Rumpke Mountain Boys Headed West [interview]
Top Ohio bluegrass talent tours Colorado
By Tim Coughlin
February 8, 2016
This week, Colorado welcomes The Rumpke Mountain Boys, a progressive bluegrass quartet from Southern Ohio.
Adam Copeland (guitar), Jason “Wolfie” Wolf (banjo, dobro), Ben Gourley (mandolin), and J.D Westmoreland (upright bass) come together to play an old-time bluegrass sound so psychedelic and unique that they’ve impressed fans of all genre’s.
Rumpke combines commanding improvisation without relying on a predetermined set list—allowing the guys to play the moment as the moment calls to them. These unpredictable set lists result in a captivating live music experience every single night.
COjam caught up with them for an interview last week as they were preparing for their upcoming Colorado run. Make sure to check them out on the following dates:
Rumpke Mountain Boys Colorado Tour Dates
Thursday February 11 at Hodi’s Half Note (Fort Collins) w/ Blue Grama
Friday February 12 at Ullrs Tavern (Winter Park)
Saturday February 13 at The Bluebird Theater (Denver) w/ Jeff Austin
COjam: For people who aren’t familiar with you guys, how about we start with some background and your formation story?
Ben: Well I’ve been with Wolfie for about 14 years. It was probably about 15 or 16, but 14 until it became something more official than playing parking lots at Walgreen’s and stuff.
Wolfie: Yeah, I met Ben first, then Adam come along, and then quite a few years later J.D joined the band. We’ve been going strong I guess since Ben and Adam joined the band. Before that it was more of a tri-state/local thing.
COjam: A lot of people refer to your specific sound as “Trashgrass.” If you could articulate this concept in words, what would they be?
J.D: I kinda see it as an assimilation of a lot of different styles of music kinda put into one thing-- as far as a description of the music goes. Other than that, the band is from Cincinnati and the highest elevation is the “Rumpke Mountain”—which is a landfill. So it’s definitely a play on the band name.
Ben: But it’s also like-- we don’t want to go in and tell a festival that we’re a bluegrass band, ‘cause you know we played Poppy Mountain Bluegrass Festival, which is very traditional bluegrass…we are not traditional bluegrass. But what we do is kinda based on what it is that night—some nights we’re more traditional than others. Some nights we’re more spacey and weird and psychedelic or whatever you want to call it. It’s very mood-oriented.
COjam: You guys normally play really long sets, filled with some notable and often surprising covers. What do you guys like to cover the most?
Wolfie: We cover a lot of Leon Russell, Bob Dylan, John Hartford, and Tom WaitsJ.D: Basically anyone that writes a good song---from Russell to Jimmy Cliff. We’re all suckers for a good song.
Ben: Yeah, there’s too many…
J.D: We’re standing on the shoulder of a lot of giants.
COjam: You’ve recently played a New Years show with notable Grateful Dead journalist and musician, David Gans (Tales from the Golden Road & The Grateful Dead Hour). He’s incredibly vocal about his admiration of you guys. How did that relationship start?
Adam: Love him. He’s a great guy.
Wolfie: He was playing the Terrapin Hill Festival years ago. We kinda met him back stage and I think we might have sat in for a couple songs or something.
J.D: He said that you spoiled the sound guy for him the next day and that’s how he said he knew you guys and that y’all played until 9 in the morning.
Adam: Yeah we kept the sound guy up all night and he had a noon set or something that the sound guy was all hung over for. So he kinda gave us shit about it and then we ended up being buddies after that.
J.D: Yeah he came in and sat in with us on the main stage at a set not long after that. I think that was the first time he played with us.
Adam: I think he was at the Ledges when we played a festival up there.
J.D: Well I called him and said, “Hey are you for real? I mean if you are—lets jam!” And he was!
Adam: He’s fun, though. And it’s like, when we’re with him we just play as his band and we’re like “What do you wanna do and we’ll just back you up, and try to make it sound as good as we can and just be ourselves.” So yeah, we like just being able to hang out with him and play and let him take over for a few songs and we just do what we can to make it sound good.
COjam: Y’all just released a new album, High Time, Low Tide. What were you going for with this one?
Wolfie: Nautical themes!
