Groovetramps
Interview by Anni Piper
They’re the dynamic duo who back up some of the nation’s top touring acts, including our own Karen Lovely and Ben Rice. They are coming to the membership meeting Feb. 2. Take a few minutes to get to know the Groovetramps, Melanie Owen and Joseph Barton.
What was your experience with gender stereotypes and perceptions as a beginner? Do you think much has changed for female bassists over the years?
Melanie Owen: I have to do a little history of Mel here to talk about it: I didn’t see women playing guitar or bass or drums growing up. Violin, piano. Singing, TEACHING music. (FYI I played piano really young then I picked French horn because I wanted to be different. Make of that what you will.)
In high school and college, I hung out with a bunch of dudes. They played in local punk and ska bands, but that’s kind of just what the dudes did. With the exception of a couple “all girl” punk bands I just didn’t see a lot of women playing these instruments. I didn’t start playing bass till I was 20, when a dude in a church group I was a part of needed a sub bass player and I said I could do it. To impress him. I did not know how to play bass but I had watched the dudes around me for years. So I taught myself the bass. I played for a few years and then put it down. I was playing more guitar, streamy folky music, and the bass I had was stolen.
A few years later when I started going to blues jams playing guitar, I met one woman (Jodie Woodward in Colorado) who plays bass and we became friends and I just thought she was amazing. (She is still amazing, by the way.) Then I saw Cassie Taylor open for Otis Taylor, just her and her bass, solo. And I was floored. And I thought, I WANT TO DO THAT. It’s true that one can’t really see themselves doing something until they see themselves doing it.
It was still years before I picked up a bass again. I saw more and more women doing it, and I needed to be able to lead a trio from the bass as I left my life and career in Denver to start a new life and career in Seattle. So I was a beginner at bass all over again, in a new genre of music, going to blues jams and leading a band. Choosing to be a beginner and work it all out in public definitely made my life harder. The willingness to be vulnerable and curious and make mistakes and learn from them in public can make people uncomfortable or assume you’re weak. And it’s amplified when you’re a “girl.” Sometimes you get pats on the head but not taken seriously, like some musicians on stage won’t even watch you when you’re leading a song — or the opposite, where people tell you you’re great when you’re not yet because the expectations for musicianship in women have traditionally been different. But I’m glad I went down that road and made the choices I made because now I work with amazing people like Ben Rice and Karen Lovely and Kris Deelane and I’ve gotten to work with the amazing Lady A #TheRealLadyA too, and I ride that old ’66 P Bass like a broomstick all over the country.
People will say “Wow, you just don’t see too many female bass players” at least once a weekend. And my response is, “Actually, there are so many of us. We’re everywhere if you look.” I still even sometimes get asked who I’m “carrying that stuff for” when I am carrying my bass and amp into the club. (Insert facepalm emoji here.) It’s awesome to tour with younger dudes than myself and tell my stories about my gendered encounters and hear them say “WHAT? That’s crazy!” I see a general change in young people who are just blasting the doors off of gender right now. My stories even feel outdated to me when I see young people and how they move through the world. Which to me means we’re headed in a good direction.
Can you describe your teenage years for me? Would you like to tell me a bit about how music fits into your family background or the culture of the places you grew up?
MO: I played French horn and piano and sang in choir, both school and church, and did theater and dance. I was a big performing arts nerd. There was music in church, music in school, music with my friends (grunge, then punk and ska — oh yes, it was the ‘90s). At home there was a lot of classical, but sometimes the oldies station and we had some Motown CDs and the (wait for it) soundtrack to “Forrest Gump,” which became my reference for classic rock. There was definitely the idea of “real music” and then the rest of it, and I never was able as a kid to bridge the classical music I was learning in my school training with the Motown and rock ‘n’ roll I preferred. So all my music training is not on the instruments I currently play.
Have you ever reached a state of spiritual nirvana where you become one with the music? Where you can’t tell where the self ends and the music begins?
MO: It’s not always easy for me to get there, but yes. I tend to worry about the things going on around me and how I’m sounding. When I can just be mindful and present, I can let the music wrap around me to the point where nothing else matters. Also, this past year I went totally abstinent from alcohol for about eight months. I am still mostly abstinent and I have been playing most shows without alcohol. It was difficult to learn how to play and trust the music without the chemical enhancement. Turns out I have a pretty good case of stage anxiety I didn’t know I had until I stopped drinking. Fun discoveries! And I had to work through that and what helped me was the music itself. A couple months into doing shows again this last year I really started to feel the groove for the groove itself.
What do you feel you have had to sacrifice the most in order to become a musician?
MO: When I was getting ready to stop doing the day job thing and just go into music full time, my friend Moses Walker, who is a musician I was a big fan of way before I even met him, told me regarding living as a musician, “I just have to make sure I don’t need much.” And that’s what I did.
Have you ever had a paranormal experience, or seen a UFO, while on tour?
MO: Yes. On tour I play in a lot of old bars and stay in some old band houses. The paranormal experiences I’ve had are usually just me going into a room or up the stairs tired from tour and something tries to get my attention and I (without looking, mind you) say out loud “Hello, I see you and acknowledge you but I have no interest in talking or interacting with you tonight thank you I’m going to bed.”
Most memorable gig ever, for better or worse?
