by Bob Makin

Rev. Jeff Mosier has taken the 22 years he has spent playing bluegrass in Good Medicine and the 14 years he had hosted a bluegrass radio show and turned them upside down with Blueground Undergrass, an Atlanta-based outfit that pets the mongrel known as American roots music with a smooth mix of bluegrass, blues, country, folk, swing, jazz and rock. Dubbed "psychedelic hick-hop bluegrass,'' Blueground Undergrass is equally influenced by the ground-breaking genre-busting of both Bill Monroe, bluegrass' founder, and Col. Bruce Hampton, the leader of the eccentrically eclectic jam band Aquarian Rescue Unit, whose original members in the early '90s included Mosier.

The Reverend's new group includes his Gibson guitar-playing younger brother, Johnny Mosier, also a 22-year veteran of Good Medicine; pedal steel guitarist-dobroist Mark Van Allen; fiddler-mandolinist Edward Hunter; jazz drummer Bob Stagner; and funky fusion bassist Kenny Palmer. They aim to set the record straight about the origin of traditional American music and its instrumentation while mixing it all up to create a new rootsy sound. By concen trating on the African origins of the banjo and the black influence on bluegrass then injecting it with country and country rock's pedal steel, rock's electric guitar, jazz's unpredictable swing and a funkadelic groove, the Appalachian-raised Mosier, Phish's bluegrass coach in the mid-'90s, was convinced he would alienate the audience he built with Good Medicine and "Born in a Barn," his radio show on Atlanta's WRFG 89.3-FM, where he interviewed the likes of Monroe. Much to his surprise, his longtime fans have had a good old time in a brand new way right next to the twirling hippies of the jam scene and young alternative-country fans. The group's roots are so true yet far from tried that such forward-thinking modern-day bluegrass heroes as Del McCoury, Vassar Clements and Peter Rowan have asked to share the stage. They've seen their audience get young and younger by tapping into the jam scene, Mosier says.

Touring as often as possible in support of two records released in less than a year, the 1999 studio debut, "Barnyard Gone Wrong," and the newly captured "Live at The Variety Playhouse," Blueground Undergrass is a welcomed addition to the jam scene's bluegrass kin, such as Leftover Salmon, The String Cheese Incident, Smokin' Grass, Gordon Stone Band and Bela Fleck. I spoke with Mosier, also a member of the Hampton-inspired Zambiland Orchestra and an accomplished actor and playwright, about his mission to do for bluegrass what The Byrds, Graham Parsons, Emmylou Harris, The Band and Poco did for country rock in the late '60s and early '70s. The fun and fascinating lesson in musicology and music business that resulted would have pleased Elvis Presley and Jerry Garcia, two of the best-known musicians who tried to rockify and popularize bluegrass, particularly among youngins.

Comment on how Blueground Undergrass is described as 'cosmic Americana' and 'psychedelic hick-hop bluegrass.'

The psychedelic part is the hodge-podge eclectica mix of roots music that the Grateful Dead brought to the table and folk-rock artists brought. The hick-hop is letting the twang be black, which it is. The banjo's from Africa. It's known as a white instrument, but twang is really African. A lot of what we play are black musical forms. We know that they are, and we don't try to pretend they're anything but black. But we know we're not.

I'm really an advocate of giving credit where credit is due and not doing it from a politically correct point of view. Just musical correctness, not political correctness. That's why we use hick-hop.

And the bluegrass ... we play a lot of blues influences in our bluegrass. And I guess cosmic Americana is really a Graham Parsons term that somehow flipped into our press release a long time ago from an interview I did, but it's really his term for what he was trying do by mixing pop music with old musical forms and ideas. What I want to do is produce the first bluegrass-laced popular music without it being cheesy. My influences range from Col. Bruce Hampton to Flatt & Scruggs and everything in between, yet I'm confined to the five-string banjo, which makes it even more interesting for me as the leader.

You mentioned that the banjo is an African instrument. In this country, it's closely associated with...

