Their name is a tribute to the Celtic anthem "Wild Rover"-- its third verse begins "We had one million bags of the best Sligo Rags." The group's base is the trio of Michael Kelly on fiddle and vocals, David Burns handling acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, and vocals and Gordon Rustvold on bass. To round things out, they work with any one from a clutch of percussionists who are available. Sligo Rags' efforts include self releases "The Whiskey Never Lies" (their latest) and "The Night Before the Morning After." And sitting down to interview them is almost as wild as their shows.
"It's mostly Celtic music with a bluegrass attitude," Burns describes the band's sound, which grabs from genres as wide-ranging as funk, jazz and rock.
Sligo Rags formed in 2002.
"I met Gordon playing in a jazz band," Kelly says. "I wanted to put together my own Irish band so I asked him to come and try that out. In the meantime we were looking for a guitar player and David became available, he was working in another band before us, and he came out and we played a few gigs."
Burns interrupts, "Actually I was still working with them at the time. We were in a state of hiatus."
"So they didn't actually fire you?" Kelly asks.
"No," Burns replies, "but that was going to happen later on."
"And after hiring him once, he would never leave," Kelly deadpans.
At this point, I decide to take each band member in turn and learn more about their lives.
Burns began playing music at 14 or 15.
"Bluegrass banjo was my first love," Burns tells me. "I was watching the Eagles on TV and it was Bernie Leadon playing a five-string banjo on a tune called 'Midnight Flyer.' The camera had a closeup on his right hand as he was playing the five-string with the picks and it looked so interesting to me that I knew I wanted to do that. My mom bought me a banjo, we found a teacher and there you go."
He studied psychology at University of California, San Diego and is a psychology teacher at Long Beach Polytechnic High School.
"I played a lot of music in school. That's what kept me studying and getting good grades," Burns says.
He is married with children, "They're very time consuming. When my kids and I are together we just hop in the car and just take off. We don't necessarily have any destination in mind. Sometimes we go to the beach, sometimes we just go and hang out at coffee houses, pizza parlors. They're my favorite people to hang out with."
Kelly came to music at age nine.
"It was violin," Kelly starts. "Mom hated it. My first two teachers said that I couldn't play worth a darn so I've never listened to responsible adults since. It put me through college."
He studied psychology at University of Utah, although he was there on a scholarship for violin performance. From there he got into country music and bluegrass. For Kelly, Sligo Rags is his full-time job-- he does the booking and handles the business matters.
Kelly likes to sleep when he's not working, "We have some other groups that we play with. I live for playing. I'm happy to be able to make a living, especially in Southern California, that I love."
He also recently had a baby boy with his longterm girlfriend- "That's my other love," Kelly adds.
Rustvold became interested in music from listening to the Beatles on the radio and drawn to the bass because of Paul McCartney. He went to several different colleges, but never completed the music degree he was pursuing - Long Beach State, Cal State Northridge, South Pasadena College, and many more - playing in the different bands available at each institution.
Rustvold plays bass for a living and is busy helping take care of kids at home because his daughter has moved back in with her three children.
Sligo Rags performs both cover tunes and originals. I ask them about their creative process.
"We tell Dave, 'Hey Dave, we need a new song' and he writes one," Kelly says.
Burns is the main songwriter of the group, "I really just hope to God that something pops into my head. If I go out there looking for inspiration I'll never find it. That's never worked for me. I can't go walk in the woods. If something comes to me and I get an idea of something interesting that could be incorporated into a song, then I hold on to it until I can get a pencil and paper. But I rarely go out and try to find something to write about and when I've done that, I've never been particularly happy with the results."
Burns works both from lyrics and music first, but most often it's the music first, "I have a much easier time writing music than lyrics. When I come up with something musical I like the way it sounds, but when I write lyrics and sit down and read them, I usually don't like them the first time."
I prod Burns for more about the lyrics.
"That's another thing that's tricky," Burns assents. "The last two songs I've written for this band, I've made an attempt to somehow give them a Celtic theme because I knew they were going to be recorded on Sligo Rags' albums and we were probably going to sing them at our shows. It's hard to do because I don't have any real inspiration, but I do have a lot of experience with the music so I can imitate what I've heard. I have a song about whiskey, one song is about a pub and that type of thing.
"The other thing we've done is we've taken some tunes I wrote for bluegrass and we didn't revamp them too much, but we've rearranged them a little bit better to Celtic beats." Burns explains, "There was one I had written for a bluegrass band that I completely rewrote the lyrics, I kept the music. It's a song about a train, like most bluegrass songs, so I studied Ireland's geography and I tried to figure out what would be a good destination for an Irish train to be going and it turned out to be Wexford, a nice touristy destination, a lot of the trains go there. I changed the tune from 'Riding on the Victory-Bound' to 'Riding on the Wexford Line.'"
Burns has never been to Ireland, nor has the rest of the band.
"We drink a lot of Guinness and whiskey though," Kelly offers.
"We've been to a lot of pubs," Burns agrees. "I never in my life dreamed that I would know so many Irish people so well. Everywhere we go, every night of the week, we're surrounded by all these Irish people, all of them from different backgrounds and different areas of the country."
I'm curious about their place in the folk and Celtic scenes.
"In the pure Irish scene, we don't fit," states Burns. "We've managed to squeeze in and find our niche there, but we made up our minds maybe two years ago that we wanted to get the attention of the folk community and I find that they've been much more receptive."
Kelly adds, "What's interesting about our style of playing the traditional songs is that we'll add that bluegrass and that jazz influence into it and some country influence and a little bit of rock and roll and it fuses it all together instead of being that the traditional. It's the fusion of our backgrounds and our passion for this traditional music, but with some of the updated stylings, I think it makes it more approachable for people who are dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists."
Folk fans seem to really enjoy their music, even more so than Irish music fans.
"We throw out a new traditional song and it morphs and mutates into something else," Kelly says.
This happens on stage, as they seldom rehearse.
"We have enough of a repertoire so that we can mix up our sets plenty," Burns explains.
"And if we get a really boring night I have a bunch of charts that I can throw these guys so we can try something new," Kelly says. "If we have a night when there's nobody showing up at the pub or they're not paying attention to us, we try out new stuff, entertain ourselves."
Sligo Rags performs at the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena, California once a month. You can also find them at venues in Long Beach, Santa Barbara, Newport Beach and Rancho Cucamonga. You can find their music on iTunes and other music Web sites.
Get a touch of the Irish from Sligo Rags by visiting www.sligorags.com
Also visit my blogs at http://mickieszoo.blogspot.com and www.insidesocal.com/doodah
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