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It was sometime in the mid 1970s when he gave me his business card, which is still tacked to the wall at my guitar shop. It was a plain white card, classy, displaying the simple message...
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I remember doing sound for Hot Rize one time in Buena Vista, Colorado. We were sitting around the motel room and Charles, always enamored with the lower frequencies, made the statement that in his opinion beautiful music simply could not be played on the mandolin. "And the reason is that THIS is the lowest note that the instrument has." Charles plucked the open G string on his 1937 D-28. With that, Tim O'Brien picked up his mandolin and played, most expressively, a beautiful Celtic-influenced piece. It was full of grace notes and rhythmic touches and was his own creation. When he finished, Charles looked Tim in the eye, deadpan, and said, "I rest my case." Charles loved good guitars, and knew more about them than just about anybody. He was smart enough to buy the 1936-38 Martin pre-war guitars when he had a chance. He had some chances, luckily enough, while working at the Denver Folklore Center back in the early '70s, where I first encountered him. Charles wouldn't stand on a bluegrass stage without playing his 1937 herringbone or '36 sunburst D-18. And he was right. It makes a difference. There comes a time when "tone" is all there is. I think Charles said that, or should have, because he got the very best tone around. A book has already been written by Dan Miller about Charles and his guitar playing, and I'd recommend it highly. There are some really great comments by other musicians about Charles and his approach to rhythm and soloing, and I won't plagiarize them here. If you're a musician, or if you've listened close to Hot Rize, then you already know. Hearing them warm up in the bus before a show brought a sense of bluegrass pulse and power you could feel all the way to your toes. It was built very much around Charles' playing. He was a masterful explorer of the "low end", both in his rhythm and his solos. He played with time, obviously influenced by Clarence White, but carried an incredible groove all the while. He liked to point out that the guitar has these low notes on it, and the mandolin, fiddle, and banjo have a tendency to play "way up high a lot." His bass runs were surprising and sure, sparse and tasteful, and full of soul. He would get way out there on stage, real close to musical disaster, then pull it out at the last minute like he meant to do it all along. Sometimes his solos would shatter you with the raw power of that sixty-year-old Martin flattop, but before he finished his solo, he'd have you diggin' the blues. His humor showed up in his solos, along with his deep reverence for the early bluegrass and blues players. Charles liked his bluegrass "vanilla" as we like to say. His band, The Whippets, reflected this approach perfectly. Even the introductions would mimic the early bluegrass bands of the '50s. "And now, from the great state of Colorado ... " And yet Hot Rize was simply too progressive for many of the traditional festivals back East. They used the electric bass, and even sometimes (God forbid) a phase-shifted banjo. But they rightly stand as one of the very few legendary bands of the modern era. Charles, Tim, Nick and Pete played together for almost twenty-two years, counting the frequent reunions. That's longer than any other bluegrass band. They were original and innovative, but true to the tradition. They were performers who delighted their audiences with their wits and their music, and Charles' way of looking at things had everything to do with who and what Hot Rize really was. Charles could be great friends with other musicians, like Alison Krauss and her fine bandmates, but at the same time joke that he just "wasn't all that fond of pop music". He loves all the Lonesome River Band guys, even though it "sounds like country music" to him. I guess he does kinda like it vanilla, but then he told me that when he first saw Laura Love, and her wildly eclectic Afro-Celtic band, he got the same feeling that he got when he first heard Ralph and Carter Stanley. Just maybe don't confuse it with bluegrass, but Charles liked all GOOD music. He often made tape collections of music in many styles that he found interesting, and then mail them off to his friends. Recipients of these tapes knew Charles was thinking of them. He would find little things for people that they yearned for, and he was always showing people that he held them in his heart. I had the pleasure these past several years of teaching with Charles at the RockyGrass Bluegrass Academy. We'd team-teach a novice guitar class and conduct a session on sound and PA gear. Charles could talk endlessly about the very serious business of amplifying a bluegrass band. Again, he knew more about it than anyone. He had the best way of describing things. He'd start with the Helmholtz Effect, having to do with the reversal of sound waves bouncing off the inside of the guitar. He'd cover it from