Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Josh Erwin, guitarist/vocalist with the Athens, Ga.-based Packway Handle Band, about his unlikely entry into bluegrass music, winning a year’s supply of beer and throwing audiences curve balls.
CP: According to your bio, when Packway Handle Band was first getting started, Athens was home to a sort of burgeoning bluegrass underground movement. Did it feel like you were participating in a kind of musical rebellion at the time?
JE: I don’t know, maybe so. It was more like a new scene sort of. It was weird the way it all went down. I think it happened with a few different groups. There were 5-8 different groups, and it was independently happening with each group. It was like everyone got interested at the same time.
I can remember the specific night that we sat down and played music with a mandolin and guitar and started arranging harmonies and stuff. It was the wintertime of 2000, and that night, Tom, the banjo player’s, brother came into town. We were all hanging out in Athens. We’d always gotten together to play music and do whatever in whatever kind of environment. We were playing all kinds of crappy rock and whatever other stuff, but this weekend it was more acoustic-oriented. None of us had sung or done any harmony, so that was a lot of fun that particular weekend.
Once we had done that, we started looking around town, and this club in town called Tasty World started having a bluegrass Wednesday night, so we started going up there. The other bluegrass groups in town were already going there. It was like, “Oh this is really cool.” Everything was new to us. It was cool. There were all these standard songs everybody plays. That was really fun and kind of eye opening.
CP: That was around the time that bluegrass entered the mainstream with the Down from the Mountain tour, “O’ Brother Where Art Thou?” and Nickel Creek becoming popular. Did that general rising interest in bluegrass impact your decision to play at all?
JE: No, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It was totally like this night where we were like, “Hey there are these songs Tom’s brother knows, let’s try to play them.” It wasn’t like, “We’re going to play some bluegrass tunes,” it was like, “I know this song, let’s play this.”
But yeah, it was happening at the same time as the “O’ Brother” thing started happening, but that wasn’t why we picked up the instruments. It was cool to do it when that was happening because everyone was like, “Oh yeah, bluegrass. That’s cool, and these guys play.” That was a helpful part because it made everyone more aware. The same thing probably happened with “Deliverance” in the ’70s. Honestly, I swear we weren’t like we saw the movement and wanted to pick up the banjo. I was truly and independent thing.
CP: Many bluegrass bands grew up with it, but you guys were completely new the genre as adults. Did that affect your approach to the music?
JE: Probably so, because we weren’t steeped in tradition. We didn’t grow up with any of that going on. We were, like most people, just listening to the radio and discovering it that way. Once you’re in the scene, you start discovering other influences. We never had any real bluegrass training. It was a lot of, “We have these instruments. What can we do with it? We can put harmonies together. How does this sound? This Sounds cool.” We just kind of dove into it not knowing what we were doing.
More so, with the rock influence and whatever we’d been playing before, it was like new stuff, like getting new things. Like harmonies. None of us sang before, so that was really appealing about bluegrass in general, like, “Everyone harmonizes, so I can sing this and you can sing that. Cool.”
Same thing with instruments. We didn’t have to sit there and worry about eight different guitar amps because everyone plays guitar. It kind of worked out that Michael decided to pay the mandolin. He was playing guitar, and I was playing guitar, and he was like, “Well, there’s a mandolin. I could play the mandolin,” and then he figured out the mandolin. Tom had already been fooling around the banjo, just to have a new instrument. I kind of stuck with the guitar.
CP: You guys really simplified things, even compared with other bluegrass bands, by doing the whole “crowding around one mike” thing. You really went back to the heart of it.
JE: I guess so, but the thing is, we don’t do it to preserve the history of it. We do it because of the whole stage aspect. I think it’s more fun for people to watch us move around. You can pay attention to more of what’s going on, instead of the mariachi line you get in some places when people all plug in and play.
CP: That sounds easier to deal with, from a sound man’s perspective, but has it ever caused you any problems on stage having to cycle in and out to the mike?
JE: Uh yeah, I guess in some cases. At some of the clubs we’ll play, they’ll be more rock-oriented clubs, and the sound guys are like, “OK. Just two mikes and no monitors? We can play around with it.” If they’re not familiar with it, it can be tough trying to work it out. It’s just a new thing for some sound guys. It’s kind of frustrating in some instances.
As far as physically in the band, every once and a while, someone will get poked with Andrew’s bow or there will be small collisions, but nothing serious.
CP: The “alt” bit to your style, did that come around because of your rock background or from being influenced from the alt scene in Athens?
JE: Well, we started out just straight bluegrass and playing straight covers and discovering what the genre was, what the music was and how to play it. Then we applied our influences.
It really started coming out when we started writing original songs. With our original songs, they ended up coming out being less and less bluegrass. We sort of discovered that bluegrass is kind of a confined genre. If you really look at a straight-up bluegrass festival, there are lot of those people who go who are not open to discovering what else you can do with a certain type of music or experimenting with it. They’re the bluegrass “purists.”
That was something we did not know. I didn’t really understand that, honestly, until just a few years ago when we were going up to IBMA. I was trying to make some showcases happen, and I wrote up a dissertation about why we should be included in this guy’s showcase. He was like, “Well, you guys don’t REALLY play bluegrass, but you kind of do. I just don’t know.” It was literally a five-paragraph essay I sent to this guy explaining what we do.
That was where that whole “alt” thing started, when we realized that we weren’t in this straight bluegrass world and that we could fit into different clubs and that our audiences were different. Many of them are interested in us because of the whole roots aspect.
