The Splinters were feature act at the Roslindale Open Mike on June 10, 2013. That means you get to do about 1/2 hour set or more if they like you. We prepared 6 songs and a couple of more in the wings, just in case and got to all of them for about 40 min.
Set List:
Long Journey Home/Old Grey Cat medley
In the Pines
Make Me a Pallet on the Floor
Red Haired Boy
Little Cabin Home on the Hill
My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It
Red Rocking Chair
Needless to say, we had a good time and people seemed to enjoy it, singing along to these old chestnuts.
Here’s a video I posted to youtube, in which I overlaid the sound from the board, so you can’t hear the crowd singing (awwww).
Hope you enjoy it and check out our gig schedule on splintersmusic.com. We kind of have a July vacation break, then 5 gigs in August.
Walsh Farm, NY. July 19-22, 2012. We attended the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival this year. I’m just getting around to writing it up, but it would certainly take a long time to capture all its awesomeness. Summary version: 4 days of listening, picking, and sweating. Yes, it was hot and dry for the most part, which was good, but it also forced you into the shade quite a bit. Luckily the Creekside Stage (aka Masters) was under a tent.
We arrived Wed about 6. J and Jennifer had already staked out a campsite cuz they got their earlier. We were next to 20+ year GF veterans, who had an bunch of campers and giant tents. They drank, swore, and were generally loud, but seemed to settle down over the week perhaps as they became more hungover and subdued. In the Picker’s Paradise, there is always a low hum of banjo and fiddle it seems.
Here’s the list of folks I was able to see:
Creekside Stage
Michael Daves Workshop (with Chris Thile)
Della Mae
Jessie McReynolds
Last part of Tim O’Brien cuz I was at the main stage watching Tony Trischka
Frank Sollivan
Dixie Bee-liners
David Bromberg (he was late and the sound on his guitar was horrible, so left)
Main Stage
Thurs: Dixie Beeliners; Thile-Daves; Bromberg Band
Fri: Deadly Gentlemen; Noam Pilkeny; Tribute to Scruggs, Watson; Del McCoury; David Grisman Sextet; Punch Brothers
When not attending concerts or workshops, J and I jammed, mostly in our campsite area, once with some friends we knew there. The whole idea was to play as much as possible, so we did that.
The food at the midway was excellent. I didn’t feel that compelled to cook at the campsite – who wants to do dishes and whatnot?
That’s it for now. Sorry I can’t review every concert we went to…no time, gotta practice!
April 21, 2012. Boston, MA – Peter Rowan and Tony Rice, along with the Travelin’ McCoury’s came to Boston’s Wilbur Theatre for a night of “The Music of Bill Monroe”. They played 2 sets of just under an hour, including the encore number. All of the tunes were songs written or recorded by Bill Monroe. We were sitting right in front of the stage, so had a good view of everything, although the sound was mostly behind us. Still, you could definitely here the acoustic instruments from where we were sitting. There were only a handful of mikes on stage and the members of the band moved around to get into position to play or sing. It was quite the ballet sometimes. And did I mention that Tony Rice was right in front of me!! Playing the 1935 Martin D-28 (58597) he got from Clarence White!! What a treat!
Here’s the set list:
Set 1
Long Journey Home
Bluegrass Breakdown
In the Pines
I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome
Groundspeed
Tony Rice Intro by Peter(21:30)
The First Whippoorwill
Used to Be (Uncle Jerry singing)
Uncle Pen
The Old Old House(George Jones hit)
Live and Let Live
Cheyenne (‘here that now, that’s the Indian sound’ Also where The Land of the Navajo originated, a song by Rowan)
Set 2
Blue Moon of Kentucky (in 3, then 4)
I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling
Walls of Time
Kentucky Mandolin
Beautiful Life (quartet singing, Pete and Tony accompany)
Blue Night (Jerry lead vocal)
This Land – bass/banjo duet
Molly and Tenbrooks
Footprints in the Snow (audience request – “you’re in New England, play Footprints!”)
With Body and Soul
Salt Creek
Muleskinner Blues – Encore
The concert started simply with just Peter Rowan(guitar, vocals) and Ronnie McCoury (mandolin, vocals) singing Long Journey Home before the band strolled on stage to kick it into high gear. Peter Rowan has a great voice and is still going strong from the looks of things. The rest of the band members were: Rob McCoury (banjo), Jason Carter (fiddle), and Jerry McCoury (bass). Jerry was apparently subbing for the regular bass player who had to be back home waiting for a baby delivery. This was some high caliber bluegrass!
