Jambands: In retrospect, what is the funniest thing that has ever happened to you on the road that maybe wasn’t so funny at the time.
Jenny: Ok here’s my story, it’s really not funny at all….
Brian: All of our stuff fell out of the trailer.
Jenny: Oh right there’s a good one.
Laughter
Kenny: We’re driving along and I think Nate was driving
Brian: Nate was driving.
Kenny: Nate was driving. This car was along side of us and they were like yelling and pointing and Nate was like and haaaaaaayyyyyyy, you know his like putting up his middle finger. He’s like what are these people screaming at me for; I’m not doing anything…”.
Brian: … And I’m in the passenger side and I was like “Ante, he’s just trying to tell you something.” And he’s just totally blowing it off. He’s like “No, Ante he’s trying to help you.” We roll down the window and the guy is like (cups hands around mouth) “YOUR STUFF IS FALLING OUT OF THE TRAILER.”
Laughter
Kenny: We pull over and the trailer door was swinging. We only lost, like, bags because we have all of our suitcases and whatnot by the back door and then all the gear is in front of that. So like sleeping bags and peoples bags fell out.
Jenny: Michelle’s bag, hers had a broken zipper so her pajamas were on the highway and this guy pulls up and he holds up these tie-dyed long underwear and he’s like “are these yours.”
Kenny: Yeah, this really nice guy liked stopped and picked up a bunch of stuff and then pulls up next to us and gives us some back and then were missing someone’s bag.
Jenny: A sleeping bag, it was like seven miles back on the over pass. And it was like “there is was.”
Kenny: So I guess that was funny. What were you going to tell?
Jenny: I was going to tell about how we were stuck on the side of the road in Wyoming for six hours.
Kenny: We hit a five-point buck 60 miles out of Jackson.
Jenny: And we just did the dipshit, we, well I don’t know..
Kenny: Well, there was really no better way to do it.
Brian: In retrospect there were MANY better ways to do it.
Jenny: We couldn’t use our cell phone because we weren’t in range, This really nice women … (conversation gives way to noise as a half dozen more people enter the room) … I don’t know. It was crazy. But anyway we were stuck on the side of the room for a long time.
Brian: We we’re expecting a reconnaissance, that one of our members of the band was going to go ahead and rent a van to came and get us and all that stuff.
Jenny: Because the van got toed to the gig.
Brian: yeah
Jenny: And they left four of us on the side of the road.
Brian: And, they took the trailer too that time. We thought they were going to come back with a rented van to get all the rest of us.
Kenny: Yeah, like Dave went ahead and he was like renting or getting a taxi to come pick us up. And then the taxi company turns out …
Jenny: They we’re probably an hour and a half north of the place we were playing. We were at least and hour south so they had to travel two and a half-hours. (The other band members) didn’t know where (the cab) was coming from. The thought it was just in Jackson, which was where we were playing. So we were out there for like two, three, four hours, and it was Wyoming.
Kenny: And it was starting to get cold.
Jenny: BUTTCOLD.
Jenny: And I thought I could here moose in the distance. I had this little (Oregon) Country Fair candle lamp that we had.
Kenny: And I had my little book light and that was it.
Jenny: We were so cold we were getting panicked and finally these two ladies came by and saw our little lamp and our little book light. They’re like ‘are you guys okay.”
Kenny: We’re like “NO.”
Laughter
Brian: We’re stupid.
Kenny: So, they pile us into this Honda Civic, five of us and two old women. And, take us back to their house, which is near there. And, we use their phone to call.
Jenny: And, we call they venue and they thought that we had been picked up. They we’re just waiting for us there.
Brian. The women who picked us up had lived in that valley for, I don’t know, forty or fifty years. She’d homesteaded there, her parents had moved out there. And here we are bums on the side of the road. She’d lived there her whole life and there we we’re on the side of the road, She was like “it going to get cold.” There was definitely nothing going on out there. She actually ends up pulling out an old fiddle that her husband used to play and gave it to Caleb and he played Echo for her. She was just a really, I’m sure, a devout, conservative, religious women but really cool.
Jenny: Saved our lives for sure.
Live from the Crystal Ballroom was your fifth CD not including the tape, right?
Jenny: Right
Jambands: Now, when you guys listen to Live at the Crystal Ballroom and then listen to Calobo or Runnin in the River, tell me what strikes you the most. How would you chart the growth or the changes in that time?
Jenny: The song writing is more interesting, everyone is better, more energetic, branches out a little bit more. We have better instruments. (laughs.) I don’t know, it’s a bigger better sound.
Jambands: At what point did this become a full time thing?
Kenny: It was found and a half years ago.
Jenny: Because we had just all gotten out of college then. We were like ‘Let’s try it.”
Kenny: We were like ‘Let’s go get jobs. Naaaaaaaaaahhhhhh.’
Laughter
Jenny: We toured a lot because we were making very little money. We just got in the van, we would rent vans, and just drove around and played the whole year, did 200 and something shows that year.
From the crowd: 240 shows.
Jenny: And then we finally got to the point where we could play less and do okay. And we’ve been doing it ever since.
Like a lot of the ‘Jambands’ or bands that are generally lumped together in this genre you have in common a strong grassroots support. What does grass roots mean to you both on the positive and negative side.
Kenny: Not corporate. Having control over what we do in terms of playing. Where. When. In terms of recording. The amazing thing about it is how it has passed through word of mouth. That’s done almost everything for us. You don’t have a lot of advertising. You don’t have a big budget behind you which I guess could be a negative aspect of being grass roots, but its also positive in that when you do achieve something you feel really good to know that you did it by yourself.
Jenny: The fans just seem to take it upon themselves to help a band make it. It’s like we like this band a lot so we’re going to tell all of our friends to go see them because we know they’re not being backed by Columbia Music or whatever. They are doing it themselves. We send out our mailing list to let people know when we’re playing, and it just works that way. It’s great.
Anything you guys want to ad?
Jenny: Oh there’s so many things. We’re working on out new record right now. There’s no release date for now.
Kenny: That’s another nice thing about the grass roots thing (laughs.)
What are you going to do for the next one?
Jenny: We’re going to do a studio record.
Kenny: We worked a bit up in the San Juan Islands. I think we’re going top kind of studio hop. To try different places, but it’s going to be a studio record.
Jenny: Our goal is to put a lot more time and energy into this record than we have put into another record before to make it more, to make it intentionally great. So we’re just plying our songs, putting them on the record and were going to try to make it a really great album. That’s the goal.
Brian: It seems like as we get more experience as far as being in he studio that we’re coming at it from a different way in terms of just method or style. And we’re maturing in what I hear coming out.
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Holly Goodman is a freelance writer and live music fanatic currently checking in from Portland, OR. She splits her time lopsidedly between writing and doing publicity work for some of the kind folks found on these pages. (READ: GO TO HOOKAHVILLE, GO TO JAMM-AICA.)
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