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Cheers: The five members of Panhandle Crabgrass Revival Band - from left, Sean Tracey (harmonica), Maridon Boario (bass), Andy Ferguson (fiddle), Erik Chadwell (banjo) and Johnse Ostman (guitar) - salute the camera before a show. The band's second CD, "Rolling Six," is due out April 14. The band will also play during the seven-day 31st Alaska Folk Festival, which starts Monday.Andy Ferguson (fiddle), Johnse Ostman (guitar) and Sean Tracey (harmonica) fish during the summer, so the band mostly shuts down from April to September, peak touring season. They meet up again in the fall, and if you didn´t catch one of their many bar shows this winter, then maybe you saw Maridon Boario (bass), Erik Chadwell (banjo) and Tracey in The Splinter Pickers, their Thursday night project at the Imperial with two mandolin players.
If you missed that too, well, the seven-day 31st Alaska Folk Festival starts Monday, and here´s your last chance for a while. Crabgrass has its second CD, "Rolling Six," coming out and will have a release party at DocWater´s from 3-6 p.m. Thursday, April 14. The band´s also appearing on "Juneau Afternoon" on KTOO from 3-3:30 p.m. Wednesday, performing its 15-minute Centennial Hall set on Thursday night, playing the Imperial until close on Friday and partying all night at the Alaskan on Saturday.
As a band, that´s as far ahead as they´ve planned.
"Who knows what´s going to happen down the line," said Ostman, a troller and long-liner in the summer. "We want to keep it going. I think we´re going to be a Juneau-based band, and we might be able to play in the festivals in the summertime again, at some point in our lives."
For this week at least, Crabgrass is more than content to crank out their meshed style of bluegrass and old-time music, twinged with a little bit of punk and influenced heavily by the Pabst and Homer brewing companies. Live, Crabgrass never repeats the exact same set. The band is somewhat isolated by their schedule, and by the geography of Southeast, but they seem to like it that way. Isolation may have helped Crabgrass, just as it´s helped old-time musicians for years.
"Old-time music just grew out of pockets of eccentrics living in the hollers, and everyone playing in a different way," Ferguson said. "Everybody had a common root in the British Isles or in the Appalachia Mountains, but they were so spread out that they did whatever they wanted with the music and it was okay.
"There´s always been more bluegrass and old-time played in Anchorage or Fairbanks than there has been in Juneau, and I think were a lot more free from influence than we would be if we were up there," he said. "We´re on our own, and we are what we are.
"We do our own thing, and we are inbred in that sense," he said. "We don´t sit here and think about what´s right or wrong in old-time. We just crank out the tunes. We know what the form is like, and we know what we want to do with it. That isn´t much, but it´s our own thing."
Crabgrass has sold 1,400 copies of its first CD, "How ÔBout Now," with former mandolin player Ethan Abbott. For "Rolling Six," the band was hoping to capture its live sound and trying to avoid logging too many hours in a studio. Skatebottom Sound engineer Albert McDonnell recorded the album over the course of three days around Christmas-time on Perseverance Theatre´s main stage. At the time, the theater crew was preparing for "A Midsummer Night´s Dream."
Crabgrass used one microphone and cut everything live, with no overdubs. Most of the songs were done in three takes, though "Big Sciote," one of the band´s longtime staples, and "Bristol Racing Record," written by Ferguson, were knocked out in the first try. One unforeseen problem was the weather. The wind was gusting at 50 mph one day, and the theater was freezing. "There were definitely times when I would have loved to seen the track like on the last album," Ostman said. "But then I thought about it, and that´s just a little bit too much polish for what we get. We´re looking to get people on their feet, dancing, swinging, having a good time, hosting glasses and enjoying the music. Any night´s never the same, and I think that´s just the way it is with the CD too."
The band ended up with 24 songs, 16 of which made it to the record. Most are fiddle tunes. Tracey wrote two, "Everything Was Cool," a lament on firearms, and "A Word From Our Sponsor," a 21-second ode to the Homer Brewing Company. Ferguson wrote one, "Bristol Racing Record."
The covers include "Corn Liquor," by Danny Barnes of The Bad Livers, "I´ve Endured," by Carolina clawhammer-banjo balladeer Ola Belle Reed; "Picture in My Mind," by the Louisville-based Freakwater; "Bricks & Mortar," by Hank Bradley; and "Aeroplain," by John Hartford. "My Uncle the Hangman" is a riff on a Bill Monroe song.
"Sail Away Ladies," a traditional fiddle tune and the 16th and final track, is actually a tribute to Boario´s uncle, Ray Garrity, and the so-called "Council of Elders," the Fairbanks and Interior musicians that influenced Crabgrass to play old-time music.
"The words are Don "t she rock them, Daddy-O,´ and one year, at this party that (Garrity) hosts in Homer every November, everyone was drinking Homer beer and it got turned into, Don´t sheet rock the patio,´" Tracey said. "So we put that on there. We view that as our salute to those guys.