The next song was “the first bluegrass instrumental ever recorded” with Earl Scruggs on banjo: Bluegrass Breakdown. This gave everyone a chance to blister the strings on a quick one. The band was tight! Of course, they were playing all these bluegrass standards, which they’ve probably played a million times, so even if they never rehearsed before, it’s okay! In fact, Peter noted that ‘we don’t have tuners on our instruments’ and that they also didn’t have a set list (at least one that was written down). He claimed that they never knew what Bill Monroe was going to play or what key it was going to be in – Monroe would just chop a chord and you better get goin’!
There were certainly a few tributes to Earl Scruggs, since he contributed mightily to the bluegrass sound, along with Bill Monroe. A tune written by Scruggs, Groundspeed, was led by Rob McCoury. Both Ronnie and Jason Carter had amazing solos on this with good support from the band.
“The most influential guitar player in the history of bluegrass…” came on the stage after that – Tony Rice! I had never seen him play before (that I recall, anyway). I was getting goosebumps just watching him, and the guitar is legendary. Even while he was tuning up, you could hear its power. As Peter said while Tony was tuning on stage, “It doesn’t cost a thing, but I’d pay to hear that.” It took about the first set for Tony to warm up. He does not look in the peak of health, even though he’s only 60 yrs old. A couple of times you could hear him talk on stage from where we were and he sounded like Miles Davis with the croaky voice. I was surprised watching him that he actually flubbed a few notes! Others around me were speculating about arthritis – at times it looked like he was telling his fingers to do something but they were not cooperating the same way as in the past. What people may not notice immediately was that the rhythm playing added another dimension on top of what Peter was playing. There were times when he added these jazzy chords to the progression that caused everyone to smile. Over the course of the night the solos got better and better. In particular, Walls of Time and Kentucky Mandolin, Cheyenne, and Salt Creek, were highlights. It looked like the rest of the band was enjoying listening to Tony, too, almost in reverence.
Other highlights included the singing and bass playing of “Uncle Jerry” McCoury. The bass was solid throughout and he has one of those good country voices with a little bit of twang. Jason Carter on fiddle was inspirational in his playing, either as a lead or accompanying. I really enjoyed the song, Beautiful Life, which had a simple guitar accompaniment but the feature was the quartet singing around the microphone. And did I mention the awesome banjo and bass duet on This Land?
I guess there wasn’t anything I didn’t like about this concert. The sound could have been better from where we were sitting, that’s my only complaint.
Here’s Salt Creek from that night – Enjoy. Salt Creek.mp3
I hope they make another visit up to New England soon!
J and I played at the West Roxbury Open Mike, which J emcees each month. The video below captures our performance of Oh Susanna. We first played this tune up in Maine one weekend just goofing around and it stuck. After each taking a chorus for improvising, we play together in a counterpoint before taking it to the finish.
(I don’t know why WordPress doesn’t display youtube videos sometimes, so here’s the link to it.)
Cold Frosty Morning > Old Grey Cat – this one we played 2 choruses of each tune and switched back and forth. The first one is in Am and the second in Em, gives it a cool effect.
Blackberry Blossom > Kitchen Girl. Blackberry we did medium tempo 3 times through, then pick it up a notch for Kitchen Girl. It’s high energy.
December 13, 2011. Boston, MA – I finally got to see and hear Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on their last concert of the tour. This was previously scheduled for Oct. 27 but got rescheduled due to a bout of laryngitis. It was certainly worth the wait, and as Gillian said during the concert, “It gave us a chance to fix a few things…” including a crack in her guitar (Gibson J-50, which you can see in the Fall 2011 issue of Fretboard Journal with Welch on the cover, showing the guitar with tape on it.) and a banjo repair. They seemed very relaxed and Rawlings family had come in from RI and were sitting right in front of us, adding to the familiarity. They are pretty funny in the banter dept. too.
The pair were in fine form on this second night of two at the Wilbur Theatre, which is a great venue for them. We were in the mezzanine about 5 rows up and the sound and sight-lines were excellent. This was a “standing room on the floor” gig, which I think is a stupid way to enjoy a concert, but whatever…we had seats. Much better than the House of Blues when we saw Dave Rawlings Machine with Old Crow Medicine show and others, where the seats are too far back and the crowd was too noisy during the Rawlings/Welch set.
The stage setting is very sparse, with only mikes on stage for the 2 guitars and 2 vocalists – no plugging in here, and they have the luxury of getting the sound just right with the microphones. The other notable stage prop is “The Box” which sits between them and contains everything they might need on stage, from strings to picks to harmonicas. The other noteworthy item was they had to stand on a rubber mat so they wouldn’t get shocked by the microphones!
