bluegrass music on our label.' Even Porter Wagoner
listened to my stuff and he was encouraging; he said, 'You write some
pretty smart tunes, boy, but you gotta remember that audience out there
is pretty dumb.'"

Nonetheless, those tunes have done right well for Peter Rowan. After
Earth Opera he spent a couple of years with the rock band, Seatrain, and
recorded the classic Old & in the Way, the album that turned a lot of
college-age baby boomers on to bluegrass, with Grisman and Jerry Garcia
in 1973. New Riders of the Purple Sage had an underground hit with
"Panama Red," and his songs have been covered by George Strait, John
Denver, Marty Stuart, Ricky Skaggs, String Cheese Incident, Emmylou
Harris and Ralph Stanley.

He himself has played and recorded a wide variety of music, always
returning to his bluegrass roots. He comes to Chesapeake this weekend
with acoustic guitar wizard Tony Rice. The two albums they've done
together, You Were There for Me and Quartet, are superb, but Rowan says
they are best heard live:

"The work I'm doing with Tony Rice is totally on another level. Here's
this great improvising guitarist, and it just sparks me to try and push
the limits of how to deliver a song. And yet you can't force it, you
can't become too conscious or too conceptual about it. You've got to let
it just be the flow; once you feel the flow, then you can go anywhere."


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