Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with resonator guitar virtuoso Jerry Douglas about his work with the BBC’s “Transatlantic Sessions,” why he left solo work to join Union Station and surrounding himself with talented friends.
CP: I hear you and Alison have been pretty busy the last couple of days putting the finishing touches on a new album.
JD: Yeah, we’re working on a new record, rehearsing to tour, to do the stuff we already have to go out and do shows. We have new management, so there’s a little time there to get to know each other and put our heads together to make this work to all our best advantage. There’s really a lot going on for us. It’s very exciting.
CP: What’s new this time around?
JD: It’s totally new songs to us. Every time we work on a record, we approach it with a real organic kind of feel, just the way we do anything else. It all changes a little bit. They all have a little bit different personality. I think we’re going more in the direction of the last record, which was 4-5 years ago.
It’s almost a new process at this point, because we’ve all been making our own records. Alison and Robert (Plant) did their record; I had a solo and a Christmas record; Dan (Tyminski) has done a record; and Ron (Block) has done a record. We’re all kind of scattered all over the place and trying to bring that back to the center. The new record is the band with some percussion – not a lot.
We’re doing most everything ourselves, even a lot of the percussion, with an emphasis on her singing. Why not? When you’ve got somebody like that, why not go ahead and let her sing? (Laughs.)
We’re working on an instrumental now, too, so we’re working on the finishing touches, doing the last tracking sessions for this record. Then, all the singing will begin in earnest, and all the overdubs will be framed in with the singing in the middle.
Then, you get to the part where you sequence the record. Before that, it’s just like a whole bunch of songs, but when you put them in the final order they’re going to be in, it’s like a child crawling and then walking. It becomes a walking, talking person all the sudden. It’s quite a metamorphosis. That’s what’s the most fun about making records, completing them. They’re not complete until the thing is standing, walking and talking to you.
CP: You would know, I suppose. I read online that you’ve got something like 1,600 album credits to your name. When have you found the time to sleep?
JD: (Laughs.) You know, I’ve had a pretty long career already, but I did start early. I started recording when I was 16. Now, I’m 83. (Laughs.) I’ve had a long career. A lot of that was when, for about 15 years here in Nashville, I just did session after session after session. I almost burned out from making records, going to the studio and doing three sessions a day for that long period of time.
They mount up. You lose track. Any session musicians here in town will tell you that you do reach saturation point, and you wonder if you’ve played that same song or same phrase or sequence of notes yesterday or last week or this morning. When it reaches that point, you have to back off of it.
Luckily, the chance to come play with Union Station came at exactly that point for me. I knew I had to give up one or the other. It was either that I take this job and travel and keep playing with great people or stay in the studio and keep doing the same thing and burn out. (Laughs.) I chose the first.
CP: Sounds like an easy decision.
JD: (Laughs.) Yeah, it was an easy decision. I left one career behind and took off on another one and didn’t look back. It’s been a great ride already. 12 years is not a short period of time, either.
CP: You joked earlier that you’re 83, but you just turned 54 last month, didn’t you?
JD: Yeah, I’m 54, but I don’t feel like it. I’m still 25. Years don’t matter; brain cells do, I guess.
CP: Since you got started on the resonator guitar in your teens, that means you’ve racked up more than 30 years at this point.
JD: I started playing Dobro when I was about 11, actually. I’ve always plunked around on something since I can remember. I think I was trying to play an instrument before I could really walk. I’ve always played mandolin or guitar or Dobro – something with strings on it – my whole life. Dobro I started in earnest thinking about doing for living when I was 16, yeah. That’s when I became a professional musician.
CP: The Dobro is obviously a unique-looking and a different instrument from other plectrum instruments. What was it about it that drew you initially?
JD: Like you said, it’s just the coolest looking instrument. They were designed and created in ’20s during the Art Deco period, so they took on that look. It’s a unique looking instrument, but it was the sound of it. Flatt and Scruggs had a guy playing with them – Uncle Josh Graves – and he played the Dobro, but he did it differently than anybody had before.
