Friday, March 30, 2012

The Best that Ever Was

Most of us go through life secretly proud of something we are or we can do. Whether or not anyone else can see how good we are at whatever it is might be a matter of debate but we tend to think of ourselves as ‘pretty good.’  Not so with Earl Scruggs who died Wednesday at the age of 88 and who lived more in those nearly nine decades than most anyone else you or I will ever know.

I love all kinds of music, some more than others and some perilously close to NOT at all (crunk, I’m talking about you). In the interests of total disclosure I will concede I am not a big country and western guy which is not very important in this context because Earl Scruggs transcended the labels so many people try to put on one another and always managed to not stay in the particular boxes that so many worked so hard to keep him in.

The obit shows the range of his musical involvement and if all you know about Bill Monroe is what you read a moment ago, go wander around the audio and video files online because he was amazing (I think of him, in his day, as the John Mayall of Appalachian Americana, in that he created a musical environment towards which talented musicians gravitated). If the only music Earl Scruggs ever made and played were with Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, his passing would still be noteworthy.

But, he played with, and for, everyone making Music, with a deliberate capital M for his enjoyment first and foremost and if the rest of us got something out of it that was fine, too. I met him, as a rock and roll kid on an early eighties Bob Dylan in Germany tour, where Dylan was born again and treating his catalog like it was someone he barely knew.

Scruggs wasn’t playing in Dylan’s band; he was friends with a pair of musicians who were and he was kibitzing with them backstage at the Mannheim Eis Stadion an outdoor arena with a cover, not unlike the Garden State Arts Center, but with concrete seats, as befitted an ice hockey arena.

He joined in an interview Dylan was kind enough to do after a sound check that had been similar to a cat dropped into a blender (electric instruments and hard surfaces make for odd bedfellows) and I was overwhelmed at the catholicity of his knowledge of various musics but also by the brilliance of his observations on any and every topic that came his way.

The interview was much more Earl than Bob which discomfited the former and didn’t faze the latter and was a huge success the late night I unspooled it on a rock radio show referred to in-house as “Diving for Dopers.” That I wore a snorkel and had Red Cross certification in CPR was, in hindsight, not the right message to be sending to management. The phones lit up to rave about the musician and the man. It was quite a time.

Earl Scruggs was a genius and a gentleman of the first order and we are all poorer today for his passing.
-bill kenny

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