The Klan, 'Dueling Banjos,' Beverly Hillbillies, rednecks, trailer parks, wife beaters, deer hunters, the list goes on. I know that. And as a southerner, I especially know that. But the reality is that the idea was brought here by slaves. And the original banjos were made out of gourds with calfskin stretched over. We took that idea and developed it into our own instrument. It's well documented. But somewhere along the way, like a lot of things white people did, we began to call it ours. But the idea of a steel string stretched over a wooden bridge is not a white thing (laughs). It's a black thing, that membrane and that drum head.

I call the banjo drums on a stick because those rolls that I'm doing with my fingers emulate African drum rolls, but yet you've got a tone going on. That's why the banjo is so rhythmic and really different. When I play it in the shows, I accentuate those drum beats and actually play it like a drum at times with my fingers.

I worked on the soundtrack for a movie called 'Miss Evers' Boys' that was on HBO. It starred Laurence Fishbourne, and even he didn't know that the banjo was originally from Africa (laughs). I played an African gourd banjo on the soundtrack. So I'm really into that.

The other thing about Blueground Undergrass is that we're trying to be the first band that takes the lid off of all these instruments instead of using them as a side dish, like Nashville does. Nashville always uses the fiddle and the banjo and the pedal steel (guitar) as sort of a side dish. You hear it in the background and it adds effect. The banjo is used to make it happy and the fiddle is used to make it country and the pedal steel is used to make it sad. Instead of using these instruments like that, we completely pull the lid off a huge wall of sound.

We're trying to bring twang into the forefront without being ashamed of it and without apologizing for it as southern, ignorant, stupid. We're trying to really play it for what it is. In my opinion, as a musicologist and a person who did (bluegrass) radio for 14 years, I think that bluegrass is eclectic enough to almost be called a world music that landed in the south through slavery. It's where black and white really came together.

Before rock 'n' roll.

Totally. And then bluegrass became a natural occurring substance within rock 'n' roll. And it is a natural occurring substance within rock 'n' roll. One of Elvis' first hits was 'Blue Moon of Kentucky' by Bill Monroe. He used two-beat, acoustic bass. He used bluegrass rhythms and, of course, he was very handsome. He used his butt. Out of bluegrass came rockabilly and out of rockabilly came rock 'n' roll. And it's all black. It can be traced mostly back to the connection of the banjo and the fiddle. So what we're trying to do, instead of being history teachers and go out and do history lessons, we're actually trying to do a modern form of music with these ideas downloaded on our hard drive, while we play it.

It's my vision, and these guys are totally into it. My guitar player is my brother who's been playing with me for 22 years. His name is Johnny Mosier. Our pedal steel player is a major player. He's been in country music a long time. Our drummer has played with Derek Bailey, the jazz guitar player, and Dolly Parton, all in one life (laughs). So he's got a diverse resume.

And it's working for us. People like what we're doing. We're just lucky to be doing it. But my biggest influence is definitely Col. Bruce Hampton.

You played with him in the early '90s in Aquarium Rescue Unit.

I was hired by him for a year and a half in the first version of Aquarium Rescue Unit. Then from that, I went to coach Phish. I taught them bluegrass music. They asked me to go on the road with them in 1995. I went out and taught them bluegrass when they're were going through their bluegrass phase. That really helped my reputation as far as the Rev. Mosier, which is my rock 'n' roll side.

Of course, I played with Widespread (Panic) and have been in and around this form of jam-band music for a long time. Even though Blueground is in the jam-band world, we actually do songs. We have both. We have Americana fans at our shows and we have hippies, right there dancing and twirling, right next to people who like alternative country and Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and that kind of crowd. And we want both. We dig the hippies. We're hippies at heart, but we actually like songs and doing material that isn't necessarily 14 minutes long (laughs) all the time.

But it still jams. Bluegrass was one of the first true jam-band musics. It really is. It requires people to look at each other. If you put blindfolds on a bluegrass band, they couldn't play. They have to look at each other to go, 'OK, it's your turn. OK, you do it next.' I always describe jam-band music as the kind of music you can't play with blindfolds. You have to be relating to one another. And bluegrass was one of those first musics. And jazz was one of them and blues. Any root music, to me, jams if it's done right (laughs). It really does jam if it's done in the tradition of the way it was created. Then it is jamming. Fortunately, Jerry Garcia was one of the first guys to bring into popular rock music a hodge-podge mongrel mix of American roots music. His first instrument was banjo and his first love was American roots music. And then he, of course, evolved into the Grateful Dead. But he is the most underrated banjo player of all time.