every angle. The quality of the instrument, the qualities of different microphones in accordance with the player's mic technique. "If you have a good band, and you're thinking of adding another member, you might think about making it soundman," Charles would say. He'd talk about speakers and power amps, reverbs and monitors, and then he'd get into musical communication at the philosophical level. Charles said, "Sound systems are a necessary evil, a total compromise. This music was meant to be listened to up close, acoustically, old time style in the living room or kitchen, or dancing with a fiddle and a banjo. Anything else is an artificiality, designed to create careers for business people and musicians by bringing them to larger audiences." It's true in the spirit Charles intended it, and it's of course also true that Charles, along with the rest of us, rightly benefited from the use of sound systems. We had started out pretty informally at Telluride with the Telluride Bluegrass Academy, and over a period of years, it was moved to RockyGrass at Lyons, Colorado. We inherited, by hook or crook, my old songbook from our local Colorado Mountain College Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Class. The book contained songs, mostly easy to teach and with nice harmonies. It was mostly bluegrass, but also got kind of folky here and there. As soon as he got involved, Charles took an active interest in making the songbook an authentic collection of original bluegrass songs in the right keys, with the right words. "If you're gonna try to teach bluegrass to people, you gotta give them Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, because that's what bluegrass is." Charlie would say. And he was absolutely right. Along with the songbook, he took the time to make DAT recordings of all of the original versions of the songs in the songbook, and we gave cassette copies to all one hundred students. "If you want to have a band someday that takes bluegrass in some new direction, that's fine, but how can you branch out from something you don't fully understand?" he would say. Charles understood it. He could sing you twenty gospel tunes in a row, all the lyrics, all in the key of G, as written. Nobody playing professionally could out bluegrass-trivia Charles Sawtelle. He was the king, and he had the best stories too. There were numerous errors in the original class songbook. One was pretty funny. Bill Monroe's wonderful song about his parents' gravestone was accidentally titled, "Memories of Mom and Dad," as opposed to "Mother and Dad" as written. Charles said, "Don't you think that perhaps "Mom" is a little too familiar Sandy?" Then he'd do that funny Charles chuckle-laugh. I'd like to thank him for helping keep me to the narrow and true when teaching bluegrass fundamentals to players new to the music. If you're teaching a class about bluegrass music, you do have to go to the source. I heard Charles one tell our guitar class, "Bluegrass has never gotten any better than the music the original masters played, and they had no one to listen to." Charles was a life affirming cynic. Any shell of curmudgeonry he might have had was paper thin at best. His love of his friends, and the life he was fortunate enough to have was bright and clear. When Mike Kemnitzer called me with the news, I felt the crush of Charles being suddenly gone. Mike was very close to Charles. He had stayed with Charles for a few days just last month, and was thankful for their time together. When Mike expressed his admiration for Charles' attitude, Charles said, "Well Nugget, you just haven't been around when my attitude hasn't been quite as good." When Mike asked Tim O'Brien how Charles was feeling playing with Hot Rize on the road a few months ago, Tim replied, "Well, Charles is feeling mighty bad, he's really sick, but he's sure playing the living daylights out of the guitar." I noticed that too. Charles kept getting sicker, and playing better and better, as if he only had time to play his best music. Let's all hope that his own album project becomes available. I know that he'd been sneaking in recording sessions with all his best friends for quite a while. I have a hunch we're going to hear some mighty fine "music from the heart" from Charles before too long. When someone you've known and loved passes on, they don't really go away right then. They never go away altogether, but for a while they're with you all the time, as if they're hovering over your shoulder... making sure you do right. Making sure you don't waste the time you've got on this good green earth. I'm sure we'd all like to think of Charles up there, playing in that great all time bluegrass band. Joking with Clarence White about Lester Flatt, singing a tune with Carter Stanley, backing up Bill Monroe on "Evening Prayer Blues." And maybe that's just what he's doing. You can bet that he'll still be doing it the Charles way, the funny quirky way, laughing infectiously, but making a point all the same. He's the guy a lot of us are going to miss the most because of how he was... to each of us who knew him. Sandy Munro 3/27/99 | ||
