Back in 1992 Jerry Douglas appeared on television’s Austin City Limits as the bandleader behind Irish singer Maura O’Connell. Douglas had just produced the Nashville sessions for O’Connell’s best-ever album, Blue Is the Colour of Hope, and he reproduced his virtuoso dobro licks from the record for the Texas TV cameras. Little did he know, but in a Manhattan apartment, 1,700 miles away, a married couple was watching that show. That couple was Paul Simon and Edie Brickell.
Simon was so impressed that he tracked Douglas down and invited him over to that same apartment to hang out. The singer picked up the dobroist after the latter’s show at the Turning Point, a listening room in the Hudson River Valley, and brought him back to Manhattan. The next day they hung out at Simon’s apartment and played a lot of acoustic guitar and dobro together—and out of that jamming grew the version of “Thelma” that emerged on Paul Simon 1964/1993. The relationship has endured, and Douglas’ new solo album, Traveler, features two Simon compositions and Simon himself on “The Boxer.”
“He’s a guy I’m really interested in,” Douglas says. “I want to know what makes him tick—without asking him what makes him tick. He’s at a point in his career and his life where he’s not afraid of anything; he’s not out to prove anything. He’s proud of what he’s done, but now he wants to have fun with it. I’m at that same point in my career. I want to just enjoy making music. I didn’t want to do a bluegrass album; I didn’t want to make a jazz album; I didn’t want to make the dancers fall down by changing time signature in the middle of a tune. I just wanted to do whatever music I’m interested in. I’m not scared, and I don’t think Paul is either.”
Simon isn’t the only unexpected collaborator on Douglas’ album—Eric Clapton, Marc Cohn, Keb’ Mo’ and Dr. John are also on hand. In fact, the lead singer on “The Boxer” isn’t Simon, who wrote it, but Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons. Douglas had befriended the British group early in their rise and invited them to contribute a song to Traveler because the dobroist was eager to find out how they achieved that big sound. The group chose “The Boxer,” not because they knew Simon’s recording but because they loved the Emmylou Harris version. After they had layered all their moving harmony parts, Simon volunteered to add his own high harmony to the track.
He then insisted that he and Douglas add the coda that they had played when Douglas had been the opening act of Simon’s 2006 tour for the Surprise album. It’s a remarkable conclusion to the song; after the oceanic waves of British voices, Douglas’ horizontal dobro steps into the quiet ending as the most eloquent voice in the arrangement, accompanied only by Simon’s acoustic guitar. Even though the solo is wordless, the instrument’s bent-note vowels and plucked consonants evoke all the melancholy regret of the aging prizefighter who is Simon’s protagonist.
Something similar happened this past April, when Douglas performed at Baltimore’s Meyerhoff Symphony Hall as part of his regular job with Alison Krauss & Union Station. Wearing a brown pinstriped vest over a white shirt, the tall, trim dobroist with the red goatee played a solo on nearly every song, whether an instrumental or a vocal by Krauss or Dan Tyminski. In the second half of the show, the other four members of the quartet left Douglas alone on stage for an unaccompanied dobro showcase. On this evening, as on recent tours, Douglas played Simon’s “American Tune” and Chick Corea’s “Spain,” a medley he reprises on the new album. At the April show, once again without lyrics, Douglas was able to capture Simon’s mixed feelings about America’s place in the world merely through the twists and turns he gave the melody.
“Unlike most singer/songwriters,” Douglas says, “the music comes first for Paul. He doesn’t write the lyrics to his songs until the track is finished. I imagine he has ideas so he can shape the track, but he doesn’t put the words down till he has the music. That’s completely backwards to most songwriters I’ve known. I spent a summer opening for him on tour, and I got to hear Steve Gadd and all those amazing musicians that have been with him forever. There’s a lot of loyalty there, and it’s a sign that he’s interested in the musical side of his songs. He wants to create stuff that lasts.”
