Peter Rowan sits down with KGNU’s Indra Raj to discuss his storied career, musical influences, and performance with the Steep Canyon Rangers. Rowan reflects on his musical journey and touches on the influence of Nashville as well as reggae, emphasizing the connection between bluegrass and reggae rhythms. (Interview date: 1/29/2025)
Indra Raj: So excited to welcome Mr. Peter Rowan into the studio today. Welcome.
Peter Rowan: I feel welcomed here with you. Thank you.
Indra Raj: You should. KGNU is a huge bluegrass station and you are a legend. So I feel very fortunate to be in the same room as you.
Peter Rowan: I’m happy to be here. Happy to be in Boulder on a nice sunny day.
Indra Raj: Yeah!
Peter Rowan: Very cool.
Indra Raj: Yeah, it’s a good day. We’ve had some not great weather. So you came at the right time. So you selected that song to play today, so tell us a little bit about why.
Peter Rowan: To me it was a breakthrough song in terms of stylistic kind of thing. It was after Old & In the Way and I had been recording in Texas with Flaco Jimenez and we did a song called The Free Mexican Air Force. But it was all very on the spot, casual, just whatever you get on tape is what it is, and I didn’t want anything more than that. And there’s some stuff with Tex Logan, live at a festival. And there’s some tape warble, and I just kept it all in. But at the time, I went through Nashville and saw some of my old friends. And I realized how much Nashville really meant to me. And so I went back, let’s see, this was Sugar Hill, right? Sugar Hill Records. So they offered me a decent budget and I had been recording for Flying Fish, which was another independent label, Bruce Kaplan’s label out of Chicago. And I’d been touring in Europe and I had met this piano player in Ireland, Trina O’Donnell, and she played the clarinet on this recording. And I think the album is called The Walls of Time. And rather than be eclectic, I decided just to go back to Nashville and get with all my old friends. Jim Rooney was a co-producer on this. Byron House, a great bass player, did the engineering. And we did it at a place called The Castle. And for me it was my first step towards taking responsibility for my sound and I figured well, it’s a bluegrass record So we got Sam Bush. We got Jerry Douglas. We got Ricky Skaggs. We got Eddie Adcock, the great bass player. He played with Patsy Cline and he was one of the old school guys and that song, I think, is an example of taking the elements of bluegrass and expanding bluegrass without adding drums. Most people, they figure, oh, just add drums and play louder. My approach, especially in the song Thirsty in the Rain, was to orchestrate it. And for a long time I thought, God, man, I just, I sterilized it. I took out the great, surround sound of bluegrass, and now I hear it and I realized that’s what I was doing. Every element comes in its own space. The banjo comes in only at the end of the song. The mandolin comes in another place, the dobro in another, and there’s no flashy solos, there’s just a riff. And I’m at this point looking back on the good things, and I realized that was a real transition for me. And one which I’m really proud of. Especially since I’m friends with all those people still, but Trina added a very special element to the song. She was in a band called the Bothy Band. And when I first went to England with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys in the 1960s, we played the second Cambridge Folk Festival. And one of the other bands on the show was the Boffee Band. Christy Moore did all the singing, and Trina was, I think, playing keyboards then. But I loved what Trina contributed. Tonality wise, it’s very, it’s in between a banjo and a mandolin. But it is really a harpsichord. And I think that instead of listening for what I didn’t accomplish, I now hear it as it worked. I’m just the hardest person to judge my own music because there’s so many elements. But Trina played her harpsichord basically on that song. So it gave it another whole dimension of European related, you know, keyboard, and I always thought “You know if you’re gonna really play bluegrass, there’s no reason not to have a nice harpsichord.” It’s the same, it’s made of wood. It’s not electric. Nowadays bluegrass has become more, all encompassing, powerful trying to cover a lot of bases, and I’ll be playing with the Steep Canyon Rangers tonight. Yes. This is my first show with them as a guest, as a featured singer and all. I have been playing with Sam Grisman. My old pal David’s son and his Sam Grisman project and that one is all acoustic and all on one mic.
Indra Raj: Yeah. Oh wow.
Peter Rowan: And nobody seems to miss not having drums. Yeah.
Indra Raj: No one seems to miss it.
