I was so much older then ...

When I was 16, bluegrass was storming through D.C. If you were a hippie, it was the local music. Zeitgeist. Like being a punk in New York in the late '70s, or a folkie in Boston in the mid-'60s. You didn't really have a choice if you wanted to be hip to what was going on. This was 1972, and right on the heels of the most explosively inventive period for one popular genre -- rock and roll -- bluegrass was opening up to its own new worlds of sound.

As I remember it, a single pivot encouraged, validated and through the force of his impeccable cred allowed the full breadth of this merging of rock, jazz, folk and blues into bluegrass. Earl Scruggs. The crucible of the civil rights movement brought Scruggs in close touch with people like Dylan, the Byrds and Mahalia Jackson. It opened his ears, too. Scruggs got a lot of flack as the first outspoken champion of civil rights in a bluegrass world deeply embedded in redneck tradition. It stands to reason that the mutual respect that arises under that kind of pressure would spread from politics and morals to the music itself, and that a spirit of inclusion would, too.

By 1972, bluegrass festivals were wild and rangy things, with Sam Bush and the New Grass Revival going atonal, David Grisman and John Herald going Eastern European, John Hartford going nutty, and Earl Scruggs and the Dillards going fully electric. I remember the afternoon when Doc Watson persuaded a shy Vassar Clements to duet with him on hardcore mountain blues songs. Vassar shook his head no for a good two minutes of cajoling before Doc got his way. As he crossed the stage to join Doc, Vassar bent down and whispered something to him. Doc burst out laughing, and related to the audience: "Vassar says he's never played pure blues before." When it was over, you'd have thought Vassar was a sideman for Muddy Waters.

The Scruggs version of You Ain't Goin' Nowhere was our anthem. Here's a video that includes Scruggs playing it with the Byrds, from whom he learned it. This was the version of the Byrds that included Clarence White, who had established his virtuosic legend first as a guitarist with the bluegrass Kentucky Colonels:

It was weird when I returned to bluegrass ten years later to learn that the young upstart Ricky Skaggs and other traditionalists had virtually done away with the blending of genres and forms. Thirty years younger than Scruggs, twenty years younger than Dylan, Skaggs should have known better. But he got his way. Bluegrass festivals in the '80s were whitewashed of Dylan and blues, and barely supported the visions of Grisman and Bush and Hartford. Under the Skaggs rule there was a trust in pure virtuosity -- perfect harmonies and speedy instrumental work -- which in any music limits the range of expression. Some things of beauty have everything to do with what is not played. Monk and Miles Davis and the Band were particularly fine at expressing silence and depth without showing off their chops.

I missed the free-for-all of early '70s bluegrass. In high school, we spent Friday nights at the Childe Harold club in D.C. with the raveup blues of Liz Meyer. That was bluegrass. And returning the next night, Saturdays were when Emmylou Harris stilled us with dreary, soulful Hank Williams songs, one after another after another. That was bluegrass, too.

Warren Hellman's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival has always had that '70s feel. When Patti Smith and Dry Branch Fire Squad can share the same festival, magic can happen. For the traditionalists, here's some Dry Branch:

A couple of years ago, Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs were onstage at Hardly Strictly with Ricky Skaggs. Earl's son Gary emceed. He said something like this: "I want to introduce my father Earl, who's 85, and Doc Watson, who's 86, and Ricky Skaggs, the oldest one of the bunch."

Nearly Dead

It's Wednesday, so I'll probably head to Ashkenaz in Berkeley for Stu Allen and Mars Hotel. They retread old Grateful Dead shows. Most cover bands are about verisimilitude; the closer to the original notes, the better received. Grateful Dead cover bands are about the spirit and dancing related to a band that encouraged sweet, open expression -- even giddiness -- as worthy of release. A Dead cover band just has to be good enough, and swing enough, to take the audience through the emotional and hormonal changes that the original band inflected. And people have to go, "Wow. He really gets Jerry."

Maybe the wit in Jerry Garcia's playing lay in his conflict aversion. Where another good guitarist would play his way into the inevitable, Jerry seemed to sidestep the expected. He and Bach had a lot in common. They both loved the geometry of music -- Jerry's arpeggios and chromatics in general -- and Bach like Jerry relished avoiding resolution. Much of the beauty of the Brandenburg Concertos is his refusal to express the next obvious chord, instead diverting us over and over again. Isn't that what Jerry did, too?

Lots of rock and roll bands are popular because they help us release id movements that are fierce and urgent. Fascist-rock bands like U2 and AC/DC, or the Killers or Ramones, get that release through metronomic hopping and robotic fist-pumping and an orgiastic collective blast of testosterone or some other raw, sexual energy. It's got its place, although there's a Triumph of the Will chill to it, too. With the Dead and its cover progeny, it's more like I'm humming along with my id, amused to have it, happy to let it dance its way into the universe. I'm not necessarily mad at anything, although that's OK too as part of the bigger picture, and the world feels pretty seamless during a Dead break.

What did one Deadhead say to the other when they ran out of weed? "What's this shit we've been listening to?"

I'm sure Stu Allen is quite talented. But it's difficult for me to think about a musician who has narrowed his public persona to a single influence. I remember being hopping mad when Tom Petty showed up. He's just doing Roger McGuinn! Then I bought a Roger McGuinn album that had him singing a Tom Petty song, and I threw my hands up. What did I know?

One night a David Bowie cover band's entourage was a table over from me, and I noticed that the wives had the same behaviors and airs of a real band's wives. I mentioned it to a friend, and she coined the term "Cover Wives."

The least creepy cover band I've seen is The Minks. It's a Bay Area all-girl Kinks cover band. They stick to the early rave-up material, and funnel it through a New Wave sensibility. They remind us that the Beatles and Kinks, in their first orientation, were a hairsbreadth removed from punk. The Minks don't perform very often, but they have their own energy, their own aesthetic, and they feel original.