Fare You Well

 Fare You Well

 We had a farewell concert for Carlos: our fiddle player and singer. Carlos and my son James got to know each other at high school and have been buddies and music buddies since then. They played in a talent show together. Over time, they aggregated into a band that I began playing banjo with around 2018. We had a number of performances, including our farewell concert. 

 Whenever I lose a regular musician pal, it’s a heartache. Response to music is inherently emotional, and parting with a regular music buddy leaves a gaping hole – not just the musical content, but the attendant emotional content. 

 Back in 1990 when my spouse Karen was pregnant with James, I decided to take up banjo and bought a cheap one on sale in a local music store in the Chicago suburbs where we were living. I got a “How to Play Banjo” book by Earl Scruggs and immediately tried to learn Foggy Mountain Breakdown, but that was a huge mistake. It’s like expecting to sound like Eric Clapton the first time you touch an electric guitar. It was torture for Karen to listen to me practice, at least for the first year. I took lessons and slowly improved, even attending my first bluegrass festival on my way to Boston in 1993 to take a job at Harvard. I tried to do some field picking, but I had a ways to go compared to the gun-slinging banjo pickers I met.

When we settled in the Boston suburbs, James was three years old. Karen enrolled him in a preschool program in the basement under a church that we later joined. 

Bluegrass with Brian (roughly 1996-2003)

James had friends in pre-school – one was Clayton. Karen arranged play dates for the two of them. Over time I got to know Clayton’s mom and dad, Alden and Brian. Brian had gone to the Berkeley School of Music in Boston. From my recollection, he had mostly played jazz guitar.

I introduced Brian to the bluegrass style of acoustic guitar and he took to it like a duck to water. We started to jam and practice together. I mostly played banjo, but sometimes guitar. 

 Brian and I ended up developing a kind of ‘brothers duet’ style of singing and playing. I’d usually sing lead and Brian would do the harmony above, typically a fifth. We had solos in our songs and it all had a good bluegrassy feel to it. Over time we developed a repertoire that was bluegrass standards and fiddle tunes.

We started going to bluegrass festivals, bringing James and Clayton along. There were two that were regulars for us: Thomas Point Bluegrass Festival outside of Brunswick Maine, and the other was called Greyfox, in upstate New York.

There are some great memories from that period. Once at Thomas Point, some guys from the Vermont mountains came by to listen to us jam. There were smoking weed and drinking some clear looking whiskey out of a jar. Also, missing a few teeth. There was a younger guy with them who seemed a bit embarrassed about being in their company. We were playing Going Down the Road Feeling Bad, and I launched into my solo, whereupon one of the older guys jabbed the younger guy in the ribs and pointed at me, saying “you hear that, son, that’s how this music is supposed to be played”. That was perhaps the best compliment around – toothless moonshining hillbillies praising my banjo picking.

Another time at Thomas Point, a woman came by to listen in on us playing next to the campfire. At some gap in the music, she asked if we had CD’s for sale, and couldn’t believe that we weren’t on the festival lineup.

Sometimes our jams at the festivals would go from sunset to sunrise, and I’d wake up in a hot tent with the sun beaming down.

At the very first Greyfox festival, I bought a couple of raffle tickets for a brand new banjo donated by the craftsman Geoff Stelling. Our camping setup had several tents, a couple of camping tables, and an elaborate system of tarps held up by poles and guy-ropes. It turned out that the setup was perfect for Greyfox because we had a storm that poured rain. This was serious. We got 12 inches in 24 hours. It was a challenge to stay dry.

At one point, Brian got up the nerve to make the hike to the main stage from our campsite. I was making coffee for our evening jam when Brian returned. Breathlessly he blurted out, “I have bad news and I have good news. The bad news is that you’re going to have to go out there in the pouring rain to the main stage…..because the good news is that you won the F**KING BANJO!”

That was in 2000, and that Stelling banjo is my main go-to banjo to this day, 22 years later.

I can’t count how many festivals Brian and I went to – almost always with James and Clayton in tow.

Then one year, Brian and family moved away because of work. His absence was a real heartbreak. I lost my jamming partner.

