Bruce Hornsby Glad To Be on the Bus Updated 12:06 PM ET September 13, 2000
news.excite.com:80/news/ap/000913/12/ent-wkd-bruce-hornsby
By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - The tale he's about to impart, Bruce Hornsby says impishly, is the tale of two roads:
the one taken and the one not taken.
One led to fame, hotel rooms and a lifetime of buses that have transported him from one concert venue to
the next. Along the way he has played his piano and sung "The Way It Is," "Mandolin Rain" and, yes, "The
Road not Taken" to millions of people.
The other is the one that would have put him behind the wheel of a bus, driving basketball players from one
end of Virginia to the other.
Yes, he was a pretty fair basketball player back in high school, Hornsby says.
"I had a couple of small school offers. Division II schools," he says, then bites back into the corn on the cob
he's been trying to finish amid a constant stream of greetings from admirers backstage at the Universal
Amphitheatre.
"But I wanted to play piano," he adds, looking up with a sheepish grin.
Yes, he acknowledges, he was conflicted.
"I've never regretted it," he adds quickly. "If I'd taken one of the offers, I'm sure I'd be a JV basketball coach
somewhere in Virginia by now."
Then he laughs at the vision.
"I'd be the guy driving the JV team around and teaching health."
But if he dodged that bullet, he still couldn't shake life on the road.
"This isn't bad," he says, biting back into his corn. "You should have seen what we had last night." That was
in San Diego. Tonight is Los Angeles. Tomorrow will be somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area.
The peripatetic Hornsby is back on the road with The Other Ones, the remnants of the Grateful Dead (Bill
Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart and Bob Weir) minus the late Jerry Garcia. It's the group he last toured with when
it last toured, in 1998.
Later in the year, he'll be back in the studio recording a new album with his own band; the first new material
he's worked on since 1998's "Spirit Trail." He's also working with Ricky Skaggs on a tribute album to Bill
Monroe, the father of bluegrass music.
And he'll be trying, whenever he can squeeze in the dates, to promote "Here Come the Noise Makers," a live
album with songs culled from a catalog dating to the mid-1980s, when he won the Grammy for best new
artist of 1986.
"We'll be playing with a symphony orchestra, the Roanoke Symphony, in October," he says proudly.
Still, Hornsby has never been able to shake The Other Ones completely.
One of his first gigs was playing in a Grateful Dead cover band that his older brother Bob threw together.
"We were Bobby High Test and the Octane Kids," he recalls with a laugh. "I was Little Brother Brucie on
the piano. That was in 1974. I was a freshman in college."
By the late '80s, Bruce Hornsby and the Range were opening shows for the Dead, a one-time cult attraction
that had grown to the status of arena favorite. When Brent Mydland, the group's keyboard player, died of a
drug overdose in 1990, the Dead tapped Hornsby to fill in until a permanent replacement could be found.
"I already knew about 30 songs," he says.
The Dead performed more than 100 songs, often going a week or more without repeating itself.
"They made me learn 160 songs," he says in a voice that still betrays incredulity.
He stayed on for nearly two years, long after permanent replacement Vince Welnick had arrived.
"I guess I figured after all that, I ought to get some use out of it," he says of his new repertoire.
Hornsby never completely left. He joined the band impromptu here and there throughout the '90s. Then he
signed on for many of the Furthur Festival shows that the reconstituted and constantly evolving Others Ones
put together.
With Garcia gone, Hornsby, 45, has stepped up front more, singing lead on some of Garcia's most popular
songs and sometimes playing piano where a Garcia guitar riff would have been a given. If the constant
stream of people stopping to chat over dinner at the amphitheater is any indication, the group's notoriously
parochial fans wouldn't have it any other way.
"L.A.," he says, shaking his head with good-natured exasperation.
"If we were in Seattle," he adds, "we could talk as long as we wanted."
Or perhaps in Williamsburg, Va., the small, bucolic town where he has lived for the past 10 years. He grew
up in Williamsburg. His father once served on the City Council. He's raising his twin 8-year-old sons there
now.
"The Colonial town," he says proudly.
Then, turning mischievous again, he smiles and asks: "You ever go there on a school field trip and have the
locals throw bottles at you?
"That would have been me," he adds. "I was one of those." |