And pedal steel too.

Yeah, he's just one of my biggest influences. And now they're talking about him on NPR (National Public Radio), what he did with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and how most people don't know that he did that session. But he did (play pedal steel) on 'Teach Your Children.'

So I've always wanted these instruments in a band all together. We have full drums and full bass so we have modern possibilities and pop sensibilities but we have traditional roots. It's a hard music to describe in an interview (laughs). I'm just telling you, man, I can't describe it, and I'm in the band (laughs).

I love the musicology part of it. Are you playing the African gourd banjo in this band?

I have some. I haven't figured out a way to get it up volume-wise yet. The only time I ever play it is when I come out by myself, but it's not but of the repertoire yet. I'm going to use it on our next record. But it's real hard to amplify. Somebody's working on a pickup system for me so that I can get it up to volume without ruining the tone of it (laughs). The beauty of it is the sound that it has. It's like this incredible tone. I haven't figured that out yet.

I talk about the African gourd banjo because people just don't think of the banjo being a black instrument. You just don't. It's got the whitest reputation of any string instrument there is. And what I'm trying to do, without doing it for political correctness, is make people aware that what makes American music really great is that there was an honest yet sometimes forced mix of black, white, Caribbean, Hispanic, Russian, Irish, Scottish music that came together on this piece of property for all the wrong reasons to make our music the envy of the world. And we are, in America, and we don't talk about our music for what it is. What it is mongrel. But yet white people take credit for twang, black people are trying to call jazz African-American classical music. None of that is correct. And none of it would have happened if we hadn't made the mistakes that we've made. So out of that tragedy has come the beauty of roots music. And Blueground Undergrass in our own small way (laughs) is trying to say, 'OK, we're white. We come from bluegrass, but we recognize that these influences are in our instruments and in our musical genres. But yet we want to create a new form, the next form of American roots music.' So that's what we're trying to do. We don't talk about it onstage, but when I get interviewed I have diarrhea of the mouth (laughs).

No, it's wonderful because I love musicology. You know, like the Rough Guide books. So you're speaking my language without a doubt. And the beautiful thing about the jam scene is that besides the groovy, grooving fun, the roots and their new directions are what it's all about.

Unfortunately, a lot of people in your business ask me the same, boring questions. I do about five interviews a week.

That's good. The band is going to get big.

Well, it's going great. But I'm just saying not everybody knows to ask what you're asking. I'm grateful that you're out there (laughs).

Well all right. Thank you. Now one way Blueground Undergrass really mixes things up is by having a pedal steel player. It's a country and country-rock element not associated with bluegrass. Why bring that into play and why didn't Bill Monroe use a pedal steel? Which came first Bill Monroe's bluegrass or Nashville's pedal steel?

What came first was Hawaiian steel guitar, which was a guitar with frets so high that you didn't finger it but you used a slide to make the notes. You laid it down on your lap. It looked like a guitar but instead of where the hole is there's a resonator tone. And they called it Hawaiian steel guitar. That developed into what we call now the dobro. That's a resophonic guitar. It doesn't have a hole, but it has a resonator. And dobro did make it into bluegrass. Bill Monroe had a dobro player at times. And he liked dobro. And Flatt & Scruggs had dobro. But Bill Monroe never had full-time dobro.

Or any pedal steel player.

No, because pedal steel is electric, and he never had any electric instrument. Then what happened, a bunch of machinists in Nashville in the '40s and '50s started figuring out a way to build this contraption that would bend strings and allow them to sit there at this table and pull strings with pedals and levers that would do things that guitars couldn't do. They were basically competing for guitar roles. They wanted to invent something that could make noises that no guitar could make. There's no amount of bending strings. So Bob Wills and Speedy West and all these western swing guys created western swing and through that genre came the first real uses of pedal steel. And cowboy music. Then in the 1950s, it developed into the kind that Mark plays. It got knee levers and everything.

