This week, Bill Amatneek called in to the Fervor Coulee (Not Only) Bluegrass Bunker from Sebastopol, California to discuss his book Discovering Tony Rice, an oral biography published this year by Vineyards Press. I have not read the book.
Bill has a long history in bluegrass, roots, and popular music as well as numerous publications; he was the bassist for the David Grisman Quintet and played on their seminal 1977 album. We spoke via Google Meet, and the interview has been slightly edited for clarity.
Donald: How did you view your relationship with Tony Rice?
Bill Amatneek: Of course, first of all he was a bandmate in the David Grisman Quintet. He was an intense player and the DGQ back in those days was an intense group. We had an informal rule- we would get together five days a week to play: if we had one gig, we would rehearse four days; if we had four gigs, we would rehearse on the fifth. Our rehearsals were long and they were intense.
But I also knew Tony as a guy, and that is important. When you know someone as a guy and as a bandmate, you can’t deify him, can’t pedestalize him as some of his fans do. You just have to deal with him one-on-one as a man, and as a picker. I remember him warmly. He was a crack-up; Peter Rowan called him one of the funniest guys he had ever met.
Tony was very sharp minded, and I consider it an honour to have played music with Tony Rice.
Why did you choose the format of an oral biography for the Discovering Tony Rice? How did the closeness of your relationship with Tony impact your decision to use that format?
BA: I’m a big believer in stories, and in the power of story to communicate. I knew I had stories about Tony, and his best friends [had stories] starting with Sam Bush who hung out with Tony when they were eighteen and nineteen years old, and Béla and Jerry Douglas- and all these guys who knew Tony and had stories to tell about him. I began my interviews with them all by asking, “How do you remember Tony Rice?” And what came out were stories, and I really discovered Tony Rice as we went along.
Tony and I played music together for innumerable hours in the DGQ, we drove hundreds of miles shoulder to shoulder in a station wagon. We toked bud, broke bread, and swilled coffee together; we shared laughs, and stories and dressing rooms many times: I thought I knew him, Donald, but I didn’t. And I only began discovering Tony Rice as I listened to these stories about him.
How did you approach your interviews? It sounds like you knew you were writing a book from when you started the process?
BA: Almost. I started…Tony passed around Christmas Day, and in the first quarter of 2021 I started putting together what I thought would be a one- or maybe two- thousand word article for Bluegrass Unlimited about what I learned from Tony Rice. And then I started thinking, “What did he learn from other people?” I started calling his old friends, his musician friends to find out what they learned about Tony. One or two interviews in I realized I had the foundation of a book, and the essence of the book is an oral biography. It dawned on me that I just had to keep interviewing and eventually [I’d] have a book-length project.
What insights did you gain in your understanding of Tony Rice by pursuing this project? You hinted that you didn’t know him until you knew him.
BA: One of the most insightful people about Tony was Jerry Douglas. I start off Jerry’s section with a quote from him. I say, “Jerry, tell me about the Tony Rice you knew.” And he said, “Or, the guy we didn’t know: the guy we thought we knew.”
Jerry continued, “Tony was a difficult personality all his life, right up to the very end.” Jerry talked about how Tony had mental problems, he had problems with needing to be at the top all of the time. And when you are at that level of music, people expect that your next album is going to be better than your last, and that your next solo is going to be better than your last. That put pressure on Tony, and that caused him anxiety. I think Jerry was very insightful about that.
Tony had issues, some of them caused by his dad who, his brother Ron Rice said, was a raging alcoholic. Behind the Tony we know and love, the magnificent picker, a very funny guy just a blast to be with and hand with, and who I even saw at the time—was a quiet, shelled up, inwardly-turned person …all the interviews pointed to that [his struggles], but especially the interview with Jerry Douglas.
[I ask a convoluted question about whether Bill had insight into the reportedly acrimonious breakup of Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pederson. Bill didn’t, but he did add that working with Rice wasn’t always easy.]
BA: There were people who quit Tony. Mark Schatz quit Tony and the Tony Rice Unit because he couldn’t deal with Tony’s alcoholism. He was responsible as the road manager to wake up Tony when he was still hungover. After a while, he just couldn’t take it any longer.
Did you ever feel that you were navigating a line between an honest and accurate biography and betraying confidences? Was there a line you had to walk?
BA: Yes, I had to be very careful of that. The people I tried to be very careful about through the entire three-year process were the living Rice brothers [Ron and Wyatt]. I tried to be very mindful of what they would think about [a particular story]. In the end I sent them both the manuscript, and Ron sent me what he called a Punch List of about thirty things he wanted to change. And I changed those things. I took stuff out of the book that was not only the truth, but factual, because the brothers didn’t want it there.
I just gritted my teeth because a biographer is supposed to be ‘all the truth all the time.’ And so here were some truths I was having to omit. But that’s okay- I didn’t want to offend them. There are some stories that didn’t get told because Tony wasn’t there to corroborate them.
As you speak Bill, it sounds like you are still dealing with that- it sounds like you are slightly uncomfortable that you did that. Is that fair?
BA: On the one hand, its fair. On the other hand, I turned to my editor whom I greatly respect and said, ‘I took out stories about him doing this, and that’…and she said, ‘That’s okay- it doesn’t diminish your book. The public doesn’t know about those stories.’ And I [felt relief.] The book is a little less truthful, a little less factual, but it didn’t diminish the book, and I agree with her.