Douglas first made his reputation as a tour de force bluegrass picker—and includes a handful of newgrass numbers at the end of his new album. But he has stubbornly resisted that pigeonhole ever since the early ‘90s when he started getting called for sessions with Simon, James Taylor, the Chieftains, Rosanne Cash, T-Bone Burnett, Steve Earle and Dolly Parton. A little later he found himself playing with rock stars like Clapton and John Fogerty as well as jazz stars like Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden. Douglas wasn’t willing to merely play the same old bluegrass licks in a new context; he wanted to prove that he could play rock licks and jazz licks on the dobro.
“You get to a point where you master your instrument,” he recalls, “and you want to do something more challenging structurally and theoretically, and jazz fit that bill. The melodies weren’t so blatant; you had to search out where they could go—plus you had layers of counter-melodies. Jazz and bluegrass are both acoustic musics with upright bass that rely on improvisation. They’re both very physical musics; if you want more gain, you play your instrument harder—and there are contortions you go through to get that. It’s not just step on the volume pedal.”
He scratches his jazz itch on “So Here We Are,” a track written and performed by the trio of Douglas, Weather Report drummer Omar Hakim and Frisell bassist Viktor Krauss (Alison’s brother). Hakim, who has also recorded with Miles Davis and John Scofield, lays down a fat, funky bottom, and Douglas plays a blues-rock lead on lap steel as if he were Duane Allman. Hakim and Krauss are half of Douglas’ current road band, which also includes fiddler Luke Bulla.
“The tunes with Viktor and Omar on the record are a launching pad for more things to come,” Douglas promises. “We want to explore that a lot more, and this was a chance to announce that. It’s like I’m Jeff Beck, but the lap steel or the dobro is the guitar. I jokingly refer to it as the Jethro Beck Trio. I’m in a completely different room when I play with them compared to everything else I do. Omar has such a strong personality as a drummer, and Viktor has a big, round sound that can’t be denied. I try to get in between those two sounds and do something with the melody. It’s the most freedom I’ve ever had as an instrumentalist.”
On this new record Douglas turns to the lap steel at least as often as he does the dobro. The lap steel is essentially a solid-body, electrified version of the dobro, played in the same horizontal position but with a lot more bite through the amplifier. It can hold its own against a drummer more easily, and that’s why Douglas likes it in those situations.
Four of the 11 songs were cut in New Orleans with local musicians, including Dr. John or Jon Cleary on piano, Matt Perrine on bass and the great Shannon Powell on drums. Eric Clapton sings lead on “Something You Got” (a 1965 R&B hit for Chuck Jackson & Maxine Brown written by New Orleans legend Chris Kenner), and Douglas plays a Claptonesque lap-steel solo on Huey Smith’s “High Blood Pressure,” sung by Keb’ Mo’.
“I dated a girl from New Orleans for a while,” Douglas acknowledges, “and I found out I just loved the place. One night I got up, ready to leave because something wasn’t right. Then I realized it wasn’t the girl I loved but the town. Whatever’s in the air down there makes people play crazy music. The first New Orleans musician I fell in love with was Dr. John, a guy holding a chicken with beads and feathers all over him. When we did the video interviews for the album, a guy was trying to stick a microphone up Mac’s shirt and got caught up in all these chains and beads. Mac told the guy, ‘Be careful; you don’t know what you’ll stir up in there.’”
The other two New Orleans numbers are a blue-eyed-soul version of Al Anderson’s “Right on Time” with Marc Cohn on lead vocals and a second-line version of Leadbelly’s “On a Monday” with Douglas himself as the featured singer. The publicity for Traveler suggests that this is his first-ever lead vocal, but in fact he sang “Ben Dewberry’s Final Run” on his 1982 Fluxedo album. But the new vocal is dramatically more confident and effective.
“That first attempt was a painful experience,” he confesses; “it took me a full bottle of whiskey to get through the song, and I still had to fix it. But as I said before, I’m at this point in my life where I don’t care, just like Paul. I really wanted to sing that song, so I did it. I’m ready to express myself in some other ways. I’m not going to be compared to Pavarotti or to Alison Krauss, but I’ve been singing parts with Alison for years, so I know what I’m doing now.”