On the most important day of my life, the Sugar Beets were there. 

We had made all the arrangements.  Round tables, each laid with table cloths and a small vase of flowers, were scattered amongst the trees of our centuries-old oak grove.  Plates in hand, our guests filed past the feast of offerings prepared by our friend and chef, John: grilled salmon, gourmet pizza, sushi accompanied by a mound of wasabi that Grandma Linda mistook for guacamole.  Kenny lurked, everywhere and nowhere, camcorder in hand as he captured the day in an archive almost as unconventional as Kenny himself. 

It was my wedding day.

This was an analog event.  It’s significance was rooted in relationship: family members, childhood friends, new acquaintances, culled from our lives like choice specimens at a garden show, bloomed side as they recognized old faces and encountered new ones.  New strains and hybrids were born.  My people met Johnny’s people, and the younger crowd stayed on all night, gathering by the old boiler-turned-firepit to talk, laugh and drink, long after Johnny and I had driven off for the coast to begin our honeymoon.

Love was in the air.

And the Sugar Beets presided over it all, playing their eclectic blend of mostly original tunes: bluegrass, country and folk with a bit of everything else thrown in, from Motown to pop.  The eight-piece band has been called a Eugene institution, and for the last 30 years, they have played the west coast, doing for thousands of people exactly what they did for us: fostering relationship through creativity and music.

I sat down (figuratively) with vocalist Megan Basset of the Sugar Beets to talk about the analog nature of what they do, and three themes, or threads, emerged.

Play

When Megan met her husband to be, Matt, in the dorm cafeteria as a sophomore in college, it was 1989, and bands like The Grateful Dead had been going strong for over twenty years.  Matt, a bass guitarist, was heading out to play with some friends — Marty, John and Tanya — in the basement of the “The House of Rainbows,” as they called the place where it all began. 

Megan said, “I sing.”

In the beginning, they often drew on the songs and traditions of the Grateful Dead, experimenting, improvising, listening, all in the spirit of play.  The music grew out of listening — to one’s own voice or instrument, to each other, and ultimately to the audience at large.  But the joy, the mystery, grew out of play.  Over time, this element came to define the experience of being at a Sugar Beets show. 

“Bubbles, hula hoops, sparkles, costumes, hats, face paint and ART!” Megan says to me, now.  “So many handmade posters, buttons, patches, t-shirts. We did many themed shows, like the ‘Full Moon Initiation Situation,’ where we did a faux-ritual as people walked through the door and had all kinds of glow-in-the-dark moons and stars hanging from the ceiling.  Or ‘Heart Fest’ when we pinned a red felt heart on each person’s shirt as they came in.” 

It was this spirit of co-creation, childlike and full of possibility, that animated their songs and lyrics when they began to write their “own quirky mix of love songs and psychedelic bluegrass mixed with theatrical pageantry,” Megan says.  “The arc of the shows usually goes from kind of mid-tempo music through a pretty high energy dance section and ends with some very touching song that is also an opportunity to intimately connect with the audience.”

This, then, is not about virtuosity, and it is not an extension of ego.  Play, explored intentionally and in community, proves to be the gateway to other worlds, and yet the touch is light, the spirit irreverent, the effects delightful and surprising.  Play returns us to our child-self and imparts a quality that nothing else can, one of wonder, discovery and shared creativity.  A quality of being at home in the world with others.

Megan tells me, “There’s almost always a moment in each show where people will spontaneously create a circle, holding hands and dancing.” 

This happened at my wedding too.

Consciousness

Each year, on April 19th, dedicated experimentalists celebrate “Bicycle Day,” in commemoration of Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann’s bicycle ride home after dosing himself with a novel psychoactive substance that caused him to suspect his neighbor was a witch.  LSD was born.

The Beets are not a psychedelic rock group, but they did inherit some of the DNA of Deadhead culture, wherein we find our second thread: the exploration of consciousness.  What is the nature of reality?  What is possible in the present moment?  For better or for worse (depending on the trip) the Grateful Dead pioneered a sort of social experiment in which music, community, and the use of psychoactive drugs combined to foster just such an exploration.  Setting aside the merits, and risks, of their methodology, what endures is the intent, to forsake known paradigms in favor of inquiry and wonder. 

As Megan puts it, “it’s about being awake to the mystery and expecting little miracles.” 

But what of play?  Here, its spirit evolves into something more profound, yet profundity seems to sit uneasily with play.  Wisdom, truth, reality — these are big words, full of import and meaning.  They are adult words.  Or are they?  Could it be that play, that child of all qualities, is the gateway to reality as well?  For how else can one venture beyond the illusions of duality but with an empty mind and an open heart?

Revival

In exploring the music of the Grateful Dead, the Beets were led to the work of a man who would had inspired, and been inspired by, generations of musicians before them.  Born in 1915, Alan Lomax spent his life saving music from the scrapheap of oblivion.  Ethnomusicologist, folklorist, and himself a musician, Lomax hit the road at the height of the Great Depression, traveling state to state in his Plymouth sedan on half-paved roads to collect the songs and traditions of American folk-life.  What he collected, he shared, hosting radio shows, producing albums, and resurrecting for the general population folk and blues traditions on the brink of extinction. 

This is an analog impulse: to receive the traditions of posterity, to transmit them to future generations.

The American folk, or roots, revival reached its height between the 1940s and the mid 60s, culminating with acts like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.  But the revival impulse remains, reigniting in each generation a mysterious desire to participate in the musical life of a bygone era.  This life has its own aura of mystery, qualities that cannot be manufactured, like gadgets off a production line, but that accrue incrementally.  Boot marks left on the floor of a century-old home; letters, collected in a box, whispering of dreams and fears shaped by a world long-forgotten; these are the hallmarks of the revival impulse.  One hand reaches backwards and the other forwards as a tactile reminder of our shared humanity, transmuting personal oblivion into heritage, belonging, place.  We are born to die, but we are all born to die.  We can do nothing to extract ourselves from the march of time, but we are all on that path together. 

And when we come together, in the spirit of play and in the light of our shared, human truth, magic happens. 

Play.  Inquiry.  Heritage.  These strands could be articulated in a multitude of ways as we approach what occurs when a band like the Sugar Beets takes the stage.  But the true analog nature of the experience lies in this: it emerges in real time and physical place.  The mystery and magic can only arise when people gather together with shared intent.  The joining of hands, the spontaneous bursting into tears in the front row, the children — running, dancing, playing as an expression of natural joy — these manifestations of mutual wonder are rooted in time and space, just like you and me.   

I will leave for another post the question of how digital capacities have transformed and empowered musical expression.  Our task, here at the crossroads, is to distinguish and integrate, to know what to keep and what to discard.  And as my conversation with Megan comes to a close, I feel the unexpected gratitude of the stranger in town who has been welcomed to the family table.  I understand, for the first time, just what they’ve been up to these thirty odd (and sometimes very odd) years, and why they’ve kept at it, through the press of careers and children and illness and life. 

The last chords fade, the guitar strings vibrate to stillness, the people pack up their blankets and head for home, but what has been created can never be destroyed, for it was invented from nothing and lives on in the heart, like all impossible things. 

Image used with permission from The Sugar Beets: Willamette Valley Folk Festival, University of Oregon in Eugene, 1999.