THE READING ROOM: In Memoir and Conversations, John Cowan Reflects on His ‘Newgrass Odyssey’

John Cowan admits that on Feb. 9, 1964, the cosmic balance of the universe shifted: “A comet slipped through the ether from the bonds of the galaxy (or was it Liverpool?) and into the side door of the Ed Sullivan Theater, depositing four humanlike beings onto Ed’s stage and into my living room.” That night, he recalls in his delightful new memoir Hold to a Dream: A Newgrass Odyssey, “changed the trajectory of my life forever.” From that moment, Cowan knew what he wanted to do, but he didn’t know where to start. But, he observes, “I had a dream to hold on to.”

It didn’t take a teenage Cowan long, though, to find a way to live his dream. And what a dream he’s been living ever since. From 1974 to 1989, Cowan played bass and sang for progressive bluegrass pioneers New Grass Revival. He recorded a number of solo albums after New Grass Revival broke up, and in the early 1990s he joined forces with Rusty Young (Poco), Pat Simmons (Doobie Brothers), and Bill Lloyd (Foster and Lloyd) to form the Sky Kings. That collaboration led to Cowan regularly playing bass with The Doobie Brothers.

Even before that seismic Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Cowan loved music, and he grew up singing in church. One afternoon, he writes in the book, he happened upon someone about his age named Gerry Gillespie sitting on his stoop and playing a Sears Silvertone guitar. Cowan eventually convinced his dad to buy him his first bass — a Univox Beatle Bass —and an Ampeg B-12 bass amplifier and soon he, Gillespie, drummer Tom Shields, and singer and 12-string guitarist Nicky Ulrich had formed a band. It didn’t last too long, though: Cowan moved from Louisville, Kentucky, to Evansville, Indiana, just before his senior year in high school. Once he arrived in Evansville, he met and started playing bass and singing in a band of older boys, The Young Turks.

When Cowan left home in 1973, he and his father were barely speaking. His father wanted him to stay enrolled at Indiana State University, but Cowan saw it as a waste of time. His father, in turn, didn’t want to waste his money paying for tuition. Cowan left “under grievous circumstances,” moved back to Louisville, worked in a car wash by day, and played music by night. Just a few months later his father died, and, as Cowan notes in the book, “I have never really gotten over it.” Two months after his father’s death, Cowan got a call from Sam Bush, asking if he’d audition as a bass player for New Grass Revival. Cowan said he’d love to, and the rest is bluegrass history. Cowan believes “to this day that somehow, some way, my father, after all our struggles, ‘nudged’ me into the New Grass Revival, a band I was about to play and tour the world with for the next fifteen years as bassist and lead singer.” New Grass Revival, he reminds readers, “became one of the most celebrated and influential bands of the 1980s … came to represent an entire musical genre … and was elected to the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2020.”

Cowan divides his memoir into two sections. The first is an autobiographical narrative that also provides an overview of the history of New Grass Revival and the changes the band went through between 1974 and 1989. The second section, titled “Interviews and Inspirations,” contains 15 interviews with musicians including Loretta Lynn, Rodney Crowell, Béla Fleck, and Chris Hillman.

From 1978 through 1980, New Grass Revival was Leon Russell’s band. Cowan chatted with Russell one day after lunch at Russell’s house, discussing songwriting and musical styles and the way Russell learned to play piano. Cowan asks Russell how he came to write his now-classic “A Song for You.” Russell muses: “When I wrote that song, I was trying to write a song, a blues song, that Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles could sing. Almost twenty-five years ago, I checked, and a ‘A Song for You’ had been cut 129 times, and it hadn’t ever been a hit. It was all the lounge lizards singing it, you know? … It’s gratifying because I set out to do it. I mean there are so many things I set out to do that just failed miserably. I wanted to write a song that everybody wanted to sing. I still do that to this day. I still try to write standards. For all you songwriters out there, there’s more money in standards than in hit records.” (Russell passed away in 2016.)

Sam Bush tells Cowan about the early days of New Grass Revival. Bush doesn’t recall having a specific mission for the band, but says that they just started “experimenting with longer jamming things. … We were literally playing like we felt it. And they certainly weren’t original ideas, because we also did tunes like, at the time, Norman Blake had given us a tape of this tune he wrote called, ‘Ginseng Sullivan,’ and he said you guys should play this.”

Cowan first met multi-instrumentalist Bernie Leadon in 1987. Leadon had gone on the road as a touring member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and New Grass Revival had been opening for them for years. Cowan recalls that he had been following Leadon ever since Leadon, who also played with the Eagles, joined Doug Dillard and Gene Clark for The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. Cowan suggests that “if you journey down the path of his [Leadon’s] musical legacy, what you’ll find is a conscious commitment to playing the appropriate thing by the composer, vision for how to put the pieces together in a coherent way, and a simple hard-fought beauty in every damn note.” For Cowan, “God’s own singer just might be Bernie Leadon.”

In his interview with Bonnie Bramlett, Cowan tells her: “For me, you were one of the people who helped me discover my own voice. It was through listening to your voice. I’m pretty confident in saying that there’s a generation of singer, my generation, that learned how they wanted to sing from listening to you.” Bramlett tells him that while she grew up singing gospel, she was looking for a certain sound when she started singing rock and roll. “It wasn’t so much the rock and roll bug as it was demonstrative expression. I wanted to sing louder than everyone. I wanted to shout louder than everyone. My feelings were bigger than everybody else’s feelings. And I was lucky to find a safe place to put ’em.”

Cowan gives readers a front-row seat for his journey and his relationships with the musicians that have inspired him in Hold to a Dream: A Newgrass Odyssey. He’s a gracious and generous artist who elevates those around him and celebrates their artistry.

John Cowan’s Hold to a Dream: A Newgrass Odyssey was published June 4 by Backbeat Books.