At that point, I had a book project that I was working on, and it was all-consuming. My Greyfox banjo went into its case for a long hibernation.

Doc Huth and the Uncouth Youth (2017-?)

A bit about James’s trajectory in music. When he was in high school, 2004-2008, he played in a talent show with Carlos.  Their band was Faith on Hope Mountain with Gabe Hirshfeld on banjo who went on to become a phenom in bluegrass.   I should also add Janaka and Sam, who both ended up playing bass with us and went to the same high school: Newton South. When James was in college at Middlebury, he picked up guitar and played in a band.

I didn’t follow his music too closely, but he lived and worked in the Boston area after college, and is attending Boston University, working towards a PhD in developmental biology. Being close to his friends from high school, they’d get together and make music periodically.

On Christmas 2017, James gave me the gift of a weekend pass to the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival, where he’d gone many times as a boy with Brian, Clayton, and me. Soon after that, he asked if some friends could come over to play music – the idea being that I’d join in. Finally, the ‘end-point’ was for all of us to go up to Thomas Point and jam at the festival.

My playing was super-rusty. The prized Stelling Greyfox banjo had taken a beating. I had a spare battery in the case, which apparently outgassed corrosive chemicals and made a mess of the tuning pegs, which were closest to the battery. I phoned up Geoff Stelling, who agreed to fix it all up. In the meantime, I had my old beater banjo from 1992 or so.

The first incarnation of the band was made up of James’s friends, roughly his age…well, and me. We had Carlos on fiddle and singing. Maggie on mandolin and singing. Sometimes Carlos and Maggie traded off on fiddle/mando as the tunings are the same for both instruments. James played guitar and was mostly the lead singer. Finally, there was Sam who played bass.

It was a little rocky at first, but we began to develop some cohesion. Four of us: James, Maggie, Carlos, and I traveled up to Thomas Point. There’s a recording from that Labor Day Weekend 2018 and it’s a bit rough but showed promise.

We continued to play once a week into the fall and winter. When 2019 came around, we were invited to ‘headline’ at a party that summer. They had a friend, Harlan, who threw parties that were themed (and named) after music festivals. This one was called HarElectricForest. I left most of the song decisions to “the kids” because I was the “old guy”. They decided to do a set of the songs in the soundtrack of the movie Shrek. They all grew up with Shrek as children.

The second set was more of a mix of tunes, some of where were covers of a band called the Mountain Goats, a favorite of James’s.

The gig went off well, and at some moment, I found myself drinking wine and indulging in weed with the youngsters at the party. For a moment, I forgot that I was a generation older, but it dawned on me that I was the ‘old-guy’.

Then, surprisingly, we got a paying gig at a BBQ party of the parents of a friend of Carlos about a month later. We hastily threw together a couple of sets worth of material. I tend to be punctual, so I was the first member of the band to show up. I knocked on the door, and when I told them that I was a member of the band, there was incredulity. They were expecting ‘kids’, and there I was.

Although the gig wasn’t our best effort, we got paid, and I drove home with $200 in my wallet.

That fall, Sam quit the band. Backing bluegrass style songs just wasn’t challenging enough for him, so it just became the four of us: Carlos, James, Maggie, and me (fiddle, guitar, mando, and banjo).

We played into the fall and winter and then covid-19 hit. That put a sudden stop to our practices, and a summer music festival themed party seemed out of the question.

But Carlos hit on a brilliant idea: we could get together outside, wear masks and practice. We recommenced our weekly practices. The practices/jams had all of our go-to songs: the high point of our weeks, so the revival was a tonic for the soul.

Playing outside attracted neighbors who listened in. Recall that this was the height of covid, so there were few, if any, indoor gatherings. Some of the friends of Carlos, James, and Maggie would come by and bring lawn chairs and listen to us practice.

It was so much fun that I really didn’t want it to stop as winter closed in. I got some propane powered space heaters, Coleman lanterns and such. Pretty soon, we were practicing/jamming in mid-January, standing on a sheet of ice on my driveway all masked up. Neighbors continued to swing by to listen to us play.

Playing outside in January

Then vaccinations arrived, and things began to lighten up. Harlan’s birthday music festival themed party returned; this time at a funky house in Orleans overlooking Pleasant Bay on Cape Cod.