As far as the newer song we’re writing and the albums, they’re not the straight 1-4-5 bluegrass songs.
It’s like every genre. Rock has 8 million different facets. If you say that, some people will think about Chuck Berry, and someone else will think about Radiohead or shoegazers. It’s the same with any genre, once you pick it apart.
So we tried to service both worlds. We don’t want to exclude anyone who wants to come see us. We were also getting a lot of people, who we were the first bluegrass band they heard. We would get people who are like, “I don’t really like bluegrass, and I saw ‘bluegrass’ on your poster, but then I saw you, and you’re nothing like the bluegrass I was thinking of.”
Alt-bluegrass is a funny one because it’s halfway all-encompassing. I’ve heard people say that about Nickel Creek, too. It’s trying to broaden the spectrum to kind of short, one-word, quick explanation of what we are and give you something to think about. If we were in an elevator, and someone was like, “Oh, you’re in a band,” and it’s like, “Yeah, alt-bluegrass.” It just leaves it to where you’re like, “Oh, not straight bluegrass but something kind of like it.”
CP: When you guys won the Miller Lite “Locals Only” battle of the bands in 2003, were you the only bluegrass band doing that?
JE: Yeah, we were the only bluegrass band. There were 72 or 73 bands, and we were the lone acoustic band.
CP: Was that intimidating or did you think it would help you stand out?
JE: No, we were like, “Let’s just enter it and see.” They would tell us, “Oh, you made it to the next round,” and we’d be like, “Cool, but this is probably it.” Then, they were like, “You’re in the finals,” and it was like, “Wow, cool.”
The way that particular Battle of the Bands went down was over a week or two with different venues around town hosting bands. We weren’t really taking it seriously as something we could actually win. We didn’t go see much of the others ones. We knew there were rock bands going on, and when we got to the finals, we were like, “There’s no way.” The rock radio station was hosting it, and it was all completely rock-oriented. We though, “No way, they’ll pick one of these three other bands,” but sure enough, at the end, it was us. It was exciting.
It was cool, too. We won a few small pieces of gear and some cash, which was great, and they printed our album. They also gave us a year’s supply of Miller Lite, which worked out to 10 cases a month, and then they cut us off after nine months.
CP: You guys seem to delight in throwing audiences curve balls. Is that for your benefit, theirs or both?
JE: I think it absolutely started as our benefit because it’s just fun. Irony is hilarious, I think. We recorded that gospel album, and there are some crazy songs on it. We’d never heard some of these things before; the messages are … interesting.
We started doing it, and the audience got a kick out of it, too. It always starts with what we think is funny. I don’t think we try to do those things in particular for the audience. It always starts with us, and the audience digs it, so we continue. That’s the process.
CP: One of the interesting covers you guys do is “Keep on the Sunnyside.” What makes you listen to something like that and think to kick up the tempo and throw it in a minor key?
JE: It goes back to the last question. It’s all about the irony of it. That makes it fun. It’s just such a happy little old song, and it’s like, “What can you do to deface it?” (Laughs.)
CP: What is your favorite of your covers?
JE: I really like that one. We don’t play it as often as we should. That’s good. I like the Violent Femmes’ “American Music.” It’s changed into a more theatric thing. We’ve played it a lot over the years, and Michael (Paynter) has turned it into this whole operatic question at the beginning of the song, which is fun.
CP: Do the covers tend to be crowd favorites?
JE: Yeah, they always get a good response. I think it’s also a familiarity thing. It’s kind of like, if you were going to see some jazz band and don’t know a lot of jazz stuff, you could say, “Oh, could you guys play ‘Take Five’ by Dave Brubeck.” That’s something you know, so it’s like, “Oh, cool. I know this song.” You can get excited because it’s something you know and can identify with.
It’s cool because now we’ve been playing enough and have released these four albums that that’s not the thing people come out for. They like our music, too, which is why you’re in a band. If people like your music, that’s awesome. We don’t have to rely on the covers like maybe a newer band would.
CP: How has your latest album, “What Are We Gonna Do Now?” been received?
JE: It came out in February. It was received pretty well. There are three of us who write, Michael, Andrew and I do. We’ve gotten a lot of responses that it’s not uniform in its approach. I think the songs are strong. People like it. We’ve gotten some good reviews.
The album release shows were a ton of fun. It’s nice to be able to put something new out. It had been two years since we’d had a new album, so people were excited to hear what we’d been doing.
CP: Having toured on it for eight months, are you tired of the new month?
JE: You always get tired of something, if you play it a lot. I think people like all the songs well enough on there that we’ll play the majority of them and keep them in the set list. It’s interesting having some of these songs how they came about to be on the album. Some we’d been playing for a while and had reached their maturity, so they don’t change anymore.
Whereas some of the others songs, like “I’m Glad You Got My Priorities Straight,” we started playing live a certain way, and we finally got in the studio and started recording it, and we were like, “We need to change this.” We got to pay attention to it to see what we could do to make it better. Then, we started playing it again after we recorded it, and it wasn’t a new song, but everyone was pleased it was a more polished version than we had been playing.
CP: What are you working on now?
JE: Going back to the covers and serving ourselves, I think we’re going to do an acoustic Devo (covers) album. I don’t think any of the newer songs will be there. It’s probably going to be a lot of the older stuff.
CP: So an EP?
JE: I think more in the style of an EP, yeah. I’d like to be done with it in the winter to have it out by early 2011.
E-mail Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com