Tao Rodriguez-Seeger to play Will Rogers
‘I think that AC/DC and Led Zeppelin are just as much my music as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly are.’ — Tao Rodriguez-SeegerBy PETER CROWLEY, Enterprise Managing Editor
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IF YOU GO...
Who: The Tao Rodriguez-Seeger Band
Where: Saranac Village at Will Rogers, Saranac Lake
When: 7 p.m. Saturday
How much: $15 in advance, $18 at the door, children under 10 free.
For more information: Call (518) 637-4989 or (518) 891-7117, or visit www.lazarbear.com.
SARANAC LAKE - Many locals first heard of Tao Rodriguez (now Rodriguez-Seeger) when he performed with his grandfather, Pete Seeger, on Aug. 16, 2000 at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake.
At the time of that concert nine years ago, Rodriguez had already given up a job programming computer games in Northampton, Mass. and had enjoyed a short-lived band with Sarah Lee Guthrie (whose grandfather Woody was, along with Pete, the most famous American folksinger) and her boyfriend (now husband) Johnny Irion.
Two months after that Blue Mountain Lake gig, Rodriguez met Mike Merenda and Ruthy Ungar (daughter of famed fiddler Jay) and formed the Mammals, a folk-rock group that was soon lifted on the winds of a old-style stringband scene. They released five albums between 2001 and 2006.
But it was this year, in his late 30s, that Rodriguez-Seeger really stepped onto national stages: first at President Obama's inauguration on Jan. 18 with Pete and Bruce Springsteen, then at Pete's 90th birthday celebration May 3 at Madison Square Garden. He also wrote and recorded two songs for "Plaza Sesamo," a Spanish version of "Sesame Street" (he's fluent due to his Puerto Rican father and nine years of childhood in Nicaragua), and his own band is about to release a new album, "Rise and Bloom." They will play Saturday in town here, at Saranac Village at Will Rogers.
Don't expect to hear any of his grandfather's standards, except for maybe a version of the anti-Vietnam-War "Bring 'em Home" updated for our current conflicts. He told the Enterprise Monday that he's "a little burnt out on stories about my famous family members, just 'cause I feel like I know all the stories there are to tell. But I do like that there's a long history of music to draw upon - hundreds of years', potentially, worth of musical tradition that I can draw on and essentially say, 'This music is my music.' Although you can say that about just about anything, I think, if you forge a connection with it personally. I think that AC/DC and Led Zeppelin are just as much my music as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly are."
Do expect Rodriguez-Seeger to play his guitar and banjo through an amplifier, and expect Laura Cortese to do the same with her fiddle.
"There's this mixture of a kind of electric rock, a dirtier sound," Rodriguez-Seeger said, "back to kind of the early sound of the Mammals in a way, although not quite as acoustic."
Informed that Will Rogers is a senior citizens' residence, he didn't seem phased.
"I'm very popular with the octagenarian set," he said. "At Mammals concerts we saw it all the time. It'd be little kids with their parents and their grandparents. Every once in a blue moon we'd see four generations of a family at a show, and we'd be, 'God, that just doesn't happen every day.' We felt pretty lucky."
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Here is the Q&A for this interview:
Peter Crowley: I'm not sure how much you know about the venue you're playing on Saturday here.
Tao Rodriguez-Seeger: I know next to nothing about it. Tell me about it.
PC: Well, it's called Saranac Village at Will Rogers, and it's actually a senior citizens' residence. But it's a beautiful building; downstairs it has a main room with a stage and everything. It was a hospital ... for entertainers who were suffering from tuberculosis. And now ... it has been renovated as a residence for senior citizens. So, while more than just the old folks will be coming to the show, you may get more of them for this gig than you might at some of your other shows on this tour.
TRS: It happens all the time. I'm very popular with the octagenarian set.
PC: Well, touring with your grandfather for all that time, you must have a lot of experience at playing for a multi-generational crowd.
TRS: It's funny; I feel like the Mammals really explored the multi-generational crowd more - I mean my grandpa definitely did, too, but at Mammals concerts we saw it all the time. It'd be little kids with their parents and their grandparents. Every once in a blue moon we'd see four generations of a family at a show, and we'd be, 'God, that just doesn't happen every day.' We felt pretty lucky.
PC: So, as part of a family where there are several generations - where there is an extended family who is known, in the public eye, do you ever feel like you have more of a sense of that than other people, more of a sense of generations?
TRS: No ... maybe not - well, yeah, I guess so, but I don't dwell on it too much. I'm really close to my grandfather, and most of my family is very tight-knit, so in that sense I think it's just inevitable, like in any family that's close, you end up sharing a lot of stories and time together. And so you talk about the family, and, as you say, it's sort of a family that's been in the public eye for a while, and so there's a lot of stories that are public-eye-worthy, I guess. I'm more interested in the sort of more obscure side of my family. I just ran into a fellow the other day who knew my great-grandfather on my grandmother's (Toshi Seeger's) side, Japanese, Takashi Ohta, who was a grand master of jujitsu. And his story is fascinating unto itself but, of course, sort of overshadowed by the famous musician in my family. But I'd never met anybody outside my family who knew Takashi, so that was really cool. I guess I'm a little burnt out on stories about my famous family members just 'cause I feel like I know all the stories there are to tell. But I do like that there's a long history of music to draw upon - hundreds of years', potentially, worth of musical tradition that I can draw on and essentially say, 'This music is my music.' Although you can say that about just about anything, I think, if you forge a connection with it personally. I think that AC/DC and Led Zeppelin are just as much my music as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly are.