The music itself is just what I expected, and more. Welch typically will crouch down away from the mics and start getting into the right groove before beginning the song. It was a real lesson in focus and intimacy. While Welch holds down the rhythm, Rawlings weaves his magic in and around the vocals. Their voices blend so well, it is sometimes hard to tell who is singing without looking at them. They started with Scarlett Town, off of the new album, “The Harrow and the Harvest”. This gives plenty of room for both of them and got us ready for what was to come.
Highlights for me were Scarlett Town (a great song, strong start), Make Me a Palette, 6 White Horses (with the dance – “I usually do this in private only…”), I Hear Them Alland the encores were just perfect, I’ll Fly Away with the audience singing along and ending with White Rabbit. I think they worked in all of the tunes from the new album and they sound like timeless classics, well-integrated with the older songs.
Gillian posted the handwritten set list to her twitter feed (@gillianwelch, but not much tweeting there). The concert started at 8:20 (I think they were late getting dinner at Legal!). The first set ended at 9:10. After a 20 min break, the second set was from 9:30-10:15 with the encores extending the show to 10:50.
Here it is in text form…and more accurate, in my opinion.
Scarlett Town
Make me a Pallete on the floor – ref. Doc Watson
Rock of ages
The Way It Will Be
Annabelle
I Want to Sing that Rock and Roll
That’s the Way it Goes
Silver Dagger
Red Clay
Second set:
Hard Times
Down Along The Dixie Line
Elvis Presley Blues
Ms Ohio – ‘she wants to do right, but not right now’ << classic line.
6 White Horses – with G doin a dance and Dave on banjo
I Hear Them All/This Land medley – led by Dave
My Wrecking Ball
Caleb Meyer
Encore
Tennessee
I’ll Fly Away – audience sing-a-long!
Time the Revelator
The Way the Whole Thing Ends
White Rabbit – turn up the reverb!
Other reviews worth reading: Jambands (includes good pic).
Now, go buy the new album so they’ll make another one before 8 years passes by.
J Johnson and I did a mini-set at Nourish Open Mike run by Ellen Schmidt. That means instead of the usual one song per act we got to do three songs before the feature act. We started with the fast fiddle tune, June Apple, then slowed it down a bit with Ook Pik Waltz, and ended up with the crowd-pleasing (we hope) Cluck Old Hen. These three songs pretty much sums up what we’re about.
I used my little Canon Elf camera to record it and it came out pretty good, except for the annoying glare from the mirror. Maybe I’ll get the official video from the soundman instead. I’m going to try to replace the audio on these videos with the one from the sound board – we’ll see how that goes in iMovie. 🙂
Enjoy. Here’s June Apple, a traditional fiddle tune in A.
On Sept 26 we went to the Homegrown Coffeehouse, in Needham, MA at the UU church to see Red Molly, an excellent group who we saw the past summer at Club Passim. Before the show, we went to eat at Sweet Basil, around the corner, a place that does not take reservations! Therefore, while we were waiting the 20-30 minutes, we went over to the church to see if we had to pay or what (Emily had ordered tickets online awhile ago).
While trying to figure out where the entrance was (on the side), I saw one of the group (Abbie) in the window and gave her a vigorous wave, to which she replied with her own wave. Then we went in and up the stairs to see the place and Abby and Laurie came out and chatted us up a bit. The guy in charge let us go in and put our coats on some seats in the front, which was fortuitous because when we came back to go in there was a big line, even at 7:30. The church is so small that there really wasn’t a bad seat.
Of course, I can’t remember the entire set list…but at the end, when we went up to the stage to chat them up some more (J had questions about the dobro – a Scheerhorn Wechter – and I wanted to get a closer look at the acoustic bass guitar – a $400 Dean), they said they had 16 songs over the 2 sets. Some of the songs that they did were, in no particular order:
Caleb Meyer (first song – Abbie in lead)
Summertime (by Carolann)
Wayfaring Stranger
A solo by Carolann
Long Ride Home (Patty Griffin)
The Mind of a Soldier (winner of the John Lennon songwriting contest)
It’s Good-bye and So Long to You
A Tim O’Brien learned song I don’t know the name of…
May I Suggest (a stunning a capella song that they did as an encore and in the center of the church with no mic’s…a religious experience right there!)
Jud Caswell, of Brunswick, ME, opened the night with an excellent set. He sat down front without amplification to do “Blackberry Time”, which made it all feel so cozy. He also came out in the middle of the Molly’s set to sing the song that gave them their name, by Richard Thompson.
Red Molly comes up to the Boston area a few times a year, so make sure you go check them out when they do, before they get too famous and you won’t be able to get close to them!