And now the dilemma of band names. There’s an amusing concept for bluegrass bands – you take a place name and pair it with some sort of human-related relationship. So….The Black Mountain Boys, or the Dismal Swamp Brothers. I live next to Heartbreak Hill (of Boston Marathon fame) in Newton, and I’d long been wanting to have a band called the Heartbreak Hillbillies. Well, that didn’t work with the ‘kids’ as they thought it would be insulting to Hillbillies.

One possible name was The Band Dynamic. It was a double entendre because we had attended a workshop on “band dynamics,” at Thomas Point Beach which we thought was going to be advice how loud to play. It turned out to be more about how they arranged gigs, practices – the human dynamic. That sounded cute, but nope!

Then there was Diet Whiskey. I’m not sure where that one came from.

Finally, there was the suggestion of Doc Huth and the Uncouth Youth, which somehow stuck. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but I deferred to the youths.

We worked up two sets of materials and played the party in Orleans, which was dubbed Capechella after the festival in Coachella.

Partiers at Capechella

There were more regular practices after Capechella and the anticipation of another party-gig the following summer. By my count, we had hundreds of songs that we played. James also had taken up song writing, and we had two handfuls of his originals.

In the fall, two friends of James joined: Chris on guitar and Janaka on bass. We continued to practice, but indoors now. Every so often we played outside and had a few neighbors stop by.

Carlos got married to Sarah, a regular in James’s friend group. Sarah got her PhD in divinity at Harvard and secured a job at Gonzaga University in Spokane Washington. Their plan is/was to move to Washington State. We were losing Carlos.

A word about Carlos: He has the most amazing ear of any musician I’ve played with. He could think of a jingle for a TV commercial from the 1960’s and could immediately play it note-for-note. Along with Maggie, he held down the vocal harmonies. He was certainly a major core musician of the group. Whenever he messed up a harmony, I couldn’t tell, but he’d scream some expletive.

A couple of new goals emerged for the band: 

 The next music festival themed party 

 Recording some of James’s songs in a studio

The 2022 music festival gig was held at Hunter, a ski town in the Catskills. The party/festival was called Dream Upstate. All told, we had four sets at the festival. One was a complete improvisation called the All of Us Ensemble. There was two sets of Doc Youth and the Uncouth Youth, and then a Sunday bluegrass set under the name Heartbreak Hillbillies.

At the end of our sets, one of James’s friend group, Aarika, asked if we could play more. I was exhausted and had to drive home. So, I suggested that perhaps we could have a farewell concert for Carlos. Everyone agreed it would be a good idea, so we set a date.

We went into the ‘studio’. I say this in quotes because it was not what I was expecting. It was in an old warehouse in Charlestown. It looked quite rundown – like the place where some mob guys would drag a hapless victim to shake him down. It was also in the middle of a heatwave. Still, it was interesting to lay down tracks. Everything up to that moment, we’d just played and practiced live.

Then was the date for the farewell-to-Carlos gig. In advance of the gig, James asked us to play a special tune for Carlos as a surprise. It was an old Grateful Dead standard: Brokedown Palace. We didn’t have a chance to practice, so each of us worked on it on our own.

About 20 people showed up, sitting in lawn chairs in my backyard. Folks brought burgers for the BBQ, beer, and we had a fire pit going. There was a bowl where people wrote down their requests on a slip of paper. James would go over to the bowl and pick out a song title and we played whatever written down. Everyone in the audience knew all our go-to songs, so there wasn’t a problem with that. Many of the requests were for James’s originals.

Doc Huth and the Uncouth Youth at the farewell concert.  From left: me, Janaka, James, Maggie, Carlos, and Chris. 

Then came the time to play Brokedown Palace. Carlos was sitting down next to Sarah and Karen to listen. There’s a particularly poignant sign off line that had Carlos and Sarah sobbing, at least according to Karen:

Fare you well, Fare you well 

I love you more than words can tell 

Listen to the river sing sweet songs 

to rock my soul

Good bye (fare you well cast in a different way) Carlos and Sarah. You’ll be missed.