Band | The Avett Brothers

Around the turn of the millennium, the brothers finally wrote their first few halfway decent guitar/banjo-based songs, and celebrated this victory by imposing their muppet-like energy upon unsuspecting coffee shop and bar-room patrons across the state (mainly just in Concord and Charlotte though, really). Around this time, Bob Crawford came out of the woodwork. He was a man full of vim and vigor, natural ingenuity, humor, and good will. He was also a natural born hustler, though slightly weary of the everyday hustle. It had, up to that point, included (but absolutely was not limited to) selling shoes, fronting various bands, working 20-hour shifts on movie sets, taking girls on dates in a 1972 4-door Chevy Impala, and selling grilled cheese sandwiches in the parking lot of Grateful Dead shows. Throughout his life, music had called, enthralled, and entranced him. It would ultimately lead him to taking countless road trips, a second college degree, and independent study in the thousands of hours. Crawford had migrated south from New Jersey in search of new beginnings, truthful folk music, a job on a film crew, and possibly, a decent cup of coffee. He eventually found each, though not without some struggles. One of the first would be in convincing Scott and Seth that a viable career in music would not magically show up at the front door, merely because they had wished for it and written multiple drafts of their eventual Grammy Award acceptance speeches.

Crawford felt, bizarrely to the brothers, that in order to pursue a life in music, a person had to actually go out and play music. They took his word for it, albeit with a good deal of suspicion. They then recorded Country Was in two days in their dad’s workshop/garage, surrounded by sawdust-covered fishing rods and tackle boxes, stacks of 1980s country LPs, a drill press, and various tools bought at the flea market. The now trio went to work booking their first tour, using landline telephones, the U.S. Postal Service, and the still somewhat novel medium of electronic mail to pester ‘music venue’ owners into either booking The Avett Brothers or telling The Avett Brothers to leave them the hell alone (the latter response took less pestering than the former). The result was a run of shows throughout the southeast and east coast regions — 14 shows over 21 days.

Coming from the limited performing experience of basically playing Charlotte over and over again since they were teenagers, for the brothers, this tour might as well have been Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ complete with rhyming, celebrations, frustrations, earth-shattering realizations, challenges overcome, and sirens. Unlike the ‘Odyssey,’ there were (fortunately) no cycloptic villains, slaying of suitors, six-headed monsters, or verses written in dactylic hexameter. It may bear mentioning that later, like Odysseus, they would be very happy to reach Ithaca (New York, not the Greek island). Everything was changed after that first tour — it set wheels in motion that are still turning. Each new place made a lasting impression, and in doing so, ensured their imminent return and hopeful building of a relationship with that town.

Time passed.

Songs happened.

An unlimited variety of settings found their way into the performing history of The Avett Brothers. They played in most of the fifty states, at parks and in parking lots, bluegrass festivals and middle schools, 5-in-the-morning local TV news shows, corporate events in big white tents, weddings and memorial services, Mexican restaurants, rock clubs, open mics, house concerts, a Super Bowl party at a bar-b-cue restaurant (”we’ll still pay ya’ll but can you stop playing so we can hear the game?”...”uh, sure”).