Peter Rowan: It’s full circle, nowadays it’s, “Oh yeah, we play bluegrass. We have a drummer and all.” I think we made some progress when I did a record called Carter Stanley’s eyes for rebel records a few years ago. And I had Jamie Oldacre playing percussion and drums, but it wasn’t a full set. It was one of those South American wooden boxes. He had that there and a snare. But if you listened to the bluegrass record on Carter Stanley’s Eyes. We minimalized it a little bit so that the record company could reach the audience that they felt was their core audience with traditional bluegrass. But we did some mixes with the percussion up. Oh man, that is really good because Jamie’s idea of percussion was to play with his fingertips. He said everybody in bluegrass is playing with fingers. So why would he play like a rock drum part, right? So he was, he’d be playing with his fingers and he’d damp part of the snare on the top, put a wallet on it or something. Get this little, he’d do a little rim shot with one finger. Yeah. So there is, you can go with finesse in adding percussive sounds.
Indra Raj: Yeah, it sounds like just listening to you speak, I’m learning so much. And the through line is I think in bluegrass, it’s like you got to work as a whole. It’s not about one person. It’s not about one sound. It’s about bringing it all together and subtle percussion. Bringing the banjo in right at the end and thinking about production in that way.
Peter Rowan: Yeah, it was really fun to do, but I was totally unsure of myself.
Indra Raj: Yeah.
Peter Rowan: One of the guys who really helped me at that time was Ricky Skaggs. He got me a publishing deal in Nashville and that was ‘81. We moved there in ‘84. And Michael was born there. And so he’s a Nashville cat. But Ricky added a note of clarity, he’s not a he’s more about organizing the sound I would say, and that was a good influence on me. And it was very exciting, and now to hear the song again, I mean I haven’t heard it in a number of years, but we do it in the band, in my band. David Greer, first thing he played when he came in to sit in with me at the Ryman Auditorium a couple years ago. He started playing the riff, and it was like, “let’s just do the song.” So yeah, I feel like I’ve come full circle in a way.
Indra Raj: Absolutely. Such a long storied career so many releases I was on like the Wikipedia page for your releases and it was just like scrolling. So it must be such a gift to listen back to things that was the thing at the time and reflect on them again.
Peter Rowan: I realized that my intentions were, there’s some stuff I’ve been criticized for the live stuff festival tapes that are, were recorded in the rain and the tapes got wet and, but to me, the spirit in those performances are what is exciting about them anyway. I remember Tex Logan actually didn’t like his recording of When I Was a Cowboy because he felt that it showed him badly. The tape warp on that same record no, on the first record, Peter Rowan on Sugar Hill, Flying Fish. The tape warp added this really otherworldly effect to Texas Fiddle, it was like some kind of effect. The performance to my ears was so fully charged, there was no mixing that, it was just a two track tape. Somebody had a tape deck rolling and that’s part of bluegrass. Before the Grateful Dead invited everybody to start taping, you’d go to a bluegrass festival in Virginia and there’d be 15 tape recorder microphones. Recording monaural or even stereo at the time was a new thing, and all reel to reel tape recorders wall and sacks, it was a big thing.
Indra Raj: Totally.
Peter Rowan: And nobody in Bluegrass ever said, no, you can’t tape us. So you got all these wonderful tapes from the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe from that era. And it’s full of the spirit of that era, and in the 60s, Bill Monroe, and I happened to be part of the band at the time to start playing for the college audiences and stuff, but Bill Monroe’s momentum was, with the help of a man called Ralph Rinsler, who managed Bill and also managed Doc Watson, Bill’s momentum was building up again. It was his second coming, really, his first one was, what, 1948 on the Grand Ole Opry with the Flatt and Scruggs, and then, here we are 20 years later in the 60s, and he’s got these four skinny city billies, who were just devoted to him. Learning his music and he was so definitive about what he wanted, which, of course, made me rebel and try and do everything else except what he wanted but, the fiddle player, Richard Green, who was also in the two bands that I did following the Bluegrass Boys, Richard was in Sea Train and Mule Skinner. We had a long partnership together, as I did with David Grisman. And Richard did say one thing that really struck me about Bill in an interview that we did for somebody online. I think it was a few years ago. We just had a get together online. And he said Somebody said what’s his name, a good interviewer he asked Richard what did you ultimately get from playing with Bill Monroe? And Richard’s answer was so unique, he said, “Bill Monroe had a bottom line, which was the truth as he saw it, of how music was organized.” And, for instance, when Richard first joined the Bluegrass Boys, Bill asked him not to play backup