Rawlings has been impressed with the band’s growing comfort in the studio. “There’s a certain way they play some of this stuff that I think will always be a challenge to play in the studio without bringing the audience in there,” he observes. “They’re used to the P.A., and having it all be loud in their ears, and so there’s a way they play it there. And of course, their vocal harmonies are one of the first things that struck me when I heard them.”
Secor suggests that while achieving bluegrass-style pyrotechnics is not a goal for this outfit, improved musical finesse can be spotted in the increasing range of sonic choices they make. “If you listen to me blow harp on ‘C.C. Rider’, just one CD ago, OK, it’s fun — and it’s soft,” Secor admits. “On the new record, I’ve learned how to blow like three different guys that I want to blow like — and each one of them is me. And where the guitjo was once an instrument that just diversified us a little bit, now Kevin is really, really playing it.
“But where our chops really got toughened up, though, is that we’ve learned how to put on a show. We’re finding more and more that the original work that we did, mostly in Canada, playing on street corners all the way back in our first three months, is what we’ve gotten back to. The essence of that sort of busker show is like a really controlled riot — big and agitated and hell-bent. Look at the Skillet Lickers; they’ll start with some comedy, do some kind of bullshit talking to each other in joke falsetto, and then the fiddle comes out and kicks off the tune, whatever it is. It disassembles and reassembles in the same way. And there are elements of that in our show. It’s a show.”
Some of that growing sharpness comes from growing attention to being in shape for the realities of the road — which may be somewhat less challenging than in the band’s hard-living, street busking days, but still has its temptations.
“I think we’re…definitely more grown-up,” Fuqua says. “I think the music’s smarter. But almost every show, someone’s asking if we want to go out and ‘play more bluegrass’ — even though we don’t play bluegrass! And that’s definitely something that I would have done back in 2001, which now seems like a long time ago. It’s all really kind of normal now. When we have a gig, I really want to go back to my hotel room and sleep and read a book afterward, because I got to get up and be in shape to fly to where I’ve got to be next. I mean, you want to — because there are always great offers to go do, uh, whatever — but you know you can’t.”
“Yeah,” Secor agrees. “It has to do with us doing 160 dates a year, motels and parking lots, all-night drives — all things that are still very much going on, but it’s all become much more cohesive. It’s so weird: You go out on the road, but the road ends up being this weigh station of the damned — this interminable waiting for your eggs order to be taken. But now there’s just an understanding of the opportunity that is here for us to play professionally, which is what we wanted to do from the beginning. And so we set it up so that we can do that.”
The Old Crows appear well aware of the potential for their very acceptance to separate them from the audience they’ve grown up among, and they know they have to watch out for it.
Fuqua notes, ruefully, “Some guy gave me a tape last night, when I was walking into the club we were playing, and he was literally shaking, he was so nervous — like I was something different. It was strange, because it was really OK for him to do that!”
This is still a young group, if by now a seasoned one, and they’ve found unusually direct validation from some of their own heroes.
“When we formed the band, and went out to play music together, who did we meet?” Secor reminisces. “Well, Merle Haggard puts his hand on my neck, and he pulls me close and he says, ‘Sounds good, son.’ And Doc Watson comes up to us on the street corner and says, ‘Well, we ought to have you do this festival that I put on every year.’
“Those are people who themselves got into the music because of the same even earlier people we also like — and they went to their heroes and said, ‘Show me everything that you can in five minutes, then let me go out and do it!’ And with that eagerness and bravado that only somebody who’s going to last is going to have.”
“It’s essential,” Marty Stuart submits, with real reason to know, “that a band grows and unfolds, as people, and as musicians as well, without losing the original concept and original vision. And to me, the Old Crow boys are hitting all of those hoops, out there in the trenches, working it out on a night-by-night basis.”
Growing audience acceptance of Old Crow Medicine Show, its moods and tones, and its freshly recast meeting of acoustic roots music with a direct rock-like attack marks a musical moment. They’re not alone in the endeavor, and in their self-aware way, the Old Crow guys see the possibilities themselves now for making a serious contribution to the stream they’ve jumped into — of shaking this thing.
Of course, past experiences give at least some pause about such predictions. “They’ve said the great acoustic revolution was coming for the last fifteen years!” David Rawlings laughs. “So, we’ll see!”
Secor sees perhaps a different future. “For me, ‘Old Crow Medicine Show’ was always a sort of hard moniker to live with,” he says. “There was a long period of time when I thought that we’d really turned into a rock ‘n’ roll band. But now, I think we really have become a medicine show — with those blue-haired ladies and 20-year-old pot smokers alike out there, buying our liquor!”
ND senior editor Barry Mazor is disinclined to suggest a new advertisement for himself in this space at this time.
