*C: There does seem to be a revival in bluegrass and folk music right now….. *

V: It’s doing good right now and there’s a lot of talk about it right now. A lot more than when I was growing up – NO, no, not when I was growing up. Bluegrass was going good, especially Monroe. I don’t know much about anybody else, but I know he was doing good back when I was growing up. Then there was that lull in there when he almost had to pay to play. Then he came back to festivals when he was doing real good. Since that time, a lot of the young ones got into bluegrass and played it all kinds of different ways. It’s being talked about a lot more now and people seem to respect it more. They always liked it you know, but I don’t know why, if it wasn’t a festival, you could hardly get any support for it. Nowadays, I think it’s doing real good.

C: I think so too. Bands like Leftover Salmon out of Colorado and Blueground Undergrass…

V: I know [Jeff] Sipe real good. I don’t know if I know any of the others or not. He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and one heck of a drummer.

C: How did you meet Rev. Jeff Mosier?

V: I don’t know how long ago that was. I can’t remember if it was in Athens, Georgia, or not.

C: I know you have a mutual friend in Col. Bruce Hampton.

V: Yeah and I had been knowing him for years, but I really hadn’t seen him. You know, I had been off of the circuit, really for a long time. I was going really strong in the 70’s and 80’s, then I started slowing down. My wife wanted to get rid of the bus and slow down. I didn’t do anything much for along time. Then of course, she passed away. This July will be 2 years ago. Now it seems like I’ve been going as much as I had back in the 70’s. I can see it seems like the places I play (pauses) it seems like the circle has made a circle. I see the same faces and the same types of people. They act the same way. It’s like I’m looking back at the 70’s, but now it’s 2000, you know. It’s like I’m seeing the same acceptance of what’s happening.

Years ago, I knew Col. Bruce and I hadn’t seen him in so many years, until I played Atlanta with Stir Fried. He remembered and I remembered him just as soon as I saw him. We talked and he brought back old memories and all that. Since then we’ve been in fairly close touch. I helped Phish, especially Michael [Gordon] do that soundtrack for him for that movie. That’s gonna be the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. My daughter was talking to Michael the other day. He’s gonna let me know when it’s going to be shown here. It’s a funny thing. If you get a chance to see it, I want you to see it. It’s funny, believe me.

C: Thinking a little about how some aspects of music have changed over time while others have stayed the same, I know Folkways Records over at the Smithsonian and David Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label have both done a great job of preserving and exposing different kinds of traditional music. Can you foresee record labels doing more for those kinds of music than they have in the past?

V: Yeah, if there’s record labels, per se, and I’m sure there will be in some description. There’s a whole lot going to this Internet thing. I don’t know how they’re gonna get it worked out. A lot of it is already worked out to a certain extent. I’ll be real glad to find out how it works anyway. They’re going to be selling them off of that, by the millions. They’re going to burn their own CDs. What I don’t understand yet is the way they are going to pay for each one. I don’t understand how they’re going to work that out. It’s supposed to be as clear when they burn it [MP3s and such] as it is right now. A few people have it worked out where they can do a whole album with a MIDI and a computer setup.

C: My father actually has a program on his computer called Cakewalk where he can score the entire soundtrack to the high school plays in my hometown using a just a MIDI connection and a Roland keyboard.

V: I’ve been behind there [in a studio] and I’ve seen them do it. It’s amazing to me how they do it. I want to try and get it worked out so I can do that. I don’t know if things like that would work on a fiddle or not, but I guess it would. I’d love to find out.

C: When you’re playing live, I’ve seen that you’ll get in the middle of a passage and you’re deep in the jam and your eyes are closed. You tilt your head back and it looks almost like you’re dreaming. Do you have anything running through your mind in those moments?

V: Yeah, I’m always having to think because I can’t remember how to play it the same way. I can remember how to start off and the ending and maybe the little riffs or stops we have in-between part of the tune. When you’re out there on your own you really don’t know where it’s going. There’s a lot of things that run through your mind, but, which one will work the best? It’s so fast sometimes that you pick the one that doesn’t work right and you try to cover that up real quick. What I’m doing is just really thinking. I guess that’s why I have my eyes closed. I really am in another world, I guess.

C: You play some other stringed instruments as well don’t you?

V: Yeah, I’m trying to get back into it. I cut my finger off with the lawn mower a few years back. You know when you bend your little finger? I cut it off just before the bend. Fretted instruments cause too much little hurt and feeling just below the bump where it was cut. I’m getting back to where I can play a fretted instrument. I can’t play it too long.

C: What about composing. Do you like to write music as well.

V: I can write.. I can write the music part, but I can’t write words. I have to get someone else to do that. I can’t condense a whole story down into a few verses.

C: You still play with Buddy Cage a good bit in Stir Fried. His pedal steel seems to complement your fiddle very well.

V: Oh yeah. I’ve been knowing Buddy since the Riders [New Riders of the Purple Sage.] Then we lost track. I lost track of where he was. When he met Stir Fried, I saw him again when he started playing with them. We were playing a place in New Jersey or New York and I was playing with a group called Ripple. I was just sitting in, playing with them, you know. Stir Fried opened up and they asked me to come out and play with them, so I did.

C: You also went out of Colorado and played with Jazz is Dead. You did some of the same material you recorded with the Grateful Dead on the Wake of the Flood album, right?

V: Yeah, but you couldn’t tell it (laughs). You couldn’t tell it by the jazz versions of it. You just go all over the place with jazz, you don’t stick with the melody too much. Now we just got through doing a Deadgrass album that a guy out in California did. We did all Grateful Dead tunes. It turned out really good. We used all bluegrass instrumentation except for the steel. Hunter and somebody wrote most of them.

C: Do you have any fond memories of playing with Jerry Garcia from years past?

V: A lot of them. He was a guy who just loved to play, so that just fits in with the rest of us musicians. He wanted to play all the time and so did we. We became friends before I ever knew who he was really. Me and Jerry Garcia as a person became friends before I knew who he was playing with. We made our way out to San Francisco and then I saw this billboard sign that looked like Jerry. I said, “hey Jerry, that looks like you,” and everybody started laughin’. They didn’t know that I didn’t know who he was. They got a kick out of that. That’s one of the funniest things that happened. We had a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

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