Critical Grass plays the Freight

If you're a music lover in the Bay Area, or a touring musician in the folk/Americana/world genre, you know about the Freight (né Freight & Salvage). For nearly 60 years, the Freight has hosted musicians of every stripe, from all over the world. Everybody from Ladysmith Black Mombazo to Del McCoury has played there. Over the last 40 years, I've been to more Freight shows than I can count, but if you'd told me I'd be playing the Freight, I'd have laughed in your face.

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Enter Leah. I get most of the gigs for the band, but Leah gets us the special gigs. Like she got us on Peter Thompson's Bluegrass Signal show on KALW radio – we got a cool video out of that. Anyway, Leah is a friend of and musical collaborator with bluegrass legend Laurie Lewis. Laurie was putting together the bands for the Berkeley Bluegrass Festival this year, and asked Leah if Critical Grass would like to play the lobby show on Saturday, May 2nd. That is, we'd be serenading the visitors as they came through the lobby before they went into the theater.

I mean, is that a trick question? Just tell us our call time.

Next thing we knew, we were on the official poster of the Berkeley Bluegrass Festival

Half the fun was telling friends and family, "Oh ya, we're playing the Freight."

"You're kidding, right?"

Actually, that wasn't half the fun – the fun was just getting started. For instance, we found out that Tesser Call was going to be doing sound for us. We've worked with Tesser a few times, starting with our Vern's Stage show at the CBA Father's Day festival last year. Watching her work makes me embarrassed that I ever put my hands on an audio mixer. But the thing is, when you have Tesser with her hands on the mixer, you just completely forget about the sound. I told her during the sound check, "It sounds just like us – only more so." 

Just stepping up, getting our instruments ready – it didn't seem real.

I wasn't sure if we'd have a big crowd or not. I kinda thought people would get their tickets scanned, then bolt directly into the theater to get seats (the Freight has "festival" seating). Apparently they ran in there, dropped coats on chairs, and ran back out to the lobby. We were playing to a packed house.

Finding the groove

It took us a minute to get settled in. I mean, the second song we played was "I Feel the Blues Moving In," a Del McCoury classic. As we were playing it, I glanced off at 1:00, and there was Jason Carter, five meters away. Jason was Del McCoury's fiddle player for three decades and recently went on tour with his own band. He was setting up his stuff at the merch table. And/or quietly evaluating our version of Blues Moving In – I'm not sure. But here's the thing: when the audience digs what you're doing, the butterflies flee. And it seemed that the people packed into the lobby were having a big time. Furthermore, any musician can tell you that having friends and family in the crowd means the world. Right there at the cafe tables down front – Leah's mom, Jeremy's folks, and O.G. Critical Grass fan and sometime sound guy, Don Bright. I saw them grinning ear to ear and thought, "Okay friends, let's party."

Our 50-minute set flew by. Leah had been struggling with voice issues during the week, and we had made a couple of modifications to the set list to go easy on her voice. But she sounded glorious. In fact, we got to the song that was going to replace one of her flagship numbers, "Call me a Taxi" by Kathy Kallick. I don't even remember what that song was, because at that moment, Leah turned to us and said, "We're doing Taxi." Yes, ma'am. She hit it out of the park.

We finished up with John singing the John Hartford classic, "Steam Powered Aereoplane." Yep, John Haupert singing John Hartford. As we went away on a steam-powered aereoplane, I looked out over the people with us in the lobby. They were smiling, singing along, even dancing a little. When we finished, the crowd cheered and applauded. Go in peace y'all, and enjoy the Laurie Lewis show.

The afterglow

We got our instruments put away and had an impromptu team meeting in the green room (aka the marketing office – the real green room is backstage). One of the band started to apologize for some mistakes they'd made. I wasn't having any of it. "Maybe you made some mistakes. I know I made some. But that's not the point. We had one job out there: to play music and bring joy to everybody in the lobby. We did that and then some." Everybody nodded. Whatever mistakes we made, they didn't prevent both audience and performers from having a good ol' time.

Before the Chris Jones set, I was sitting out in the lobby at the Critical Grass table. I mean, it was a little cafe table with Leah's mom, Leah, John, and Anica from the Freight. Turns out that she and Leah grew up in Canyon, California together and she was telling us the most amazing stories of Tim O'Brien and other legends being at her house. While this was happening, people stopped by to thank us for the music, tell us how much they enjoyed it. I coulda sat there for hours hearing Leah/Anica stories and basking in the kind words coming from folks.

Eventually though, four of us (Chris had gone home to his family) ended up on high-backed stools along the center walkway in the theater, listening to the Jason Carter Band. I doubt I'll ever be on the main stage at the Freight, but that's okay. I got to play with Critical Grass in the lobby, which is way more than I ever expected. And sitting there with my bandmates in the dark, listening to the A-list pros up on stage, I knew that we belonged there. We had done our piece to make the Berkeley Bluegrass Festival a joyous celebration of acoustic music.

Huge shout-out to everybody at the Freight. Allegra and Anica for getting us settled and making us feel at home. Tesser for making us sound like us, only more so. And finally a deep sweeping bow to the legend, Laurie Lewis, for inviting us to the festival and giving us all a memory for a lifetime.

--Lee