A Conversation with Steve Martin
A feature drawing on this interview appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 23, 2010
It was great fun to interview Steve Martin, an actor, comedian, writer, and, yes, musician that I’ve admired for a long time. Martin is on tour promoting his Grammy-winning bluegrass album “The Crow” and he called from New York. As we began the conversation, I mentioned that St. Louis was the home town of the late John Hartford, with whom Martin worked on “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” in the 1960s. “I just bought his old banjo,” Martin said. “It has his name – he inscribed his name on the inside of the pot of the banjo. I worked with him when I was a beginning comedy writer, and that’s the banjo that he had at that time. He inscribed his address on the inside, too. It was a real thrill to be able to get it.”
I also mentioned the Dillards, the bluegrass band perhaps best known for their appearances on “The Andy Griffith Show.” “It’s funny,” Martin said, “You’re talking about two of my – well, I can’t say John Hartford really influenced me, because I was so in awe of him and I couldn’t do anything that he did. I mean, he was so great. But the Dillards certainly influenced me to get into bluegrass. Because I saw them maybe three years before I met John. Or four years, so I was already on my way. But John Hartford was a sweetheart.”
At one point, I told Martin about a trip I took to Aspen, Colorado, in 1978. My friend Jerome and I drove all over the state, sleeping in the back of his beat-to-death Datsun pickup, and we eventually wound up in Aspen where we barely were able to scrape up the cash for a hotel room. Warm and dry at last, I started looking through the phone book for celebrities that I knew lived there. There were several “S. Martin” listings, but I didn’t want to guess, so instead I dialed the number of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band drummer Jimmy Fadden. His girlfriend answered and was friendly as we chatted, telling me that Fadden was in Golden, where the next night he’d play with the Dirt Band at Red Rocks Amphitheater. Jerome and I piled back in the truck and made it to the concert the next night where we were lucky enough to meet Dirt Band banjo player – and Martin’s good friend, John McEuen.
Despite my confession of stalker tendencies, Martin talked to me at length.
It seems like you’ve always got so many projects going in various media. How did it come about that this album finally happened?
Well, it’s a little bit – it’s incremental. I’ll try to shorten it. But earl Scruggs asked me, about 10 years ago, to play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on one of those, you know, bluegrass jam cuts on one of his records. And I played and I realized, “Ah, I’m a little rusty.” So I just started playing again more regularly. And you know, I had written songs years ago, about four or five songs. More than that, actually. And I started just getting back into it again. I started writing a few songs and then Tony Trischka asked me to play – he was making a double banjo record. He asked me to play and he said, “Well, what do you want to play?” I said, “You know, it doesn’t do any good just to play an Earl Scruggs tune.” They could just get Earl Scruggs and he could play it more like Scruggs than I could. I said, “I do have some songs of my own.” And he came over and I played three or four of the songs, and one of them was “The Crow.” He said, “Oh, let’s do that one.” I said, “Okay,” so we recorded it, and it was one of the cuts on his “Double Bluegrass Banjo Spectacular” album, and it became a little bit of a hit in the bluegrass world…which means it sold a hundred.
And that encouraged me. I thought, “How many songs do I have?” And I thought maybe I could do an album where I would play maybe four songs, or I could actually choose my favorite banjo tunes and do one of those kinds of albums. You know, banjo tunes from other players, even just from prerecorded things. But then I thought, “Wait, I’ve got a dozen songs here. I could actually do my own record.” And I thought, “For one thing, I’m not getting any younger. And I’d wake up in the morning and my fingers would hurt. So I just booked a date, called Tony Trischka, Pete Wernick and John McEuen, we all got together, and bingo, we started recording.
If you had done it the other way, I think it would have been viewed as a bit of a novelty. With you writing all the tunes as well, it shows the full range of what you’re about.
Well, I did think that it’s important that I do all my own songs. I can’t do bluegrass standards. There’s 50 bands who could do bluegrass standards, so the only contribution I can make is to play all my own songs. That was the premise of the record and that’s why I called it very specifically “New Songs for the Five String Banjo.” I thought, well, that at least makes it something a little different.
I was amazed at the album’s success, because here you have essentially a banjo record (laughs).
