In the Studio with Dread Clampitt

By Chris Manson March 8, 2007 Issue

Dread Clampitt vocalist-guitarist Kyle Ogle has been hounding me to do a “proper” article on the band for months, but they don’t seem to be hurting for press. Not just the local rags, but also the Associated Press and the USA Today website. I tend to mention them in every other Beat article, if the artist I’m profiling hasn’t already done so. But seeing how the band is getting ready to cut a new album — and remembering how much I loved 2005’s Geaux Juice —
I head over to Donnie Sundal’s studio. Even though I’ve never been to the place, I feel drawn to it, like the music’s calling to me even though Ogle and his band mates haven’t unpacked their instruments yet. Maybe it’s the CD I’m listening to in my car, a copy of Waylon Sings Hank Williams I made for Ogle. He was raving about the Ol’ Waylon album the last time I spoke to him, and the guy really does justice to the late, great Mr. Jennings’ song Lonesome, Ornery, and Mean, too. You know, like I mentioned in my last half-dozen articles…

CM: What’s different about the new album?
Balder Saunders (Vocals, Mandolin): We want to give this album a “live” feel—as if you’re at a Dread Clampitt event concert. We’ll go back and polish it, but we’d like to have it as raw as possible—the vibe, not necessarily the sound quality.
Kyle Ogle: The emotion of the band, the energy of the band, but have it all sound good with really good equipment and microphones and Donnie Sundal behind the wheel. This is really exciting because Kenny has been in the band two and a half years now, and we feel like we’re better than we’ve ever been. When we went in the studio to do Geaux Juice, Kenny had two weeks to get all those songs under his belt. He took over the tenor parts from Justin, and now all the songs have three-part harmony where before we weren’t really where we needed to be vocally.
Kenny Oliverio (Vocals, Bass): I think as a band we’ve evolved so much. Just the tightness — it’s way beyond what we were doing two years ago.
Ogle: The crazy part is as soon as we get finished with this one; we’re still an album behind. We’ve still got another album in the can. We’ve still got a vault of songs stored up. If we can do this record and cut it “live” like we want to do and finish this in a couple weeks, put it out right before summer or end of summer…right now it’s a challenge. We’ve got like 26 gigs in March.
Saunders: We’re blessed to have a wide variety of fans that range from all ages—the old dudes dig it, and the kids are into it. And the hippies and the country lovers.

CM: I first talked to you guys about four years ago. Since then you’ve toured and played and jammed with a lot of different people.
Ogle: When you first interviewed us, you asked us who our heroes were. You mentioned a song we did, Same Old River, that Sam Bush sang and Jeff Black wrote. Because of that article, Sam Bush came and heard us.
Saunders: He wanted to check out who said one of their influences was Sam Bush. He came to the Funky Blues Shack to see us.

CM: Did that surprise you?
Saunders: He’s been coming down here for about 20 years. His band New Grass Revival used to play the Mullet Festival. But, yes, it totally surprised us. I looked at Justin and said, ‘Dude, that’s Sam Bush!’ That started a relationship. He’s a really approachable dude. He’s really kind of mentored us in a lot of ways. He sat in with us for three or four gigs recently.
Ogle: Not only is he one of the most accomplished mandolin players of all time, he’s one of the coolest human beings you’ll ever meet —an accomplished instrumentalist, and a mad rhythm player.
Justin Lewis Price-Rees (Fiddle, Vocals): We also opened for Tracy Byrd and Blake Shelton.
Ogle: Right after Kenny joined the band, we went to a bluegrass competition at Telluride.
Saunders: We made it to the final four, but one of the judges produced the album of the winning band! We placed fourth, but we played for 10,000 people and got a standing ovation during the middle of a song.

CM: Have the record labels been calling? Have you been courted and lied to by the suits?
Oliverio: It’s gonna be difficult with us for the labels because you can’t categorize what we do as any one genre of music. I think the music business in general is looking to say, ‘Okay, you’re rock and roll, you’re blues, you’re this, you’re that.’ It’s hard to find anybody that’s willing to take a chance on a band they can’t put a finger on.

