Posted on Fri, Apr. 30, 2004 Mercury News (San Jose)
By Shay Quillen. Reproduced by kind permission.

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Before they could play bluegrass like the masters, the college buddies who founded the band King Wilkie decided they would at least look the part.

"We started out wearing suits, I think, 'cause we were just trying to be as bluegrass as we could be," recalls mandolinist and singer Reid Burgess.

But before long they were making waves with their music, and not just among die-hard bluegrass fans. The Charlottesville, Va., band's national debut CD, "Broke," hit stores April 20, and the band is in California for the first time this week to kick off a tour that will visit a Mountain View church and barrooms in San Francisco and Alameda.

The band blends a respect for the music - it's named after Bill Monroe's favorite horse, for goodness' sake - with a youthful energy that's bringing new fans to the most tradition-bound branch of country music.

"They seem to really appeal to the younger set," says their producer, old-time banjo master Bob Carlin, "and not by playing hippie music but by playing pretty straight-ahead bluegrass."

They don't have the jaw-dropping chops of Nickel Creek or the pop crossover appeal of Alison Krauss, but they do have a simple yet effective formula: powerful duet singing, a mix of time-worn classics and fine new originals, and a hard-driving ensemble sound.

"Hopefully, they'll remind people what makes the music great in the first place," Carlin says, "the straight-ahead heartfelt emotion of it, rather than the hot licks."

Four years ago, Burgess and his Kenyon College pal Ted Pitney, a guitarist and singer, were playing together in rock bands; Burgess had fooled around a bit with a mandolin, but his role model was R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, not Bill Monroe. That all changed when the two friends made the short drive to northern Ohio's Mohican Bluegrass Festival. From then on, the pair was "head over heels into bluegrass."

After graduation, the young men decided to head to Virginia to get closer to the heart of the music. At first they were playing with some college pals as Colonel Catastrophe. "It was pseudo-bluegrass," says Burgess, now 24. "We were learning."

By 2002, they had adopted their current name, and as original members moved on, Burgess and Pitney recruited some top-notch young bluegrass talent to take their place. From East Tennessee State University's bluegrass music program, they found hard-driving banjo player Abe Spear. Nashville native John McDonald brought solid rhythm-guitar chops and a knowledge of Stanley Brothers-style vocal harmony to form a killer duet with Burgess. In 2003, Ohio fiddler Nick Reeb and bassist Drew Breakey from Maryland completed the present lineup.

Historical leanings

Along with originals by Burgess and Pitney, the band's repertoire gravitated to the oldest part of the bluegrass tradition - Bill Monroe, as well as pre-bluegrass tunes by Jimmie Rodgers and ancient ballads like In the Pines and Little Birdie.

"That's just sort of the sound that we're drawn to," says McDonald, 25, who discovered the music in jam sessions as a college student in Colorado. After growing up around rock, he says, those ancient tunes still sound "new and different" to him. "I can't really get tired of those timeless melodies."

"We like reviving, dusting off old songs," Burgess says, comparing the band's approach to his mother's love of antiques. "That's sort of what we do, refurbishing antiques and making them a functional thing again, without losing that timeless quality. We plan to keep doing that."

But what excites a lot of people about this band are the original tunes Pitney and Burgess are adding to the tradition. Burgess' It's Been a Long Time, the first song on Broke, could easily be a lost classic from the '50s. Other originals take familiar bluegrass themes to a place Flatt & Scruggs never would have gone.

Pitney's Drifting Away, for example, echoes the symbolism of old gospel songs like You're Drifting Too Far From the Shore, but his version ends, not with the promise of salvation, but with utter despair:

If I were to throw myself over,
Would I see you there in the light?
Would I sink to the depths of the ocean,
To a place as dark as the night.

"I think we've gotten better at writing songs where we're not that concerned with trying to have them sound totally traditional or really old," Burgess says. "That was definitely an agenda with us for a while. Now we just take the attitude that bluegrass - it's not over. It's not something that's done that we're trying to re-create. We definitely see it as sort of a tradition that's a growing thing, and not something that's preserved under glass."

When it came time to make their debut recording for Rebel Records, the band turned to Carlin, a traditional banjo player and musicologist whom Burgess and Pitney had met at that first bluegrass festival in Ohio when Carlin was playing with John Hartford.

The producer and the band agreed they didn't want the bright, polished sound of most current bluegrass recordings. "We just wanted something that was really natural and fit the aesthetic of the music we were playing," Burgess says.

Old-time vocalizing

Carlin even persuaded them to sing the duets live into the same microphone - despite some initial reservations from the vocalists. "I just knew that having them singing on the same mike, looking at each other and listening to themselves through a speaker, rather than through headphones, was the way to do it," he says. "The real old-time way - that's what we did."

Despite the old-school recording style and the dapper suits, Burgess bristles at the term 'retro'. The way he sees it, King Wilkie is taking its unique set of influences - including all the Cure and Jimi Hendrix and Gram Parsons CDs they've listened to - and bringing something new to the bluegrass tradition.

"Really, that's what Monroe did with his music. It's a synthesis of all the kinds of things that he liked," Burgess says. "I guess we're just adding to that synthesis and discovering that's sort of what it means to be a traditional musician."

Shay Quillen San Jose, California. Email (less the 'x')  to squillen@xmercurynews.com

5 June 2004