Tony Rice, bluegrass guitar maestro, went to the great pickin’ festival in the sky today. He hadn’t been well for a while which had affected his playing and he’d refused to perform when he felt he was less than 100% i.e. about 1000 times better than almost anyone. He was also a languid and natural singer and took the genre way beyond where other great bluesgrass pickers go, rather like Clarence White, his great inspiration, did in the 60s. He leaves a great legacy of albums and live material, this being a good example of him in his natural environment, trading licks live with other monster players Mark O’Conner, Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas. His solos at the beginning and end would probably take the average moral about 30 years to learn and he knocks them off with ease – and you can be sure the following night he’d have done something completely different. There are many great shredders but few with such swing, poise and relaxed sense of fun and joy at playing.
Tony Rice RIP
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This was posted on twitter earlier. The fascinating history of Rice’s Martin D-28. https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/58957-tony-rice-and-his-holy-grail-martin-d-28/
Often in association with Chris Hillman, the Byrds bass and mandolin man, through whom I came to know of his name as a mark of quality on an album.
Without going into a full-on hissy fit I am beginning to wonder what the point of the Obituaries 2020 thread is. I suppose my case is not helped by the fact that it never seems to refresh on the main forum page.
His passing as a true maestro is a great loss to the guitar firmament. It’s particularly sad at the moment that much of his solo work is not easily available for any newcomers to his picking to acquire – his talent was an original seam that many have mined after him. RIP
Robbie Fulks wrote a very good eulogy, on his Facebook page. See below (NB: it’s long, but good):-
Tony Rice has naturally been on my mind all night. Pardon a few stray thoughts from someone who never hung or played with him, whose lone personal interaction is the basis for a frequently retailed and ridiculous anecdote, one I’ve told before and will again in a few paragraphs.
The first time I heard him play was in the summer of 1978, and it stands in my memory in a Kennedy assassination way, a good Kennedy assassination way — I mean, stamped with a time and place and dividing one’s life history cleanly into Before and After. I was working in a greenhouse outside Durham for a hippie couple who were kind in every outward way including keeping the radio going all the while we sweated in the sun. I think I was shoveling some dirt into a wheelbarrow or something hopelessly rustic like that when “Dawg’s Bull” came dancing out of the little speaker. All work came to a standstill. The skinny hippie guy said, for my benefit, “That’s David Grisman’s new one, and hang on a minute, you’re not going to believe this guitar playing coming up.” Of course he was right. It knocked me sideways; and though it’s only an accidental outcome of my date of birth, every subsequent time a player has stunned me by making a musical instrument do things that seemed to defy physics, it’s been overshadowed by that remembered afternoon in the greenhouse. How great to have been surrounded in youth by random people who were paying close attention to music like David Grisman’s. And how shameful to have been oblivious to Tony until 1978! He had been no secret whatsoever for three or four years. You really can be too wrapped up in Bob Dylan.
Even as the world is understandably focused on Tony’s magnificent soloing, let’s recall his rare worth as a rhythm guitarist and as a singer, too. Bryan Sutton has smartly pointed toward the first record in the Bluegrass Album series, where you can get a master course in guitar accompaniment, those less romanticized skills such as keeping a fire lit under a group with a relaxed whiphand, connecting one chord to the next, and sometimes doing less than may seem required. About the singing, it can be surprising to return to that era (1980) after acclimating to Rice’s range as little as 6 years later. “Molly and Tenbrooks” in Bb!
There was also Tony the writer. His sentences had gravity and often showed a self-consciousness in their shaping, which, combined with one’s high interest in knowing his thoughts, sent some of his utterances from liner notes and interviews straight into long-term mental storage.
Of Sam Bush, from the notes on Cold on the Shoulder: “The slightest sound from his instrument is valuable.”
The rather portentous opening of the essay adorning the first Bluegrass Album: “Bluegrass. If one were to look up the word in Harper’s dictionary of music, they would be instructed…”
The unforgettable note about “Fine As Fine Can Be” from 1986: “This version, I hesitate to say, was recorded under extremely emotional adverse conditions, otherwise known as a low point in one’s own personal life.”
A comment from an interview in Frets that I think I remember verbatim — on transducers: “You’ll find that exactly 100 per cent of them sound like shit.” (And I have indeed found that.)