Which like you said, would sell a hundred. But in your case, it became the best-selling bluegrass album of last year and won a Grammy.
It’s incredible. It’s thrilling. And you know, what’s really thrilling is, I get the feeling that people really like the songs and they like the music. I don’t get much feedback other than the Amazon.com letters (laughs), but they say, “I liked every song on the record.” That kind of thing.
You’re not doing the fast, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” kind of thing for the whole album. There’s some slower, more reflective stuff. And actually, I was going to ask you to take one of the songs and take me through your writing process.
Sure. Well, first of all, I’ll preface this by saying I deeply believe the banjo is a romantic instrument. It is very evocative. To me, Irish folk music is very evocative and soulful and mournful. I think the banjo has all of that. It has joy, it has sadness, it has melancholy. And that’s the type of banjo music I grew up on. I grew up on bluegrass, but I also grew up on sort of weird, folky banjo playing and frailing, or clawhammer. All of that – you’ll notice, it’s all on the record. There’s a little sampling of each, and that’s not because I wanted to give a sample, it’s because that’s the way I play the banjo. There’s some clawhamer – I grew up calling it frailing, that’s why I always slip into frailing. But they now call it clawhamer – and that’s the style that’s played without picks.
Like, for example, let’s take the song “The Crow.” Now, I love…the reason that song sounds the way it does is, that’s in the tuning. They call it double C tuning. That’s an open tuning. The banjo’s usually played in open G. You strum it and you get a G chord. But when you strum it in double C you get a modal chord. And it’s already heartrending. So that’s where you begin with that tuning of the banjo. I said, I love this tuning that much, and I was influenced by another player named Tony Ellis, who plays a lot in double C, or drop C. Tony Ellis is playing very romantic-type songs on the banjo. I think “The Crow,” that particular song, because it’s in double C tuning, it automatically is evocative. That tuning is just evocative. A lot of the songs originate…I say, “Okay, I want this tune to sound like a Scruggs tune.” But it has to be original, obviously. Or I say, “I want this to sound like that song I heard 40 years ago that got me hearing the modal sound of the banjo,” blah blah blah. And I try to write from an emotion, I guess. Almost a memory of how I felt when I first heard a particular sound coming from the banjo. So I try to write the sound of it. I have a good friend, Pete Wernick, who is a banjo player and he said, “One of the most common things people say about the banjo, people who don’t know anything about the banjo, they say, ‘I always liked the sound of the banjo.’” The sound. And I guess that’s true. ‘Cause I’m in love with the sound of it, too.
You mentioned a lot of the feelings that you had when you first heard the banjo. Is that what inspired you to play?
It definitely was the sound. Because I heard…there was a sort of folk music craze around the early '60s and it hit the whole nation, but it hit California really big. And you’d hear these records, like, by the Kingston Trio and it was almost like looking at something through a field of corn. You try to part the corn – meaning I was trying to part all these other instruments, and go “What is THAT sound?” It’s like there’s a banjo hidden behind the corn (laughs). You go, “What is that?” You’re focusing so hard. And it’s a banjo. And you have to understand, the only thing I had ever heard was a four-string banjo. That’s that sort of Dixieland thing. But the five- string, to me, in this case, it just changed everything. So I went from to four-string to hearing Pete Seeger or the Kingston Trio strumming. And then on to Earl Scruggs. And that’s when the heavens just opened.
Later, the banjo became part of your comedy act. Was that simply a case of using everything you’ve got?
Yes, absolutely. You have to understand when you’re starting in comedy, the hardest thing to find is material and filling the time. If you have to do 20 minutes, you gotta do 20 minutes (laughs). Yeah, I played the banjo, I did magic, I did juggling, I read poetry, I did everything to fill up 20 minutes and the banjo got dragged along with me. But it was good practice. I learned to play the banjo onstage, really. You can’t blow it when you’re onstage. You learn to do it no matter what.
That was such a great secret weapon, too. I don’t think anybody thought you could really play.
I always think it’s important when you’re doing an act where you look like a fuckup – that you have something to show that, oh, you can actually do something.