PC: So, I'm of your generation, but some musicians, I've interviewed a few in the past who've come through here, and one interesting thing that's come up a couple times is that some are of the view that there was a Golden Era of great American music from about maybe 1900 to somewhere maybe in the 1960s or so, and that since then we've been living in a kind of a tepid time for musical creativity. What do you think of that? Have you heard that tossed around before?
TRS: I have heard that opinion bandied about. I think they're wrong; whoever has that opinion is clearly not paying attention. The music industry may be suffering at the moment, but that doesn't mean that people aren't writing. I mean, all you have to do is go on MySpace to find tens of thousands of very interesting, bizarre pieces of music - most of which will never be commercially viable, for whatever reason. ... In fact, I would say there's probably more songwriters now than there's ever been in the history of the United States, simply because there's this kind of allure of recognition, the potential for recognition, and maybe people even feel like you can make a living at it. And it turns out that if you can make 50 or a hundred bucks a night, and you have the stamina to play five or six shows a (week), and you can do that for 52 weeks a year, then you can in fact make a living at it, and it's not really as daunting as some people might make it out to be. You just have to kind of take the plunge. You know, 11 years ago, I was programming computer games in Northampton, Massachusetts, and it was getting in the way of playing music. I remember being bitter every time somebody would say that I couldn't go off and do a gig 'cause we had some deadline or something. ... Any time, of course, music got in the way of my regular job, which paid quite well, I was thrilled that I could take a day off to go play some music with my friends or my grandpa. So I think once you reach that kind of emotional conclusion, that you've found something that satisfies you regardless of whether it really makes as much money as you'd like, you're a damn fool if you don't just jump at it.
PC: So when you kind of jumped at it, maybe 10, 11 years ago or so, was that with the Mammals or Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion?
TRS: Sarah Lee and Johnny, yeah. I met Johnny one night: We were playing with Grandpa and Arlo at Carnegie Hall, and Sarah Lee and Johnny had just been dating for about eight or seven months. And he tagged along, and he was her new boyfriend, and none of us really knew him too well. So we were getting to know each other and picking tunes up in the hotel room, and it just felt really good, so we said, 'Hey, why don't we rehearse some tunes up and play a gig. That's always the way the best bands happen; that's the way the Mammals happened, too. ...
PC: Some of those folks have come through Saranac Lake: Both Sarah Lee and Johnny, and Mike and Ruthy from the Mammals have, at least twice each, played in town here. I know I've talked to Sarah Lee and Johnny before and written about them in the past. And Northampton, well, western Mass., I suppose, is a bit like northern New York in a sense, in that there's a certain allure to it, maybe more so than up here, but it's a small town and people tend to know each other.
TRS: It's a hotbed of youth culture in the Pioneer Valley because of those five colleges. They are old-timey music in a hyped-up, sort of punk, aggressive way, but at the same time bring a more contemporary, indie-rock edge to it, and there was enough of a context amongst the youth culture that both were understandable. If you play old-timey music, if you play folk music and you give it a rock 'n' roll edge but nobody understands where the rock 'n' roll comes from, then it's harder to really grasp the connection. We got lucky in that a year or two after we started the Mammals, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" came out, and all of a sudden there was this resurgent interest in banjos and fiddles. And so here our original music mixed with old folk songs and murder ballads and square-dance music, it just was making sense in a very sort of national context - and we weren't the only ones taking advantage of that. Crooked Still, Uncle Earl, the Avett Brothers, the Duhks, Old Crow Medicine Show, lots and lots of it - Gillian Welch and David Rawlings - I mean, the list goes on and on. And for every one of those recognized and successful musicians, there's probably three dozen bands who are still slogging it out and having fun playing on the weekends and keeping their day job, which is, at the end of the day, really the important part - that you just play the music and let it speak to you and let it speak to others. But like I said, we got lucky in that there was a crowd, an audience that understood both sides of the musical coin. They could understand the traditional; they could understand the contemporary and grasp it and appreciate it. So we're lucky that we live in an era that people are educated enough about music that they don't close their minds to experimentation. I can think back to when my grandfather maybe wasn't as appreciative of Bob Dylan as he should have been, and the whole folk world turned on its head, and before you knew it there was a schism. Now you could argue that that schism was created by Al Grossman (Dylan's manager), which I think it probably was to a certain degree, to sell records, but it doesn't diminish the fact that there was a huge contingent of folkies who were very intolerant of Dylan's need to do something different than what they wanted. But that doesn't seem to be as prevalent anymore, which I'm very thankful for.
PC: So, can you describe the kind of music people can expect from your show Saturday?
TRS: Well, we're coming as a trio, so there'll be no drums, no keys, no screaming lead electric guitars, but Laura and I - Laura's the fiddler, Laura Cortese - Laura and I play through amps ... So there's this mixture of a kind of electric rock, a dirtier sound. And Jake (Silver) will play upright bass instead of electric, so it'll be kind of a mixture, back to kind of the early sound of the Mammals in a way, although not quite as acoustic. ... I'm still very interested in what the Mammals were all about, which is taking old-timey folk music, traditional fiddle and banjo tunes and reinterpreting them, but I've been writing a lot as well, so we'll do original material that maybe do some original material that maybe doesn't sound quite as traditional. We'll do some stuff in Spanish, some beautiful stuff from Puerto Rico and Cuba. ... We probably won't do any of my grandpa's tunes, in case anybody asks - well, one or two, actually. We've been doing "Bring 'em Home," which is Grandpa's anti-Vietnam War song, but I've changed it around a bit to be slightly more contemporary and apply more to our current situation. Instead of just singing, "If you love your Uncle Sam, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, support our boys in foreign lands," I say, "Support our girls in foreign lands," too - stuff like that. They all gotta come home.
