Phoning It In From The Cellar: A Conversation With Keller Williams March 14, 2021 17:53

Keller: Correct. I'm playing down in St. Petersburg on Friday, and then Del Ray Beach on Sunday.

Keller: Absolutely. This is all outside with reduced capacity and table seating. We're taking the whole thing very, very seriously and trying to create an experience while being as safe as possible. 

Keller: Absolutely. I am as well.

Keller: Well, I guess it all started with Hee Haw. Roy Clark and Buck Owen's pickin' and a grinnin'. It was an old TV show. I remember watching as a toddler. I was probably three or four. I remember watching the guys play guitar, and I would pretend to play with a tennis racket. I finally got a little starter guitar. I'm right-handed, but with no strap, as a little kid, I kind of held the neck with the right hand, so I could pretend to play it.

When I was about ten, and I actually took my first lesson, they were like, "Well, we need to string your guitar differently, or you need to turn it around." From there, they were teaching me scales and the basic learning tools of guitar. I was on the baseball team and swim team at that point, and I kind of left it for a while. Then when I was about fourteen, someone showed me "Smoke on the Water." I kind of went with that, and later on, another friend showed me the basic cowboy chords. Everything you can do on the first couple of frets. The C's, D's, E's, G's, and things like that. 

It turns out that once I had G, C, and D, I could play so many songs off the radio. I think at age 16, I had my first paid gig doing just that. Sitting on a stool playing covers during happy hour for dinner and tips. I did that a few times. This was 1986, I guess. I moved on to college at Virginia Wesleyan and played in a few bands. One band in particular stayed together for a little bit. Everyone had day jobs, and everyone wanted to put our gig money towards making a record. I had to put the money towards rent and bills. 

I did have a few random jobs. I worked for a temporary construction agency. I would show up in the morning, and they sent me out to do grunt work that other construction workers didn't want to do. One in particular was taking a piece of cinder block, smashing it, and then taking a piece of the smashed cinder block and scraping mortar out of the cracks of walls of a school being built. Eight hours in long pants, boots, and a hard hat in the middle of the Virginia summer. 

Back then, minimum wage was maybe $3.50 an hour. It might have been hard enough work that I was paid $4.50 an hour. After sitting on a stool playing covers for two hours and making as much as I did for eight hours of scraping mortar, that's kind of what led me to pursue this unrealistic career of being paid to sing and make up songs. 

Skip ahead to about 1992, that's when I gave up on school and ideas of "real jobs." I was totally focused on making money playing music. Around that time, there was a lot of Mondays in Fredericksburg, Tuesday/Wedesnday in Virginia Beach, Thursday night somewhere else, maybe Richmond. On the weekends, I'd try to open up for bigger bands as a solo act. It's pretty much all of the gigs that my band was getting. Once we split up, I could go back to those venues and get a solo gig for the same amount of money, which was about $250. 

I was raking it in, you know? It just kind of went from there. I guess my style kind of came about from those gigs. Those were a dude in the corner of a restaurant. Move the tables around. I'd bring in my little PA, and I would play. These were places that people weren't coming to see live music, but there just happened to be live music there. No one was really paying attention, so after a while, I stopped paying attention to them. I was focusing on this music, and out of that came my style, I guess.

I had a lot of influences, the obvious being the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, and Bob Weir. Their styles of rhythm and lead, and well as Phil Lesh's obscure bass lines, and of course the improvisation. There was also Michael Hedges, who had a huge influence on me. I was probably about eighteen when I got turned onto him. I'd just gotten into the Grateful Dead and experimenting with all kinds of things. 

Along comes Michael Hedges, who is this solo acoustic guitarist, and he's up there demanding the stage of the audience. His tuning and playing style all hit me. Mostly, it was the way he would do cover songs. He would do them in different tunings, different keys, and make them his own while staying true to the original. I took a lot of that from him as well. That's kind of the long shot there. 

Keller: Right. Well, that came from hours and hours of playing in places where people weren't paying attention. I needed a different avenue to make it more interesting for myself. So, without being able to afford humans to do it...there's nothing more expensive than human beings. Their pay, food, lodging, gas, and all of that. There was no way I could afford a band, but I needed more musically. That's kind of where the looping came in. It basically started with voice and guitar. I think I incorporated the bass in maybe '99? Once the bass is in that loop, and the air started to move, people started to dance and pay more attention. Then in 2000-2001, I actually started selling tickets and playing places where people came to see the music. 

Keller: Yeah...String Cheese was originally more of an acoustic four-piece. They're obviously a six-piece powerhouse now. When I first met them, it was Keith Moseley on electric bass, Bill Nershi on acoustic guitar, Mike Kang on acoustic mandolin and fiddle, and Michael Travis on drums and percussion. Really what got me from the get-go was Michael Travis playing kick drum and snare with one foot and hand, while playing hi-hat and percussion with the other. This was all at the same time, like a two person beat that was always happening. 

I guess this was in a basement in Telluride. They were playing an after show for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival of 1995. I had just moved out to Colorado. I was 25 years old with no real address. I saw them for the first time, and I had a few gigs lined up, but I would go see them at different mountain bars. I saw them play three or four times before I actually met them, which was in a small bar in Colorado Springs. I met Keith first, then Travis next.

The next year, I was living in Steamboat Springs, and String Cheese was playing a free show in the town park there, maybe opening for Maceo Parker. I was doing a Wednesday night gig across the street, and we had met briefly. By the end of the night. I had everyone plugged in to my little PA on a stick. That was really cool, and I think it was maybe spring of 1997 that I did a tour with them. We started on the West Coast and made our way out east.

