Here is a picture i had taken of old time fiddler Dave Madron (1894-1978) at Calico Ghost Town in 1972, with my flesh and blood older brother Mike beside me.  Originally hailing from Indian City, Oklahoma, in Payne County, Madron was to become a hero to me in the guise of musical inspiration and leanings towards and about the devil’s box.  I remember visiting his home, a humble fruit picker’s shack, a floor lamp making tea stain shadows on the walls, while outside lurked the disappearing farmland of Norco, California.  The picture above is the day i first met him.  He eventually gave me the fiddle pictured.  It had a lion’s head scrawled into the peghead, dime-store diamonds around the bouts (like the kind Stratovarius used), and a stain made assaultingly by rubbing in plugs of tobacco. Continue reading →

I wrote these notes upon a request from my friend Darol Anger, who preformed and produced the epic recording (1998).  As per usual my stream of consciousness style didn’t get past the label heads, sailing like every other free bird, above the heads of a martini lunch.  The project included contributions by Willie Nelson, John Hartford, Vassar Clements, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Stuart Duncan, Michael Manring, and others.  So, needless to say i was edited out in good company.  I hope that you are amused by my humble efforts.  After you are done marveling at my shear disregard for sentence structure feel free to revisit this rare sonic masterpiece.

Patrick Brayer

Heritage : Introductory Notes for Darol Anger

If the search for reason had an end, and it hired a band, it would be a small army of old time fiddlers on horseback. We ourselves, as if playing in a similar unison, have the identical questions, as if reason were a short artery rising up independent of meaning. To the same rhythm of hooves on leaves, in the corn colored rays we have all the information of the civil war cherry orchards yet sleeping in our blood.

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Long live Okie Adams when he died

Hot rod and banjos, and California pride

Who has an answer when it’s a parable crime

It won’t be water but rather fire this time

The flame’s own boarding school light on doom

He inlayed a figure on a sawdust moon

Like my grandpa always asked, “what was that that won’t forget”

Every memory as silver as an overhead jet

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Pat Cloud: The Five String Trane

By Patrick Brayer

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

The moon glimmered like a belt buckle with a gut of baby’s breath clouds hanging over. It was below all that, to the tone of the December Santa Anas of 1986, that I found myself in a modest track home amidst the diamond street lit glower of Los Angeles, California. I was attending a party unencumbered by invitation. A party in which it wouldn’t hurt to believe that bluegrass music could, would, and should be the battering ram to birth a new year, or the repercussions of a moonshine lunch. I rode in conveniently on the tailcoats of a long time friend and local coffeehouse five-string banjo godhead, Craig Smith (Winston Salem by way of San Berdoo). As I was, as usual living straight for experience, I watched an indelibly pink Byron Berline (Bill Monroe, Rolling Stones) work the pathos out of a room, trance fiddling, with his eyes locked and closed. Claustrophobic as I may have felt, I was getting in good shape just shifting politely, chess like, across the lavender shag pile, trying not to block in any way the very flux of the pumping event. Bluegrass can be very industrial in that sense. The Appalachian circus virus leapt ghost-like from every corner, but corners not without a certain fuel of gayety. In trying to sum it all up, the rhythm was infectious, even though the interpretation was obviously more from the computer-learned side, and more than a century’s stones throw from its hayfield and pre-tractor origins.

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