Peter Rowan  --  Back to his roots

ROB ADAMS  http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/38596-print.shtml

They call Peter Rowan the source down Texas way. Over the past 40 years and more, Rowan has played almost every style of music that America has produced, which makes him the ideal candidate to launch Glasgow's Big Big Country festival of Americana next Wednesday.

Rowan hasn't just played these styles of music, however, he has immersed himself in them, gone right back to their roots in order to form a complete understanding of them.

Rowan baulks at being described as an authority but when, in the mid-1990s, country maverick Steve Earle wanted to return to recording after exorcising his personal demons, it was to Rowan that he turned for advice and help, resulting in Earle's emotional, back to his roots comeback album, Train A Comin'.

Years before, the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia had sought out Rowan and his buddies, fiddler Vassar Clements and mandolinist David Grisman, when he fancied playing some extra curricular bluegrass in the successful Old And In The Way.

Rowan, of course, experienced the ultimate bluegrass education in the 1960s during a three-year spell with the genre's godfather, Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys, an experience that not only lit Rowan's fire, as he puts it, but persuaded his family that playing music for a living was a viable option.

"One of my jobs with Bill, apart from singing and playing rhythm guitar, was to drive the band bus," Rowan recalls. "And when we went over to Great Britain to tour, I had to find somewhere safe to keep the bus while we were away. So I parked it in my folks' drive and when I got back, my brothers were quick to tell me how big an attraction that bus had been, with people coming past specially to look at it. My dad knew then that I was in a real business, if not a proper job."

Rowan had learned to play guitar from his great uncle, George Wallace, and in his teens in Boston he frequented the Hillbilly Ranch nightclub. Here he heard bluegrass and old-time bands, discovering the blues and folk ballads through visiting New Yorkers such as Dave Van Ronk and Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

His first band was a Tex-Mex outfit at high school, called The Cupids, in which he played electric guitar but by the time he dropped out of Colgate University in 1963, Rowan had returned to his acoustic roots. Long-time friend, banjoist Bill Keith got Rowan into Bill Monroe's band and once installed there, says Rowan, there was no turning back.

"I hadn't given much thought to what I was going to do with my life at that time. My mother was an artist and she got me interested in that, so painting was a possibility," he says.

"But with Bill Monroe, I got into music at a deeper level. Bill had hung out with blues singers down in the south where he came from, so there was a lot of blues in his music. It was darker and had more of an edge to it than the bluegrass I'd been playing up to that time. When Bill played mandolin, fire came out. It was exciting and I remember he told me, 'if you can play bluegrass, you can play any music'."

When he left Monroe in 1967, Rowan set out to test his mentor's theory. With the aforementioned Grisman, he formed Earth Opera, a band that became a victim of its own eclecticism, despite having a minor hit single, Home To You. Next came the now legendary, jazz-influenced Sea Train, whose albums were produced by George Martin and would become vinyl collectors items long after the group had burned out.

By this time, Rowan was well established as a songwriter. He wrote Panama Red for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, another Grateful Dead spin-off, and when he teamed up with his brothers, Chris and Lorin, as The Rowans they caused a stand-off between American music industry giants Clive Davis, of Columbia and later Arista Records fame, and David Geffen. Eventually signed to the latter's Asylum label, they flirted with chart success during California's soft-rock heyday. During the 1980s, Rowan became a Music Row songwriter in Nashville, writing country hits for George Strait, Ricky Skaggs, Michael Martin Murphy and Janie Fricke. But he never lost interest in America's traditional musics – due in considerable measure to the examples of musicians from this side of the Atlantic, including Cathal McConnell and Aly Bain of Boys of the Lough, the Bothy Band and Dick Gaughan.

"I'd run into these guys on trips over there and they seemed to have a real connection to their roots. I can remember Cathal, particularly, trying to teach me an old Irish ballad over the music that was blasting out of a hi-fi at a party – he just bawled it into my ear," he says. "At the same time, the Scots and Irish traditionalists had a way of taking the music forward and I've found that really inspiring."

Rowan's regular working partner, Tony Rice, refuses to fly, so their quartet doesn't tour outside of America and Canada. Which means that Rowan resorts to solo troubadour mode when he comes over here.

"I'd like to bring my other group, a trio, over some time, but I'm just happy to get to Scotland, to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors (he has Hamiltons as well as Wallaces in his family tree) and breathe that good Scottish air.

"Besides, I enjoy the intimacy of a solo gig. I just walk out with no set idea of what I'm going to play and see where the mood and the audience takes me."

Peter Rowan plays the Tron Theatre on Wednesday, May 11. Big Big Country runs from May 11 to 21. For further information, call 0141 248 6543 or visit www.soundsfine.co.uk