Pete Wernick will be working next week on a live recording with Long Road Home, a bluegrass band based in Boulder, CO. They will be tracking May 25-27 at the Etown Hall in downtown Boulder, with admission proceeds going towards the capital fund for the building.
Wernick says that both the new band and their upcoming live CD has a “back to the future” vibe for him…
“I’ve been playing with these guys for over a year now, and it gets more and more fun as it goes along. It’s an unusual band in that two of us are “older” (me and Gene Libbea), and the other three are in their 20s. We’re all very much on the same page about unmistakably tradition-based bluegrass. As with Hot Rize, we all play other kinds of music, but we know what straight bluegrass is, and that’s what the band is about. Here and there a bit of weirdness will sneak in, but that helps keep it interesting without disrupting the bluegrass feel. What we might lack in complexity we make up in intensity. Martin Gilmore, our lead singer, writes some fine songs and is a strong and soulful singer. Justin Hoffenberg is a righteous fiddle player with blazing tone, and Jordan Ramsey is a creative and hot picker, winner of the Rocky Grass mando contest last year. We have a lot of fun when we play. Gene’s attitude and his bass playing kick our butt!
The idea of a live recording is to capture the band’s energy. We use two mics and work them as needed. The site of the recording is the new headquarters of the famous Etown radio show, hosted by my Hot Rize buddy Nick Forster and his wife Helen. It’s a sweet venue in Boulder where Hot Rize recently played. It happens that Justin, fiddler in Long Road Home, is also the overseer of the Hot Rize live archive, with over 200 shows back to 1978, ten years before he was born. That’s kind of cool to me.”
More details about the live shows can be found on Pete’s web site. He also mentioned that he has copies of the newly re-released version of Steve Martin’s The Crow CD on his site. It has been remastered for release on Rounder Records.
Pete performed on two of the tracks, one of which he wrote with Martin.
