Hailing from Kalamazoo, Michigan—the city where Orville Gibson first started building acoustic guitars and mandolins over a century ago— Greensky Bluegrass have developed a progressive style over their twelve-year career that blends contemporary musical forms with sounds that trace back to before the invention of Gibson’s Les Paul. Drawing inspiration from acoustic innovators like Béla Fleck and Sam Bush, who launched a movement with their New Grass Revival in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the band’s sound is influenced by the elder statesmen of bluegrass and jambands alike, placing them squarely on the divide between two thriving musical communities.
In October Greensky released Handguns, their fourth studio album as a group and second since adding dobro player Anders Beck to their lineup in 2007. A notoriously prolific live band, they’ve been touring for most of the year since the album dropped, including appearances at festivals large and small this summer. Beck and vocalist, mandolin player and songwriter Paul Hoffman spoke with us between appearances at Telluride Bluegrass Festival and High Sierra Music Festival about their recent tour, festivals, the “newgrass” movement, their genre-crossing live covers and more.
You guys just played with Jimmy Cliff in Michigan, how was that experience?
Anders Beck: It was great. It was sort of a late add-on to our schedule, a support gig. There are things that you never say “no” to, and I think one of those things would be opening for Jimmy Cliff. It’s like a bucket list thing for a bluegrass band. It was really fun. It was a lot of our hometown crowd along with the Jimmy Cliff crowd. I got to hang out with their band a little bit and it was cool to hear that they all dug what we were doing, and to hear a bunch of Jamaican Rasta guys trying to explain to us what bluegrass is in their mind—it was pretty funny. But yeah, it was a great time.
What were they saying about bluegrass?
AB: They’re like “It’s got the reggae, mon, but it’s the blues” and they were talking about how the back, like the chop in bluegrass, you know, the “boom chk boom chk boom chk,” is similar to really fast reggae; it almost has the ska thing going on in a way, which I thought has some sort of correlation to it. They were complimenting all our playing and they really liked Paul’s singing. They said “in Jamaica, mon, they call that ‘good shit’” and I was sort of thinking, you know they say that everywhere too. It was fun, it was a cool experience.
Reggae and bluegrass seem like an unexpected pairing, how did the crowd react? Were they surprised by the acoustic instruments?
AB: I think a lot of the crowd, being that the show was in Michigan, sort of knew us coming into it, and knew that—while we play bluegrass—we also spend a lot of time outside of that bluegrass box. It was definitely a strange pairing, but especially with our kind of bluegrass where there’s a little more space and freeness to be creative— It’s all music is the best way I can describe it, and I think that the crowd felt that way too. So we didn’t get booed off the stage or anything.
You just mentioned the bluegrass “box” and you guys are commonly pegged as contributors to the “newgrass” movement, how do you feel about the whole term “newgrass?”
AB: I think it’s a great term, because bluegrass traditionally is sort of a very finite thing, starting with Bill Monroe back in the day, and then Sam Bush and Béla Fleck, when they started the New Grass Revival, created that as a way to step outside the box, and then their band name became a whole other genre of “newgrass.” The term itself really frees up bands and musicians to use the bluegrass instruments and then do what we do, where we use the bluegrass instruments as a jumping off point for making our own music. And it separates us more from traditional bluegrass, which I think is important when you’re a band like Greensky where you’re trying to write a lot of original material and you’re not just rehashing things that have been done for seventy years in traditional bluegrass.
Paul Hoffman: For me it just means bluegrass with no rules. Everybody comes to bluegrass from a different place, and playing music like bluegrass that’s so seemingly defined, anything that’s outside the norm will set you apart from it. We tend to come to bluegrass from a rock and roll standpoint, so that’s the best description for me. I think that’s Newgrass, I think that’s what those guys did. I was having a conversation with Sam Bush at Telluride and he was telling me stories about the New Grass Revival showing up at festivals with amplifiers and people being real mad about it, and them getting kicked out and not being able to play and stuff. That was new. They’re still kings of bluegrass though, so I’m happy to be a part of it.
What first attracted you to learn an acoustic instrument and play bluegrass?
