Music Video of the Week
I’m trying to think of an analogy for Hot Rize that encapsulates their place in bluegrass, but coming up short. At first I thought “The Aerosmith of bluegrass”, but that’s not quite right. It does get right that they’re sort of the journeyman rockstars that manage to keep doing their thing successfully over the course of countless sea changes in the biz around them, and that while they never manage the place in rock history that more flashy bands might have (in Aerosmith’s case, say Led Zepplin or the Rolling Stones), they’re easy to take for granted.
They were a band that were essentially carrying bluegrass for a great many years, between its first prominence and its revival, and they did it by both being very traditional (they were technically excellent and always standard-setting) and very experimental (they toured often as two acts, button-up bluegrass band Hot Rize, and bar-rock country western band Red Knuckles and the Trail Blazers—literally between sets they’d go change into costumes and adopt tongue-in-cheek alternate personalities/characters). In any case, they are bluegrass Hall of Famers, no doubt. Tim O’Brien is, to me, the absolute template of a bluegrass vocalist. When I think in the abstract of what bluegrass sounds like, it’s his voice I hear.
Hot Rize – Radio Boogie and Martha White