"If we can take credit for inspiring anybody to play, either now or in the future, that would be awesome," he said. "I totally got it from Maridon´s family, and her uncle and all his buddies that he grew up in Alaska with. Those guys directly inspired me to play bluegrass."
The new album´s title, "Rolling Six," refers to a dice game called "Ten Thousand" that involves six dice and a cumulative scoring system. They learned it in Bellingham, Wash., while waiting for a chicken to roast on the first day of their 44-day, January-February 2004 West Coast tour. They and played it for the next 43 days, all the way to San Francisco. "I think we played Ten-Thousand on every bar countertop down the Pacific Highway," Boario said.
That tour ended at the San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival. Crabgrass returned this year, and played two shows in the city and one in Alameda.
"It was really cool, but it´s not a dancing crowd," Ostman said. "Up here, we´re used to getting people up on their feet and dancing. Down there, you have a lot more people sitting and listening."
"They consider old-time music to be some high art form down there," Tracey said. "Up here, it´s just good times, two-chord music."
"In the bigger cities in America, it just seems like with the resurgence of old-time music, people have gotten into it, but academically and in terms of the history," Boario said. "It´s more like a class or something. And then old-time people don´t play bluegrass, and the bluegrass people don´t play old-time. In Alaska, now the hardcore bluegrassers are playing old-time, and the hardcore old-timers are playing bluegrass."
In Juneau, Crabgrass may be able to claim some credit for sparking a resurgence in old-time over the last four years.
"When we first started playing, it didn´t seem like there were that many people playing old-time music in Juneau, but right now, there´s a jam going on over at the Alaskan Hotel, where every week at 4 in the afternoon on a Sunday, people show up and play," Ostman said. "Everybody from Gerry Fiscus, who´s probably in his 50s, to Leif Saya, in his 20s, they´re all playing the same tune and they all have their own takes on that tune."
"It´s a really beautiful thing," he said. "Everybody is locked together and playing, and I think it started when we said, ÔHey, let´s get together on Sundays at the Alaskan in the dark of the winter.´ We did it last winter, and the winter before and we´re still doing it. It´s an avenue for people to come in and play this kind of music."
Ostman grew up with his parents listening to the Grateful Dead, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bill Monroe. His immersion into the old-time scene started as a young fisherman in 1991, when he showed up at the Hobbit Hole, near Elfin Cove, and heard well-known Alaska musician Bob-Bo Bell play the banjo at dinnertime.
"It was a bunch of old, hustler fishermen, and young greenhorn me, and I just sat and listened to what they were playing, and thought, "Wow, I can play that. That seems like fun," Ostman said. "They just cranked the tunes out, and that´s why Bob-Bo is the grandfather of Crabgrass. I just wanted to see that music billow out of the sky."
The first version of Crabgrass evolved out of a weekly jam at a cabin out by Thane, sometime in 1998. Ostman and Tracey organized a show with nine other people at Valentine´s Coffee House. At the time, almost everybody in the group was still learning to play.
Tracey and Boario had just returned from their honeymoon in Mexico, and Ferguson wasn´t yet part of the equation. Ferguson has played old-time music throughout Alaska for years. In fact, on a break from college, Boario snuck into the Howling Dog Saloon in Fox to see one of his old bands, Tideline, play its last show with guitarist Joe Karson (a Folk Festival regular). That was years before Crabgrass was conceived. At the time of the Valentine´s show, Ferguson was just returning to town.
"I was just jaded on the whole music scene in Juneau, but I got back and somebody invite me to play," he said. "All of a sudden, there were 25 20-something-year-olds just cranking out old-time music. I was just like, ÔWhat´s going on here?´"
The band morphed into a nine-piece, before whittling itself down to a six-piece. Boario replaced C. Scott Fry on bass for a tour of the Interior and was soon in the band full-time. Crabgrass played its first bar show in 2000 and later recorded "How ÔBout Now" with the intention of selling it at the Anderson Bluegrass Festival. The CD didn´t show up in the mail until after the returned, so they held a release part at the Alaskan in Sept. 2001.
Abbott departed the band soon after, and with Ferguson´s fiddle assuming the lead from the mandolin, Crabgrass quickly veered into more old-time tunes. The band has about 175 songs in its repertoire and nearly half are old-time fiddle tunes.
"I think there´s something about this band that makes people drop their guard entirely," Ferguson said. "I know none of us are taking this stuff too seriously, yet we´re playing music that makes people like Joe Page feel like it´s okay to crank out old-time tunes."
"If you want to preserve the old traditions, you stay on the East Coast or you stay in Ireland or you stay in Virginia," he said. "I think it´s a beautiful thing that something that old can be preserved orally like that. But when you hit the West Coast, you can get away with things. We aren´t trying to get away with much. We just love old-time and we love bluegrass."
• Korry Keeker can be reached at korry.keeker@juneauempire.com.