I had always wanted to play in a band with this instrument because in my opinion, it is the hillbilly organ (laughs). It's that whiny thing for George and Tammy on the side. Then when the hippies started doing folk rock and Emmylou Harris, Graham Parsons and the Byrds came into the picture and all these people start doing this hybrid form of rock 'n' roll, you start hearing it more as an integral part of rock. Rusty Young from Poco was one of the first ones to play it with rock attitude. He was right out front. He wasn't the fat guy sitting in the back. He was out there and rock kids were like, 'Damn, what is this thing?'

The good thing about our pedal steel player is that he knows all of this a nd eight times more. He's just not a Nashville guy. His brain is bigger than the Nashville thing. I always wanted pedal steel, so I when I met him, he was the guy. I think he is our secret weapon. It's amazing how many people stand and watch him every night we play. And the great thing about pedal steel is that it's purely an American instrument. It's so American, more than the banjo. Everybody thinks the banjo is so American, but really the pedal steel is totally American.

In Blueground Undergrass, there are nights when it evokes the most unbelievable feelings in the audience. The power of this instrument is just phenomenal. And we haven't even begun to tap into what it can do in rock. We're just starting to dabble into the possibilities without even messing with the tone of it. Just straightahead pedal steel. No fuzz or phase shifters, no tricks, just the instrument itself.

Jerry's smiling on ya'.

And it's funny that a lot of the kids that come don't even know that he played pedal steel. They know he played banjo because of Old and In the Way. And we do 'Midnight Moonlight' and 'Friend of the Devil,' but they don't know he played pedal steel so we're teaching them.

'Teach Your Children.' To what extent is the title 'Barnyard Gone Wrong' a reference to the idea that many fans of traditional bluegrass and folk music don't like musicians who fuse those styles with rock or plug them in.

Yeah, I had to bolt out of the bluegrass thing. It's like leaving the church. You don't just leave the church. You tell everybody that you left the church (laughs). I love those people, but I gave them 22 years to go on the Darwin tour and none of them ever went.

With Good Medicine?

Yeah. They never fell for it. Yeah, I played my stuff, then I'd do one little off chord and it was like, 'I don't know. I heard an off chord.' I just got tired of it, man. I got older. I was 39 and married with three kids and had to make a living. And I was tired of playing bluegrass in people's backyards and hearing 'Rocky Top' all the time. So when I bolted and started this band, I wanted our first project to say right out of the box, 'If you're Rounder Records, don't call us. If you're a bluegrass fan, you might not like this, but give us a chance.' That probably won't happen again. The next thing we do probably won't be so in-your-face. That was just me saying, 'It is barnyard, but it has definitely gone wrong from your perspective.' The ironic part is that nobody abused half as bad as I thought they were going to. A lot of my bluegrass people have followed the band and actually dig it, which surprised me. I thought I'd get hate mail.

The other thing that's really surprised me is to do this band, I had to quit bluegrass radio after 14 years. I thought, well, I'll probably never see any of my heroes because we'll never get booked on any of these festivals with any of my heroes. You know what? We're getting ready to do a show with Vassar Clements. We're going to be his band. I just played in the Old and In the Way reunion with Peter Rowan and Vassar Clements. They invited me to play banjo around one microphone. I was in tears the entire time. Here's these two guys who are THE guys and they asked me to play banjo. I was really proud to do it. That was in October at the Magnolia Fest in Florida.

So what do you say to those who still say you don't plug bluegrass in?

There's a whole different way you play an instrument when it's plugged in. When I get around one microphone, I can play straightahead, up-your-ass Earl Scruggs bluegrass. And I don't waiver from it. But when I plug in, I completely morph into another type of banjo style. The future of this music is going to be it's going out as far as it can and then people coming back to understand what it is unplugged. That's what's so great about doing this. The hippies come to hear us. They've never heard bluegrass. They hear us for the first time. They think we're bluegrass and then we turn them onto Ralph Stanley or Del McCoury, who we opened for the other night. Now Del McCoury is one of the greatest bluegrass players of all time. His son, Ronnie, got up and sat in with us. He's great. I love him. He had not one critical thing to say. They see the viability of what we're doing. And we totally worship the viability of what they're doing. But guess what? Del McCoury said, 'You know, a lot of these young people have been coming to our shows, and I'm just loving it. I know they're a little loud, but I like it. I like it. Can we do some more shows together?' He's tired of looking out and seeing 40- and 50-year-old people sitting there like they're at a eulogy. And I don't blame him.