My music education was autodidactic and patchwork, and so the prodigy soloing guitarists that would normally appear in the “official” chronology between Doc Watson and Tony (like Clarence White, Dan Crary, and Norman Blake) were obscure to me until a good while after I had discovered Tony. For that reason, I carry around a paradigm in which Tony is the young firebrand who wildly disrupts an established order presided over by Doc. It’s inaccurate yet dislodgeable. Nonetheless, there is something in Tony’s approach, in the personality of his playing, that does mark a change from his predecessors, and I’ve been turning over possible ways to express that change in my mind these last hours.
The simplest way to say it is probably “Django Reinhardt.” When Tony left J.D. Crowe’s group and fell in with Grisman’s scene in the Bay Area, he immersed fully in old jazz records. Todd Phillips told me that for months on end (I think this must have been 1975), before Grisman et al got up and going, the gang sequestered and studied. They listened to, discussed, and labored to decode recordings by the Hot Club and others. Thus Tony’s education, that phase of it, went from ear to fingerboard without the consistent intercession of concepts like chord names. It’s interesting to think whether it might be possible for a young musician to follow a straighter path — straightened by wider historical knowledge, a formal teacher-student relationship, and step-by-step learning via soberly articulated systems — and come out at the end with the virtues that made Tony so special and supreme. To ask it this way is to say “I very much doubt it.” The sound of Tony in performance in the late 1970s isn’t the sound of a freshly graduated summa cum laude pupil. It sounds more like someone who has spent a long winter alone in the woods, killing wild boars with his hands…
Jimmy Gaudreau [correction – I think it was Ronnie Simpkins] mentioned the upstroke in Tony’s soloing as unique to his style. This gets into some weeds, but why not? The idea was that instead of treating the upstroke as the dimmer-witted twin of the down-up pair, consigned to “and” beats and occasional practical uses like rakes and string-crossings, Tony picked in an upward direction…when he felt like it. To most of us, using an upstroke is more of a mandate than at at-will device; you use it when ergonomics, ease, and pattern logic call for it, and you work on making it equal in power to a downstroke, since it goes away from the earth. Rethinking that might make for a picking style that appears stochastic or odd when viewed from the outside. But if the observation and my understanding are both on-target, Tony’s equalizing of the two hand directions was a large part of his effect; it broadened his projective force and liberated him from phrase-paths that had grown recognizable and a little staid over the years.
Thinking more about the difference in Tony’s approach to guitar, I realize that over my life I’ve learned a lot of heads from Doc and Norman records note-for-note but have transcribed relatively few of Tony’s fiddle tunes. Strangely, I have the impression, in copying Doc’s “Salt Creek” or Norman’s “Girl I Left Behind Me,” or even copying Crary in tunes like “Dill Pickle Rag,” that I’m getting very close to the tune itself; whereas when I sit and repeat phrases from Tony’s versions of “Red-Haired Boy” or “Blackberry Blossom,” I feel at a remove from the tune — the remove being Tony’s particular original personality. Isn’t that nuts? It’s not like Doc and Norman and Dan aren’t original stylists, for God’s sake. It could be that Tony’s Reinhardt-infused sophistication is just a little outside my personality and abilities. But when I learn a fiddle tune off Doc it tends to morph, fast and easily, into something that just sounds like me playing, and tunes copied off Tony sound like me clumsily impersonating Tony Rice. There are grace notes and rests that don’t come naturally to my mind or hand, and there are references to odd-numbered compounds (9ths, 11ths, 13ths) that feel a little Martian to someone steeped in Doc. I’d venture to say that Tony hugged the shoreline a little less than his elders in his fiddle-tune playing — whether you want to call that originality, confidence, or something more critical.
This leads to the oft-mentioned point that the world is overstuffed with bluegrass guitarists impersonating Tony — it has been since the 1970s and though I sense that his grip on the young players is lightening, Mr. Rice still does hover over the field, and will for a long time. There are a thousand guitarists out there playing the Lester Flatt G-run as Tony rewrote it, and there might not actually be anybody playing it the way Lester did. Likewise, there are vocalists mimicking Rice, and he probably has some sartorial proteges too. The guy had the magnetism of a great brand. Needless to say, all of that is a little unfortunate, in terms of keeping the artform fluid and open-ended, and also needless to say as well that none of the idol worship is Tony’s doing or fault. On the day after his death, I feel like putting a positive frame on the teeming landscape of clones: he simply made such a beautiful sound that everyone else wanted to recreate it. Moreover, his approach to his instrument was both so radically new and so completely natural, that, like Earl Scruggs’s three-finger banjo, it generated the friction of two excitingly complementary thoughts, “I’ve never heard anything like this” and “This is exactly as this instrument was meant to be played.”
His Manzanita record was a bluegrass quintet record without banjo. Dumb banjo jokes aside — there’s something worth imitating! For some reason almost no one has.
