Mark O’Connor – String ties
Soon after he graduated from high school, O’Connor learned that Tony Rice was leaving the David Grisman Quintet, and they were holding auditions to fill the guitar slot before going out on tour with Stephane Grappelli. O’Connor had been 13 when he first heard Grappelli and had immediately fallen under the spell of the Frenchman’s lyrical mingling of swing-jazz and gypsy folk music with guitarist Django Reinhardt.
“I flew down to the Bay Area for three days of auditions,” O’Connor recounts, “and, oh, man, I got the job. The first day of rehearsals, one of the other musicians mentioned that I also played violin. Stephane raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to hear you.’ I hadn’t touched a violin in a week, so I said, ‘Maybe later.’ He said, ‘No, I want to hear you now.’ He gave me some sheet music for ‘Tiger Rag’, and after I played, he said, ‘You and I, young Mark, will play two-violin at the end of every show.’ So just like that, I was playing twin violin with my greatest violin hero.
“Over the course of the tour, he really filled in the gaps for me — the singing quality I desired, the subtle use of vibrato. As ingrained as I was in the Texas style of fiddling, Stephane freed me and opened me up to hear the whole world. He would take me aside and we would go over passages. He would grab my hand as if he were trying to channel his 70 years of experience into his little protege. And I remained his protege until he died [in 1997]. At the reception after one of his last concerts, he plopped down on the couch and held my hand for two hours. It felt as if he were still trying to channel.”
O’Connor spent 1979 and 1980 touring with Grappelli and Grisman, and the experience convinced him he wanted to be a full-time professional musician. He would never be content to be the amateur master of an obscure tradition, as Thomasson was.
“Real folk music is always an amateur scene,” he says. “That’s so important for the culture, and I think some of the best fiddlers in the country work another job. They love what they do so much that they would rather just do it on the weekends and have a great time. At the great fiddle contests, most of the winners — including myself, because I was a full-time student when I competed — aren’t full-time musicians. But musicians who want to make a larger statement, to expand their goals, to make an imprint, have to become professionals.
“My two mentors were the opposite in this regard. Benny was a part-time fiddler, and Stephane was a world-renowned violinist. Both had tremendous command of the craft, but Benny was content to stay in his trailer and make up his incredible pieces just for his friends. Stephane felt compelled to take his music to the whole world. Benny came from a close-knit family, and he found a refuge within his blood family. By contrast, my home life was a little messy, so I think I wanted to create a musical family. Stephane’s family life was probably more like mine.”
O’Connor’s third violin hero at the time was Jean-Luc Ponty, the French fusioneer who had played with Frank Zappa and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. After two tours with Grappelli and intervening trips with the Grisman Quintet, O’Connor signed up in 1981 to play Ponty-like licks with the Dixie Dregs, a top jazz-rock band led by guitarist Steve Morse. The group put the 19-year-old fiddler before the biggest crowds of his life. But that ended after two years.
“Apparently Steve didn’t want to play with me anymore,” O’Connor says ruefully. “Some people felt I was getting too much attention; I guess he felt some competitiveness. He broke up the band and reassembled it without me four months later. After the second Grappelli tour, I hadn’t been asked back by Grisman. These were two of the many rejections I would feel along the way.
“Part of it was that my head had exploded from too much praise. Too much emphasis was put on what a prodigy I was. Can you imagine what it was like to be 12 years old and have all these older fiddlers say I was going to save fiddling, so I better learn a few more tunes real quick? Part of it was that I wanted attention. My mother was the only one who loved me the way I wanted, and she spent most of my childhood dying of cancer. For years you could barely walk around the hospital bed in our house.
“So there I was in Atlanta, where I had moved to be with the Dregs. My mom had just died, and I’d just been fired by my hero. I was broke and about as depressed as someone could be. I went through a period of drugs and alcohol, and I’m lucky to have come out the other side. I didn’t know where to turn.”
O’Connor eventually came to terms with a reality many musicians face sooner or later: Unless you live in New York, Nashville or Los Angeles, there’s rarely enough paying work to support yourself as a full-time session musician. When he got down to his last seven dollars, O’Connor drove the four hours from Atlanta to Nashville in 1983.
His break came when he played on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song “High Horse”, which rose to #2 on the country singles charts in 1985. Suddenly the floodgates opened. As the first choice on fiddle for Nashville producers, O’Connor was playing two or three sessions a day, five days a week, on records by Randy Travis, Travis Tritt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Waylon Jennings, Patty Loveless, Steve Earle, Reba McEntire, Kathy Mattea, Lyle Lovett and a whole lot more. Then he abruptly stopped.
“After the newness of being successful wore off, I knew there was a lot more out there for me,” he explains. “I didn’t necessarily know what it was, but I knew it required giving 100 percent of my effort to my solo output. I knew if I played two or three sessions in the studio every day, I’d come home so brain-dead that I couldn’t do anything but watch Letterman. That wasn’t going to advance my solo career.”
It was a risky move, for it meant an immediate cut in income with no obvious option for making up the difference. It was the kind of go-for-broke gamble that throughout his life has reflected O’Connor’s burning ambition. After the Grammy success of The New Nashville Cats in 1992, those ambitions turned in the direction of classical music. It wasn’t that he wanted to tackle the European repertoire; he wanted to create his own fiddle-flavored American music incorporating the grand architecture and massed strings of the classical tradition.
“When you have the potential to do complex things and you’re constantly held back, it’s pretty tough,” he observes. “If you’re a race track horse and you’re trained and ready to run, you’ll freak out if you can’t. I can play the most basic melodies as beautifully as any fiddler, and it can be very satisfying, but I have to use all that I can do. I’m ready to run. I want audiences to see the full range of the violin and the full range of my compositions. That’s why in the typical violin concerto you have a slow movement in the middle of all the fireworks. For a musician who has experienced a lot, too much of any one thing is going to get boring.”
He helped alleviate that boredom by releasing two album’s of children’s music — 1992’s Johnny Appleseed and 1993’s The Night Before Christmas — on Rabbit Ears Records, as well as 1993’s Heroes, a Warner Bros. tribute to such role models as Thomasson, Grappelli, Kershaw, Ponty, Vassar Clements and Pinchas Zukerman.