Winning musicianship

Wood Brothers may not have a shelf of Grammys, but they’ve got a different take on success

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To be completely candid, we missed most of the Grammy Awards a couple of weeks ago, except for the segment where the ever camera-shy Madonna seemed to be commanding a legion of worshipping satyrs, a spectacle made only more surreal with the sound off at our local gym before expressionless, lycraclad Boulderites pumping away on their ellipticals.

But we couldn’t escape the post-event buzz about Kanye stopping himself from his second I’m-a-letya-finish moment while Beck was accepting his award for album of the year and later castigating someone (the Academy, presumably) for failing to appreciate Beyonce’s “artistry.” (For the record, Beck has five Grammy’s to his name, including the two he nabbed this year.)

It is worth pointing out, as many did the morning after, that Beyonce’s artistry was aided by more than 60 people in the making of her record — players, writers, producers — while the lamentably undeserving Beck produced and wrote every song and played every instrument on his record himself.

Artistry is a complicated virtue.

As it turns out, we had an interview with Oliver Wood, one half of the Boulder-native Americana brother act (though, technically, one-third of the group, as it includes multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix) scheduled for the next day. We couldn’t resist the urge to get a little perspective on this nonsense from a working musician, a guy who probably doesn’t have a suit in his closet that would gain him entry to the Grammys, much less Beyonce’s after-party.

“Yeah,” he reflected, “we’ve been working in this big studio [in Nashville, on a new record due this summer], and I guess there’s some pop stuff that goes on at this place. It’s funny when one of the engineers — the house engineer or one of the assistants — will come up and say, ‘Wow, it’s so cool, you guys just come in and play music.’ Y’know no cliques, nothing like that. We don’t have an entourage.

“But, y’know, it’s all creative, it’s all artistic. We certainly like to see someone like Beck get credit, for a change. That’s a guy who’s been doing this for a long time, and he’s so talented. He’s such an amazing composer and lyricist. Gotta honor that once in a while.”

Is there a little bit of pop-star elitism happening here? Even if Beck has a growing Grammy shelf of his own, is there a lingering perception of an alt-rock underclass getting a slap down when they dare to actually earn some of the spotlight?

“So many of these things are relative,” Wood observed.

“I have this young, up-and-coming friend of mine who’s sort of frustrated and disillusioned, had a lot of doubts about what he was doing: ‘Am I doing the right thing? My parents want me to be a lawyer…’ Of course, there’s the financial side of the music business, and of course like anything else, the money sort of rules things.

“But on the creative side of things, those of us who are just making any kind of a living playing music are so lucky and blessed. … It’s a real privilege to be able to do it on any kind of level, where, wow, you can eke out a living and love it. If you can do that, you’ve made it… you’ve definitely made it, as much as Kanye’s made it.”

Wood’s decade-long partnership with bassist-brother Chris started as an impromptu gig at a family gathering in Boulder, and a couple of subsequent sit-in gigs led the two of them toward a folk/Americana duo act, improbable as it may have seemed given their disparate musical histories as professionals. Oliver played guitar for Tinsley Ellis and then went on to form and tour in the country/R&B outfit King Johnson down in the Atlanta area, while younger brother Chris studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and formed the highly esteemed avant-jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood in New York in the early 1990s.

But growing up in Boulder, sons of a now-retired molecular biologist, the brothers Wood absorbed from a young age the folk, gospel and blues stuff that had obsessed their music fanatic dad. It wasn’t so much fighting over who scratched whose Mott The Hoople album — it was more a shared exploration into roots and contemporary forms that eventually led them into playing themselves.

“We first gravitated to the blues stuff, people like Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Josh White… We thought we could play that — it was accessible and not that complicated. I’m four years older, so I really taught Chris how to play, and we got a lot of mileage out of 12-bar blues, which I went on to play for years.”

Wood still sees the enduring resonance of classicism as a source of inspiration for young musical minds.

“I’ve got a 12-year-old, and you can put on a classic rock station and he knows all those songs,” he says. “He’ll listen to Billy Joel right next to Metallica, and all the stuff in between. And the Beatles, obviously. That just seems to go from generation to generation, but there’s a lot of other stuff that’s still big with the kids.”

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