That was my first trip to the West Coast. My first gig out west was the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I'll never forget that. As a kid, I always wanted to play the West Coast and California specifically. 

Keller: Right. Yeah, so when was the Breathe album recorded again? I know it was released in '99, but I think we recorded it at the end of '98. I'm not sure. But yeah, we had played together on stage several times. I would sit in for encores. They're always really generous with their opening acts. We did that a lot, and we were really comfortable. I remember sending them all of the songs on a cassette tape that I recorded in my motor home that was plugged into campground power. 

I remember this super low hum that went throughout the whole tape. Somehow, they learned all of the songs from that. I think we spent a week in the Colorado Sound Studio outside of Denver. We put that thing out, and that was just such a cool experience working with those guys. I think we might have played all of the songs together at the same time, and maybe kept the drum track and kind of built it from there. That was an amazing experience, and even more amazing to play all of those songs at Red Rocks for the album's 20th anniversary. 

Keller: So, with More than a Little, when we first started, there were three members who were paid to play churches on Sunday. There was one guy who did two churches. So, the gospel element was kind of in place. I was using these amazing players and teaching them my weird, funky songs. They would incorporate what they've learned playing gospel, which is amazing. It's very different from any other group of musicians that I've played with. 

Their way to pay attention, improvise, and put chords and harmonies together was amazing. So, with More than a Little, the gospel element was already there. I got on the bill at LOCKN', and I think I played with the Keels on the first year. We were struggling to get confirmed on the bill again, so we put together this idea for Sunday morning gospel and Grateful Dead tunes. 

LOCKN' is very Grateful Dead oriented, you know? Pete Shapiro has a huge connection with the band. He definitely focuses on that type of vibe. That's where it went from there. They allowed me to do the three days of Grateful Grass at 11AM on this little stage in the woods. I felt that three sets of Grateful Grass was maybe a little too much. I had this band that was steeped in gospel. Maybe I could teach them some of these obvious spiritual songs that Jerry and the Dead played and incorporate it into the morning gospel. It just kind of took off from there, you know? 

Keller: Well, thank you so much.

Keller: Yeah, it's been an interesting year, to say the least. I was on the road getting ready to play Memphis, Little Rock, and Oklahoma City. It was a Thursday, Friday, Saturday run. I think it was March 12th, and I had just finished soundcheck. My management team (Madison House) and booking agency (Paradigm), the wonderful people who take care of me, were getting pressure to cancel the show. I suggested we check with the other venues we were playing that weekend. The folks in Little Rock and Oklahoma City were like, "Fuck it. Come on!" So, I talked everyone into letting me play the Memphis show on Thursday, and I was back home by 4:00PM the next day. So, March 12th in Memphis was the last gig.

Those first couple of weeks, I didn't take it very well. I was definitely concerned about my financial future. I didn't have much of a backup plan for making money. Now, if I had my fingers chopped off, I have insurance. (laughs). I'd be good for a couple of years. But this is something totally different. There was a lot of anger and a lot of brush clearing with a machete. Making a path that I've been wanting to make for forever. I made a path down to the river, and I got into fishing. Never really caught anything. I didn't have a whole lot of other hobbies.

There were a whole lot of weird, interesting ideas going off in my head. By that time, I was looking to the future and had to embrace the live streaming idea. We got on it pretty quick, and we were able to establish this really interesting community called "The Cellar Dwellers." I'm very fortunate to have a large basement with all of my show posters, and there is a great vibe to it. I was able to start up pretty quickly. Doing a very basic, one microphone / one camera type of thing. I incorporated taking a bunch of requests. It's done on StageIt.com, which is a streaming service where you pay $5 to see the show, and you can tip more if you want.

Everyone was doing Facebook live, which I respect, but it's all free, and you can choose to tip if you want. After a few months of that, I think people just stop tipping. I would imagine, after doing it for months and months, it becomes difficult. But, you know, we did this thing in the basement, and people from all over the country came for every show. People would meet up online on Wednesday nights. We hit it hard at first. We ended up going with Wednesday nights at 9:00PM EST. I think we've now done 62 episodes. It's an amazing thing. 

That, in itself, helped me play songs to their entirety. If I'm not in front of an audience, or no one's listening, I'll play a song and stop in the middle. That's not good. You can really get lazy like that, and that whole time, there is nowhere to go. I'm out on the back porch late at night, improvising with different tunings. I came up with a whole bunch of those and sent them to this guy named Bobby West, who is a DJ/producer out of Denver. He goes by the name Erothyme. He took all of these tracks, ran them through a system, created these songs, and out comes this record called Cell. All of my tracks, which were guitar, piano, vibraphone, and vocal, were recorded on my cellphone. 

I wasn't going anywhere. There weren't any available studios. This was the pandemic quarantine shutdown. So, I just recorded everything on my cellphone. I'd record the vocals in a closet, so they couldn't hear the air conditioning or the kids screaming. I was really surprised by the quality of the product when it finally came out. A lot of people don't know that unless you tell them. You can tell with the guitar. It sounds like there is not a quality microphone on the guitar. The vocals, I thought, were just like normal studio vocals. I recorded them on a voice memo.

Keller: My joke is that I'm very proud of that album, but I literally phoned it in.

Keller: I agree. I'm actually playing down there at the end of this month. It's a spring fest / golf cart / drive-in type thing. They're pulling it off. I'm doing a solo set and a set with Travis Book from The Infamous Stringdusters on bass.

Keller: Absolutely. This has been really enjoyable. I appreciate you hanging with me all these years, Jordan.