Myself, and the untold number of people I have been lucky enough to lift a free music lesson off of without paying for them. I list the following as my heroes:
- The first fiddler I ever saw as a child of 10 in Georgia at a fair
- Malcolm (Bo) Macdonald, my late grandfather who let me tear around their house in Chicago playing air-clarinet to his old swing band records as a child
- My parents for buying me a sax, harmonica and guitar as a child
- My friend Chris from Ohio who took up harmonica at the same time I did in middle school
- Dave Evans (Cleveland, Ohio) who taught me to teach myself about music and thus eliminate the need to sit in a 6'x6' room that smells of sweat and gym shoes for lessons
- The unknown townie in an Athens, Ohio biker bar (The Smiling Skull) who goaded me into sitting in with a band via the reverse psychology trick "Awww, you're problably not good enough anyway!"
- The homeless guy I saw in Washington DC in 1999 who played a homemade drum kit constructed of pickle buckets, bunjee cords, traffic cones and a British cop whistle
- Every woman I've dated who if things didn't work out gave me a wealth of songwriting ideas/self-psychotherapy sessions
- Every musician who has ever sat in the front row of a show of mine with their arms folded and turned up their nose at my playing with comments such as "You're not doing it right..." or "Do you know who I am?" and made an ass of themselves for my benefit
- Anyone who has ever seen a show of mine and actually delved into the music that I played via old records or live performances.
-Anyone who organizes their music collection autobiographically.
The players include:
Don Rawson-vocals, guitars, upright bass, tenor sax, fiddle, writer of songs, producer.
Chris O'Neill-drums, original music afficionado.
Kevin Scanlon-clawhammer banjo, resident mad dog.
Matt "Mr.Steel" Smith- steel guitar.
Jason "Lips" Robinson- piano.
Chris Kakacek-trumpet.
Derick Johnson-trombone
Scotty Roberts-tuba
Jeff Knorr-accordion, piano, horn arrangement, engineer and wellspring of good ideas, Collapseable Recording Studios, Asheville N.C..
Brad "The Popester" Pope- idea-bouncer-offer and engineer of now defunct Dorm Room Studios (now Audio Biography Studios, Asheville, N.C.) for help using a computer and being the guy who told me in so many words "Hell yeah, make an album, what are you waiting for?".
Greg Stiglets, cover design.
Greg Stiglets, Neal Crowley, Kevin Scanlon, Tom Dudley, Brad Pope and others who let me have a peep of their original music on hastily burned CDs with no label or list of songs in order to see what's out there.
By the way feel free to check out the pictures section too as you can take a peep at the cover design by Greg Stiglets and read the blog putting the call out to any who would desire to do something different musically.
Influences
"Spinal Tap", "A Mighty Wind", "Guy Terrifico", "The Dancing Outlaw", Robert Altman’s "Nasheville", "The Muppet Show", Old time music, Piedmont style country blues, hokum, string band music in general, jazz (early Congo Square stuff through Blue Note era stuff) Chess Records era blues, Motown, Stax Records and soul music, "scratch" music from the Bahamas, old country music that has a heart and soul before Nashville homogenized it into a vanilla hit factory (about 1970), good old loud fast and sloppy rock music from Chuck Berry to Crazy Horse, anything with a great horn section, Western Swing music, honky tonk, rockabilly, Cajun and Zydeco, funk, solo artists like Townes van Zandt and Jimmie Rodgers, Balinese Gaamelan Orchestral music, the soundtrack to the original "Star Wars" movies (very Peter and the Wolf-esque to me), black gospel vocal harmonies, original music that is innovative yet not narcissistic (down with emo and the hair flip), music that maintains a sense of tradition in our age of cultural strip mining, the salad bar approach and the "it’s all good bro" mentality, any music that is first and foremost rhthymic in nature with melody sprinkled on top, underproduced vs. over-produced albums, weird music like Sun Ra and Wesley Willis, the social commentary of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa and Chuck D.
