Doyle Lawson – Quicksilver’s message in service
Without compromising his faith, Lawson does acknowledge the benefits of having two separate sources of bookings in the bluegrass and Christian music fields. “I’m a musician. I’m a professional musician, and this is the way that I derive my livelihood. I’m responsible for myself and five or six other people for their income on a yearly basis, and I have to look at it realistically. But on the other hand, it is a way that we can go and be a witness.
“And we may be in some place where some other [performers] would not feel comfortable or would feel like they didn’t belong there, whatever the case may be, and whatever their reason may be. But I don’t feel condemned about it. For me, if we can go someplace and sing, and people get something positive from that, that would cause them to think about maybe the condition that their life is in, and do a turnaround, I think that’s part of being a witness.”
The present edition of Quicksilver — banjoist Dale Perry, guitarist Barry Scott, acoustic bassist Jamie Dailey and fiddler Doug Bartlett — brings to just short of twenty the number of musicians who have been in the band since its inception. This is far from a record among bluegrass bands, but is nonetheless illustrative of the rigors of life on the road. “A 45-foot bus looks like a monster when it pulls into the park,” Lawson observes, “but when you’re inside that thing day in and day out, it can get kind of small.”
Moreover, the eventual desire of talented sidemen to break away and pursue their own musical visions is a reality Lawson must deal with, just as it was for the leaders who employed him in earlier years. He has seen his share of band members leave and find success in other settings: Lou Reid, Terry Baucom, Randy Graham, Ray Deaton and Scott Vestal, to name a few. He is an understanding but nonetheless single-minded bandleader.
“I try to stay focused, and the guys that come into the group, I tell them that they have to change for me,” he says. “I can’t change for them, because if everybody that came here was allowed to do everything that they wanted to do, pretty soon I would be just another mandolin picker up there with a bunch of guys playing some music with no direction. They’re very good about it. If they want to stay here, they understand that that’s what I’m looking for: somebody that will adapt, just as I did when I worked with Jimmy Martin [from 196366, and again in 1969]. I tried to play Jimmy Martin’s music as close as he wanted it. When I went with the Country Gentlemen [1971-79], which was a really radical change, I did a lot of changing there. And I think that’s what makes a group work.”
Unapologetic as Lawson is about his firm leadership stance, he is quick to share credit with a couple of his band members for a 1994 innovation of which he is very proud: a high-tech return to the classic single-microphone staging of bluegrass onstage. Looking back on his early years as a performer, he observes, “I broke in with one mike, and the most I’d used was two. That’s all we had, and if we had two, we were ‘way uptown.” By the ’70s, however, the demands of larger venues and the expectations of listeners accustomed to louder music gave rise to setups employing two mikes per band member.
“But what I missed,” Lawson continued, “was the choreography and the real intimacy that you could get with the group, how close-knit you’d become and how you’d listen to everything; you could hear what people are doing, and you become more aware of working as a group when you do it.
“So I’d fretted at it for a long time, and even made a feeble attempt at rehearsing with it in my garage, but the personnel wasn’t right, or whatever — it just didn’t work out until…when Dale Perry signed on, we were talking about it one day and I said, ‘There’s gotta be a way we could do that.’ Because a part of the music heritage is lost. Nobody is seein’ that. To watch Lester [Flatt] and Earl [Scruggs] when Josh [Graves] would come charging up the middle…and I thought, ‘They need to see that.’
“So I was talking to Dale and [former Quicksilver guitarist] Steve Gulley. They were both well-versed in sound. I said, ‘There’s gotta be a way we could combine some tradition with technology. I mean, with today’s stuff, there’s no way in the world that we cannot do that.’ And we agreed that we should try, and we started doing some research until we came up with what we started using. And I’ve got to tell you, there was a lot of, ‘It’ll never work. It’ll work in a small room, but it’ll never work anywhere else. You can’t do this and you can’t do that.’ But I believed that you could.”
The arrangement has indeed worked well for Quicksilver, and the element of physical movement and “working the mike” has become a vital element of their stage presentation, all with little or no compromise to their audibility. According to Lawson, it is only with great reluctance and under unusual circumstances that the band will submit to working with multiple microphones these days. Other acts are following their lead, most notably the Del McCoury Band, Blue Highway and the Osborne Brothers. Still others, such as J.D. Crowe & the New South, have adopted a limited approach to the technique, singing through a single mike but retaining multiple mikes on their instruments. One senses in Lawson an extreme sense of pride in his leadership toward this “retro-innovation” — again, this reflects the painstaking attention to every detail of bluegrass performance and heritage that is a cornerstone of his musical personality.
Whenever I think of Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a musician friend. “You know,” he said, “my wife likes a lot of different kinds of music, but she can’t stand bluegrass. When I put it on around the house, she leaves the room. Except for Quicksilver. She loves Quicksilver.” I shared that story with Lawson, hoping for an explanation of this paradox.
“You don’t know how many times I’ve heard that,” he said with a laugh, and mentioned a very similar encounter with a fan just the evening before. In such situations, his response is a polite thank-you. “How do I tell ’em?” he muses. “I eat, sleep and breathe bluegrass.”
Paul Birch is not the talented Nashville singer-songwriter, Paul Burch, and vice versa. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He (Birch, that is) is a mandolinist and long-eared equine enthusiast in Powhatan, Virginia.