Who???

Yonder Mountain String Band

By By Chris Brown

Thursday, January 27, 2005



COntributed photo

The Band:

Jeff Austin: Mandolin, Vocals

Ben Kaufmann: Bass, Vocals

Dave Johnston: Banjo, Vocals

Adam Aijala: Guitar, Vocals

Call them bluegrass, call them folk, call them old-time, or just call them some form of rock n’ roll, you can’t seem to define an indefinable band like Boulder, Colorado’s Yonder Mountain String Band. Experts in weaving old and new genres of music seamlessly together in 10-minute instrumental improvisations, this quartet pushes the musical envelope by calling upon new forms of musical expression to paint over a foundation of simple, yet soulful music that originated on front porches in early 1900s Appalachia. Cut from the same cloth as Blueground Undergrass, New Grass Revival and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Yonder Mountain String Band has carved out its own unique niche among these and other bands that have collectively been lumped into a brave new category of modern day bluegrass called “newgrass.” The band kicks off a national tour starting January 27 in Telluride, Colorado, and comes to Lawrence to play at Liberty Hall on Sunday, Jan. 30.

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Jayplay writer Chris Brown chats with bassist Ben Kaufmann about life on the road, bad food and that asshole at every show that’s wasted and can’t help but ruin someone else’s concert experience.

Brown: In your song “40 miles from Denver” you sing about abruptly picking up and leaving Colorado for the Appalachian Mountains. Does this stem from a personal experience?

Kaufmann: It was about a break-up and I guess it was a few years later when I wrote this song. It’s sort of about wanting to have the courage to tell someone “you’ve treated me bad, that’s not cool and I’m outta here.” For most songs you have a personal experience and you might embellish a bit, but you want to write around some truth. You want to start with a general truth and go from there.

This tour you guys are about to start is called the “Cabin Fever” tour. Do you all have cabin fever this time of year or what is this tour name referring to?

We get to spend a month at home and I was getting used to hanging out with my girlfriend, being with friends and just relaxing. This will be our first tour [of 2005] and we’ve had a lot of time off and we’re ready to play music again. There’s cabins on mountains, right? I guess it just gets at that need to get out of your “cabin,” whatever that may be, and do something different.

You speak of “rambling on” in many of your songs. Can you define what a rambler is?

Being bored in one place too long is the prerequisite for rambling. The rambling spirit is when you can’t stay too long before you look to the horizon for another place.

How would you characterize Yonder Mountain String Band’s music and what direction is the music moving in the future?

People have called us “jamgrass” in the past but it’s such an awful term.

Yeah, anything “jam” always just makes me think of incessant musical noodling that goes nowhere.

Oh, I know, it really doesn’t do the music any justice. I guess you could call us Americana but we’re also sort of bluegrass, folk, country, and rock n’ roll. Sometimes we just sound western. There’s not another band like Yonder Mountain. We’re always that thing, whatever you want to call us. Fucking bluegrass, I don’t know…

Do you have any pet peeves or things that just really tick you off when you are having a bad day on tour?

Well, it’s really nice to meet people in the audience who really appreciate the music but there’s usually some drunk asshole that you run into after the show who took too many drugs and won’t sleep for three days and just wants to talk about something. Ya know there’s such a sense of community in the crowds at our shows but those people who just don’t know their limits ruin it for others around them. There’s individuals in the crowd that are really feeling the music and make eye contact with you and I try to apologize for that drunk asshole standing next to them with a look.

Ever eat a really bad veggie burrito?

Well, during festivals the last thing you want to deal with are the toilets there so we stay clear of sketchy food. I don’t know about burritos but grilled cheese is pretty safe unless it’s made with like, “organic Egyptian goat cheese” or something like that. Down in Austin [Texas] we had some soup at a restaurant that smelled like dirty gym socks we all now refer to as the ‘soup of the doom,’ kind of like ‘fruit of the loom’; it made us all sick.

How does Lawrence stack up among all the other college towns you’ve been played in?

I haven’t spent a whole lot of time in Lawrence but it seems closely related to Boulder. I don’t know what it is about these places but they seem to attract the same sort of open-minded people that are really into music and come out and support us. There’s a real sense of community in these places.

Lawrence was the one town I remember where I was so scared to take a shower in this really shady hotel we got for the night a few years back. I think we weren’t actually playing in town that time, just stopping through, but I can remember opening the door to this hotel room and immediately seeing tons of cockroaches disperse across the floor. That night, I took a shower in my socks because I was so scared to stand in this shower. It looked like there was this layer of coffee grinds in the tub. I don’t know if we got the decaf coffee room or what.

Ok, ya got 30 seconds: how many names can you give for a marijuana cigarette?

Can I get some help from the rest of the band?

Of course, it can be a joint effort.

Ok, here goes: joint, hooter, doobie, bone, spliff, jay, cone, leaf, pattie, pinner.

Which mountain is the “Yonder” mountain?

Whichever mountain that next one is. We picked “Yonder” out of a folk book. We knew we wanted to have “String Band” as part of our band name and we just thought Yonder sounded really cool.

If Steven Segal and Chuck Norris were to “throw down,” who would win?

Isn’t Segal like a really big dude, like 6’5” or something like that? Actually, I heard he’s kind of fat these days. I think Segal would probably because he can break some bones and shit. I’d pay $15 to see that fight.

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