AB: Well I came from the jamband background. I was big into the Grateful Dead and then Phish, and that was really my musical background. I grew up on the East Coast so I got to see probably 130-some Phish shows before 2000. So that was my musical background—I was an electric guitar player. I moved to Durango, Colorado and stumbled upon bluegrass the way a lot of people do, and I still don’t know if they get enough credit, through Old and In the Way, with the Jerry Garcia connection. After growing up listening to the Grateful Dead, all of a sudden you start to explore and find out that he played banjo in this band, and then you listen to that and all of a sudden you’re listening to David Grisman and Tony Rice. It’s the backwards evolution of bluegrass because you start out with Jerry Garcia-grass and then, at least for me, it made me dig all the way back to Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe, and suddenly I’m listening to this incredibly old music, and so that’s really how I got into bluegrass. And I had been playing a lot of acoustic guitar with friends, and it was just great music to play. It’s the kind of music where you can just sit around and learn songs and play them the next day. And then Telluride Bluegrass Festival had a big influence on me when I decided that, I liked bluegrass and was getting all into it, I saw a dobro workshop in Elks Park, which is where they do their workshops, and that’s when it literally hit me like a ton of bricks that that was the instrument that I wanted to play. I had been looking for it because I was looking for something that combined bluegrass and the acoustic music and the electric guitar that I grew up playing, and the dobro has more sustain and things like that—it’s kind of like the electric guitar of acoustic music.
PH: I was a guitar player growing up, and sort of leaned more towards playing acoustic guitar and singing songs and writing songs than towards getting a Marshall stack amp and learning how to rip like Van Halen. I was turned on to Grisman and Garcia by a friend—I really liked the mandolin and decided to buy one because of Grisman. I think Grisman and Sam Bush were my two biggest influences, stylistically and in the types of music that I played. Both guys are very competent in bluegrass but also have their own styles and twists, and they don’t necessarily adhere to rules. I’ve never been very good at learning every little thing and being that kind of a bluegrass player—which is certainly a handy skill, because when playing with other people you’ve never played with, or if you’re having a jam or something, it’s great if everybody knows the same songs. But for me, learning how to musically express myself on the mandolin and with my voice or with songs and whatever is more important than learning how to play all the tunes and learning how to be the best bluegrass player.
You mentioned a whole list of players that inspired you, but you guys have had the opportunity to play with some legends too—I saw you guys played with both of the drummers from the Grateful Dead. Who have been some of your favorite guests to play with on stage?
PH: We just had Sam Bush up at Telluride—that was pretty awesome and humbling. Like I said, when I started playing the mandolin he was a great inspiration for me. I went and saw him really early on and met him and got his autograph and did that whole fan thing, and now I’ve played with him. That was really awesome. Definitely having Kreutzmann up on drums from The Dead was a really cool thing. Those are the more shocking musical collaborations based on those peoples’ status. Being big fans of them and then having them join our stage is a really big pat on the back, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment. We’ve done some other great musical collaboration too, one of my favorites is Andy Goessling from Railroad Earth sitting in on saxophone—that’s really fun and sounds cool. He’s real familiar with the music because we play with them so much. I think musically that’s been some of the coolest stuff. One of the songs on our All Access Vol. 2 features him playing tenor sax. It just sounds cool.
AB: To date, having Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart both play with us is my favorite. It was, like… I don’t know. I still have a hard time describing it. It was like the coolest possible thing that I can think of happening. To have those guys come up and play on the Greensky Bluegrass stage and feel the power of those two guys playing drums together behind us, it was pretty amazing and absurdly inspiring. For someone who has grown up listening to the Grateful Dead and seen them many times, all of a sudden hearing the way those two guys play—we played “China Rider” with them, and I remember at one point looking back and thinking to myself “Oh I’ve got to tell them…this is where I would have to cue people that the changes are coming” and then I just had to laugh at myself because, not only did they know exactly when they were coming, but they drove our band right into everything perfectly. Other than that having Drew Emmitt and Vince Herman from Leftover Salmon play with us is always an honor, and Nershi from String Cheese—the more bluegrass guys. It always feels really good just because they’re the forefathers of our version of bluegrass music, so it’s always cool just to sit around with them and play tunes and have them come play onstage with us. Not to say that there’s any sort of “passing of the torch” kind of thing or anything, but it’s really encouraging to have them get excited about what we’re doing. Ronnie McCoury is another one that comes to mind, he’s played with us a couple of times recently.
