Colby
The first time I met Colby Acuff was in the lobby of the Beta house in Moscow. It turns out that we both attended the same frat 34 years apart. At the time I was recently retired from my software career, and had been conscripted by the corporation that held the physical house as Treasurer.
It was fall 2018 and our memories seem to diverge on this story. Here’s mine: I was in the lobby overseeing some kind of plumbing thing in the house when this tall skinny kid walks up and says:
“I hear you play bass”.
And I said something flippant like:
“Yeah, who the hell are you?”
Then he holds out his hand and says:
“I’m Colby Acuff and I play country music.”
An auspicious beginning, but this has happened to me a number of times. Evidently bass players are hard to come by. So we agreed to meet up at my house to see if we could come up with a sound we liked together. Now this is funny. I’m 34 years older than this kid, and that doesn’t seem to bother him a bit. I mean, wouldn’t you rather play music with people your own age? Well, Colby’s dad didn’t have him until he was in his 50s. And since Colby’s been doing surprisingly large gigs since he was 12, he’s always played with older musicians. So I guess that’s why it didn’t bother him.
We had one practice. We tried about 8 songs, mostly covers, but I particularly remember him introducing me to his original “Good Moonshine”.
He was playing a fast back beat on the guitar and there was a perfect slot for the bass on all the downbeats. It’s like he wrote this song in anticipation of me.
He invited me to play with him on a gig at our local coffee shop, but I don’t like coming in to a new group cold. So I showed up with my little digital recorder and recorded the whole show. I’ll have to post a couple songs from that gig as a “before” comparison. Later. I listened to all the songs and practiced against the recordings, which made almost no difference at all because at that time he changed keys quite often, had a ton more covers than I heard that night, and he often took requests from the audience.
So I started showing up at his gigs with my bass — Old Blue.
Old Blue.
Quite often he would call a country standard that I’d never even heard, because I’m about the least educated musician you’ve never heard of. So he does a high-speed strum of the chord progression off mike just to me, about 10 seconds. Then he’d jump into the song and I’d fumble out a rhythm based on Colby’s rhythm and trip over all the changes. High entertainment.
It went on like this for a while. But then I started to get a handle on most of his regular songs, but also on his visual cues. You’ll notice that I’m always posted on Colby’s right, about three feet away, and I watch his strum hand like a hawk. I started to seldom miss a change. He figured this out and started throwing dead stops and other changes randomly throughout songs just to see if he could throw me. It got to be impressive how we seemed so amazingly tight, though we never practiced and only played once a month at the local coffee shop.
Colby was still in college at the time, so he was way to busy to practice. We would just wing it every time. Funner that all get out. In fact, he was a bit shy about asking to come play. Afraid to bother me. I would get a text from the manager of the Bucer’s coffee shop (Pat).
She’d say:
“Did you know Colby is playing tonight?”
I’d say:
“No.”
“Are you going to play with him?”
“He didn’t invite me.”
So I’d show up with my bass and he’d say:
“Yeah, sit in”.
It went this way for about four months until once I was on my way back from my folks place on the west side somewhere around Pateros WA when I got a call from Colby:
“You gonna be there tonight?”
I checked the clock and mileage and I’m like,
“Yeah, I got a half hour window to go home and get my kit”.
Then he said something really nice like:
“You’re my confidence.”
That’s probly not true, but I like to remember it that way.
From that day on I was Colby Acuff’s bassist.
Hitting a Groove:
We eventually got tight enough, and were entertaining enough that we started to get a pretty good following and our monthly gigs started to get pretty big. I mean, we were clearly having fun with the songs and unspoken communication / miscommunications and guffaws at the end of songs and people really loved it.
This was the summer of 2019 and we were starting to get “super fans”. We define that as a fan that is very vocal about liking our music and sure of our future success:
“Colby, will you remember us when you’re famous”.
Super fans also had means to further our career. That sometimes meant money, but more that they would set up good paying gigs for us and find other ways to help. Guys like Kent. Kent is some kind of manager in the a shipping company. He say:
“If you ever need anything on the road shipped fast, call me.”
He also has set up a number of well-paying gigs for us. So Kent is in our phone merely as “Kent”. The people in my phone identified with the fewest letters are the most important.
We now have quite a few super fans, Scott and Josh in Lewiston, Charlie in Lubbock and Barry in Arlington to name a few. We go out of our way for our super fans. Personal access.
Along about then Colby decided to make an album. We have different recollections about how that decision came about, and I think I’ll leave that discussion until the “Rolling Stone” entry. The best I can do is describe my situation at the time. I’m always in about three bands because there aren’t enough bass players. I had Colby rated as the “B” band about that time because I was in a ripping bluegrass band called Pickaxe that I thought was pretty technically tight. Not that Colby wasn’t good, but there was just the two of us.
With a name like Pickaxe, it had to be some serious high power picking. And it was. The lead had a few really good originals, “Dandelion Wine” in particular, and was making some noise about making an album and maybe a short tour to Denver. I mentioned that to Colby and he went quiet and got the deep thought face. Shortly after that he gathered a bunch of his songs he’d written in the last few years and decided to make an album.
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