Alex and I were living in Pendulum, but then we moved down to San Francisco when we first started playing shows and everything. We kind of got our start in San Francisco.
Is it true you lived in the Haight-Ash- bury District? Yeah, we lived on Haight Street.
That’s so great. That’s a legendary place. Yeah.
But what happened? I read in a press release about you getting evicted or something. Is that true? Oh yeah, we got booted out of our house. New landlords bought the building. There’s a lot of big money coming into San Francisco and buying everything up, and the rent prices are skyrocketing, and tons of artists are getting kicked out because they can’t afford to live there anymore.
Oh man, that sucks. Yeah, well, we’ll figure it out. You know.
When the band first started were you playing originals or covers or a mix? Definitely a mix of both, I mean, you know… we’d just kind of started writing songs and we had a bunch of songs that we started playing that we had learned from other people that were traveling musicians. I mean the thing about Haight-Ashbury is there were always street musicians coming through town like vagabonds, you know, dudes with acoustic guitars and banjos coming through and stay- ing the night in Golden Gate Park, which is like a block away. And they would just play music on the street during the day and Alex and I knew some kids from Seattle that taught us a handful of old-time songs and that’s kind of where that started, and we started playing
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some of those and some other originals that we had written and just kind of kept going with that. Started writing more.
Who influenced your music most back then Ah… the Rolling Stones and the Kinks and Led Zeppelin… and Devil Makes Three.
Oh yeah. What a great group that is. Yeah, they’re awesome.
I read that your mother played too, is that correct? Yeah, she was in a band. They did acoustic like four part harmony folk stuff back when we were kids and we’d just sit and watch them play. Actually, we found a video, like a VHS tape of them performing a couple of weeks ago when we were back home for Christmas, and we dug out this tape and it was them performing, which was awesome because all I had were like memories of them practicing when I was a little, little kid. It was really cool to go back and watch all that.
Oh yeah, I’ll bet it was. Well, let me ask you this, Ben. What would you con- sider your biggest break so far that’s really helped the band? Well I would say probably the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco. We’ve played that thing three times now and I mean, it’s the biggest crowd that we’ve ever played to, like 20,000 plus people.
Wow. And yeah, we’ve just had the great fortune of being involved with that and getting to play that a few times now. It’s just given us great exposure and you know, that’s in San Fran- cisco and we’re from San Francisco, so it’s been really good to build that local crowd up. It’s just great.
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