I was astonished to find out that you were present for the sessions for the Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” album. And I know the connection between your manager, who is John McEuen's brother. But what was it like to be there and even get to record some of your own stuff during those sessions?
Well, you know, if I only knew what a thrill it was THEN… I know now. But my manager Bill McEuen made it very clear to me that this was a huge thrill. It was like the last time…he kept saying, “This is the last time all these musicians will be together.” I didn’t get to meet Mother Maybelle (Carter) but I got to meet Vassar Clements and…I don’t remember who I met and who I didn’t, frankly. And Earl was there and Doc Watson. I met Earl. He’s a sweetheart. When you’re in it, you’re not outside of it, you’re just in it.
Some of those songs that you recorded back then wound up on “The Crow,” but in new versions, correct?
Yeah, re-recorded. Yes. I figured it’d be cheating if I couldn’t play them again. That would be cheating.
You haven’t been on the road in decades, doing standup or whatever. What has the experience been like now and how did you prepare for going out for a full music tour?
It’s been great. First of all, not to have the pressure of performing comedy for an hour and a half – there’s music there, and music is essentially soothing – although not everyone calls banjo music soothing (laughs). I have five other guys onstage. I used to be alone. At first, I was a little nervous, but then I got relaxed and confident, and now I’m hoping to just fully and completely enjoy it. That’s why I wanted to do it again, that’s why I booked a second tour. I thought, “Gee, we worked up a pretty good show. I don’t want to just throw it away.” And now we have a dozen new songs and the only way to do that is to try ‘em out and take ‘em on the road.
Will there be another album?
Yeah, we’re going to do another album. I’m going to do it with the Steep Canyon Rangers. And we’re going to record it in August. And I don’t know when it’ll be out. It’s called “Jubilation Day” – that’s a working title.
You’re going to be playing some huge festivals, but you’ve done standup in front of stadiums. But this time you’re doing it without an arrow through your head.
Yeah. Well, actually, when you get to this stage in your career, you really have done it all. And so to walk out in front of a hundred thousand people, you know, I’ve done that before. Walk out live on the Oscars…yeah, I’ve done it before.
A feature drawing on this interview appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 23, 2010
It was great fun to interview Steve Martin, an actor, comedian, writer, and, yes, musician that I’ve admired for a long time. Martin is on tour promoting his Grammy-winning bluegrass album “The Crow” and he called from New York. As we began the conversation, I mentioned that St. Louis was the home town of the late John Hartford, with whom Martin worked on “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” in the 1960s. “I just bought his old banjo,” Martin said. “It has his name – he inscribed his name on the inside of the pot of the banjo. I worked with him when I was a beginning comedy writer, and that’s the banjo that he had at that time. He inscribed his address on the inside, too. It was a real thrill to be able to get it.”
I also mentioned the Dillards, the bluegrass band perhaps best known for their appearances on “The Andy Griffith Show.” “It’s funny,” Martin said, “You’re talking about two of my – well, I can’t say John Hartford really influenced me, because I was so in awe of him and I couldn’t do anything that he did. I mean, he was so great. But the Dillards certainly influenced me to get into bluegrass. Because I saw them maybe three years before I met John. Or four years, so I was already on my way. But John Hartford was a sweetheart.”
At one point, I told Martin about a trip I took to Aspen, Colorado, in 1978. My friend Jerome and I drove all over the state, sleeping in the back of his beat-to-death Datsun pickup, and we eventually wound up in Aspen where we barely were able to scrape up the cash for a hotel room. Warm and dry at last, I started looking through the phone book for celebrities that I knew lived there. There were several “S. Martin” listings, but I didn’t want to guess, so instead I dialed the number of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band drummer Jimmy Fadden. His girlfriend answered and was friendly as we chatted, telling me that Fadden was in Golden, where the next night he’d play with the Dirt Band at Red Rocks Amphitheater. Jerome and I piled back in the truck and made it to the concert the next night where we were lucky enough to meet Dirt Band banjo player – and Martin’s good friend, John McEuen.
Despite my confession of stalker tendencies, Martin talked to me at length.
It seems like you’ve always got so many projects going in various media. How did it come about that this album finally happened?