It’s good hearing Tony play in the later 1980s, because you can see him throwing obstacles in his own path when he solos. He had gotten to the point where the only guitar-mind that could challenge him was his own. Check out his solo on “Ain’t Nobody Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” from the 1993 LP Tony Rice Sings and Plays Bluegrass — 16 of his greatest bars, 20+ years into his career, packed with exerting self-challenges and brand new ideas, such as the crazy little B-string unbend that kicks off the solo.
The ridiculous anecdote is that in 1981 or 1982 I went, along with my great friend Wally Griffith, to see Tony play at the Bottom Line in NYC, and at the bar before the show, had a few highly awkward words with the master. Wally had planted some bullshit idea in my head about trading picks. He told me that he had recently met B.B. King backstage and had traded flatpicks with him. It was a friendly little thing guitarists might do, a ritual shared by those in the know. Tony was by himself at the sidebar off of the stage-right dressing room, drinking alone in his wacky leisure suit, and I came up to him with a simulated swagger and a pick in my outstretched hand. “Tony!” I announced. “I love your music, and was wondering if you would trade picks with me!”
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“Trade picks. You would take mine, and I…” Some of the air was already coming out of me.
“I can’t give you my pick,” he said. “It’s tortoiseshell, and it’s expensive.”
“Okay,” I said, attempting a save. “Would you just take mine, then?”
He took the pick, a Fender medium sold then as now by obnoxious merchants out of plastic tubs for a quarter apiece, out of my hand, and bent it one way and the other.
“Naah,” he said. “I’d never use it. It’s too thin.”
In real life he handed it back to me and I slunk back to my little round table; but when I tell the story nowadays I like to end it with him flicking the pick disdainfully over his shoulder into the trash.
As for the show that night, it was a quartet of Jimmy Gaudreau, Tony, Fred Carpenter, and Todd Phillips, playing music off their recent release, Still Inside. It was Tony’s sort of “my own Dawg” chapter, and even though Earl Scruggs is what I relate to easier than Earl Klugh, it was an extremely satisfying performance. The encore is permanently etched. Tony finished it with a dramatic solo flourish, the band falling away for maybe 30 seconds. Just the fastest cleanest wildest guitar playing I’d ever heard, and the laws of physics once again were over in the corner cowering. Wally and I were dumbstruck as the four guys left the stage. “That’s the best guitar playing I’ve ever heard,” said Wally, which made me happy, since I was always dragging him out of his land of Keith Richards and into mine. It’s hard to think of two guitarists more unlike than Keith Richards and Tony Rice. (By the way, if you’ve been reading all this and don’t know much about these names or this scene, it should be plain that these people are, for people like me, what people like Keith and Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton are for many millions of other people.)
One of the highest high points of my last ten years or so in music has been falling in with the bassist from that longago evening, Todd Phillips. Teenage me absorbed what he did from afar; middle-aged me travels and works on performances and recordings with him. That’s a mind-bending progression, and I find that I get just about accustomed to it but never altogether. He’s the upright bassist I listened to as a teenager more than any other — for one thing, everyone seemed to be playing electric bass.
There are these tasteless FB obituary reflections that turn out to be all about the writer and hardly at all about the decedent. I’m getting back to Tony, truly, but bear with me. This older musician leaps out of the longago clouds and into your work life. Suddenly you might dimly feel yourself to be playing with people who aren’t even there! Tony’s idea of rhythm, a lot of which came from J.D. Crowe, was pressed into Todd in the mid-1970s. When I play with Todd, I sometimes feel as though I stepped into Manzanita. Tony, or now Tony’s ghost, is a linkage between us, not pathologically imagined but actually operating on what we’re doing in the moment. In this way among others, music by its mysterious methods connects strangers across generations and geography, and even between this world and the land of the dead. The fantasies that inspire us to strike up conversations with our heroes and ask them to touch flimsy pieces of plastic junk pulled from our pockets: yes, pathological and imaginary. But the harmonies and rhythms these geniuses open for us are real and profound and shareable.
Luckily, Todd doesn’t mind answering my many questions about Tony and the old days when we’re traveling in the van or talking on the phone. One of the stories he has told is of Tony coming into the band’s tiny dressing room one night with a queer expression. “You’re not going to believe what just happened,” he said. “Some numskull at the bar tried to trade his Fender medium pick for my tortoiseshell!”
That’s brilliant. I love Robbie Fulks more than ever.
He was a masterful player. Effortless. I love his stuff with David Grisman.