CM: What about radio? XM and Sirius — both have a lot of “niche” channels.
Saunders: Yeah, there’s Crossroads, Bluegrass, Newgrass, Alternative Country—all those things that we put a foot in but we don’t necessarily slot into. But it’s good, because we get a wide variety of play on different channels. That’s a big target for us. We don’t listen to the radio that much. It’s hard to find something that floats our boat. There’s only a handful of new artists that I really enjoy listening to. And it’s usually word of mouth. Someone hands me a CD and says, “This is really good.” Darrell Scott’s Theater of the Unheard is probably one of the best-produced and mixed albums that I’ve heard in a long time.

CM: Most of the bands and artists I interview credit you as the group that really elevated the local music scene. How does it feel having that on your shoulders?
Ogle: The weight of the world, we never bargained for it. We never asked for this burden (laughs).
Saunders: The easiest way to explain it is being a bluegrass format you can get away with a lot more stuff. Because automatically when people walk in, they’ve never heard what you’re gonna do in that format. You can play whatever the hell you want and say it’s bluegrass, so we got away with doing a lot of different covers across the board whereas normal cover bands and bar bands, they have to do Freebird, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan. And we can just go, “Hey, I don’t know that one! But we’ll do this one…” And that’s how we got away with a lot of that. And people would say, “Dread Clampitt does whatever the hell they want!” It took venue owners having faith in us, saying, “I’ll book you even though you’re bluegrass-ish.” It’s allowed us to write our tunes our own way, and the crowds have always been really receptive.

CM: I think you’ve opened the door for a lot of other groups--the WaCo Ramblers for example.
Price-Rees: Yeah, Balder and I taught a couple of those guys.
Saunders: I gave Bud mandolin lessons. He’s really blossomed into a good player. Seeing people coming up in acoustic bands is really refreshing. It’s not like we’re the grandpas and they’re the little chickens, but we’ve been around for four years and paid our dues. And if other bands can benefit from that, we’re happy to blaze a trail. We owe a lot of what we do to bands like Hubba Hubba (Duke Bardwell’s group), Mike and the Micros, that old band—what was it, the Rhino band? The Rhinos, John Hoorman and Pat Boone. Hubba Hubba is getting back together—Duke Bardwell, Billy Garrett, Washboard Jackson. They’re sounding better than I’ve heard them in a long time. They’re playing once or twice a month.

CM: Duke is a powerful singer, particularly on the “hidden track” that closes Geaux Juice.
Saunders: That song was about my Uncle Potter. When Duke brought it to me as a gift, we cried like babies for an hour. When we played it on stage, it took me a year to not break down crying. And then another year to sing harmony without crying. It’s taken a long time to really finish that song without just breaking up into tears.
Ogle: I wanted to mention that we did a cruise ship aboard the Solaris. We rented it for Halloween, sold it out and dressed up as the Beatles for the second set and performed the entire Let It Be album.

CM: So is this the beginning of the end, like it was for the Beatles?
Saunders: More like the beginning of the beginning.
Oliverio: We’re at ground zero.
Saunders: The first album (Dread Clampitt) was like a demo. It was done in three days. I think Geaux Juice is more representative of the band, so this will just build on that. We recorded most of that in Donnie’s house. We haven’t played a note in this studio yet, so we’re excited. It’s a lot bigger, a lot more room for isolation.

CM: Was 2006 your busiest year so far? What were the highlights for you?
Saunders: 2007 is shaping up the same…
Price-Rees: Supporting Jerry Douglas at the Mobile Civic Center was a highlight.
Saunders: For me personally, it was Sam Bush sitting in.
Ogle: We’d explain the chord changes for Ridin’ High, and he’d be, like, really concentrating.
Price-Rees: And then he’d play it better than we ever could!

CM: Someone observed that before you guys came along you really didn’t hear a lot of “twang” in the music around here.
Oliverio: You have to go to Texas to hear that. And who the hell wants to go there? (Laughs.)

Later, the guys gather around a single microphone and tear it up on Rose In Paradise, Waylon Jennings’ last country chart-topper. The song has figured in many of Dread Clampitt’s recent live appearances, but this is the first time I’ve heard them perform it. “You should come to more of our shows,” Ogle says. With Dread Clampitt playing almost every night this month, they’ll be damn near impossible to miss.

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