photo credit: Dylan Langille

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Over Halloween weekend Greensky Bluegrass returned to their point of origin and proving ground in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There the band celebrated a quarter-century of spirited sounds and sparkling songcraft. The group debuted as a trio at a house party on October 31, 2000 with Michael Arlen Bont (banjo), Dave Bruzza (guitar) and Paul Hoffman (mandolin) focusing on traditional bluegrass. The group’s musical palette expanded over time, as did its roster, with Mike Devol (upright bass) becoming a member in 2004 and Anders Beck (dobro) joining three years later.

The new Greensky Bluegrass album 25 embodies the band’s ingenuity and evolution. As Hoffman notes in a Track By Track feature that appears on Relix.com, “For our 25th anniversary, we were talking about what we were going to do, and I started making this joke that we should release a greatest hits record. Except I thought we should go in and make new recordings of all of these songs, not just compile the songs from their original recordings. But when we started to open the door to the album, we had all these additional ideas. We said, ‘What if we have guests? What if we rerecord songs with our older voices and better playing?’ Then we just started doing all of those things.”

What follows is an oral history in which the five musicians discuss their initial connections to one another, along with the dynamic reverberations.

Dave Bruzza: As I think back, we never anticipated what it would become. We did it because it was something we loved, not because we had serious ambitions for it. I mean we had no ambitions for it.

Mike Bont and I have known each other since 1997. We had a lot of mutual friends in Kalamazoo. At the time I was a drummer around town playing in bands, he played guitar, and we both got along great.

We both had an interest in bluegrass music. I really enjoyed listening to it, although I hadn’t picked up a guitar at this point. Then it kind of happened where a friend of ours, my buddy Scott, who I was in the high school band with, gave me a guitar. I was about 19, I think Mike was 21 or 22 and he got a banjo around the same time. So I literally made the joke that I’m going to play bluegrass guitar.

Michael Bont: I was originally a guitar player. I’ve been playing since I was 10 years old. Then when I was in college I started thinking about becoming a jazz guitar player. While I was in the process of discovering how hard that was, I heard a bluegrass band playing at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo and just loved the sound of the banjo.

I found bluegrass through Jerry Garcia. I was a big Deadhead and had been listening to Jerry Garcia and Old & in the Way. I was amazed by the fact that he was not just a great guitar player, songwriter and singer, but an equally great banjo player, and also pedal steel player, once you realize all the albums that Jerry played pedal steel on.

Then when I was going to turn 21, my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday. She was thinking that she would get me the regular 20 bucks and a card but was I like, “I don’t know, get me a banjo,” not necessarily wanting a banjo per se.

So she actually called my bluff and got me a banjo. Shortly thereafter I saw the bluegrass band at Bell’s and understood what it meant to play a bluegrass banjo. I was like, “Okay, that’s really, really cool,” but in starting to learn it, I realized that learning how to play a banjo is also really hard. [Laughs.]

Ultimately to get to a point where you can play a song requires so many hours of practice that most people give up because they don’t have the time. Luckily for me, I was at a point in my life where I didn’t have a girlfriend and I was a morning sous chef at a restaurant. So I would go to work from eight till three and then come home and play banjo until nine o’clock at night.

I just repeated that cycle for the better part of a year before the first time when it all came together. I was sitting on my front porch one morning, I had my Earl Scruggs book in front of me, and I started playing “Little Cabin Home on the Hill” the way Scruggs would play it. I remember that feeling of, “Holy crap, I’m doing it! I’m playing this how it’s supposed to sound.” This was after months of figuring out how to do that, because back then there you couldn’t go online and get banjo lessons from Tony Trischka or whatever. That wasn’t available at the time.

I would go to this CD store and sort through the bluegrass section. I wouldn’t know any of the artists, but I would look at the back of the CD to see the instrumentation. If it was guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin and upright bass, I’d be like, “This is probably a good one.” Then I’d flip it over, and it would be Flatt and Scruggs or Bill Monroe or something. There might be one that had autoharp, drums and a flute on one of the tracks and I’d say, “Maybe this isn’t what I’m looking for.” So I would find all these bluegrass masters, having no idea who they were.

There was a series of books called Homespun Bluegrass, where you could learn bluegrass but you’d have to order them through a catalog. Nowadays it’s so easy where you can just go to a website and pick some stuff up. I was really just throwing darts at a board and seeing what would hit.

Bruzza: The very core of it was that Bont and I wanted to learn how to play bluegrass. So we would learn the songs off the records we liked, then tried our best to be that thing. Then there was this spot outside of Kalamazoo called the Cooper Cafe where the Lonesome Moonlight Trio—Pete, Pat and Jimmy—would play every Wednesday and Saturday morning. We’d record them on a little tape recorder and then learn those songs.

Then there’s another band around Kalamazoo called Great Lakes Brass we really looked up to that played a lot of traditional bluegrass music. We were focused on doing that, and it was fun. We were also diving into records by Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe and a lot of others. The Seldom Scene was a really big one for me and Bont.

