Scenechronized
Seldom Scene
Sugar Hill Records

"Please don't think about me when I'm gone," sings Dudley Connell on "Hometown Blues," the opening track of the Seldom Scene's new Sugar Hill release, "Scenechronized."
 
But how can we not, when it's the Seldom Scene, one of the most acclaimed bluegrass bands of all time, and it's been seven years since their last recording?
 
The band is back, and like an old friend coming around for a visit after being gone too long, the Scene pulls up some chairs and starts telling stories, and the time between just melts away. From the first notes of the CD, it's like the band was never gone. The familiar warm harmonies and sparkling instrumental work are as strong as ever, signature sounds over the band's 36-year career that have remained constant despite multiple line-up changes.
 
"If someone had come up to me in 1971 and told me I'd still be doing this in 2007, I'd have told them they're nuts!" says banjo player Ben Eldridge, the band’s leader and founding member. It was at the regular Monday picking sessions back in 1971 in Ben's basement that the band came together: John Duffey, John Starling, Mike Auldridge, Tom Gray, and Ben. The name was chosen to play off the fact that from the outset the members planned to keep their day jobs and not tour. The irony was that they quickly became the darlings of the Washington D.C. bluegrass scene, and were seen quite often, playing every Thursday night for years at the local bluegrass club, the Birchmere.
 
Now the band is Eldridge, along with guitarist/singer Dudley Connell, mandolinist/singer Lou Reid, dobroist/singer Fred Travers, and bassist/singer Ronnie Simpkins. It's this quintet that is the longest lasting version of the band, together since the 1996 death of founding member, the legendary mandolinist and larger-than-life character John Duffey.
 
"It would have been easy to hang it up after Duffey died," admits Eldridge. "But we had a meeting about a month after he passed, and we decided that we'd been enjoying playing together too much to let it just fade away. And these songs, the body of work that the Scene had created over the years, it would have been a shame to never play those songs again."
 
Let's recap how that body of work came to be: Banjo player Eldridge and singer/guitarist Starling met at the University of Virginia . Later that decade, Eldridge joined Cliff Waldron's band, which also featured a young dobro player, Mike Auldridge, who was busy redefining what a resonating slide guitar could do. Auldridge, Gray, and Starling all became regulars at Eldridge's jam sessions, and Ben remembers asking Duffey to come by: "He came in and started singing with that voice of his, and Starling and Auldridge joined in on harmonies, and it just fit. Everything worked and that was that."

Regular gigs at the Rabbit's Foot, the Red Fox Inn, and finally the Birchmere started the ball rolling, and that quintet released five records in its first 3 years. It's on these recordings that the Seldom Scene pushed the boundaries of bluegrass, catching some flack along the way, but changing the face of the music forever. Unafraid to mix Dylan tunes with traditional banjo breakdowns, Grateful Dead jams with Haggard classics, old-time gospel with anarchic drinking songs, the Scene tackled everything that caught their fancies, giving permission to a new generation of musicians to crash through whatever boundaries might confront them. They also championed lesser-known songwriters like Rodney Crowell, Paul Craft, and Herb Pedersen, and brought new life to chestnuts by the greats: Jimmy Martin, Stanley Brothers, Lester Flatt.
 
Starling's departure in 1977 (choosing his medical practice over a music career) was the first of many changes the band would weather. Singer Phil Rosenthal followed, then Lou Reid. Starling returned for a year in 1993, then Moondi Klein joined as lead singer and guitarist in 1994. There was a big change in 1995, when Klein, Auldridge, and T. Michael Coleman (who'd replaced Gray on bass in 1986) all left to form Chesapeake , wanting to play music full-time.
 
"That was when I thought we'd really have to call it a day," recalls Eldridge. To his surprise, it was Duffey who wanted to keep it going. "Probably out of stubbornness, but he wanted to keep playing."

Dudley Connell remembers hearing the band was hanging it up: "It was around September, 1995, and I read in Bluegrass Unlimited how they were breaking up. I was still in the Johnson Mountain Boys, and had played with them several times, but I didn't really know Duffey. He kind of intimidated me, frankly. But I called him up to say how sorry I was about the demise of the band, especially as how they were, to me, Washington bluegrass. He was really nice and said, 'We're not really breaking up, we just need a singer, a dobro player, a guitarist and a bass player.' He was kidding, but not really. So something clicked in my head, and I said to him that I'd love to get together and play. He said, 'Do you know any of our songs?' and I admitted I didn't, so he gave me my homework, gave me six songs to learn. It was actually a few months before our schedules could match up so we could get together, but by the time we did, I was really hungering to get the job. I wanted to be in the Seldom Scene."
 
Connell got his wish, and on New Years Eve, 1995, all the versions of the Scene threw a big party at the Birchmere, the night ending with the new line-up. Along with Connell, it featured rising dobro star Fred Travers and bassist Ronnie Simpkins. "When Dudley and Ronnie and Fred came in, we really started having fun again, especially John," says Eldridge. "He hated to practice, but after these guys joined, Duffey would call me up and say, 'Hey, you want to get together Wednesday at my place?' And it wasn't because he felt we needed the practice. It's because it was so fun for him again."
 
Sadly, it didn't last the year. Duffey's fatal heart attack was in December, 1996.
 
Early in 1997, after making the decision to go on without Duffey, Ben turned to Lou Reid, asking him to rejoin the band. "We did one show with him not long after Duffey died, and that two-and-a-half hour show just flew by it was so much fun. We asked him to come back full-time, and he said yes." He returned, taking up the mandolin, rather than the guitar he played during his earlier stint with the band.
 
Full-time didn't really mean full-time, as the band members each still had day jobs and was on the road only during the summer festival season. It's that as much as anything that has limited the band's recorded output, according to Dudley Connell. But he promises a shorter wait next time: "We fully intend to get back in the studio and start working on something right away," he says.
 
But for now, the world is a better place with the release of "Scenechronized." In its way, it's a tribute to the Scene's past as much as it is a statement about the present. You'll find two songs recorded by the Country Gentlemen along with one song written by Duffey and recorded early on by the Seldom Scene. There's not one but two Paul Craft songs (Craft contributed such gems as "Keep Me From Blowing Away" and "Through the Bottom of the Glass" to earlier Scene releases). There's one called "Sad Old Train" that's an explicit tribute to "Old Train," a beloved number from the Scene's repertoire. And once again going outside the usual bluegrass lines, there's a Dylan song, a John Fogerty song, a Duane Allman song, as well as a more traditional Stanley Brothers tune.
 
And throughout, you'll find the songs couched in brilliant arrangements by this stellar quintet--frequently augmented by the jaw-dropping flatpicking of Ben's son Chris Eldridge (of the Infamous Stringdusters), who wasn't even around when the Seldom Scene first began on its incredible journey.
 
"He didn't come along until eleven years after we got started," says Ben. "I have to say, he played some amazing stuff. Nice that he can show us a thing or two."