Well, it’s a little bit – it’s incremental. I’ll try to shorten it. But earl Scruggs asked me, about 10 years ago, to play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on one of those, you know, bluegrass jam cuts on one of his records. And I played and I realized, “Ah, I’m a little rusty.” So I just started playing again more regularly. And you know, I had written songs years ago, about four or five songs. More than that, actually. And I started just getting back into it again. I started writing a few songs and then Tony Trischka asked me to play – he was making a double banjo record. He asked me to play and he said, “Well, what do you want to play?” I said, “You know, it doesn’t do any good just to play an Earl Scruggs tune.” They could just get Earl Scruggs and he could play it more like Scruggs than I could. I said, “I do have some songs of my own.” And he came over and I played three or four of the songs, and one of them was “The Crow.” He said, “Oh, let’s do that one.” I said, “Okay,” so we recorded it, and it was one of the cuts on his “Double Bluegrass Banjo Spectacular” album, and it became a little bit of a hit in the bluegrass world…which means it sold a hundred.
And that encouraged me. I thought, “How many songs do I have?” And I thought maybe I could do an album where I would play maybe four songs, or I could actually choose my favorite banjo tunes and do one of those kinds of albums. You know, banjo tunes from other players, even just from prerecorded things. But then I thought, “Wait, I’ve got a dozen songs here. I could actually do my own record.” And I thought, “For one thing, I’m not getting any younger. And I’d wake up in the morning and my fingers would hurt. So I just booked a date, called Tony Trischka, Pete Wernick and John McEuen, we all got together, and bingo, we started recording.
If you had done it the other way, I think it would have been viewed as a bit of a novelty. With you writing all the tunes as well, it shows the full range of what you’re about.
Well, I did think that it’s important that I do all my own songs. I can’t do bluegrass standards. There’s 50 bands who could do bluegrass standards, so the only contribution I can make is to play all my own songs. That was the premise of the record and that’s why I called it very specifically “New Songs for the Five String Banjo.” I thought, well, that at least makes it something a little different.
I was amazed at the album’s success, because here you have essentially a banjo record (laughs).
Which like you said, would sell a hundred. But in your case, it became the best-selling bluegrass album of last year and won a Grammy.
It’s incredible. It’s thrilling. And you know, what’s really thrilling is, I get the feeling that people really like the songs and they like the music. I don’t get much feedback other than the Amazon.com letters (laughs), but they say, “I liked every song on the record.” That kind of thing.
You’re not doing the fast, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” kind of thing for the whole album. There’s some slower, more reflective stuff. And actually, I was going to ask you to take one of the songs and take me through your writing process.
Sure. Well, first of all, I’ll preface this by saying I deeply believe the banjo is a romantic instrument. It is very evocative. To me, Irish folk music is very evocative and soulful and mournful. I think the banjo has all of that. It has joy, it has sadness, it has melancholy. And that’s the type of banjo music I grew up on. I grew up on bluegrass, but I also grew up on sort of weird, folky banjo playing and frailing, or clawhammer. All of that – you’ll notice, it’s all on the record. There’s a little sampling of each, and that’s not because I wanted to give a sample, it’s because that’s the way I play the banjo. There’s some clawhamer – I grew up calling it frailing, that’s why I always slip into frailing. But they now call it clawhamer – and that’s the style that’s played without picks.
Like, for example, let’s take the song “The Crow.” Now, I love…the reason that song sounds the way it does is, that’s in the tuning. They call it double C tuning. That’s an open tuning. The banjo’s usually played in open G. You strum it and you get a G chord. But when you strum it in double C you get a modal chord. And it’s already heartrending. So that’s where you begin with that tuning of the banjo. I said, I love this tuning that much, and I was influenced by another player named Tony Ellis, who plays a lot in double C, or drop C. Tony Ellis is playing very romantic-type songs on the banjo. I think “The Crow,” that particular song, because it’s in double C tuning, it automatically is evocative. That tuning is just evocative. A lot of the songs originate…I say, “Okay, I want this tune to sound like a Scruggs tune.” But it has to be original, obviously. Or I say, “I want this to sound like that song I heard 40 years ago that got me hearing the modal sound of the banjo,” blah blah blah. And I try to write from an emotion, I guess. Almost a memory of how I felt when I first heard a particular sound coming from the banjo. So I try to write the sound of it. I have a good friend, Pete Wernick, who is a banjo player and he said, “One of the most common things people say about the banjo, people who don’t know anything about the banjo, they say, ‘I always liked the sound of the banjo.’” The sound. And I guess that’s true. ‘Cause I’m in love with the sound of it, too.