Bont: Dave and I started going to this thing called Bluegrass Breakfast at this cafe just outside of Kalamazoo, out in the country. It took place every Wednesday and Saturday morning and there’d be this three piece traditional bluegrass trio that would play from nine to noon. You could go sit and you could watch these guys play while you’re getting these pancakes that were so big, they were overflowing the edge of the plate.

So we’d go watch these guys play and we’d get inspired. Then Dave and I would head back and play songs that we kind of knew. We weren’t very good bluegrass musicians at the time. We were still learning our instruments because Dave was originally a drummer—a great drummer—but he decided that he was going to learn how to play bluegrass guitar.

Dave was that same way. He was just out of high school and at the time when I met him, he was the go-to drummer in Kalamazoo. If you wanted the best drummer around Kalamazoo, you would call Dave.

At that point I was really into jazz-funk and still played guitar a lot. A lot of the musicians I knew were mad because I took the drummer in Kalamazoo and made him a bluegrass guitar player. [Laughs.]

Bruzza: I play guitar like a drummer. I played drums for years before I even picked up a guitar. Then I learned how to play guitar with an old guy named Al Bates who was in the band for a little while, who played dobro. That’s how I learned how to take leads. I think about what drums add to rock-and roll-music and other types of music, sometimes to a fault. I apply it to how we approach songs. I think it’s as simple as that.

Bont: Dave and I loved bluegrass music, so we were playing bluegrass standards and kind of finding our own voices on our instruments. After we had played a handful of open mics, we were like, “Okay, someone’s got to sing songs.” We both decided that Dave was a stronger singer than myself, which I agree with to this day.

So we started playing these open mics and by this point people were starting to come see Dave and me, as opposed to just going to an open mic and watching whoever play. That’s when Paul came up to us and said he’d like to jam with us.

We were like, “Sure, we’ll give you a chance.” As I remember it, the next day he came skipping down the street with his mandolin over his shoulder, while wearing a hemp fedora with a big peacock feather sticking out of his hat.

He was enthusiastic but he really didn’t know what he was doing yet. So I gave him Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs CDs and was like, “This is how you should chop on a mandolin.” He listened to it and the next time we got together, he could kind of do it.

At the time, he was a major in English lit in college. I remember we would practice in my basement and Paul would be like, “Okay, I’ve got to go because I’ve got to read this entire book before this exam tomorrow.” Then he would stay up all night long, read an entire book and take the exam. He was able to do both those things, and ultimately, I think that’s what led him to be the songwriter that he is nowadays.

Paul Hoffman: As a young musician, I didn’t know what bluegrass was when I bought a mandolin. I was listening to David Grisman and Garcia-Grisman kind of stuff, and that’s not entirely bluegrass. The Seldom Scene was a big bluegrass band for our band as far as an influence. Then obviously—or maybe it’s not obvious—the jambands were big influences.

With New Grass Revival I feel like we sort of followed in their footsteps, although not so much in that we specifically sound like them. It was more like, “We love music, including bluegrass. So here’s how we approach music that’s genuine and true to our taste.”

When I talk about to Sam [Bush] about New Grass Revival, he says that’s what they were doing. They liked the fusion of jazz and other musical styles that they were into, including the way that they were bringing in pop music. They were trying to be poppy, especially with John Cowan singing.

They were just being sincere and genuine to what they liked and challenging the limits of bluegrass in a way that was natural for them. That’s exactly what we do and it makes us kindred spirits.

Sam talks about when they were doing it that they were getting a lot of criticism. They weren’t wearing their hair right and they didn’t look right and all these other things that get talked about in bluegrass music a lot.

I feel so blessed to have picked up the mandolin and told myself, “Sam Bush, I need to listen to this guy.” Now we’re friends and I’m like, “How lucky am I that I got to become friends with my idol and what a role model for a sustainable, amazing career.”

If you hear mandolin on a country record, it’s probably Sam Bush. I’ve stood side stage with him and watched other mandolin players, like Chris Thile, who’s insanely talented. Sam will sit there and embrace it. He’s not judging or comparing his playing to anybody else, he’s just genuinely himself.

That’s what I want in a role model. I want someone to encourage me to be myself and to be authentic and genuine, not just tell me to go practice, although that’s also important. [Laughs.]

Bruzza: Paul was always a very creative forward thinker and very fiercely wanted to do this. He was always interested in writing. So once we kind of solidified playing bluegrass in a way, we all focused on writing songs, which is something I had already started doing.

At one point after we made our first CD, I think we felt like we could do just about anything. Paul would suggest that we play “When Doves Cry” by Prince, so we would play it at Bell’s and people would love it.

I think a lot of the people who were there wouldn’t think of listening to bluegrass on their own, but once they heard something familiar to them, it turned some of them on to more bluegrass. That was definitely something we realized as the years went on.

We all had so many different but also similar musical likes and dislikes. Then at one point, I don’t even think we had a discussion, we were just ourselves. We were writing songs that reflected who we were and how we were feeling and the music that we liked.

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