Photograph by Dave Stotts
One reason bluegrass music has a devoted following today is because of a humorously named band the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia launched with accomplished players of that genre, including David Grisman and Peter Rowan. Old & In the Way released a self-titled album in 1975 that sold well for bluegrass at the time, mostly because of Garcia’s huge following. The group has continued to draw interest, partly because of the ongoing respect and curiosity music lovers have for the Dead frontman who passed in 1995 at age 53.
Garcia played banjo on the album, Grisman played mandolin and sang, Rowan contributed guitar and vocals, Vassar Clements played fiddle, and John Kahn was on bass. They were definitely not in the way. The album also had a contemporary sensibility—Rowan wrote two songs, while Grisman contributed the song “Old and In the Way” and covered the Rolling Stones’ soulful ballad “Wild Horses.”
To celebrate that music as still relevant and fun, a traveling show called the Sam Grisman Project, with Rowan as a headline performer, will play Memorial Hall on October 18 as part of the Longworth-Anderson concert series. “Old & In the Way was a work of love, that’s all it was,” says Rowan, still making music at 83, in a telephone interview. “We had no ambition of doing anything big. The name means we’re useless, but what still grabs people today is that we were trying to play really well. We helped get bluegrass on the map and passed the baton.”
In the early 1960s as a Boston youth, Rowan played banjo with the great Bill Monroe, the Kentucky-born mandolin player, singer, and songwriter credited with launching bluegrass. Rowan and New Jersey-born Grisman became acquainted on the southern circuit of bluegrass jamborees that appealed to them both. In the late 1960s, the two started the progressive rock band Earth Opera, whose epic song “The Great American Eagle Tragedy” (also the title of an album) was one of the era’s most angry and biting Vietnam War protests.
The musician credits on that album provided a good indication of just how talented and versatile both men had become as musicians. Rowan sang and played acoustic and electric guitar and tenor saxophone, and he wrote all but one of the songs; Grisman contributed mandolin, mandocello, piano, and alto saxophone and sang. (The other band members were Paul Dillon and John Nagy.)
Rowan later wrote a counterculture-friendly song called “Panama Red” that was recorded in 1973 by a hippy/country group with Dead connections called New Riders of the Purple Sage. It became quite popular on FM radio. Old & In the Way played the song live, and it’s on their 1975 record.
Rowan says his shows with the Grisman Project are a way to remember Garcia the banjo player and bluegrass lover, a long way from his visionary guitar work on Grateful Dead’s Dark Star. “You live to play the banjo and all of a sudden you get a whole lot more interest from other people for playing the guitar,” Rowan says of Garcia’s career. “And he wanted so badly to learn and absorb everything and translate it to guitar. But his first instrument was the five-string banjo.”
Rowan says he’s especially looking forward to the Cincinnati show as he recalls playing at one of the Tall Stacks roots music concerts here and was a fan and friend of Katie Laur, the tireless Cincinnati champion of bluegrass who died in 2024.
Photograph courtesy samgrismanproject.net
Sam Grisman, who organized this tour and plays bass in the band, is the son of David Grisman, who at 80 is semi-retired these days and not traveling. But Project members are hoping to make David proud.
“The biggest blessing of putting this group together is I have such a tremendous network of friends who are talented and have unbridled love and affection for Peter and his catalogue and for the whole catalogue of Dad and Jerry,” Sam says in a telephone interview. “That opens up a more sustainable path for my community of music friends to weave in and out of the Project and play the gigs that make sense for them.”
Sam recalls when his father built a studio in their home in Mill Valley, California, in the Bay Area and Garcia would come over for recording sessions. And even though he was young when Garcia died, Sam vividly recalls his father’s reaction.
“That was quite a memorable event in my early life,” he says. “It was the first time I ever remember hearing my father cry. My parents were watching news and I was watching cartoons in the living room, and I heard screaming in the bedroom and walked in and the TV announcer was saying that Jerry Garcia had died.”
Bluegrass now seems healthy and relevant for younger generations, thanks to ever more updates from artists like Billy Strings. “He’s bridging that gap for lovers of all music,” Sam says about the guitarist/singer/songwriter who sells out concert venues and has won two Grammy Awards for bluegrass albums. “He noticed growing up that his bluegrass guitar heroes, as well as Garcia, had played with David Grisman, so he said my dad needed to be one of the guitar heroes, too.”
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