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The Reverend Leads a Revival:
An interview with Jeff Mosier and Bob Stagner

by Chip Schramm

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For some folks musical success is fleeting and precious. The proverbial fifteen minutes of fame often translates into fifteen weeks on the Billboard charts or maybe fifteen months of good radio play and record sales. In these cases, success is a goal in and of itself, more often than not driven by performers who view fame as a specific end to which they can justify any means at their disposal, not a by-product of a musical pilgrimage. True musicians and artists, however, find that success is of a more personal nature and more intrinsic to the journey, not the goal. The "Reverend" Jeff Mosier has been fortunate to enjoy personal success in many of his endeavors, both within the musical realm and beyond. His contributions have been both as a leader and supporter of others. Ever the philosopher, Mosier has drawn inspiration from the great players before as well as beside him. In turn, he has found many outlets to express his joy for entertainment, both as a musician, an actor, and a playwright. He has been given the opportunity to teach and influence others, and now with his latest project Blueground Undergrass, he as taken the reins again to drive a new vehicle in the robust improvisational bluegrass scene.

Mosier's roots can be traced back into the hills of eastern Tennessee, so it should come as no surprise that his main instrument of choice is the banjo. Blueground Undergrass' sound is self-described as "psychedelic hick-hop bluegrass" which can be quite a mouthful. It's hard to imagine how someone can fit all of these influences into one band, but every night BGUG takes the stage, the sounds of steel guitar, mandolin, fiddle, acoustic guitar and bass all mesh neatly around Mosier's fluid banjo picking. Many things have changed in Jeff's life since he first put together his first band with his brother Johnny some 23 years ago. He has made many sacrifices to put all of his energy into the partnership with Mark Van Allen, Mark Byum, Edward Hunter, and the newest member of BGUG, Bob Stagner. In the one short year since their inception, BGUG has already seen two members depart for other pursuits, yet the band's popularity continues to grow.

I had the opportunity to chat with Jeff and Bob shortly before they played an opening spot for the Allman Brothers Band in Atlanta, on September 4th. Bob hails from Chattanooga, Tennessee and has been an active participant in the improvisational world music scene for quite some time through his association with the Shaking Ray Levi Society. His influences range from Mickey Hart to Olatunji and beyond. His wide-open style has really helped BGUG broaden the scope of their sound. Excerpts from the interview follow.

C: Are you an ordained reverend?

J: I'm not an ordained reverend, but my degree is in theology. I went to school and I have a four-year degree in theology and counseling. When Bruce Hampton found that out, he named me "The Reverend Mosier from the hills of Tennessee." That's my true Zambi name. When I did the Phish thing and had the bluegrass coach job, they put me in the Phishing Manual and a few other books as "The Reverend," so a lot of kids don't even know I'm Jeff Mosier. I just sort of went with it even though I'm not really happy to be associated with a lot of reverends. I am happy because it came from Bruce! Bruce is my biggest influence.

B: You're a new kind of reverend. (laughs)

C: Did you grow up in a particularly religious family?

J: I did, I really did. My parents were wonderful and unlike a lot of people they really lived the Christian life and made a huge difference in my life. I don't use my career to do Christian music but I would say that what I do is certainly not incongruent with the message. I don't say it much in interviews, but I believe that Christ along with a lot of other leaders, but mostly Christ, represents the ultimate healthy human being. It's just unfortunate that most of his followers don't do anything he says!

B: You are playing spiritual music.

J: Well, I am. There's a difference between religious and spiritual or Christian and spiritual. I think that mine's not about trying to convince anybody to be like me when they grow up. It's trying to just help them have a better quality of life. By doing songs that I think have some kind of message that's bigger than "I broke up with my girlfriend," or "Boy that was a good hit of acid" or whatever people write about. I think it's a little bit bigger than that.

C: What was the first instrument you learned to play?