MO: I’ll go with the Waterfront Festival 2019, playing bass for Marina Crouse. I had had the fortune to be on the Waterfront stage singing backup vocals for Karen Lovely a couple of times, but this was my first time on bass in a brand-new for-hire capacity and I was really excited. Right before the show I looked over on the side stage and there was one of Marina’s regular bass players and drummer from the Bay Area … and I looked out and I saw Lisa Mann, and I saw Calen Uhlig, and I had just gotten a text from Stacy Jones that she was there … so, so many people I look up to. And I just froze. And I kind of had to really step into myself in that moment and trust in my place there. I can’t be anyone else but myself and I gotta bring it the way I bring it.
What’s one thing about being a touring musician, or life on the road, that would surprise someone who hasn’t done it themselves?
MO: The best representation of touring I’ve seen in TV recently is in the TV show “Pen15.” One of the characters’ dads is a jazz drummer and when he calls from the road, he’s in a cheap motel with four other dudes, one’s on a cot, one’s noodling on a guitar right next to his ear and he’s trying to talk, the mom does merch and you see her come in with the table and two different servers tell her “You can’t put that there.” I laugh so hard because it’s so honest. I would add that sometimes you roll into the club after a 10-hour drive and you have a four-hour show that starts at 9 p.m. and you power through and they drunkenly yell “ONE MORE” and you just want to crumple into bed. But sometimes you get to see really cool stuff on the road or stay someplace really nice or get to hang out at the ocean, and you can kind of refill the creative cup to keep putting out good music.
You’re working as a visual artist as well as a musician – tell me about your designs.
Joseph Barton: I guess in 2015 I started doing artwork on guitar cases. It was pretty simple designs, ‘cuz I wasn’t really a visual artist but just really had a call towards doing artwork on guitar cases. You know, I just like painting on stuff. What I do is a lot of patterns, like with playing cards. I glue them down to the guitar case with Super Glue, and then I cover them with epoxy. Geometric designs and abstract, I don’t do pictures. I can see ideas for drawing, but I don’t have the technical skill. But I’ve been really enjoying the abstract and the geometric stuff has been real satisfying.
Can you describe your teenage years for me? Would you like to tell me a bit about how music fits into your family background or the culture of the places you grew up?
JB: I suppose this is going to be around me getting started playing music, specifically musicians in the family. My uncle played keyboards. I had, I guess, sons of my grand-aunt, my grand-nephews? Family back East from Connecticut to Pennsylvania. I didn’t catch on to music till later teens. It took me a while to get into, I started with the guitar. I wanted to play the drums originally as a little kid, but my parents didn’t want a kid with a drum set. So later on, a guitar showed up, and then I figured sometime later after that I picked up the bass. I thought, ‘I can probably find work doing this,’ and I did, and I did that for a few years on bass guitar. I love music, but I actually got into it in my earlier years by just being interested in vintage gear. My family is from back East and they would do antiques and I got into that strong interest in the vintage stuff. If you study the internet revolution, of the book and death of the printed knowledge, look at ‘70s ‘80s ‘90s and 2000s. I just came up with the general knowledge of love of instruments and vintage instruments through those decades. Of the Golden Era — you know, stuff from the ‘50s and ‘60s, Gibsons and Martins, you know. That’s what I remember from my teenage years. I did play a little, but I was too shy and didn’t really get a band together. Kind of had to come later, but that interest in antiques and antique guitars is where that fascination came from.
Have you ever reached a state of spiritual nirvana where you become one with the music? Where you can’t tell where the self ends and the music begins?
JB: Yeah, I feel like I’ve had those moments. You know, the moment I find I get most often is our three-hour gig just disappears. You know you were energized, and that by the end of it you could keep going or stay up the rest of the night or whatever is happening. You get lost in the moment of the thing that you’re doing. I need to get the right players together and you can get that often enough, that time lapse and I think sometimes that’s that moment for me.
Have you ever had a paranormal experience, or seen a UFO, while on tour?
JB: I want to say no, not that I know of. I hit a bat one time driving through North Carolina, it was just kind of hanging off the windshield. (Editor’s note: we reached out to his publicist but were unable to confirm if this bat was actually Dracula.)
Most memorable gig ever, for better or worse?
JB: There was this show, “Full Throttle Saloon” on one of those stations, you know 10 years ago, it was kind of what we now see like a Netflix reality show. It was a show about that bar in Sturgis. I was working with this songwriter from Texas. He was living in Rapid City — it’s like a half-hour drive to get to Sturgis. I don’t know how many, 100,000 bikes — you know the traffic! So we would do the “Full Throttle Saloon” and they would be filming it and there’s like three or four stars. There’s Jesse James, he was in the band Jackal and he had a band that was able to play sometimes. George Michaels was one of the guys at the show. Because it was a huge place, it burnt down but they rebuilt it. There was a good-looking woman who had a dance crew, Angel I think, and then her husband Mike Ballard, and they were always dressing up. There was a midget who would wear costumes like a leprechaun or a baby. They had the camera crew, like six or eight of them, to be taking shots of all the good-looking bartenders. They would wear military outfits, or cowgirl outfits. They had little spots all around where you can do like trios and stuff, we were working all the time. They had the sound booth for the main stage was a tractor, like a cabover diesel truck, 30-feet, 20-feet in the air. They had motorcycles inside the bar sometimes. All you could see was white smoke.
What’s one thing about being a touring musician, or life on the road, that would surprise someone who hasn’t done it themselves?
JB: Some of the work conditions. Some of the sleeping arrangements that you get, the hotels or band rooms. The stages or the backline that you have to deal with to make the work happen. People get a job and they go to a routine, I mean it’s like we got a routine too but routine changes at every f***’n venue. Every day is going to be different and I love it.