behind the vocals. Because it was, first of all, hard to sing when the guy’s playing lead fiddle behind you singing. Richard couldn’t stop soloing. He was just that kind of player. He just flowed. So Bill Monroe had him just play rhythm during the singing and during other people’s solos, no backup at all. It went and when it came time for his solo you could do whatever you want and Bill said about soloing and improvisation that if you … A good foxhound will chase that fox until he knows which way that fox will go.And after a number of times, they do a repeating thing, maybe four or five, the fox will always run in the same direction, trying to get back to his hole. He said a good foxhound, after repeating it over and over again, will cut across and catch the fox, which is like the savage purity of Bill Monroe’s vision. He’s a country guy. And he used to listen to those foxhounds, and he’d know when one was cutting across, his bark would change, so he, Bill Monroe’s life was very connected with livestock. Farming, he was a farmer, and had his foxhounds. He traded foxhounds, we once took a truckload of foxhounds up to Beanbossom, Indiana to trade for one red mule that Ralph Stanley was bringing from North Carolina. This is another world, the world of cockfights and, a little bit brutal to our sensibilities as city people. But that gave the music the earthiness that it really had in the beginning. But Richard’s take on a purely musical level was this, and I’ll never forget it, he said, Bill Monroe required that you take a stand on what Richard called the truth. The truth, as Bill Monroe wanted it to be, perceived it to be, and it’s all within the musical, it’s all pre existing musical rules that are like mathematical or like a color wheel. And by not playing anything but rhythm during other people’s soloing and singing, he landed somewhere in the music where his time, Richard’s time, became the same as Bill Monroe’s time, and that’s what Bill Monroe called this mysterious thing in bluegrass called the timing. It doesn’t mean tempo. It doesn’t mean fast or slow. It just means how things fit together in the traditional way that Bill heard it, and so I think Thirsty in the Rain reflects that, but in just a little more, maybe clearer way, because I remember when I recorded with Bill, we went to CBS studios, the smaller of the two or three studios they had over there in Nashville. And we just did one or two takes and that was it. There was no like, “what if we do …” it was just like, you just do that and that’s it and it was a take. And they become historical documents and people go, “that’s a great take.” And I go, “Elvis Presley, when he recorded Heartbreak Hotel, he did 52 takes.”
Indra Raj: Yeah.
Peter Rowan: To get Bill Monroe to do more than two takes.
Indra Raj: Not gonna happen.
Peter Rowan: Not gonna happen. But Richard said he found a truth with Bill Monroe and that he could never find it again. He said he never found it anywhere else but there. Of course, he took it with him. In his own sense of how to organize music, but I thought that was amazing to hear from a guy who is prolific on the violin, that Bill embodied a truth, a musical truth as a person and his person.
Indra Raj: Absolutely. It’s all connected. So tonight you’re going to be with the steep Canyon Rangers.
Peter Rowan: We are, we’re going to have an adventure.
Indra Raj: Yeah! What can folks expect is going to be at the Boulder Theater? We do have a pair of tickets to give away, so people should stay tuned for that. What can people expect? What are you looking forward to with the show?
Peter Rowan: Truthfully, I have played with these guys before and it’s gonna be a whole new ballgame. I have no idea.
Indra Raj: Okay! That’s exciting! It could be anything.
Peter Rowan: We’ve all, we all have the same repertory musical background, and I remember when they were just an acoustic, straight ahead bluegrass band, and I’ve known them for a long time, and the band has stayed together, which is great. Except for Woody, Woody’s gone on to be more on the organizational level of, in his area, North Carolina, which, that’s a whole other question, what’s gone up, what’s gone down up there. But I’m looking forward to tonight, seeing the guys, and we never know what comes out of these things.
Indra Raj: Yeah.
Peter Rowan: It’s very exciting.
Indra Raj: That’s live bluegrass, you never know where it can go.
Peter Rowan: That’s the one thing that’s great about it, is you’re not going to get just a rehashed version of something.
Indra Raj: Yeah.
Peter Rowan: Because there’s so much musicality involved, and the dance between the players. If I may be so bold and call it a dance.
Indra Raj: It is a dance, and it’s a conversation, and it’s fun. Full of improvisation. So we have another recorded track here that you selected, but you also brought in your guitar. I don’t know if you wanted to play a song for us.
Peter Rowan: Let’s listen to the other recorded track and I’ll maybe play one at the end.
Indra Raj: All right. So this is Land of the Navajo. Anything you want to say about it?
Peter Rowan: Which?
Indra Raj: Land of the Navajo?
Peter Rowan: But from which …
Indra Raj: Oh, I pulled the one from Crucial Country.
Peter Rowan: Okay.
Indra Raj: Is that good?