B: I played guitar when I was ten and I was really frustrated because I had these stubby little fingers that couldn't stretch across the neck, but I had my right hand going like a fiend. My sister was dating a drummer and I thought he was pretty cool. He said "you need to be playing drums." I said "man, anybody can play drums, I want to play guitar." One of my heroes was Chet Atkins. I'd go to see Chet Atkins every time he'd come to Chattanooga. For some reason I started de-tuning the strings on my guitar and bouncing things off of it, so I was an early hammer dulcimer player and without even knowing it! Then going into the eighth grade some band director realized that I could bounce sticks and hitting things was going to keep me out of jail. And it has, knock on wood!

C: How about you Jeff. Were you playing the banjo growing up exclusively?

J: No, I was really into music and drama in high school and then my senior year, which was 1977, probably before you were born (laughs), a friend brought a banjo over. Of course, I had heard banjo growing up in Tennessee. I grew up in Bristol. He brought it over and sat it in my lap and said, "here's my banjo." I thought it was the weird and heavy and loud and nobody played one. I had never seen one up close. When I had seen them on TV with Buck Trent or Earl Scruggs it looked like their fingers were moving one speed and what was coming out looked like it was another speed. It was the weirdest, coolest thing. Being a weird person, of course I gravitated toward it and became obsessed with it. I went out and bought a banjo the next day for $100. Two weeks after that I bought a $1000 banjo, which in 1978 was a really expensive banjo. It was called a Fender Artist. It had been played at Jimmy Carter's presidential inauguration one time before I bought it. My dad thought I had lost my mind. He said "What are you doin'?!" Now he realizes that I was serious back then.

I've never played anything else but Dobro. The Dobro is picked very similar to banjo but on the left hand you use a slide. The politically correct term for Dobro is recephonic guitar. Dobro is actually a brand name.

B: Kind of like National

C: Back in '79 you started Good Medicine which has been a long-term project for you. Several of the members of that are now in Blueground Undergrass. How has your is your attitude different now than it was then or when you played with the Aquarium Rescue Unit?

J: The difference between me then and now is pretty much like everybody else -- I went through a musical revolution. I started playing banjo and I was playing banjo music. I started evolving with what I was listening to. I started out listening to Flat and Scruggs. I got the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. I got the Stanley brothers, Jim and Jesse, and then this band called Hot Rize came on the scene. They were from Boulder, Colorado and they were named for the ingredient in Martha White flour. They were a huge influence because they took regular straight bluegrass, but they wrote original songs and they had a kind of wacky approach to it, but it wasn't progressive. It was still traditional but it was interesting. I would call them new traditional.

Then New Grass Revival came on the scene. Bela Fleck joined that band in 1982. That's Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Pat Flynn, and John Cowan on bass. That blew me away because Bela was the first person to play banjo so interestingly and so progressively that I thought "I can do this for the rest of my life." That was the first time I saw the banjo as something other than a bluegrass instrument. I played a five string, three finger style that was pretty much invented by Earl Scruggs in the mid-'30s. Bela took that instrument and that style and started playing Chick Corea and fusion and classical and Celtic music. He pretty music brought it out of the bluegrass closet and into other music. I got to know him around 1984 to 1986. At that time I was promoting concerts that brought New Grass Revival to Atlanta. I sat down with him a couple of times and he spent the night with us. His tone is really the biggest influence on me. I don't play like Bela at all. I wish I did, but I have more of a round, lower bottomy tone like he does.

C: When did you originally meet Col. Bruce Hampton, ret.?

