Breathing Life into These Songs  The Jerks of Grass: Come On Home
(produced by Jerks of Grass and John Wyman at the Halo) CD Review by Jeff Trippe
The long-awaited Jerks of Grass CD, Come On Home, is not merely a collection of a few of the band’s best tunes. It also serves as a deliberate response in the debate over multi-track recording versus live in-studio performance. And, surely not least of all, it is also an affirmation of the Jerks’ identity as a dynamic team whose members work best when they can feed off of one another’s energy and spontaneity. This talented quartet made the right decision in going live. By the time we are well into the second song, “Big Spike Hammer,” an Osborne Brothers classic, the big excitement is coming through. The band renders this and other straight-ahead bluegrass standards, including “Foggy Mountain Special” and “Tennessee Waltz,” with the same genuineness which has made them one of New England’s favorite acoustic acts, but they are not afraid to go out on the farthest limb with contemporary instrumentals by Bela Fleck as well as Chris Thile’s finger-busting “In the House of Tom Bombadil.” Even though their choice to record live means that not every note on such complex pieces will line up as it should, one has to admire the courage and skill involved in just getting a good take down. As guitarist/mandolinist/vocalist Jason Phelps told mainefolkmusic.com, “We wanted to record live because we really wanted to make a disc that accurately reflected what we do onstage. We are a live band, and after over 1200 shows it is something we are very comfortable with. Recording live allowed us to play off of each other like we do around one mic in our live show, and not doing ANY overdubbing forced each of us to rise to the occasion. On many tunes, once we did a couple runs through for technical purposes, it was one or two takes and we knew we had it.” Anyone who has seen the Jerks of Grass play live has been exposed to the one-microphone performance method still used by many traditional acts today (Del McCoury’s band, for example, or Rhonda Vincent and the Rage), which can be riveting. However, the problems in modern stage and studio amplification for acoustic bands are manifold: audiences now are used to higher levels of volume than those who went to hear, say, the Bluegrass Boys in the 1940s; in addition, today’s condenser mics are more sensitive to high frequencies than the old RCA 44A used by Flatt and Scruggs, thus making feedback a real problem. In the Jerks’ case, producer Jonathan Wyman at The Halo studio took a common-sense approach, first ensuring the band’s comfort as they sat together in a single wood-floor room, just as they might for rehearsal, and then miking each player. But Wyman’s liner notes address the problems which arose: “Inevitably, there will be bleed; the fiddle mic picked up the top-end slap of the bass, and the guitar and the vocal were all over each other. Rather than try to fight it, we embraced it.”
The song selection is interesting and again reflects what one might hear from the Jerks on stage. To my taste, “Down in the Willow Garden” (attributed in the notes to Charlie Monroe but really a very old ballad with roots in the British Isles) – consciously or not – is a little too close to Tim O’Brien’s version. Speaking of O’Brien, the band does a fine job on his “Nellie Kane,” although I don’t hear any new twists. The prolific Mickey Newberry’s “Why You Been Gone So Long” is really a page out of the Tony Rice songbook, but hey, the fact that Phelps can play licks which conjure up thoughts of Rice is pretty impressive. After all, guitarist Bryan Sutton has made a career doing more or less the same thing. So what is the answer to the question, Was it worth the ten-year wait? Jerks of Grass fans will be unified in hollering back: YEP! The disc does indeed capture the band’s skill and zest, and that was the objective. Not only that, it seems the band members met their own personal goals in successfully recreating many of those mysterious and magical moments which surface during live performances by folks who love the music they are playing. As Phelps remarked,
The life of a song – seems like a simple concept, but so many commercial studios and artists seem to specialize in the “sucking” to which Jason alludes. Thank goodness for bands such as the Jerks of Grass, who respect the songs, themselves, and their audience. The Jerks of Grass play live on Thursday nights at the Bramhall Pub in Portland.
You can purchase "Come On Home" at all Bull Moose Music locations, or on line at the Jerks of Grass web site.
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Hats off to Wyman for his openness, but I would venture to say that the average Jerks fan doesn’t mind the bleed. The feeling is what counts, and it comes across. Phelps’s picking is, as always, superb on all cuts, and on “Foggy Mountain Special,” Carter Logan’s banjo is about as loose as the ladies in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge (but in a good way). Melissa Bragdon’s fiddling reflects her training and self-discipline throughout, but she delivers just the right sort of wild-heartedness on tunes such as “Frank’s Reel” and “Twin Peaks.” Bassist Kris Day exhibits fluency in ranging from 
“For me personally, it's quite a challenge/rush to pull off a tune like ‘Stomping Grounds’ or ‘Tom Bombadil’ live, never mind live in the studio: multi-tracking allows for repetition to absolute perfection, but it can a double-edged sword that can also suck the life right out of a song.”