RESOURCES:
Live on Mountain Stage: Outlaws & Outliers
TRANSCRIPTION:
Jeremy Baldwin: I am speaking here to long-time Mountain Stage host Larry Groce, who is now, I think...Larry, correct me if I'm wrong. Are you, like, host emeritus? Is that you calling yourself or pinch hitter?
Larry Groce: Yeah. I would say "former host."
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah.
Larry Groce: And now, I'm still a consultant for the show. And I help with the artistic direction still.
Jeremy Baldwin: Well, we're talking to you today because coming up here very soon, you're going to be releasing a brand-new live compilation of performances from Mountain Stage over the years. It's called "Outlaws and Outliers," and it has quite a few tracks by quite a few artists that people will definitely know. Tell us about the record and it's been a while since the last Mountain Stage compilation. Correct?
Larry Groce: The last one we did was way back in 2001. We did a bunch of records, back then with a subsidiary of Oh Boy Records. And this time, we're doing it just with Old Boy Records themselves. They've changed management and so forth. Oh Boy is the record company that John Prine started, and it still puts out all of his material. We got approached by them, but I think because of the 40 years Mountain Stage celebration about doing something. And we were excited about that. I'm always excited to try to put together these things because we have so much good material in our vaults from 40 years. So, I started out with over 250 different artists possible. And then, we decided we would narrow it down some. Because we do so many different styles on Mountain Stage, we decided to focus on things that were more rootsy, country, Americana, alt-country, that kind of thing. And so, that got it down some more. And I narrowed it down myself to close to 100. And then, we had a team of people that I joined in with who we're going to produce it--somebody from Old Boy and somebody from Cathy Mattea's management and somebody from promotional team. And we just went through the artists and the songs and together decided which might be the best. And we were aiming to get somewhere less than 30 finalists because we knew we needed somewhere between 20 and 25, and we knew we wouldn't probably be able to get permission easily from all of them, because we're talking about some songs from as far back as the early 90s. And sometimes, it's hard to get people to sign off on some of these things. So, that's how I proceeded. And we have just an abundance of good stuff. We have much more than what's on here. So, I'm happy with the 21 that we got left. And that's kind of how it started. And that process has been going on now. It started last year ago February. So, in February of '23, we started going through this, and we worked through it to last summer and fall and came up with the final lineup in December, actually, and then started putting it together to release in April.
Jeremy Baldwin: And it's a great lineup. And you kind of answered my next question, which is how far back to some of these performances go back. But you're saying to the early 90s for some of them?
Larry Groce: Yeah, I'm looking on it now. I think the earliest one is 1991. I think we chose "Souvenirs" by John Prine from 1991 when he was on the show.
Jeremy Baldwin: Which makes sense since it's his record label that's putting this out there in the world. And, of course, it's John Prine, you know?
Larry Groce: Yeah. You want to include John Prine if you've got a chance. Always.
Jeremy Baldwin: That's right.
Larry Groce: And also, it goes all the way up to 2023. It's the most recent.
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah. All right. Well, I want to ask you about just a few of these tracks while we got time here. And maybe if you've got the list in front of you, you can tell us when they're recorded if you have that available. But I wanted to ask you about the Lucinda Williams track. Do you remember that when she came on? This is a great version of her great song, "Joy," that's on here.
Larry Groce: Yeah. She was doing songs from that record. I believe this was 1998. And she was coming through, and I believe on that record was--excuse me, on that show--was also "Mermaid Avenue" with Billy Bragg and members of Wilco on that same show.
Jeremy Baldwin: That was the same year.
Larry Groce: It was good that they had her whole band. Yeah. And she had her whole band—you know, with the the all-star band that she had—and we listened. We had to do narrow it down. She did several from that record. But we decided to choose. That's a wonderful song.
Jeremy Baldwin: Absolutely! How about the more recent track from Tyler Childers' "Going Home"?
Larry Groce: Well, yeah. We knew about Tyler pretty much long before the world did, because he was a local artist. And he's he was in the Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, and he's played around before anybody ever heard of him. And I actually hired him to play a little festival that I used to be in charge of here to play out on the street. And I went down because a friend of mine recommended him, and I went down and listened to him. I thought, "Wow, this guy's really good!" And not only was he good at holding the crowd, but he was a really good songwriter. So, we invited him. He came on in 2015. This song is from the very first time he was on the show, and he had a couple of guys that are still with him in the band. The bass player and the drummer were with him then, and he had a couple of others. I think the steel guitar player was too. Any case, he did a whole bunch of his more famous songs, but when we went and asked him if we could get permission to use something for the record, they said, "Why don't you use this one? Because it's never been released."
Jeremy Baldwin: Oh, that's so cool!
Larry Groce: We have a song on here that you can't get anywhere else, which is pretty great.
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah! All around!
Larry Groce: It's a great song--"Going Home." Yeah, it's a fun song. And now we understand that the night that the record was released, he's got a big concert somewhere. He's going to sell it in concert that night and sing that song, which is great because I think he has decided to kind of put it back in some of his setlists--
Jeremy Baldwin: Right.
Larry Groce: Just because it's on this record. We really appreciate that. He and his management team have been good friends. And we had him on, I guess, a couple times before anybody ever heard of him, and now everybody's heard of him!
Jeremy Baldwin: All right. I'll ask you about one more here that I'm looking forward to hearing. Because I don't think I heard it when it was on the original broadcast. How about Wilco doing David Bowie?
Larry Groce: Yeah, that was one. And, once again, Wilco and their whole team was so good to us because it's something that Wilco had done in concert for a while but had never been released on their records, and we heard them when they did. This was 2016. They did it in on Mountain Stage. And when they start that song, everybody's heard "Space Oddity." I mean, I don't care if you don't even know music. You've heard that and "Ground Control to Major Tom." But they started that. And we thought, "How are they going to do that acoustically?"
Jeremy Baldwin: Right.
Larry Groce: And make it work? And we were so impressed, as everybody always is, that it worked great. It was like it was written for acoustic music almost. It was really great! So, we thought, "Wow, that would be asuper thing if we could get that!" And they said yes. They would let us do it. And so, once again, you get a chance to do that, you want to lead your record with it.
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah.
Larry Groce: And we released that as a single back in January on Bowie's birthday. And it got a lot of mileage because it's such a great version of that song.
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah, yeah. Well, all right. Well, once again, the record--the Mountain Stage compilation, live compilation--is called "Outlaws and Outliers". And, all these artists and many more on there, including Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Gillian Welch, Steve Earle, Sierra Ferrell, Rhiannon Giddens. And we mentioned John Prine and more. I don't even have time for the whole list, but I really want to thank Larry Groce for talking to us today about this record. And we'll be playing some tracks from it!
Larry Groce: Wonderful! Thank you so much! Good to talk with you!
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