Returning this week from Strings and Sol, a five day bluegrass experience in Puerto Moreles, Mexico, Bont and the rest of Greensky Bluegrass have short break before winter tour commences on January 13 in Bloomington, Indiana. Acts at Strings and Sol this year included Yonder Mountain String Band, Railroad Earth, Leftover Salmon, Sam Bush and of course, Greensky Bluegrass. This is another amazing destination musical extravaganza brought to you by Cloud 9 Adventures (www.cloud9adventures.com), purveyors of One Big Mayan Holiday, Jam Cruise and Holy Ship. Relaxing on a chilly December afternoon, Bont recalls their recent trip. “You find other people that are into the same bands. I’ve had a lot of people who became friends through the whole thing. It’s a very great experience. It’s relaxing, It’s community oriented and you get a good sense of all the people who are into Blue grass and jam grass. Everybody is so nice, A lot of great people show for the event. And of course, there is a stage on the beach. It’s pretty hard to beat I stage that’s directly on the beach. It’s kind of like a beach party with all of your friends and all of your favorite bands. You’re likely going to run into your favorite musician in the buffet line during lunch. It was a really great time.”
Looking back on 2014, a year that has taken Greensky all over the place, including stops at Bonnaroo, Red Rocks and as we mentioned earlier, Strings and Sol. These are only a few highlights of a monumental journey that is quickly making Greensky Bluegrass a household name. “I can’t believe that I get to be a musician for living is pretty much what I think to myself all the time, and this is my job, to make people happy. The fact that people love our music just blows my mind. Between playing tonight at the Fillmore selling out two nights at the Ogden in Denver, obviously red rocks, Obviously Bonnaroo and Strings and Sol. (laughing)Strings and soul is more a family vacation for string bands really. You get to go down there and have a margarita with Vince urban and Drew Emmett and all the Railroad Earth guys and all the string duster dudes. Basically an all of our contemporaries Beach party. The fact that I wake up every morning after playing a sold out show in Sun City and just be like, I can’t believe that this is what I do for living and running to do it all over again tonight.”
The choice in instruments is sometimes a childhood love, but other times it finds us further down the road. “I was a guitar player. I think it started out when I was a kid, when I was 10. Then I was playing in punk rock bands in high school. (As to his choice of the banjo) Sometime in high school, it was one of those things like something you see in the movies. After a long night of partying after my senior year of high school, a friend of mine was like, ‘hey man, there’s this band called The Grateful Dead that’s playing at The Palace. Do you want to go see it today?’ I became a huge Dead fan and then found out Jerry Garcia played the banjo. For my 21st birthday, my mom actually bought me a banjo. I became super obsessed with it and then found the old masters who were like the back door to bluegrass, i.e. Jerry Garcia, Old and In the Way, that kind of stuff. Through them I discovered Flat and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, J.D. Crow and all those greats.”
The road to becoming a musician is filled with long nights, endless traveling and often, more than one job. Bont has found a way to achieve balance in the mix. “I worked in the kitchen for the same company for a long time. We were going to be gone a month and a half, and my employers really liked what I did is a cook, I guess, and they were like, ‘Whenever you’re around, we’ll try to get you on the schedule as much as we can.’ It became one of those things where I realized that when I was around at home, that we were touring so much that I didn’t want work anymore. That being at home for a week and a half or two weeks between tour, I felt like was my time off, i.e. the proverbial weekend of the weekday 9 to 5 type person. As opposed to spending Friday through Sunday, my weekend is a two week block of time. That’s kind of when things changed. I actually needed some time to not be doing things. It’s like, okay, I see, it’s just a little bit too much between playing shows and coming home from a tour and getting home at five in the morning from driving across the country and the next morning have to be at work in the kitchen. (Laughing) It’s like, okay I can’t do it anymore, it’s too much.”
Despite the tougher parts of constant touring, some musicians crave the road (For an example of this, Check out our interview with Lucero’s John Stubblefieled). “Not so much from me, I don’t know how it is for the rest of the guys. I tend to keep my music life and my home life kind of separate, or separate in some ways. For me psychologically, being on the road is not the easiest thing in the world. People think it is, if you aren’t musician, but if you are musician, being on the road it’s not the easiest thing and it takes a lot of commitment. It doesn’t always work out the greatest for everybody (laughing). When you get out on the road and get going on tour, it becomes all about the music. There’s something to that whole routine you get into playing music on tour. As a musician you feel like you’re able to hone your craft. (Laughing) Here at home, I have my wife telling me to take the garbage out or do dishes or whatever. She’s like, ‘could you please stop playing the banjo? You’re annoying the crap out of me. On the road, it’s all about the music.”
Greensky has become known for their improvisational skills and intelligent songwriting. They are also quite famous for their covers, which are often not what you would expect from a bluegrass band. “(Laughing) I really just like playing solos…I like playing solos and singing harmony vocals. It really doesn’t matter what song, if I can do both in the same song, I’m pretty much winning as far as I’m concerned. I’m a fan of music in general. I have this gift where where I know pretty much all the words to every song ever made. I can hear a song a couple of times and remember the entire song. Whenever we do a cover song, I’m in initially into it because they’re like, ‘what are the words Bont? Come on, I know you know the words?’ (Laughing) Okay, the words are this… It’s just so random how we pick a song. Usually one of the guys is listening to something, whatever they’re into at the present moment. It’s interesting how, with our instruments, we disassemble the song to reassemble the song to sound similar or sound completely different. There’s fine line between the two. If we like the song how it’s presented on its own album, we’ll say, ‘what if we bluegrass it? Or, no no no, that doesn’t work bluegrassy’ and we’ll stick with the original version. The whole process is really interesting and you never know. The cover song we think is going to be the coolest, may be the one that when we work on it, is impossible to figure out, but the dumb cover song is the one that people love forever and ever, like the version of Time we do by Pink Floyd. We’ve been playing that song for 12 years. The first cover song we did was When Doves Cry and that gets people a lot, but I think the one that gets people more than any is our version of Time. That is the oldest cover song we play and people still go crazy over it.”
Greensky Bluegrass will be in Knoxville on January 14, 2014, at The Bijou Theatre. For tickets and all things Greensky, check out https://greenskybluegrass.com.
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