He was a master of backing a musician, too. He knew when to play and when not to play, how to embellish and make the singer sound even better. I just … that hit me; that sound really got to me. I loved that sound, and no other instrument did that to me. It was so soulful, especially the way he played it. It really made me want to play the Dobro.
I took that and all the influences I had growing up as a kid up in northeastern Ohio, which was not that far from Cleveland. I was waking up in the morning to Flatt and Scruggs and going to sleep at night with The Beatles or The Rolling Stones coming in from the rock stations out of Cleveland.
I was little confused, musically, for a while there, but I combined all of it into whatever this is I do now. With a lot of experience being in the studio and playing with a lot of great musicians over the last 35 years, I am whatever I am now.
CP: You certainly seem to surround yourself with quality, people like Alison and Edgar Meyer and Sam Bush and Bela Fleck. Does counting that caliber of player among your friends encourage you to raise the bar in your own music?
JD: Oh, completely. That’s part of the reason to do it, to keep learning. That’s the whole idea. It’s a vocation and a journey at the same time as being aurally pleasing. To be able to be a musician is to surround yourself or involve yourself with musicians who are better than you. You’re trying to find people who are better than you to learn from and raise your own bar to become a better musician.
The Telluride Bluegrass Festival happens the weekend after Chattanooga, and I’m playing with Alison there on Thursday and playing with Peter Rowan and Sam Bush and Viktor Krauss on Friday.
This year, my band is Viktor Krauss on bass and Omar Hakim on drums. He plays with Weather Report and Sting and all these people. He’s just this amazing drummer … he’s more than a drummer. He’s an instrument. He’s not a “boom boom” drummer; he’s melodic.
I like working with people who you can look at them and see them playing an instrument but when they play, it’s not like anything you’ve ever heard played on that instrument before. It’s someone who takes it to another level.
That’s what this band is doing. We’re sort of in a renaissance right now because we haven’t toured in so long. We’ve all come back to the band with new ideas. We’re stretching. There’s all this new management and new blood. It’s very exciting, which is exactly the way I like it.
CP: How long has it been since Union Station has been together on the road?
JD: I think 2006 is when the last studio album came out. There’s been another compilation record since then and the Alison and Robert album and even another European compilation has been released, but this will be the first studio in five or six years. We haven’t really toured in two years, not on a real touring kind of basis.
CP: How long will you be with Union Station for this upcoming tour?
JD: We’re finishing the record, so the way all this works is you get the product ready, you finish the product, you turn it in and then there’s a set up time until the record is released to the public. All this publicity and advertising are being put in place.
So we’re only doing a couple. I think Chattanooga and then Telluride will be our last date this year. Then, we’ll start touring in earnest when the record comes out early next year. Next year, we’re going to tour this record.
CP: Speaking of which, have you chosen a name yet?
JD: We don’t even have a name for it yet. There are a bunch of song titles, but there are so many ways to name a record. You can either use a song title or something completely unrelated or a lyric that jumps out of a song somewhere. Or you could just give it a name, any name, but it doesn’t have one yet. “TBA.” (Laughs.)
CP: You mentioned Viktor is in your touring band this year, so you’re fairly enmeshed in the Krauss family at this point. When did you first meet Alison?
JD: I met her when she was 14. She had just signed to Rounder Records, and Ken Irwin brought Alison down, looking for somebody to produce the first record and to just kind of show her off.
We met at Bela Fleck’s house, and Sam (Bush) and Bela and I sat there to listen to Alison sing and play. I know it was embarrassing to her – she doesn’t like to talk about it – but it was amazing. It was obvious to us that she was really something.
So I played on the first record, produced the second record and then played on subsequent records, just about every record she’s done. But I wasn’t really in the band until ’98 but had played on just about every record the band made. We’ve got a pretty long history already. We’ve been friends all along.
CP: What’s she like as a band leader? Is the dynamic within Union Station set up so that any one person has that position?
JD: There always has to be somebody. We really like for her to have the final word on things. Somebody needs to, and it’s her name in big letters. That’s the way it should work. But everybody has a piece of the action. It’s … almost democratic, I would say.
Everybody is involved, in the writing and arranging and producing – all the things that go into making a record and live shows. Everybody has a say, and if we need to come down to someone saying “Yes” or “No, we couldn’t possibly do that,” if someone has a strong opinion about something one way or another, it’s honored.
