The
band's instruments - including mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar -
suggest folk and bluegrass. But the centerpiece of Hot Buttered Rum's
second studio album, last year's Well-Oiled
Machine, is "Waterpocket
Fold," an instrumental tune clearly built on the intricacies and
interplay of jazz and classical music.
The track still has the old-time vibe inherent in a string band, but it's stretched and pulled in different directions: complex, narrative, delicate, precise, lovely. "Waiting for the Squall" is similarly sterling and has a darkness and urgency that give it the heft of rock.
"We make some of our living in bluegrass," said Nat Keefe, a singer and guitarist for the San Francisco-based band, in a phone interview this week. "We make a lot of our living in kind of the Grateful Dead music world; some call it the jam-band world. We're carving out our own little niche in all of this, where it's this hybrid of acoustic music and bluegrass and kind of a jam-band scene ... ." And jazz, and rock ... .
Hot Buttered Rum, which will perform on Thursday at the Redstone Room in downtown Davenport, doesn't expect to attract all fans of those disparate genres. It mostly wants to pick up a few from each everywhere it goes. (The band has performed at festivals ranging from Telluride Bluegrass to Bonnaroo to 10,000 Lakes.) The word "marginal" is often dismissive, but Hot Buttered Rum seems comfortable traveling along the edges of music cliques.
"Our growth has been slow and steady, and I think that's going to be what our path is," Keefe said. "Because we aren't going to be the darlings of bluegrass. We aren't going to be the darlings of the jam-band world. ... We're going to be at the outskirts of each of those scenes. We're happy to do that. But it does make us harder to package."
The band has been a full-time endeavor for its members for more than four years, and since they purchased a vegetable-oil-fueled bus in 2003, environmentalism has been something of a calling card. It's a great marketing hook - helping to bypass the challenge of selling something that doesn't respect musical boundaries - but it would be meaningless without a good product.
And even if bluegrass isn't music you generally seek out, Hot Buttered Rum probably offers something you can connect with. The versatile ensemble doesn't let its instruments or genre trappings keep it from exploring whatever territory interests it.
"We bring a lot of the aesthetic of a string quartet to our quintet," Keefe said, citing the group's "dynamics" and "articulation." "There are times when we think like a rock-and-roll band and times that we think like a string quartet."
Keefe grew up on bluegrass - his father plays mandolin - but studied classical composition and ethnomusicology in college, while other band members have backgrounds touching on classical performance, jazz, west-African music, and folk.
"We've
got four songwriters and we share the songwriting responsibilities,"
Keefe said. "We each bring just our best stuff. We don't have to
scrape the bottom of the song barrel."
As for the band's audience, Keefe said it's adventurous, and that the band tries to play off the moods and energy it's getting from a crowd.
"The people who are into our music are ready for us to go in a lot of different directions," he said, from "big, psychedelic fun" to "very serious, complex music. ... And people are willing to go with us to all these different places. We love having to fulfill that expectation.
"What's difficult is when a crowd is mixed," he continued - such as when bluegrass fans are sharing a room with jam-band fans. "That's when we're really pushed to please everybody. The bottom line is actually that we need to please ourselves. While we are reactive to what we perceive as the needs of the audience, we really just try to amuse ourselves through that."
Tailoring a concert is partially about planning, Keefe said, but it also requires performance flexibility. "We try to predict as best we can, and we write a set list accordingly," he said. "But we often deviate from the set list and try to follow the crowd and take the people where they need to go. ... There's a sense of these things that any performer after years of doing this acquires. I feel like we're just starting to gain a low level of mastery of that."
A new CD of new material recorded live will be released in May, Keefe said, and the group will also start offering select live shows on its Web site for download.
The band came together on a backpacking trip, Keefe said, and "our love of the outdoors has been a baseline for us."
That led to the use of alternative fuels for the band's bus. In 2003, Hot Buttered Rum purchased a veggie-oil-powered bus on eBay from students at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2005, the group upgraded to a 40-foot-long, Greyhound-style bio-diesel bus.
The band sometimes parks behind restaurants to fill up using their cooking oil, but more and more is buying bio-diesel at filling stations. "We plan out the tour so we can get bio-diesel along the way," Keefe said. (A sponsor helps defray fuel costs, he added.)
As passionate as Hot Buttered Rum is about the environment, Keefe said the band doesn't impose it on the audience. "We try to never preach," he said. "We want to be an example, and we're happy to talk to people about all this stuff. ... At set break we'll often give a veggie-fuel demonstration at the bus. ... We're a small organization, but we've influenced a lot of people to switch to bio-fuel."
Keefe said his band's fans are generally concerned about the environment, as well. "We create a community, and that community is based around more things than just the music," he said. "It's based around common values, and one of those common values often in our fans is environmentalism and the need, the hope to make the world a better place."
Hot Buttered Rum will perform on Thursday, March 15, at the Redstone Room in Davenport. The show starts at 9 p.m., and tickets are $11.
For more information on the band, visit (http://www.hotbutteredrum.net).