PH: The guest thing can go either way, I think if you ask a lot of bands they have mixed emotions about it. You think “Oh this song would be really cool with horn on it” so you get a horn player up, but it creates complications. I think the easiest way to explain it is that the five of us play 175 shows a year and spend 220 days a year together, so what we’re able to do musically sort of transcends music and goes to the way that we can communicate with each other nonverbally, with just a look, or we can read each other’s body language. I can tell by the melody that one of my other bandmates is creating where he’s going to go with it, and you throw a guest into that situation and they can either inhibit that or they can introduce new things to it, or new flavors and new energy. We try not to have a guest just for the sake of having a guest. We try to make it cool—to make sure that the guest serves the song well.
Is there anyone else you’re dying to play with?
AB: Oh man, yeah… I think that any of the Phish guys would be, just sort of on a personal level, really cool. We’ve had some people sit in on electric guitar and it’s turned out really cool—like Steve Kimock played with us on Jam Cruise once and it’s really interesting how that actually fits in pretty well to what we’re doing. Greensky Bluegrass has a pretty psychedelic side separate from the bluegrass side of the band, so when we get into that space it’s really cool to hear electric guitars or pianos over the pillow that we create musically. Off the top of my head it’s hard to say exactly who, because when you say who then it’s on paper, and the sit-in—at least in my mind—is a really organic thing, you know, you’re backstage at a festival or a gig and someone shows up, it’s more along the line of “Hey, want to come play with us? It’d be really cool” then “Oh, hell yeah, sounds fun.” The second you start putting it on paper it becomes something different I think.
PH: There’s a lot of stuff that we still talk about doing. We’ve got horns on the most recent studio album, it would be cool to do that song with the horns more often. It might be cool to play with a horn section for a whole show or something. Sometimes we talk about playing a set with a drummer, but as a mandolin player that makes my job boring because the snare drum takes over for me. I think a piano would be really cool, just for something different.
Your band is known for covering a massive range of songs from other genres, what do you guys look for in a song that makes you want to add it to your live set?
AB: It’s always a pretty interesting process, because there are two ways we do it. We’ll take a song and we’ll bluegrass it—like Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” we learned that the day that he died as a tribute and we tried to play it true to form, you know, exactly like it is on the record. Then we realized that, rather than do it that way, it would be cooler if we just bluegrass it, and then all of a sudden we’ve got this fast thing that turned out to be really cool. It was supposed to be a one-time-only thing and now we still play it every 5-10 shows. And then the other side of it is songs that we actually play true to their form. It good to do that mostly with the Grateful Dead songs, like “China” > “Rider” or something like that, we’ll play it exactly like they played it. Or we do our best to do so. The thing with covers is that sometimes we’ll pick a cover and we’ll think it’s going to be really cool, and it just doesn’t work—it’s just not that cool. The ones that stick around are the ones that have evolved—they’re a bit more exciting. We really just pick them based on things that would be fun to play and sing and if we think they would work in Greensky Bluegrass.
PH: A lot of times the rhythm of a tune just sounds like it will lend really well to our instrumentation, depending on what the drum beat is or something. A lot of times I want to play songs that are just fun to sing, and sometime that doesn’t work out very well. Not everything translates without the drums and without synthesizers, depending on what we’re trying to do. Also, a lot of the covers we do that get less recognition, but are important to us, are tunes we try to pick up from people we know, just too expand our repertoire and bring our friends’ songs to more listeners. We don’t necessary consider those as much of a “cover,” because when people say “cover” they mean us playing “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. It’s a nice way to challenge ourselves as well. I think I’m a pretty good songwriter, and I write at a pretty good pace, but I certainly know a lot of other writers who write a lot faster than I do. There’s no reason to not be learning songs just because there’s not a new one that we wrote to learn, so a lot of times we’ll learn songs and then we won’t even really play them. Or we’ll play them once and be like “ehh, that’s not super cool.” Then there’s other things like, I remember the day that we were still an open mic band and I suggested we play “When Doves Cry” because I thought that the backbeat would be really good for bluegrass, and here we are, eleven years later, still playing it. It must have worked, because we can’t get away from it. It’s fun to play.
