“What fame’ll get you is eight hours a day and a very small paycheck,” says Acoustic Syndicate’s Steve McMurray. Since 1992, guitarist McMurray and his cousins; Byron on banjo and brother Fitz on drums, along with bassist Jay Sanders and saxophonist Jeremy Saunders, have been stirring up the acoustic circuit with their eclectic mix of jazz, bluegrass, folk and rock.
But in ’05, after turning in a dazzling six-hour-long set at Smilefest, the group decided to stop touring. “We never said we were gonna quit playing,” McMurray said by phone from his Shelby home. “We just had to take a look and see where we were going and how long it was gonna take to get there.” The group wasn’t too pleased with the results. Despite five releases and a nationwide following, the band had to depend on live shows to make a living. “It’s the traveling part that gets me,” McMurray says. “Didn’t none of us like it very much, and we did it for ten years, long time to be way from home, especially when you like home as much as we do.”
But when the band climbed out of their van and resumed their lives at home, they lost track of time. “Life moves on, and the next thing you know, we’ve all got an whole ‘nother life going in a years time and things seemed to get farther and farther away from us,” McMurray says.
Even a series of pleading phone calls from their agent, didn’t sway them to come back. The offers coming in were good ones, but McMurray kept turning them down. It wasn’t all about money. “After that much time had passed, I had gotten afraid to do it,” McMurray says. “I was afraid people wouldn’t come back to see us.” He says he doesn’t have a good reason for saying that, it’s just his nature to be pessimistic. “I always think nobody’s coming,” he says, laughing. “Fitz has been trying to tell me for years that’s a bad habit, but I’ve never listened to him.”
Finally, his agent, Hugh Southard, wore him down at the end of ’06, convincing him he should put together a few dates for early spring of ’07. The timing was right. “Our overhead was nothing,” says McMurray, who had been accustomed to the expenses of traveling cross country with a bus and paying full benefits, room and board for nine people — the five band members and a four-man sound crew. The group decided to play three local gigs to start — the first at their regional hangout, Asheville’s Orange Peel, followed by a couple at local favorite the Visulite. The group played a few close-to-home gigs this summer and have a few planned for fall.
“I tell you man, taking a step back off that thing was the best thing we ever did as far as the band goes,” McMurray says. “It really freshened it up for all of us, the fun’s come back into it — that’s the most important thing.” As anybody who’s ever worked in a family business discovers, it’s not always easy to deal with. “We tried to be the exception to that rule,” McMurray says, “and we made out pretty well. When we quit playing together, we were as close as we ever were and the best of friends, all of us.”
McMurray, Byron and Fitz have been picking and singing together since they were 12. Their careers started the Christmas McMurray turned 11 and the cousins all got instruments. Fitz got a guitar, McMurry a fiddle and Bryon a banjo. Fitz adopted the drums later and McMurray switched to guitar, but it was Byron’s approach to the banjo that have made Acoustic Syndicate unique. “If you gave Jimi Hendrix a banjo, that’s probably what it would sound like,” McMurray says of Fitz’s self-taught technique.
That approach has made the band hard to categorize. McMurray insists they’ve never been a bluegrass band — the drums and saxophone would rule that out. A rock band that plays bluegrass is another label that’s been tossed around, but that’s not wide enough to encompasses the territory Acoustic Syndicate explores. “I struggled with that myself, to find a niche for us,” McMurray says. “I didn’t want to get pigeonholed in the wrong thing. More I reflect on it, folk rock fits pretty good.”
McMurray is also satisfied with the fit of the band’s new schedule. “We get to do some of the stuff we had the most fun with, playing the good ole rooms and still stay pretty close to home,” the guitarist says. “It’s a win-win scenario for us.”
Acoustic Syndicate plays the Visulite on Dec.
21 and 22 at 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $15.
This article appears in Dec 19-25, 2007.