When it fires up, bluegrass is dance music. It's lively.

And if it's lively and loud, then it's going to be better for some people. To each his own. Some people haven't moved. But Peter Rowan, man, 55 years old, is hangin' with the hippies, meeting these people. Vassar Clements, 70-something years old, rehearsing with Blueground Undergrass, playing with Buddy Cage, playing with these jam bands, out there, man, in the fucking stream of change. And I cannot respect anything other than that. And that's what I want to be when I'm old. Del McCoury's playing with his sons and his sons are sitting in with Phish. And they sat in with Col. Bruce Hampton the other night. And you know what? They didn't walk away with testicular cancer. They didn't walk away with brain tumors. Their ears are fine. They're not gonna die. And they can still get around that one mike and play blistering bluegrass and they're OK.

We had the chance in the '60s with the folk scare to bring roots music to the forefront and we blew it. Now in the '90s, for some ungodly reason, the next wave of this interest from young people is coming upon us. And I'm not young. I'm 41. So I'm about where Flatt & Scruggs were when it happened to them. They were in their late 40s. Now we don't have record companies trying to market us as a hootenanny. We don't have people fucking with us. For the first time, we have an Internet. We've got an ability to run our entire business as musicians and artists, for the first time in history, without anybody else telling us how to do it. We have the ability to find everybody who might be interested in what we're doing and to ignore the rest. It behooves all of us from every genre to get together and collaborate and be as supportive as we possibly can about American roots music and what it means to our particular brand of music, especially in bluegrass. I mean, Alison Krauss couldn't save the ship, man. She didn't save the ship. Dixie Chicks are getting some attention. Hey, they just sold millions of records. That might be the largest-selling album with a banjo on it in all of American musical history. My hat's off to them. I don't want to be them, but they're doing it. If they called me and said, 'Would y'all open for us?' I'd go.

For somebody to say you don't plug these instruments in is from the same exact voice that said, 'You just don't pick a banjo with picks.' Then all of a sudden, Snuffy Smith and Earl Scruggs are cooking up a way to get the banjo to sound louder, more poignant and more interesting. And so Bill Monroe discovers it. He gets it in his band. He starts creating this form of old-time music and it pissed off everybody in old-time music. The fiddle style was wrong because it was from swing and it didn't play the melody. 'Y'all should play the melody.' They wouldn't play the melody, but they were creating another form of music.

Who's to say there's not another form of music right now in the making? That is my soapbox and I am passionate about it. I do workshops and talk about it at festivals. I mean, I totally preach. It's only sound and sound is so flexible. Sound is the most flexible, beautiful, universal and healing of all substances. It is and it can't be fucked with by human thought. When you do, you destroy it. I'm trying to, with my band, vent my anger about that notion. That's exactly what our music is about.

I'm trying to have a Grand Ole Opry feel if the Grand Ole Opry went to Woodstock for a couple of weeks and they all came back to the Grand Ole Opry. It's still nice and friendly and southern and accessible and they say hey to the audience and it's a fun show and uplifting, but it's got an edge that they didn't have before they went to Woodstock (laughs). That's really what we are. We're trying to be the Grand Ole Opry but the next generation. That's why I want to keep it all about sound. The real issue is sound, what they're hearing, and how it makes them feel. I want our shows to be therapeutic for people. I really do.

You're from the Appalachians in Tennessee?

I'm from Bristol. I'm from where country music came from. The first Jimmie Rodgers and Maybelle Carter sessions were recorded in Bristol, Tenn. My grandmother played bluegrass until she was 75. She taught us how. I'm bluegrass, but I met Bruce and that threw a wrench into the thing. Bruce was like,' You gotta come here Sun Ra.' I was like, 'Do what? What is he?' Here he is taking a banjo player to see Sun Ra. Then I met Widespread. I met Phish before they were even drawing 300 people in Atlanta. I played in a band (Aquarium Rescue Unit) with Oteil Burbridge, a black bass player; Jimmy Herring, one of the greatest guitar players on the planet; Col. Bruce; Jeff Sipe, one of the greatest drummers on the planet, and me, a banjo player. So I was either going to have to be in denial the rest of my life and say I didn't meet these people or was going to have to make it part of my experience. This band is me melding my traditional roots and my Zambi roots or my Bruce Hampton roots.

