C: Back in ’79 you started Good Medicine which has been a long-term project for you. Several of the members of that are now in Blueground Undergrass. How has your is your attitude different now than it was then or when you played with the Aquarium Rescue Unit?

J: The difference between me then and now is pretty much like everybody else — I went through a musical revolution. I started playing banjo and I was playing banjo music. I started evolving with what I was listening to. I started out listening to Flat and Scruggs. I got the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. I got the Stanley brothers, Jim and Jesse, and then this band called Hot Rize came on the scene. They were from Boulder, Colorado and they were named for the ingredient in Martha White flour. They were a huge influence because they took regular straight bluegrass, but they wrote original songs and they had a kind of wacky approach to it, but it wasn’t progressive. It was still traditional but it was interesting. I would call them new traditional.

Then New Grass Revival came on the scene. Bela Fleck joined that band in 1982. That’s Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Pat Flynn, and John Cowan on bass. That blew me away because Bela was the first person to play banjo so interestingly and so progressively that I thought “I can do this for the rest of my life.” That was the first time I saw the banjo as something other than a bluegrass instrument. I played a five string, three finger style that was pretty much invented by Earl Scruggs in the mid-‘30s. Bela took that instrument and that style and started playing Chick Corea and fusion and classical and Celtic music. He pretty music brought it out of the bluegrass closet and into other music. I got to know him around 1984 to 1986. At that time I was promoting concerts that brought New Grass Revival to Atlanta. I sat down with him a couple of times and he spent the night with us. His tone is really the biggest influence on me. I don’t play like Bela at all. I wish I did, but I have more of a round, lower bottomy tone like he does.

C: When did you originally meet Col. Bruce Hampton, ret.?

J: In 1988 or 1989 I met Bruce and became one of the charter members of Aquarium Rescue Unit. When I joined the band it was me and Oteil Burbridge, Bruce, Jeff Sipe on drums, and Charlie Williams on guitar. Later we got Jimmy Herring on guitar. The Count M’Butu was on percussion occasionally. It was thrilling because there I was playing a bluegrass banjo, but I’m playing with these insane avant-garde musicians who are coming from Latin, fusion, rock, and Bruce comes from blues and southern rock. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It literally changed my life. To this day I say with all my heart that Bruce Hampton is undoubtedly my biggest influence. During that time I played in the band, I was exposed for the first time to Sun-Ra and Widespread Panic. At that time, they were just a young band getting started. In that time, the whole movement was starting with bands like Dave Matthews, Blues Traveler, Medeski, Martin, and Wood, and Phish. It changed my playing because for the first time I was playing the banjo the way I felt it should be played instead of replicating the “clone-prone” sound of bluegrass. When I left the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Matt Mundy took my place.

During that time I went off to work with Alzheimer’s patients doing music therapy. Then I got into theater, which put another whole layer of influence on my playing because I started doing theater and started acting. I wrote a Christmas play here in town that did well and did a play called “Cotton Patch Gospel” which is a play that Harry Chapin did the music for. Actually Harry Chapin did it right before he died in 1982. It’s a wacky thing, it’s like Christ’s life set in the South. It’s all bluegrass music and it was really a wonderful influence. All during that period of time I was doing a radio show called “Born in a Barn.” I was doing it here in Atlanta on 89.3 FM, WRFG. It was a wacky radio show because I did traditional, progressive, and contemporary bluegrass music. We even had a section called the phone festival where people would call up over the telephone and we would jam live with them over the telephone. Me and my brother Johnny would be down at the studio on banjo and guitar and they’d be on the telephone either at work or at home or sometimes they’d pull up to a pay phone and pull the phone into their truck! It had a cult following.

C: Was Jerry Garcia an influence of yours at any point?

J: During that time, a lot of hippies used to call. They’d say, “play some Jerry Garcia, man, play some Old and in the Way.” I’d be like “OK”, but I didn’t know who Jerry Garcia really was. I mean, I knew about the Grateful Dead, but I didn’t, you know? I put on Old and in the Way and I said “Oh Gosh, this is pretty bad bluegrass.” It was because my ear was so attuned to a certain sound. This was going on in ’84. As time went on and I started to play with Bruce, I really started to realize who Jerry Garcia was. People would call up and say “I want to hear some Peter Rowan and some David Grisman and some Tony Rice.” All of a sudden it occurred to me that there was this whole other world of music out there played on bluegrass instruments and it killed me. So I started really listening. Even though Jerry had some severe finger problems; he didn’t have enough fingers to really play the banjo, in my opinion he played the banjo from a place where it had never been played from before. He wasn’t a hillbilly but he revered Bill Monroe. He often said he dreamed of being one of the bluegrass boys, one of Bill’s boys. Bill Monroe really was on of THE guys in American music.