Peter Rowan: Yeah, it’s long.
Indra Raj: Okay. We’ll listen to it.
Peter Rowan: Do we have time?
Indra Raj: Yeah, we have time.
Peter Rowan: Okay.
Indra Raj: Alright, so let’s play that.
Peter Rowan: I got a lot to say about that.
Indra Raj: Okay, here we go. If you’re just tuning in, this is KGNU. We’re live with Peter Rowan in the studio. It’s gonna be with the Steep Canyon Rangers tonight at the Boulder Theater. We’re going to listen to Land of the Navajo from Crucial Country now.
[Land of the Navajo plays]
Indra Raj: So you brought your guitar in today, such a treat what are you going to play for us?
Peter Rowan: I’d like to say something about that recording.
Indra Raj: Oh yeah, of course.
Peter Rowan: In the Land of the Navajo, and that was pretty much, the same thing as The Walls of Time. We had started playing in, in, in ‘81 and I moved to Nashville in ‘84 and stayed there until 1990. So the kind of interplay that we were capable of reflects those six years of a decade of playing together. I remember Amy Lou Harris hired everybody in my band including Roy Husky on bass, and she said, “I’m sorry I stole your band.: I didn’t have the vision to organize the whole thing. I was in a phase of just letting it be what it is, but the by-product was the music was very pure. It had no incentive other than being good, and getting us off. So it’s interesting to see that progression from Thirsty in the Rain to through this version of Land of the Navajo, which had Victor Kraus, Allison Kraus’s brother on bass, and a great bass player Larry Adamanyuk from C Train, and Sam Bush Band, and Emmylou Harris Band came down from Canada to join C Train when I was in that band, and it was great to play with him again. It’s just a fluid player. And on percussion, we had Kester Smith, the late and great Kester Smith, passed away about six months ago. He was Taj Mahal’s drummer. And Kester was from Trinidad. It really helped bring in some of that kind of Calypso Reggae-ish feel. But the overall thing worked, and quite truthfully, we tried to do a kind of Crucial Country reunion. It just didn’t, it was flat. It was good, but it didn’t have that momentum of all those years, and now let’s just play Telluride and do it up.
Indra Raj: Yeah.
Peter Rowan: So that’s the nature of the music business is how, the life of a band, basically this consortium of players is a decade. And you look at some of these bands like the Rolling Stones, they’ve stayed together for more than 30 years. Yeah, it’s amazing. And I, as an elder now, I look at that and I go, “geez, any of these bands could have, could we have stayed together? Could C Train have stayed together?” No, because every element in these bands was creative and people had to move on. That’s the bottom line. And I’m like Ishmael in Moby Dick, only I am left to tell the tale. In a way, it’s my tale, but other people have their tales. I still play with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas. I still play with Larry Adamaniuk. Victor I’d love to play with again soon. And Kester he’s gone on, but it’s just these elements that come together at a time and create a certain kind of magic. That’s been my role and my path. And yeah, thank you.
Indra Raj: Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that, and nice to have it captured, that moment at Telluride from 30 years ago now, yeah. Alright, so you got your guitar here, what are we gonna hear?
Peter Rowan: I don’t know. I’ll do one from … first the old Chinese number, tuning.
Indra Raj: Yeah, you gotta get that right.
Peter Rowan: I wrote this back a couple presidencies ago. Since we have the same guy now.
[Peter Rowan plays a song]
Indra Raj: Live with Peter Rowan here in the studio. So you wrote that eight years ago or so?
Peter Rowan: Yeah, I think so.
Indra Raj: And do you still write songs on the regular?
Peter Rowan: I always figured the songs were writing me. If I can listen well enough to what’s going on, there’s a song there. And sometimes it’s harder to listen, sometimes one little line that you wrote five years ago in the back of a notebook somewhere will speak to you. And you go, “wait, I never finished that song. There’s a song there.” And I did a lot of listening, really, a lot of listening, just in general, listening, and then I don’t know. If I have a religion, it is the religion of joining my voice into sort of a universal chorus. I’ve been lucky enough to be taught mantras and those mantras are the key to vocalization in my view. There was a time when there were several practitioners of mantra around California where I lived and they’d just show up at the door and they wouldn’t even talk words, they would just sing mantras. There was a guy named, his actual name was Keith Lampe, and he renamed himself Ponderosa Pine, and he vowed he would never wear shoes again until the world was at peace. Wow. And you’d hear a knock on the door, and you know it was Pine because before you got to the door you’d hear him. Which is taking the mantra, syllabic approach into another broader musical realm, or perhaps to the original realm, so I know that the history of mantra is long and has been used in many ways, but I think for musical deep dive, mantra gives you a lot. And I don’t mean just, you really put time in, and of course all the Buddhist visualizations and Hindu too. It’s a very old tradition, but we have the five senses of sight, sound, touch, feel, taste, and then space. How do we unite with space?