Are you still doing Good Medicine?

It's still going.

John has always played with you in Good Medicine?

Always. He's my younger brother.

On your radio show, you got interview Bill Monroe. What was that like?

Incredible. It was the thrill of my life. I'm going to release it as an MP3 shortly on our website (www.bluegroundundergrass.com). I want people to hear it.

Did he get to hear your music?

Good Medicine played at a festival with him one time. But he didn't remember. He didn't know me as a musician. He was just doing an interview. He doesn't know me and I wasn't friends with him, but he was my Elvis. It's like Jerry Garcia said, 'He was one of THE guys.' One of the important guys in American music.

There was two people I wanted to interview before I die. One was Bill Monroe. That was the thrill of my life. I did it about two and half years before he died. The other was Earl Scruggs. I never got to interview Earl Scruggs. Leftover played with him on their new album. They said they could maybe help me get in touch with him.

Did the radio show influence Blueground Undergrass?

Hugely. One of the great advantages you have as a radio person is you get to play tunes every week and see what ones make the phone ring (laughs). There's certain tunes that people would call for all the time. For 14 years, I got to decide what tunes work. It affected my writing and the kind of tunes I want to do. It also affected my set list because I want the show to sound like a radio show with ups and downs and slow tunes and fast tunes. We morph from one tune to the next.

Besides John, how did you guys hook up together?

Ed played with Good Medicine. Bob Stagner I met through Bruce Hampton. Bob Stagner is from The Shaking Ray Levi Society in Chattanooga (Tenn.), which is improvisational jazz that has done everything. They've had Derek Bailey. His partner is Dennis Palmer, who is the brother of our bass player, Kenny Palmer. Bob brought Kenny to us because they had played together for years. One of Kenny's heroes is Jaco (Pastorius) and also Oteil (Burbridge, formerly of ARU, now with The Allman Brothers Band and The Truth). So he's from fusion and funk. He's a real modern bass player. He's got big ears.

And Bob played Dollywood. He did a lot of cheese like I did. I used to play bluegrass at Six Flags, theme park gigs, which are really great places to learn how to play. It's good for your hands.

So it's almost a marriage of Good Medicine and The Shaking Ray Levi Society.

Yeah. And Edward is a unique fiddler in that he plays all styles. He's an old-time fiddler, a Celtic fiddler, a bluegrass fiddler and a good swing fiddler.

I met Mark at Six Flags Over Georgia. He was playing country music. Then he recorded with Good Medicine and I realized what he could do. I said, 'Man, it sounds wacky. I'm starting this band and I loved you to try it for a while.' He jumped in with both feet and was just blown away by the material. He said, 'You really want me to play this loud?'

To what extent did the success of bluegrass-oriented jam bands like The String Cheese Incident and Leftover Salmon and banjo players like Bela Fleck and Gordon Stone inspire you to pursue Blueground Undergrass or would you have done it anyway?

I was wanting to do it four years ago, but I was still really committed to the idea that Good Medicine would do something. The reason I didn't is because my brother had a day job and I just didn't want to do anything without my brother. I knew that to get into a rock project I'd have to tour. So I asked my brother to do it for a year and to do the record and we'd get another guitar player if we started to tour. Six months into doing it, he started talking about quitting his job. And he's been with Delta for 10 years making a fortune and he had all this, like, 401K. He had a normal life, whereas I've been struggling, doing theater and voiceovers and singing telegrams and raising my family being an entertainer. It's a wacky thing being an entertainer. He had this 9-to-5 job, but he's thrilled, man. He's a new person. His wife and him are thrilled.

Of course, we're drawing well in the south, trying to break into the north. We've got a tour bus. That's changed our lives tremendously for the good because we can sleep. The van was killing us. It's just going great. I'm just so grateful.

You put out 'Barnyard' yourself and Phoenix Presents put out the live record. Do you think you'll make a studio album with them?

I'm not sure. If we do a studio album it probably will be with them. They're good people.