For you, what are the most fun covers to play?
PH: Lately we’ve been playing “Atlantic City” by Bruce Springsteen, sort of a knockoff on The Band’s version of it, and I really dig playing that song. It’s a lot different than anything we play; it’s sort of like a power anthem. It’s a little slower, less charging than a lot of the bluegrass we play. I’m always impressed by the power that the song has over the audience, people really get into it. I hear from a lot of our fans that they really like when we play it, and I think to myself “good, because I like playing it.”
AB: My favorite is still “King of the Hill,” the Bruce Hornsby tune. It’s become quite a jam vehicle for the band, but it always comes back to the Hornsby lick and the verses and stuff. I love the song first of all, and I love what it’s become within the Greensky Bluegrass show. I’ve really been loving playing “Atlantic City,” which we just started. We first played that on Halloween this last year. It’s, you know, the Bruce Springsteen tune that The Band covered, and it’s taken on more weight since Levon Helm died for us. There are literally times when we’ve been playing it on stage and it almost chokes me up. It a heavy tune that’s now heavier since I associate it with Levon Helm since his death. And that’s a song that really has no jamming in it, and it’s just the opposite end where I just love playing that song because it’s such a damn good song. So those are probably my two top favorites at the moment. But ask me again in ten minutes and I might come up with something else.
Greensky has been a fixture on the summer music festival scene for awhile now, how do you think large, destination festivals have affected your career as a group?
PH: I think that it’s been pivotal in exposing us to a wide range of listeners. In a lot of ways that seems like the obvious answer, but being a bluegrass band that sort of genre-bends I think it’s given people the opportunity to see us that wouldn’t normally think that they would like bluegrass. I came to bluegrass the same way—I liked the mandolin first, and then once I liked the mandolin it made sense to listen to bluegrass; I found that I liked it and was kind of surprised. I think it was three years ago—this is our third All Good in a row this year—three years ago we did All Good and we stayed on site, because it was far to leave and we wanted to have fun and leaving was kind of a drag. We decided as a band that it had been a long time since we did a pick in the campground. We felt like we were the token acoustic band because everyone there had electric guitars and drums—I think Pretty Lights may have been playing on the main stage while we were messing around in the campground. So we just played acoustic out in the campground, and CNN ended up doing some video footage of it and putting it on their website. We have a handful of very devoted fans that found us that night in the campground, and that was their first experience seeing us. I don’t even think that those people saw our sets at All Good that year—they just saw that late night pick and it gave them some insight into our personality as well as our music. Unlikely fans of the music become fans of, at least Greensky Bluegrass if not all bluegrass. Hopefully we lead them to a whole new catalog of listening, because I know as a musician and a music lover that there’s nothing more exciting than when you come through a door and there’s all this music you love that you never knew about.
AB: Festivals are an amazing way for fans to get to see a ton of music; I think that’s the most important thing. For us, we basically end up gaining a lot of fans at festivals, because especially now that we’ve been getting embraced even more by the jamband and just bigger music communities than just the bluegrass world we’re playing more music festivals, like Bonnaroo or All Good or Summer Camp, were it’s not tied to acoustic music or bluegrass it’s more just about music. That’s what I like doing because we get to be, not the token bluegrass band, but we sound incredibly original, more so than at a bluegrass festival. At a bluegrass festival we’re the token weird band. On a more personal level I just love the idea of a festival where you can just go for a weekend and be whatever you want and have as much fun as you want and focus on music or focus on partying or focus on whatever you want. It really is a vacation. These festivals really afford a place for people to go and hear new music and just be whatever they want and have absurd amounts of fun, which I think is really special.
