Peter Rowan
Courtesy Ronald Rietman
advertisement:
Peter Rowan is in an enviable place right now.
The Massachusetts native has stood at the forefront of acoustic music for decades — playing guitar in legendary bands, leading his own acts and racking up awards, critical acclaim and a legion of fans along the way.
At 67 years old, he's still a road warrior. This weekend, he'll perform at the Sisters Folk Festival (see “Where to see him”).
“I like the opportunity to play solo,” Rowan said earlier this week from his home in Inverness, Calif. “It becomes more about the songs than genre.”
He spends his time in Inverness “walking and doing a little swimming and working on songs and paintings,” and the place suits him.
“I've got my ‘69 Ford truck looking like a Dust Bowl vehicle sitting outside the gate,” he said. “I need to be out here. I've been trying to divide my time between (here and) my little place in Texas ... and I just decided to stop doing a balancing act.
“I haven't lived just by myself in years, and it's kind of like, ‘Hey! Welcome home to yourself!'” Rowan said.
Besides his own accomplishments, Rowan is part of an exclusive club of musicians who've played with both the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, and the de facto face of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia. He joined Monroe's Bluee Grass Boys in 1964 and spent a couple years in the genre's iconic band before setting off on his own. In the early 1970s, he teamed with Garcia and David Grisman in the bluegrass supergroup Old & In the Way, whose debut album continues to be a guiding light for bluegrassers.
So Rowan has a fascinating perspective on two legendary musicians who couldn't have been more different.
The buttoned-down Monroe was from rural western Kentucky and was known as a tough bandleader. Garcia came from 1960s San Francisco, preferred the frumpy T-shirt look, and was as laid back as a hammock.
Rowan told a story of his waning days with the Blue Grass Boys.
“Monroe came up to me and we were jamming out in a field in Indiana, and he said to me, ‘Pete, (bluegrass has) the fiddles, it's got the banjos, it's got the harmony singing, it's got the gospel. How could you leave it?'” Rowan said with a laugh. “I came up to him later and said, ‘Bill, I can't find a mandolin player who can do what I've expected by playing with you.'”
Garcia “was just the opposite of Monroe,” Rowan said. “Bill appreciated music that was a little outside, but he didn't think his fans would understand it, so he had no interest in being experimental.
“And we grew up in an experimental time, the ‘60s,” he continued. “We were listening to John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and all these jazz players and being bluegrassers, you know, you had to play within the lines.”
Garcia believed in lines, but he was more willing to bend them than Monroe, Rowan said. He summed up the difference with another story, this time about playing with Old & In the Way.
“When you're driving between the lines, you get real critical about turns and things, and we'd come off stage and look at each other: ‘Harumph!' ‘That wasn't perfect, was it?' ‘The sound really wasn't that good. Harumph!'” Rowan said. “Garcia put up with that for a few nights, until one night we were up in Eugene playing, and we came off stage, and at the first ‘harumph,' Garcia, sort of like a Zen master, said, ‘No thoughts.'”
No thoughts?
“‘No thoughts. Do not try and conceptualize what's going on. Just go. Play. Let it flow,'” Rowan said. “Because bluegrass is so nitpicky. It's picking music. You have to be so precise, and Garcia's whole thing ... was, you know, if we want to extend solos, we're fine with that. If I want to sing some Indian chanting ... I'd look around and Garcia's just nodding his head, like, ‘Go.'”
Now, Rowan says he's having as much fun playing with his namesake bluegrass band as he has since the Old & In the Way days. He's got a small army of talented pickers surrounding him and an old guitar he loves to play. It was left to him by Charles Sawtelle of Hot Rize, who died of cancer in 1999.
“You can try playing bluegrass all day long ... but when you pick up a pre-war instrument that already has a legacy of its own, it just sits in your hands and you strum a big chord on it, it just kinda tells you what to do,” Rowan said.
“You've got to generate some power in the kind of bluegrass I believe in. It's not just playing pretty notes. But there's a certain point where there's this ... emphasis on the rhythmic thing,” he continued. “So it's like, ‘Do you want to take on the bluegrass challenge?' And I'm like, ‘Yeah!' I've got the weaponry of this guitar to be victorious in the sound.
“To me, if you put on a bluegrass instrument, strum an E chord and you twang a note, you go, ‘Mm-hmm. Kick it off,'” he said. “It's bluegrass time.”
ARTICLE ACCESS: This article is among those available to all readers. Many more articles are available only to E-Edition members. Sign up today!