It’s a pretty good situation for everybody. I know, when we walk out on stage, that the focus is on her. Whoever else is soloing and singing, the light is on them at that point and everyone else is support, but most of the time, what we’re doing is framing her in. We’re selling her voice, and it’s a pretty easy thing to do. (Laughs.)
CP: Union Station is, for all intents and purposes kind of a super group of the bluegrass world. Alison is great, but you’ve had a lot of praise heaped on you as well. The New York Times has even called you “the contemporary master of the Dobro.” That seems like a lot to try to live up to. Do you feel a lot of additional pressure because of praise like that?
JD: Oh man, I try not to give that any weight at all. I’m a musician, and I just want to play and make people happy and keep learning. It’s their business what they call me and what they think.
That’s all very flattering and wonderful to hear – that’s part of why we do this, I’m sure – but the real pay off is to feel like you’ve done a good job and made people happy with the music you play. That’s really it. I’ve been called everything in the world, but none of it sent me spinning in any certain direction. I just keep going where I’m going.
CP: I’ve always been a fan of your work on the BBC series Transatlantic Sessions collaborating with British and Irish musicians. What is it like getting to take American music back to its original roots?
JD: That really fun. That’s a pay off there. It’s so much fun to do those things. You can imagine the setting we’re doing those things in. Getting to go there every day and play with those amazing musicians – they just floor you every day.
I get to play with Americans a lot, but to get to go over and play with the Irish and Scottish guys … it’s just another world, a totally different world. That’s where our music came from, but they’re still so advanced in their own music, trying to find new ways to play it.
You don’t have to change the beats or add a big drum to make it new. I played on a record once – I won’t name who it was – and I couldn’t recognize the song I was playing because of the rhythm section. It made me mad because they lost the essence of what we were supposedly doing. It made me so mad that I quit. I said, “I don’t want to do this. I feel like I’m doings something wrong here, and I don’t want to be part of this.” That stuff is so valuable and can be mistreated just like anything else, and that’s what I thought we were doing, so I got out.
Those shows are fun. They’re beautiful and are set in these amazing places, old, ancient grounds. Because my family is from Scotland, it makes it even richer for me. I’m glad to hear someone else likes those shows because I pour everything I have into them.
I’d like to get that over here, but it’s like Guinness; it doesn’t travel. To me, it’s more fun for me to play that music there than to play it here. It seems like I’m acting if I do it here, but over there, I feel like I’m part of it. I’m grounded. It grounds me.
CP: In addition to doing those programs, you’ve also played country, jazz and Hawaiian styles, to name just a few. What fuels your desire to take the Dobro so far outside its traditional place in bluegrass and Western swing music?
JD: I think it’s just the desire to play with musicians of different genres. I didn’t search out Bill Frisell; he came after me. But then I went after him after that. Charlie Aden and Chet Atkins and Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain and those guys – they’re all great musicians and good at their craft. We all speak this common language, but different dialects. That’s the way I view it.
And it all works. It’s even more fun to see how you can make it work without forcing it, to leave your mark on some other genre of music just by introducing a new instrument to it. It’s always a very nice feeling to leave it better than you found it. (Laughs.)
CP: That sounds like the Boy Scouts motto. Were you in the scouts growing up?
JD: No, I wasn’t. I didn’t have time for that. I was too busy playing baseball and football. Id didn’t have time to go to a meeting. (Laughs.) But it’s the same concept I guess. I learned it somewhere. Somewhere along the line, somebody told me it was good to put your time into something.
CP: What can fans expect at your show at Riverbend? What’s the set list going to be?
JD: It will be a lot of songs they’ve heard us do before, but it’s a smattering of about 20 different albums, probably. It’s all recorded stuff, and even some stuff off of other records that we’ve made separately. We’ve kind of banded it all together. There will be some new looks in there, too. But we’re trying to do the songs people want to hear us do.
We’re having such a good time playing, and that’s mainly what they’ll see, five or six people up there having the time of their lives. We’re having a lot of fun playing together. It’s a good time.