J: In 1988 or 1989 I met Bruce and became one of the charter members of Aquarium Rescue Unit. When I joined the band it was me and Oteil Burbridge, Bruce, Jeff Sipe on drums, and Charlie Williams on guitar. Later we got Jimmy Herring on guitar. The Count M'Butu was on percussion occasionally. It was thrilling because there I was playing a bluegrass banjo, but I'm playing with these insane avant-garde musicians who are coming from Latin, fusion, rock, and Bruce comes from blues and southern rock. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It literally changed my life. To this day I say with all my heart that Bruce Hampton is undoubtedly my biggest influence. During that time I played in the band, I was exposed for the first time to Sun-Ra and Widespread Panic. At that time, they were just a young band getting started. In that time, the whole movement was starting with bands like Dave Matthews, Blues Traveler, Medeski, Martin, and Wood, and Phish. It changed my playing because for the first time I was playing the banjo the way I felt it should be played instead of replicating the "clone-prone" sound of bluegrass. When I left the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Matt Mundy took my place.

During that time I went off to work with Alzheimer's patients doing music therapy. Then I got into theater, which put another whole layer of influence on my playing because I started doing theater and started acting. I wrote a Christmas play here in town that did well and did a play called "Cotton Patch Gospel" which is a play that Harry Chapin did the music for. Actually Harry Chapin did it right before he died in 1982. It's a wacky thing, it's like Christ's life set in the South. It's all bluegrass music and it was really a wonderful influence. All during that period of time I was doing a radio show called "Born in a Barn." I was doing it here in Atlanta on 89.3 FM, WRFG. It was a wacky radio show because I did traditional, progressive, and contemporary bluegrass music. We even had a section called the phone festival where people would call up over the telephone and we would jam live with them over the telephone. Me and my brother Johnny would be down at the studio on banjo and guitar and they'd be on the telephone either at work or at home or sometimes they'd pull up to a pay phone and pull the phone into their truck! It had a cult following.

C: Was Jerry Garcia an influence of yours at any point?

J: During that time, a lot of hippies used to call. They'd say, "play some Jerry Garcia, man, play some Old and in the Way." I'd be like "OK", but I didn't know who Jerry Garcia really was. I mean, I knew about the Grateful Dead, but I didn't, you know? I put on Old and in the Way and I said "Oh Gosh, this is pretty bad bluegrass." It was because my ear was so attuned to a certain sound. This was going on in '84. As time went on and I started to play with Bruce, I really started to realize who Jerry Garcia was. People would call up and say "I want to hear some Peter Rowan and some David Grisman and some Tony Rice." All of a sudden it occurred to me that there was this whole other world of music out there played on bluegrass instruments and it killed me. So I started really listening. Even though Jerry had some severe finger problems; he didn't have enough fingers to really play the banjo, in my opinion he played the banjo from a place where it had never been played from before. He wasn't a hillbilly but he revered Bill Monroe. He often said he dreamed of being one of the bluegrass boys, one of Bill's boys. Bill Monroe really was on of THE guys in American music.

Jerry had some heart and feel about his playing that really freaked my up as a player. I started listening to what he did on Old and in the Way and Midnight Moonlight and White Dove. Here were these guys who were playing these songs that weren't necessarily traditional, but some of them really were. I mean, Pig in a Pen, that's hardcore bluegrass, White Dove, that's hardcore bluegrass, but then Midnight Moonlight, that's not bluegrass. It's a Peter Rowan song and has weird chords. It just kills me to hear him play it. If Jerry Garcia hadn't come out of the closet and said, "Hey, I like bluegrass" and done the hillbilly thing in San Francisco in the early 1970's, there would not be a Blueground Undergrass, in my opinion. I don't think there would have been a market for Aquarium Rescue Unit and there certainly wouldn't be a Leftover Salmon or String Cheese Incident. A lot of these bands have spawned because of the interest and re-interest in bluegrass music that Old and in the Way had brought in.

C: How were you originally approached to do the Phish project? How did they decide "Jeff Mosier is the man we want?"