Jerry had some heart and feel about his playing that really freaked my up as a player. I started listening to what he did on Old and in the Way and Midnight Moonlight and White Dove. Here were these guys who were playing these songs that weren’t necessarily traditional, but some of them really were. I mean, Pig in a Pen, that’s hardcore bluegrass, White Dove, that’s hardcore bluegrass, but then Midnight Moonlight, that’s not bluegrass. It’s a Peter Rowan song and has weird chords. It just kills me to hear him play it. If Jerry Garcia hadn’t come out of the closet and said, “Hey, I like bluegrass” and done the hillbilly thing in San Francisco in the early 1970’s, there would not be a Blueground Undergrass, in my opinion. I don’t think there would have been a market for Aquarium Rescue Unit and there certainly wouldn’t be a Leftover Salmon or String Cheese Incident. A lot of these bands have spawned because of the interest and re-interest in bluegrass music that Old and in the Way had brought in.

C: How were you originally approached to do the Phish project? How did they decide “Jeff Mosier is the man we want?”

J: I don’t know. I hadn’t seen or talked to them since I’d played with them at the Roxy in ’92. That’s when I played Paul and Silas. That was a big show for Phish back then. It was like “Wow, Phish sold out the Roxy!” I sat in with them and then I got into theater and working with Alzheimer’s patients and doing all kinds of stuff. Then one day I got a call from Mike [Gordon] and he said “look we’re in this bluegrass thing now and I come out and play the banjo. We’d like for you to come out on the road with us.” I said, “OK.” I didn’t really know what to do, but once we got out there, evidently they wanted to have class, so I ended up getting little notebooks and giving them a history lesson, teaching them songs. I taught them Nellie Cane, which is a Hot Rize tune written by Tim O’Brien. I taught them one of mine called Little Tiny Butter Biscuits, even though it’s called “Butter them Biscuits” in the Phish books. It’s named after an Alzheimer’s patient that I worked with who one day said that out loud. I taught them Dooley, which, is from the old Andy Griffith show. It’s a moonshine song. I taught them Blue and Lonesome, which Blueground now does. It’s an old Bill Monroe tune. They already did Ginseng Sullivan and Long Journey Home.

It was great. John played mandolin. That was hilarious, seeing him play mandolin. Page played acoustic bass, Trey had a Martin guitar and played some great flat-picking, and the Mike played banjo. It was thrilling. I played with them at night, too. It was right after Hoist came out, so they had just recorded with Allison Krauss. They’d gotten to know Bela. They had just been enamored with bluegrass. I don’t like to call it a bluegrass phase, but they were going through a phase. I knew it wouldn’t last, but that’s cool. Phish as a band, the big word for them to me is “curious.” They’re just curious people. They’re sweet, curious, and genuine. They try to fit every possible thing into their music that they can and I dig ‘em for it.

C: You guys played some shows touring with Leftover Salmon not too long ago. How was that?

J: That was great. We did a tour up north and went through Burlington.

C: Had you played with Mark Vann before?

J: I sat in with Leftover before in Atlanta at the Variety. I knew Mark and Mark came over to my house to check out my banjo because he wanted a Rich and Taylor, which is what I play. I knew Tye from Zambiland [Orchestra] and we were all in Zambiland and we went out to Boulder to do a little Zambiland West with me and Paul McCandless and T Lavitz and Ricky Keller and Tony Furtado. Jeff Sipe went, too.

I knew them and it was thrilling. We went out and opened for them in Chicago and Connecticut. We went through Burlington and hung out with Mike Gordon at his house.

C: How did you get hooked up playing on the same bill as the Allman brothers in Atlanta and Raleigh?

J: Kirsten [West, Blueground Undergrass’ manager] knew about me through Bruce and then of course Oteil helped a lot with that. He really wanted me to sit in back in November. Kirsten and Oteil worked to make Dickey feel comfortable with a banjo player standing beside him (laughs). Dickey was in a good mood and I got to sit in. He was like a childhood hero to me. Oteil was on my left and Dickey was on my right and it was like a dream. Of course, I played with Oteil when we were in Aquarium Rescue Unit together and I still to this day feel that he is the greatest bass player alive. He’s the Bela Fleck if you will of the bass.

C: How have you had to adjust your life since deciding that you wanted to pursue the Blueground Undergrass project full time?

J: I was going to give the band three years. We played our first gig February 20, 1998 and by June, 1998 we were in the studio doing our first record. I had to transfer all my eggs into the Blueground basket. At the time I was doing cheese: playing private parties and Six Flags Over Georgia and voice-overs for the radio as well as theater. I just had to go “this is it” all of a sudden and we did. Now my brother has left Delta airlines, and I’m a father of three children who are all under five years old. I’m in a world that’s not necessarily family-oriented as far as Rock and Roll, per-se. It’s a new day. The band’s working and we have an album that’s coming out in October on Phoenix Rising label. It’s going to be a limited addition bootleg of a live recording. We’re only going to release 5,000 of them. It was a live show recorded at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta. We also have a lot of interactive features on our website, too.

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