You mentioned a lot of the feelings that you had when you first heard the banjo. Is that what inspired you to play?
It definitely was the sound. Because I heard…there was a sort of folk music craze around the early '60s and it hit the whole nation, but it hit California really big. And you’d hear these records, like, by the Kingston Trio and it was almost like looking at something through a field of corn. You try to part the corn – meaning I was trying to part all these other instruments, and go “What is THAT sound?” It’s like there’s a banjo hidden behind the corn (laughs). You go, “What is that?” You’re focusing so hard. And it’s a banjo. And you have to understand, the only thing I had ever heard was a four-string banjo. That’s that sort of Dixieland thing. But the five- string, to me, in this case, it just changed everything. So I went from to four-string to hearing Pete Seeger or the Kingston Trio strumming. And then on to Earl Scruggs. And that’s when the heavens just opened.
Later, the banjo became part of your comedy act. Was that simply a case of using everything you’ve got?
Yes, absolutely. You have to understand when you’re starting in comedy, the hardest thing to find is material and filling the time. If you have to do 20 minutes, you gotta do 20 minutes (laughs). Yeah, I played the banjo, I did magic, I did juggling, I read poetry, I did everything to fill up 20 minutes and the banjo got dragged along with me. But it was good practice. I learned to play the banjo onstage, really. You can’t blow it when you’re onstage. You learn to do it no matter what.
That was such a great secret weapon, too. I don’t think anybody thought you could really play.
I always think it’s important when you’re doing an act where you look like a fuckup – that you have something to show that, oh, you can actually do something.
I was astonished to find out that you were present for the sessions for the Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” album. And I know the connection between your manager, who is John McEuen's brother. But what was it like to be there and even get to record some of your own stuff during those sessions?
Well, you know, if I only knew what a thrill it was THEN… I know now. But my manager Bill McEuen made it very clear to me that this was a huge thrill. It was like the last time…he kept saying, “This is the last time all these musicians will be together.” I didn’t get to meet Mother Maybelle (Carter) but I got to meet Vassar Clements and…I don’t remember who I met and who I didn’t, frankly. And Earl was there and Doc Watson. I met Earl. He’s a sweetheart. When you’re in it, you’re not outside of it, you’re just in it.
Some of those songs that you recorded back then wound up on “The Crow,” but in new versions, correct?
Yeah, re-recorded. Yes. I figured it’d be cheating if I couldn’t play them again. That would be cheating.
You haven’t been on the road in decades, doing standup or whatever. What has the experience been like now and how did you prepare for going out for a full music tour?
It’s been great. First of all, not to have the pressure of performing comedy for an hour and a half – there’s music there, and music is essentially soothing – although not everyone calls banjo music soothing (laughs). I have five other guys onstage. I used to be alone. At first, I was a little nervous, but then I got relaxed and confident, and now I’m hoping to just fully and completely enjoy it. That’s why I wanted to do it again, that’s why I booked a second tour. I thought, “Gee, we worked up a pretty good show. I don’t want to just throw it away.” And now we have a dozen new songs and the only way to do that is to try ‘em out and take ‘em on the road.
Will there be another album?
Yeah, we’re going to do another album. I’m going to do it with the Steep Canyon Rangers. And we’re going to record it in August. And I don’t know when it’ll be out. It’s called “Jubilation Day” – that’s a working title.
You’re going to be playing some huge festivals, but you’ve done standup in front of stadiums. But this time you’re doing it without an arrow through your head.
Yeah. Well, actually, when you get to this stage in your career, you really have done it all. And so to walk out in front of a hundred thousand people, you know, I’ve done that before. Walk out live on the Oscars…yeah, I’ve done it before.