Do you guys prepare differently for festivals than your own headlining shows?
AB: A little bit. When we’re doing a 75 minute festival set versus two 75 minute sets and an encore at a Greensky show, we tend to—I make a lot of the setlists with Paul—you try and not only please the people that are our fans, but also try and focus on what songs are going to draw in people that are like “Oh I’m not going to go see that because I don’t like bluegrass.” Then you think about them walking by, and what songs might draw them in. With ten thousand people at a festival, how do you get them to react to Greensky and sort of “get it.” And we try to cram as much music as possible into those 75 minutes. There’s never enough time.
PH: I tend to find that, when we do our own show typically we’re doing two sets, so we’re playing longer, and it’s a more intimate experience because you’re all going there for Greensky, as opposed to at a festival everyone is there for the event, or their favorite band is headlining the event or who knows why they’re there. So I think the festival sets tend to be more of a highlight of what the important material is at the current time. I think at a lot of festivals we play the same couple songs on our main stage sets because right now they’re important songs to us, and with a show of two sets in a theatre or something like that you’re more likely to get a random throwback song or something like that. I think both formats have their qualities. I really enjoy when fall comes around and you get to go back into the normal touring routine, and you get to stretch out a little bit more and try some new tricks. Then all that is like a brush-up and polish before summer comes around and we play these big stages, and it’s like “remember two months ago when we played that one song right before that other song, and it was really cool because we did this and this? Let’s perfect that and do it for 10,000 people instead of the 500 who were at that club.”
How does the experience of a bluegrass festival like Telluride compare to some of the larger Bonnaroo or All Good type events?
PH: I like playing at the Bonnaroo, All Good type events better. I like being the different band or the odd duck more. I feel like it gives us the better staging ground for our eccentricness and our non-bluegrass side, and then also the bluegrass side is more poignant in that setting than it is at a bluegrass festival. Just as an example, we played a festival called Romp in Owensboro, Kentucky last week, and Vince Gill played a bluegrass set before us, and then Jesse McReynolds played before him and both of those bands played “How Mountain Girls Can Love.” I was thinking “wouldn’t it be funny if we also played ‘How Mountain Girls Can Love?’” But I tend to notice at an event like Telluride, when Sam Bush and all these other great players are there, I get a little more intimidated because more people are aware of our craft, and I think as a band we shine playing for people who don’t already know that they love bluegrass. It’s like a conversion process—we’re crusaders converting the savage mainlanders to the new religion of bluegrass. Maybe part of that comes from… people ask a lot “what’s the bluegrass scene like in Michigan?” and the answer is “well, we are.” There are bluegrass festivals in Michigan and stuff, but I think a lot of our early shows in bars and locally were just like that—we were converting a lot of people to bluegrass, and that’s when things like “When Doves Cry” become good ideas. People who don’t like bluegrass are like “Oh, this is really neat!” I know it’s cheesy, but that’s ok.
One last question- who played the kazoo on “Hot Dogs (On Parade)?”
PH: All of us! That was the last thing we did, there’s a champagne cork popping there too if you listen carefully right at the end. We joked around about it the whole time and then did it. The funny thing is we played kazoos through the whole song, all of us. But we didn’t keep it all, but floating around in the archives somewhere there’s an all-kazoo version of that song. It’s pretty much one of the most atrocious things I’ve ever heard.
AB: (laughs) I think that was Dave’s idea. He wrote the song, and we all thought it was sheer genius, because what every bluegrass album needs is a kazoo section, of course. It was one of those things in the studio where it’s like “Is this a good idea or a bad idea?” And we don’t really know. When we hear it we’re like “Well I think it’s awesome.” And then once you send the album to mastering you’re still scratching your head and thinking “Is that awesome?” I think that humor is an important side of music along with everything else, which maybe comes from my background listening to Phish. At the end of “Bring Out Your Dead” on Handguns, which is a heavy, heavy track with distortion and everything, it ends and then the first thing you hear is a kazoo blast into a guitar instrumental song—it makes me laugh every time.
