Music Keeps 'Em Young
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ShareAt that point, Bush had already won a handful of national fiddle championships as the boy wonder from Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was still only a teenager when he formed New Grass Revival, a band that lasted until 1989, albeit in two distinct permutations. The ‘70s New Grass Revival comprised of Bush, John Cowan (replacing original bassist Ebo Walker), Curtis Burch on guitar, and the late Courtney Johnson on banjo. In 1981, Burch and Johnson were replaced by Pat Flynn and Bela Fleck, the lineup that saw the band trading the hippie, John-Hartford-disciples vibe for a glammier, more-electrified sound and look. The result was the band’s first real commercial breakthrough and Top 40 success, but just as soon as they started scoring hit singles, the band called it quits. “Success did us in”, says Bush.
In the post-New Grass Revival years, Bush has played on hundreds (thousands?) of albums as one of Nashville’s top-of-the-wish-list studio aces. He was the musical director of Emmylou Harris’s Nash Ramblers band for a time, but by the late ‘90s, Bush’s decades as one of roots music’s most consistently electrifying instrumentalists and live performers increased his stock. As a result, Bush would go out with a rotating lineup of the world’s most versatile bluegrass ringers, which he would call the Sam Bush Band. This year’s incarnation—Moughin on guitar, Vestal on bass, Brown on drums, and brand-new recruit Todd Parks on bass—is touring in support of Bush’s sixth solo studio album, last year’s Circles Around Me, and he’s clearly hungry to play the new material for audiences like tonight’s.
One thing Bush isn’t keen on anytime soon is a full-blown New Grass Revival reunion. The 30-year anniversary of the formation of the Bush-Fleck-Cowan-Flynn version of New Grass Revival hits in 2011. I ask him—since Bush, Fleck, and Cowan meet at Telluride every year—why not scratch the itch of the faithful by billing a headline set as New Grass Revival? “Because I don’t want to”, Bush answers with a sigh. The anticipation surrounding such an event would be intense, which is partially why Bush is reluctant to restage the band. “We’d have to rehearse for months ahead of time”, he says, somewhat surprisingly, given the alacrity with which these players jam spontaneously with each other and other acts.
Making it look easy is a key aspect of such immense talent, but Bush insists that a New Grass Revival, er, revival wouldn’t be simple at all. “We can collaborate with each other—I can jam with Bela, or Bela can jump on stage with Cowan or whatever, but something about the combination of all of us alone together… within a few minutes, we’re all thinking, ‘Oh, yeah. I remember your ass’”. Bush is quick to point out that it isn’t a matter of bad blood, however; it’s the inevitable result of getting too many natural leaders in the same group.
“Bela and John have been the leaders of their own bands for years now, and I like being the leader of my own band, and no one’s eager to give that up”. He remembers that Bela wanted to quit before New Grass’ last album, 1989’s Friday Night in America, but was talked into one more album and tour before the band dissolved, thereby resulting in a sort of Big Bang of progressive bluegrass. “I remember telling Lynn when I first saw Bela with [the Flecktones] that this was exactly what Bela ought to be doing”.
Bush clearly still loves his own job, as well, one that he’s been doing now for 40-plus years. Such longevity is complemented by the fact that he seems to have a sort of Dorian Gray thing going on; despite the fact that he’s two years away from turning 60, he still looks and moves much like the kid who first came on the scene with his wiry frame and lion’s locks. He has, however, had his share of physical ailments, including two bouts with cancer—beaten since 1987—and, more recently, bone-spur surgery on his foot.
Still, sitting just inches away from him, I was even more impressed with his remarkably youthful visage, so asked him for his secret: “Genes, I guess. My dad didn’t start turning gray until his was almost 70. Plus, music keeps you young. It’s finding something you love doing. I remember even when I had cancer, I’d feel terrible, exhausted all day, but when I got onstage, it was like I wasn’t sick at all”.
Close calls have, naturally, given Bush a keen perception of time, and life in the music industry has placed him close to a long list of mentors and fellow travelers who have gone on before him, including Bill Monroe, Courtney Johnson, bassist Roy Huskey, Jr., and others, and he articulates a transcendental awareness of his existence and the influences of those both here and gone in the title cut of Circles Around Me. It’s his father, Charlie, who died in 2008, however, that Bush talks to me about most. Charlie was a farmer and fiddle-music lover, whose records young Bush he mined for inspiration. He tells me a story about getting bucked off a horse as a child, a foggy memory that he verified with his dad shortly before Charlie died. “I asked him, ‘Did I dream that or did that really happen?’ and he said, ‘Oh, it happened all right’”.
Bush has a sharp memory, as it turns out, easily reeling off specific dates as he tells stories (“That was in the fall of 1974…”), and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of country music history. When I mention that my father was in an obscure Nashville band in the ‘60s called the Homesteaders, his eyes light up. He can tell me the names of every member of the band and then starts singing an old 45 single by the group, rattling off the first verse and chorus as if he’d just rehearsed it, his left hand forming phantom mandolin chords in the air.
Moments later, Lynn reminds him that it’s time to write the setlist for tonight’s show, signaling that our interview is over. A half-hour later, the band is onstage whipping the crowd into a frenzy with bangers like “Riding That Bluegrass Train” and “Bringing in the Georgia Mail”. When Bush plays standards like “Uncle Pen” and, later, a medley of the Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek” and fiddle/banjo standard “Cripple Creek”, the crowd jigs and shouts, causing Bush to march in place a little harder at the microphone, bopping up and down during one sizzling solo after another, as though a lifetime of musical adventure, the passion of the crowd, and the ghosts of his past, are all forming circles around him and dancing, too.