J: I don't know. I hadn't seen or talked to them since I'd played with them at the Roxy in '92. That's when I played Paul and Silas. That was a big show for Phish back then. It was like "Wow, Phish sold out the Roxy!" I sat in with them and then I got into theater and working with Alzheimer's patients and doing all kinds of stuff. Then one day I got a call from Mike [Gordon] and he said "look we're in this bluegrass thing now and I come out and play the banjo. We'd like for you to come out on the road with us." I said, "OK." I didn't really know what to do, but once we got out there, evidently they wanted to have class, so I ended up getting little notebooks and giving them a history lesson, teaching them songs. I taught them Nellie Cane, which is a Hot Rize tune written by Tim O'Brien. I taught them one of mine called Little Tiny Butter Biscuits, even though it's called "Butter them Biscuits" in the Phish books. It's named after an Alzheimer's patient that I worked with who one day said that out loud. I taught them Dooley, which, is from the old Andy Griffith show. It's a moonshine song. I taught them Blue and Lonesome, which Blueground now does. It's an old Bill Monroe tune. They already did Ginseng Sullivan and Long Journey Home.

It was great. John played mandolin. That was hilarious, seeing him play mandolin. Page played acoustic bass, Trey had a Martin guitar and played some great flat-picking, and the Mike played banjo. It was thrilling. I played with them at night, too. It was right after Hoist came out, so they had just recorded with Allison Krauss. They'd gotten to know Bela. They had just been enamored with bluegrass. I don't like to call it a bluegrass phase, but they were going through a phase. I knew it wouldn't last, but that's cool. Phish as a band, the big word for them to me is "curious." They're just curious people. They're sweet, curious, and genuine. They try to fit every possible thing into their music that they can and I dig 'em for it.

C: You guys played some shows touring with Leftover Salmon not too long ago. How was that?

J: That was great. We did a tour up north and went through Burlington.

C: Had you played with Mark Vann before?

J: I sat in with Leftover before in Atlanta at the Variety. I knew Mark and Mark came over to my house to check out my banjo because he wanted a Rich and Taylor, which is what I play. I knew Tye from Zambiland [Orchestra] and we were all in Zambiland and we went out to Boulder to do a little Zambiland West with me and Paul McCandless and T Lavitz and Ricky Keller and Tony Furtado. Jeff Sipe went, too.

I knew them and it was thrilling. We went out and opened for them in Chicago and Connecticut. We went through Burlington and hung out with Mike Gordon at his house.

C: How did you get hooked up playing on the same bill as the Allman brothers in Atlanta and Raleigh?

J: Kirsten [West, Blueground Undergrass' manager] knew about me through Bruce and then of course Oteil helped a lot with that. He really wanted me to sit in back in November. Kirsten and Oteil worked to make Dickey feel comfortable with a banjo player standing beside him (laughs). Dickey was in a good mood and I got to sit in. He was like a childhood hero to me. Oteil was on my left and Dickey was on my right and it was like a dream. Of course, I played with Oteil when we were in Aquarium Rescue Unit together and I still to this day feel that he is the greatest bass player alive. He's the Bela Fleck if you will of the bass.

C: How have you had to adjust your life since deciding that you wanted to pursue the Blueground Undergrass project full time?

J: I was going to give the band three years. We played our first gig February 20, 1998 and by June, 1998 we were in the studio doing our first record. I had to transfer all my eggs into the Blueground baskest. At the time I was doing cheese: playing private parties and Six Flags Over Georgia and voice-overs for the radio as well as theater. I just had to go "this is it" all of a sudden and we did. Now my brother has left Delta airlines, and I'm a father of three children who are all under five years old. I'm in a world that's not necessarily family-oriented as far as Rock and Roll, per-se. It's a new day. The band's working and we have an album that's coming out in October on Phoenix Rising label. It's going to be a limited addition bootleg of a live recording. We're only going to release 5,000 of them. It was a live show recorded at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta. We also have a lot of interactive features on our website, too.

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You can check out info on upcoming Blueground Undergrass tour dates and news at www.bluegroundundergrass.com. Also check out the Homegrown Happenings section this month to find out more information about Harvest Festival outside of Atlanta on October 9-11.