Indra Raj: Absolutely.
Peter Rowan: Music is one of the great vehicles. Yes.
Indra Raj: And vocalization. Yeah. I think singing is such an important connection with our body awareness.
Peter Rowan: Totally agree with you.
Indra Raj: Have you been singing since you were born or?
Peter Rowan: Before I could play an instrument I was listening to the radio and most of these excursions into other musics, like Hawaiian music and Jamaican music and Tex Mex music. I heard them as a kid on the radio before rock, before Elvis, before rock and roll. There was just, I used to take my dad’s Philco radio and under the covers with me at night and listen to Arthur Godfrey from the beach at Waikiki. And I learned, the first instrument I learned was to vocalize a pedal steel guitar.
Indra Raj: Oh, cool.
Peter Rowan: Can I play you a tune?
Indra Raj: Yes, of course. You don’t need to ask.
[Peter Rowan plays a song]
Peter Rowan: It’s my steel guitar imitation.
Indra Raj: It’s pretty good. When you can sing like an instrument, you’ve got it. That was awesome. I love it. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about your connection to reggae music because you put out a whole album about it. It’s a part of who you are, it seems. And it’s not always something that all of us would maybe connect all the time. So tell me a little bit about that.
Peter Rowan: One of the great elements that Sam Bush and I talk about a lot is this whole idea of in a bluegrass beat, you’ve got a one and a second beat like a one and two and one and two, three and four and so the “and” beat is that back beat and in Bill Monroe’s world, that’s, back beat. Sorry, but yeah, so it’d be like. So reggae takes that idea and enhances it in several different ways, which I hope I can get at least one of these ways across. It’s not just simple and neither was Bill Monroe’s either. Bill Monroe had a whole thing within his structure of a backbeat, but in reggae you’ve got things that are. It all goes back to people like Bo Diddley and in American music, too, is this kind of swamp like rhythm, but Buddy Holly wrote a song that goes like, “I’m going to tell you how it’s going to be,” which is a Bo Diddley beat, but the reggae thing has refined it. To where there’s If you’ve got a bass part going. Or it can go into a different feel. But when I first played with Tony Chin, it blew me away as we were rehearsing. He understood the whole concept. He was Peter Tosh’s guitarist. And he did a thing that was like, check stroke, but then he, on electric guitar he’d do a back brush, and he’d let that ring. And it, so there’s a world of connection between how to accent the back beat to put it simply, but then, I always used to go to Jamaica and I’d find some locals playing and they were like, “who are you, man?” I’d say, “can I sing one?” And I’d sing one and then we’d just jam all night. Which is different from the recording studio situation. When I played, that was Ziggy Marley’s band pretty much at the time when I did Reggae Billy.
Indra Raj: Yeah.
Peter Rowan: And there’s interpretations, of a song like, Angel Island.
[Peter Rowan plays Angel Island]
Peter Rowan: And their interpretation of that rhythm was so unique. And all I did, I played acoustic guitar on that record. I didn’t play any electric guitar. And I had it down in Jamaica, and I recorded that record on that guitar. These are little things that add joy to the whole story, right?
Indra Raj: Absolutely, and it’s again, it’s like finding those connections and being open to those connections between different types of music, different cultures, and that’s huge.
Peter Rowan: Then there’s, your heart in your throat when at a jam session, a Rasa guy goes, let me see that guitar, and it disappears across the room into the hands of, whoa, sure sounds good.
Indra Raj: Absolutely. Yeah. So we are. actually going to run out of time soon. All right. But it’s been such a pleasure having you in, Peter Rowan. You’re going to be at the Boulder Theater tonight with Steep Canyon Rangers. And I can’t wait for that. We do have a ticket giveaway for this KGNU Presents show. If you would like to win those tickets, I’m actually going to do this by email right now. Just send an email to [email protected] with Steep Canyon Rangers and Peter Rowan in the subject line. And the third person to email will win those tickets. Thank you so much for sharing all of your stories and music and knowledge today. I’ve learned a lot.
Peter Rowan: My pleasure.
Indra Raj: And hopefully we’ll have you back again soon.