Ben: And it wasn’t really on purpose. It was kinda like we finished Moon and had some material sittin’ around and Mike (manager) wanted to get us back in the studio. We just kinda started workin’ on High Time, Low Tide slowly. It wasn’t even like a concept of any sort.
Adam: We put together like nine months of going in for a day or two for a couple hours of work, and then leaving to go on the road for a couple weeks. We kinda had to keep coming back to it every once in a while.
Wolfie: We were inspired with the nautical theme when we toured down in the Outer Banks area of North Carolina.
Adam: Yeah, just south of the Outer Banks and we really got into the “pirate lore” of the area and then we realized the album we had been trying to put together over the course of several months was like--most of the songs had like an ocean theme and then we added a few songs after. Then by the end of it was just like, well this all just nautical themed.
COjam: A local periodical described it as “an experience of the highs and lows of the human condition.” That’s a pretty intense interpretation. How do you guys feel about that?
[Everyone laughs]
Ben: That was actually our merch/road guy who set that up, like we were supposed to come up with something in a group email and Jason wrote that up and we were all like, “Man that’s kinda…pretty good!” [laughs]
COjam: You guys are getting ready for a Colorado run. What’s your history like out there?
Adam: The first time we went out there was 8 or 9 years ago.
Wolfie: Oh, that doesn’t count!
Ben: Well it was so long before we went back, so we’ve been repetitively hitting Colorado for the last like three years.
Adam: 2011 was when we really started first hittin’ it regularly. We always do Denver. We have a great crowd out there. We also have a lot of great friends that live out there. You know, so many Ohio people are like, “Yeah I’m going to Colorado and I’m moving out there for…the obvious reasons, I guess.” So now when we go out there we got at least ten or twenty people that we have known for ten years in Cincinnati and they each bring out ten of their friends and it’s awesome because it definitely has grown every time we go out there.
Ben: I think what works to our advantage, too, is that they have a lot of bluegrass, but they don’t have bluegrass like us. Like there’s a “Colorado Bluegrass” sound and then we’re coming in and we’re hittin’ that market where people are hip to the acoustic music, but it’s a different feel to the same type of genre. It’s like a breath of fresh air. It’s the same instrumentation, but a different sound that not all of them are accustomed to hearing. So it works out advantageously for us.
COjam: Part of that different sound seems to be the new dimension you take bluegrass improvisation to. Can you explain that to people who haven’t heard your seen any of your shows?
J.D: I don’t think I could do it another way. That’s what makes it fun. Like—I don’t know what the next guy is gonna play song wise—like last night in Cleveland there were a lot of surprises.
Adam: Yeah, we had a bunch of songs that, I don’t think, J.D had ever played on with us before.
J.D: There were two or three I had never played on!
Adam: Yeah, we were just like, “Hey this how the song goes, it’s in this key and uhh…lets do it!”
Wolfie: Rhythm section was on fire last night.
J.D: Haha yeah. We were ragin’!
COjam: I guess I’ll have to check that tape out.
Ben: Oh no…don’t bother. [laughs]
Wolfie: J.D had been drinkin’ a little bit…
COjam: You have to in Cleveland! Definitely not Colorado as far as having things to do goes. But what’s the story with Ben’s hat?
Ben: Haha I’m a huge Leon Russell fan and used the hat for a Halloween costume one year and then ended up losing that one in a fire in a bar. So I bought a second one, because I kept getting all these comments about it. Then I finally bought a good one out in Colorado, because the second one I ended up getting signed by Leon so…can’t wear that one anymore. Haha, but I don’t know. It gets enough notice that I just keep bringing it. I’ve never been much of a hat guy, but now I have a hat!
COjam: What are some of your plans for the rest of the year? Festivals? Studio time?
Ben: We have a lot of festivals for this summer. I know we start with Suwannee down in Florida, and then Dark Star Jubilee, Cabin Fever [Music Festival]…
J.D: And everything at Terrapin Hill [Farm]. Terrapin hill is where it’s at.
Wolfie: Hopefully some West Coast festivals. We’re hoping to get back out to Oregon and Northern California again this year.
Adam: But we’re still waiting and there’s still a lot of scheduling being worked out at the last minute. Well, not really last minute, but in the music business it’s relatively late. We’re still mapping out our summer. With our new vehicle we can go coast to coast and not even think about it. It’s so easy and casual that it’s not a burden the way that our old shitty vehicles are.