Gemini, Loves rainy days, likes Piedmont fingerpicked blues, loves musicians that keep impeccable time, Gibsons over Martins, the key of C over the key of G, a 7th chord over a major chord, dislikes guitarists who overplay and people who insist on strumming a guitar outside of clubs like the guy you wish you could strangle in college who always played in the stairwell (he lives in Asheville now, can play any folk song in G and has an 100% attendance rate at open mic night).
I think the label "Americana" should be changed to "white mush rock with mandolins, badly played harmonica, Telecaster overkill and slide guitar all sharing the stage at once."
I believe that what you listen to on your time off from playing will eventually come out in your playing (therefore listen to a lot of different styles of music). As a side note, I am just as neurotic and critical of my own original tunes as I am others’ music. Differences of opinion are what make for true growth (add politically uncorrect to my list of vices too). No one without a sense of musical history and roots is really worth my time playing with (believe me there are plenty of musicians to choose from in Asheville, NC).
The ideal players I like to share the stage or stuffy recording studios with are well rounded in what they listen to. They also work together as a team to make a song that keeps time, has a pair and espouses an idea or theme instead of merely killing time before their next solo.
Music does not exist in a vacuum so "original" to me means that you have taken all the influences that pass into your ears and filtered them through your instrument of choice. I also see the fine line between artistic and commercial ($) success as a very hard line to walk unless you’re independently wealthy so conflict, self doubt and questioning one’s motives for playing music is a healthy thing in small doses.
I’m going on 15 years here in Asheville and have seen the music scene change quite a bit for the better and worse, but what I lack in intelligence I think I make up for in persistence. Did I mention that I love music and feel passionately about it?
"Without contraries there is no progression"- William Blake
At this stage of my life I can make sounds on a harmonica, my voice, a guitar, an upright bass, a fiddle, a tenor sax, a kazoo as well as my armpit. When I'm not scrawling lyrics and chord changes down on yellow legal pads, I'm playing my own stuff out solo or working with four other bands: I play fiddle/tenor sax/sing with The Cisco Playboys (Western swing/Cajun/honkytonk/rockabilly), I play fiddle/sing with The Queen Anne's Revenge (old time), I play upright bass with County Farm (bluegrass/old time/string band) and upright bass with The Creekjumpers (blugrass/old country).
All I tried to do here was take the sounds that float around in my head and attempt to paint some sort of musical picture with them. Wanna hear a joke? Ok, I'll tell it anyway. What do you call a singer/songwriter with a cell phone? An optimist. Attention Asheville music afficianados- if you're walking the walk and not talking the talk then try something new: Go see some music you enjoy instead of just going to see a band because it has your friend (or boyfriend or girlfriend) in it or because you heard a "buzz" on a blog somewhere that they're the next "big thing". Once you find music you like, let your wallet speak for you. Buy their albums, attend their shows, etc. Asheville has been transformed into a town full of amazing players who play to empty bars as well as a town with a reputation for harboring dilletentes and sychophants who pack the house every time. This is not unheard of in any hip little bohemian town but arrrgh not in my back yard! And what is a contrarian? In the context that I speak of a contrarian acts contrary to conventional wisdom by not listening to others who say "this is how they do it in Nashville/Los Angeles" because the stuff coming from major industry recording studios there smells bad. There are philosophers who talk about doing things and those that would wait forever to achieve the perfect "clean and smooth" sound on a CD, and there are do-ers, that is people who make things happen in this world where you're "a short time here and long time gone". In the musical case, it simply means "take it or leave it- hey there's always 'Frampton Comes Alive' or Nickel Creek if you don't like my work." Give a listen to the four tracks off the album. It's free and you won't be forced to attend an open mike to enjoy it at home in your boxers! CDs are available for sale on CDBaby under Don Rawson and the Contrarians. They are also available locally in Asheville at either Karmasonics, Harvest Records or Acoustic Corner (Black Mountain). If I see you in person I'll also have some in an old ammo box in the trunk of my car to sell.
Don Rawson and The Contrarians's Friend Space (Top 8)