I understand you preface the final chapter with a warning, ‘You may not want to read further than this’ or words to that effect. Why did you feel that was necessary?
BA: The editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, Dan Miller, read the book and he said, “Bill- some of Tony’s fans are going to resent this book.” They’ll resent it—I’m filling in the blanks here—because the book shows sides of Tony his fanatic fans are just not going to want to see.
The last chapter retells the medical examiner’s report and what the toxicology report says… Some of his fans just don’t want to hear it.
It is befuddling to me, Donald—”You don’t want to hear the facts, you don’t want to hear the truth? What do you mean?”
It sort of speaks to where the world has gone in the last dozen years, our own truth is what’s necessary.
BA: That’s a good point.
When you have someone like Tony Rice who is bigger than life, and people just can’t accept that he wasn’t perfect…
BA: He had troubles. Donald. He died with ten different drugs in his body. Everyone thought he had Twelve Stepped his way from alcohol, but they found ethanol in his blood. One doesn’t know, Was that the only shot he had had in twenty years, or was he long off the wagon? But what one does know is that three of [those] drugs in concert with alcohol will kill you. …
And I think this is one of the things that people object to: “My ‘god’, this person I put on a pedestal whom I thought had twelve stepped away from alcohol, maybe he hadn’t.”
What did you learn from the process of preparing and writing a book, from the writer’s craft?
BA: One of the things that was interesting was hearing stories from different people, and those stories not necessarily meshing up…how do you deal with that? I tried to present all views…I tried to present all sides.
Memory is very interesting. Everyone thinks their memory is perfect. No one’s memory is perfect. When we tell stories from our lives, we tell the stories that make us feel good, that make us look good. When your book is entirely stories, with the exception of the medical examiner’s report, then you have to be wary and keep that in mind.
You must have realized at some point, “This is now the picture- I think I’ve got it. Despite the embellishments, despite the missing elements, I’ve got a nice, rounded portrait of who Tony Rice was.“
BA: That occurred with my last interview with Frank Poindexter, Tony’s uncle. Frank knew Tony his entire life, played with him in his earliest days, and knew him at the very end when Tony had sequestered himself in his home and wouldn’t come out to see people.
The interview wasn’t long, about thirty-five minutes, but when the interview was over and we hung up, I said, “That’s it. I got it. The book is done.” …I’ve got a full picture of his life, from his uncle, from Sam, from the people who played music with him…when you play music with someone, you’ve got a certain kind of bond that goes beyond. To play music with someone, you know them on another level. With Frank, I felt I had got it.
I know you wrote previous books. Does it get easier? Writing is hard for me—when I review an album, it takes forever. It’s painful. What kind of writer are you?
BA: I have to agree with you. I would not make a good journalist. I cannot write a first draft and send it in. I agonize for weeks and months over a single article. Does it get easier?
This book took three years. My previous book which was an anthology of men’s writings called Heart of a Man, took ten years.
Does it get easier? Maybe a little because I know my writing a little bit better. I feel I am a slightly better writer than I was in the past. Although I still agonize and I still redraft and redraft and redraft, the process of writing is a little more fun, a little bit easier. Hemingway said, There are no great writers. There are only great rewriters.
I rewrite and I rewrite, and hopefully have a better document than the first draft.
What’s the moment of your life—you have posted the story in France with the tortoiseshell picks- with Tony that you most cherish?
BA: Certainly, that moment was one of them. I was a long-time fan of this period of history, the liberation of France by the Allies…and here was an old guy who had lived through the liberation of France who was gifting us a hundred tortoise shell picks as his thank you for the Americans liberating Paris. Man, oh man, that was hugely meaningful to me. [Excerpt from Discovering Tony Rice here] … My eyes welled up, they still do, thinking of this moment, with Tony and me, and Bill Keith and David Grisman, in this little shop with this old man who was repaying us Americans for liberating France.
There is one more memorable event. At Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. I’d have to look up which year [ed: maybe 2005]- Tony was there with Peter Rowan. They called their duo Rowan and Rice. After their show, I was there backstage. Tony walks off stage and calls his agent to cancel the rest of the tour because his hands ached so much from osteoarthritis he couldn’t hang onto the pick and flatpick anymore. By the way, he had been scoring the flatpicks to make them easier to hang onto. And he just couldn’t do it anymore- and I thought, ‘Here is a turning point in Tony’s history.’ That was quite a moment for me.
I remember going down to Santa Cruz with him to pick up the first Tony Rice model guitar. We brought it back and went to his home, and he took it out of the case and tuned it up. He started playing and he said, “There is something the matter, it doesn’t sound right.”
It sounded right to me.
He says, “Somethings the matter, the notes ain’t there.”
Sounded like they were there to me.
He took out a yardstick. He measured the distance from the nut to the bridge on the Tony Rice model guitar, and he measured the length on his Clarence White Martin. And the string length on the Santa Cruz was one-eighth of an inch longer, and he could feel it. And he could hear it.
I couldn’t hear it. Come on, Tony could make any guitar sound incredible. Sam Bush said as much—Tony could pull tone out of any guitar. But that moment, I went ‘Wow- he could feel an eighth of an inch.’ He could feel the added tension that put on the strings. He could hear the tone difference. He had big, big ears. And that was one event that really impressed it upon me.
You asked for one, those were three very memorable moments.
Bill Amatneek
Fervor Coulee- roots music opinion 