Rattlesnake Tidal Wave

Foghorn String Band

Stephen "Sammy" Lind-fiddle, vocals;

Caleb Klauder-mandolin, vocals;

The Reverend P.T. Grover, Jr- banjo;

Kevin Sandri - guitar;

Brian Bagdonas-bass

Lost Girl / Lost Indian / Drunkard's Dream / Policeman / Grey Eagle / Fine Times at Our House / Rocky Pallet / Roving Gambler-Jaybird in the Ashbrook / Jim Short's Tune / Lacy Brown / Willie Moore / New Broom / Cherry River Rag / Three Forks of Cumberland / Courting Days Waltz / Let Me Fall / Sherburn's Breakdown / Pretty Little Dog / Father Along / Huckleberry Blues

Let's say you're driving along and all of a sudden a tune comes on the radio, a blasting, powerhouse of an old-time tune, with monster fiddling, driving banjo, edgy singing--everything that makes you sit up in your seat and say "Whoa, what is that?" Sounds sort of like the Camp Creek Boys, maybe, but no, it's a little more modern-sounding. It's got the tone and power of Bruce Molsky, but no, that doesn't sound like any band he's in, and the fiddling's different. It's got those good hard fingerpicked banjo thumbtacks of John Ashby's band, but who ever plays those LPs? So what is it already? Fasten your seatbelt and find the nearest tsunami escape route -- it's the Foghorn Stringband.

The gods must have been hovering above Portland, Oregon, making sure that these musicians ended up there and happened to meet each other: Caleb Klauder originally from Orcas Island, in the San Juans; Sammy Lind from the Minneapolis area; Taylor Grover from Smyrna, Georgia; Brian Bagdonas from Dayton, Ohio; and Kevin Sandri from Wyckoff, New Jersey. The gods must have been participating too when a friend of Taylor's sent him copies of the old County John Ashby and the Free State Ramblers LPs: Old Virginia Fiddling, Down on Ashby's Farm, and Fiddling by the Hearth. At that point Taylor, who'd long been an excellent clawhammer player, switched to fingerpicking, inspired mainly by Ronnie Poe, who played banjo in the Ashby band, but also by Walter Liggett, who banjoed with Dr. Humphrey Bate, and by Ralph Stanley.

Foghorn is a big band, with fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, and bass. In some bands, the mandolin and banjo fight each other, but in this one, they don't: the banjo pierces and drives while the mandolin sometimes pairs with the fiddle and sometimes picks chords. The guitar is dead-on and unfancy, as is the bass. This is that modern, bouncy, rolling bass sound, but if you haven't liked it in other bands, you might like it here because the entire sound is so tight. If the band has one goal, it's to get gritty, but in Foghorn's case, "gritty" does not mean rough or scratchy or untogether. It means with a huge wave of old-time noise bearing down.

Singing is definitely part of that noise. Caleb's got a "field holler kind of a vocal," as Taylor calls it, which Sammy blends with beautifully on their duets. The singing is simultaneously piercing and dreamy. My only and very small difference with this recording is that I'd have put the vocals more in front. This CD was recorded around one very excellent mic (by Alan Garren of Waltzing Bear Audio), and that method has worked great for the instruments, reproducing the unified, interlocked band sound of Foghorn's live performances. On this CD, though, I'd love for those vocals to blast over the top a little more. Maybe next time.

Though all the band members are excellent musicians, we all know that an old-time band depends on the fiddle, and Stephen "Sammy" Lind here--well, I don't know why you haven't heard of him yet. His fiddling has a power which supports delicacy and detail, and he's a great band player. Here's a story: Once upon a time, Taylor happened into a session at a Portland brew-pub, and there Allen Garren introduced Taylor to this kid, Stephen, a banjo player. But for some mysterious reason Taylor misheard the name as "Sammy," and has never been able to call him anything else. After he got his new name, Sammy began fiddling up a storm -- "Sammy" must have been Stephen's true name, releasing the fiddling magic in him when it was given.

As for Taylor's title, Reverend, he bestowed it on himself, and is indeed a minister of the Universal Life Church. But the concept comes not as much from that as from a childhood of exposure to the fire and brimstone preaching of his grandmother's Assembly of God church, and from the evolution of that hellfire imagery into an artistic and secular adulthood.

As for the title of the album, that developed over a few gigs' worth of camping in the desert and staying by the sea, during which banter about phobias reached nightmare heights. The result is that a tidal wave of rattlesnakes is about the most horrific thing some of the band members can imagine. I'd say that the music invokes the power of those nightmares but not the horror. Maybe that's how to get a handle on nightmares: turn them into totally fierce music.

Brian Bagdonas, the band's bass player, is a printer and designer, and he developed the totally cool cardboard CD envelope with as much writing on it as a Dr. Bronner's bottle, which includes lyric-related graphics, all the song lyrics (how did Brian fit them all in? By curving them around and about), and lots of tiny print. If you can't read the tiny print, just treat the words like graphics and enjoy the swirls. But if you do feel like running for the magnifying glass, you'll be able to enjoy the words on the skinny little sides of the envelope. They list the name possibilities the band considered before settling on "Foghorn." If you read the right side first, the list is a drama, discussion, argument, and word-play session, finally ending with the name discovered and confirmed.

And inside the bottom flap of the envelope are some secret drunken drawings, but if you want to look at them, be careful because you risk tearing the cardboard tabs that hold the envelope together. The band will tell you what the drawings are of if you ask -- but every CD (any art project at all, really) ought to contain a secret somewhere, don't you think?

As you can tell by the tune list, the sources are various: Tommy Jarrell's "Policeman," Clyde Davenport's" "New Broom," and the Skillet Lickers' "Rocky Pallet," for example. The band draws on secondary sources as well, such as Jimmy Triplett, Ginny Hawker, and Kay Justice. This band does not take the "reproduce it exactly like the original" approach, but neither does it present dramatic or cute interpretations or fancy arrangements. It's straight-ahead, good music.

Old-time scholars might notice that the tune Foghorn plays here as "Fine Times at Our House" is actually Ernie Carpenter's "Falls of Richmond." I have a hard time faulting them for this error, since the first part of "Falls of Richmond" certainly does sound like "Fine Times at Our House," and also because if the music's great, the music's great. Yes, we should all run our notes by several experts before the final printing, but if we miss a detail, well, let it add to the footnote fun for those who come after us.

As a reviewer for The Tablet, a Seattle paper, says, "There's no getting around the fact that the Foghorn Stringband kicks major ass." The Foghorn Stringband, if you ask me, is one of the greatest new things in old-time music. All they have to do is play, and the power surges straight through your own chest. They are supertight, are major monster players, and they don't do anything weird to the music -- they let their own musicality and the tunes speak for themselves. It's a major joy in my life that they and their music exist.

Molly Tenenbaum