A Conversation with Ketch Secor of OCMS (continued)

PM: So are there leader types, or type A personalities, in the band?

KS: Yeah, there's myself, and there's Willie, and Morgan, our bass player, we kind of divvy up the responsibility between the three of us.

PM: As democratic as bands have to be, there also have to be guys who come to the front and take care of different kinds of business.

KS: Yeah. I usually take care of the interviewers because I'm a talker.

PM: Oh yeah, you're really fluid and you're perfect for the job. Let's see, is there a guy in the band who is always late or you have to go find him?

KS: No. I mean, there used to be those elements. But we cleaned up a little bit. We really had to. There's a lot of responsibility once you get all these people on board with you, and suddenly you're supporting everybody else's families. That's when you realize that you got to take your job seriously, so that's what we did.

PM: Are you guys living together at this point?

KS: No.

PM: No. Everybody's got their own digs. Families?

KS: Yeah. I'm married. But I'm the only married guy. But the other guys have got their own lives going on in Nashville. And who knows where we're going to end up. I don't think Nashville is going to be the home for the Old Crows forever. We've been here for about four years now. And when we first came to town, we moved into a house together, all of us, on Dickerson Road [a pretty wild hood, lots of hookers and cracktivity, and so forth].

PM: Wild.

KS: We're just as happy as ever to get the hell out of that dump.

PM: No kidding! [laughs] When did you first get turned on to string band music, and did you ever play a different kind of music, or have you been playing this kind of music right from the get?

KS: Well, the Old Crows have always played this kind of music. We never played something else. We were initially a string band that has evolved into something more than a string band, writing our own songs and covering some tunes, et cetera. But for the individual members, everybody started with something other than traditional music. Myself, I started with just learning rudimentary chords so that I could play rock songs. I really got sold early on in my life on folk revival music. The first song I ever learned to play was a Tom Paxton song.

PM: "The Last Thing on My Mind," or which one?

KS: It was "Ramblin' Boy."

PM: That's a real big favorite in my family. We all played that.

KS: Oh, yeah?

PM: So it's mind blowing to hear you say that.

KS: Yeah.

PM: And "I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound," too, that one.

KS: Yeah, that's a great one.

PM: Small world.

KS: Well, I had this Newport Broadside record that I was really, really crazy about. It was 1963 at the Newport Folk Festival. And I learned a lot of licks off of that. And I was singing "You Playboys and Playgirls," and a bunch of Bob Dylan tunes pretty soon thereafter. So I got to give props to Bob. I think that Bob is really the main one, the integral force in making me want to play jug band music and making me want to go back to the source.

PM: Wow.

KS: Because Bob is such a literate guy, and his songs so easily throw you back in time.

PM: Yep.

KS: All these characters he conjures up. Even just the general words he chooses, they're coming from somewhere else, they're coming from before. And you can go back there easily with just a library card, you can figure out who played what and how it all went down. And I'm a history man.

PM: What about the other guys? What were they playing before they came to traditional music?

KS: Well, Critter was something of an electric guitar prodigy. He was playing all of these tablature licks right out of those rock 'n' roll magazines.

PM: Arlen Roth and all those guys, right?

KS: He was really hitting like Diamond Darrell from Pantera.

PM: Dime Bag! [laughs]

KS: Yeah, man. And he really liked like Queensryche, and all that just kind of bullshit metal.

PM: [laughs] Oh, that's hilarious.

KS: He learned like all of those licks, like Yngwie Malmstein and like David Mustaine [of Megadeath fame].

PM: Oh, my Lord!

KS: So that was Critter.  continue

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