When was the last time you played Wetlands before this Blueground show?

1990 when Aquarium Rescue Unit opened for Phish.

Is 'Mr. Lunchbox' Bruce Hampton?

No, it's Deacon Lunchbox. He was a performer in Atlanta. He died in a car accident. He was a local performance artist and a really great guy. I wrote that for him. I haven't written one about Bruce yet. He gets embarrassed with stuff like that, but I'm going to. But he is my biggest influence, and I see him constantly. I comes over here all the time. He's my best friend and my other father (laughs). He's a great man.

You were only in Aquarium Rescue Unit for a year and a half, but you had a strong impact on the band by bringing in a bluegrass sound and an unusual rock instrument in the banjo. How does Blueground Undergrass sound like the Col. Bruce Hampton version of ARU?

Well, a lot of the tunes I'm doing now in Blueground Undergrass I wrote when I was in Aquarium Rescue Unit, like 'African Hillbilly.' And 'Roger Judy' was an Aquarium Rescue Unit tune. We did them in ARU, but we didn't record them because I didn't record with them. I was already out before the Capricorn record. The biggest thing is that it's got the invisible whip, which is a Bruce Hamptonian term. An invisible whip is when the music sounds like it can't decide where to go. There's time we do these segues where it's atonal. It's got a Zambi-like quality. And Zambi is a term from Bruce and it's this kind of out thing.

But with roots music?

Exactly.

Do you think you'll keep doing the Zambiland Orchestra?

Oh yeah. I call it a company party for sick musicians. It's really our only chance to get together. We usually do it around Christmas in Atlanta. You don't have to be a rock star for the night. Widespread and Phish can come and nobody badgers them. It's a night where everybody's equal and we don't talk about our bands. We just play music. Like this year, (former New Grass Revival mates) Sam Bush and John Cowan were there. And also Victor Wooten (of the Flecktones). The only one (of the Flecktones) that hasn't come is Bela. But we played the outest shit you ever heard in your life. Then Sam's on the Grammys five weeks later and Rosie O'Donnell's abusing him.

Is there a core to Zambiland Orchestra?

No. You're invited and all that, but it changes a lot.

Do you think they'll be another Zambiland tour?

It's hard to tour it because it's made up of musicians that are usually working. They're thinking about putting out a two- or three-CD set of the four years of shows. It will be insane. Everybody's on it. You name them, they're on there.

They should chronicle it's history on a website because its so amorphous.

Somebody's trying to do that. There's already setlists and tapes of every show, but if somebody could put together a roster of all these people and how impossible it is. There's no reason why Sam Bush would be on the same stage as an accordion player from a Latin band. It's just this amazing group of people. It's really cool and fun.

That web roster sounds like a job for JamBands.com. What is 'The New Old Time Christmas Gathering?'

It was a bi-racial Christmas play that I co-wrote. It was me doing theater, a Christmas play that accentuated the black and white aspects of American roots music. We had a bi-racial cast. I played African banjo in it. It was in the spirit of Christmas and a lot of Christmas songs. It was real successful here in Atlanta. But as long as this band keeps going like it's going, I can't do anything. It's taking all my time.

That's a good problem.

It is.

While their bluegrass coach, what did you learn about Phish that you think nobody else knows?

I learned during my time on the road with Phish that they are a very curious bunch. When they focus on something they really want to know about it from the source. In the case of Bluegrass they really wanted me to teach them all about the form and the history. They were serious and that's what makes their music interesting to me. They also hire people to do things for them. They don't act like "know it all" just because they are rock stars. Being a rock star doesn't make you smart, informed or well rounded you know. You always have to keep working to evolve and get better at being yourself. Phish as a band and as people are very kind and open to people from all worlds and it shows in their music.

What was the wackiest fun you had with Phish either then or some other time?

The most fun was teaching them the song Dooley. Jon was so funny to watch as he played mandolin and sang the song. I just love his reckless abandon and lack of concern of what he looks like or how he comes across. He sang his heart out and then the dress really added once live on stage. They all four are so different and that makes them a great band. I think the beatles were that way. We also laughed alot about Col. Bruce and all share a common love for him and his insane influence on us.