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Greg is quiet, unassuming, occasionally bordering on shy. He's cautious in his speech, which can give the impression that he's leading up to something important. He's what you might call "detail-oriented." A self-described control freak, he designed and created the art for most of his seven CDs, runs his own website, his own snail-mail and e-mail lists, and even handles much of his own sales and fulfillment. As an independent artist, of course, he doesn't have a great deal of choice in the matter.

It's fair to say that Greg feels strongly about music. Since he's spent so many years making a living off of his music, it's to be expected that he's got some pretty specific opinions about the industry. I ask him how he feels about MP3s and Napster.

"I'm worried about trends in digital music. Knowing how much time and money I spend making a record...this last one, I flew to Holland three times: writing, rehearsing, producing. If you don't have the backing of a big record label to front the bills, you really have to sell a lot to recoup your costs. I would hope that music fans would realize that, and rather than say 'well, you know, CDs cost too much money,' they should recognize that there's a scale involved. If you go to a nice restaurant and have a meal that's prepared by a great chef and you really enjoy it, you don't complain that pasta sauce isn't that expensive, pasta isn't that expensive, you don't complain 'why am I paying so much for this food?' I've never tried to orient my music specifically so that it would appeal to record companies because I didn't want to change what I was doing artistically just to appeal to a money machine to keep it going. The result is that if I don't sell a lot of records, I can't afford to keep making records. Fortunately, I'm able to do it. But if enough people rely on free MP3s as their music source, then it won't be possible for people like me to keep making records and touring. If people object to the money that record companies are making, maybe they should invest their money in companies that aren't making millions of dollars. Ultimately, if they like the record, they should buy it."

Greg moved to Charlottesville in 1982, just one year after the opening of Miller's, the popular bar where Dave Matthews Band would eventually get their start, where Tim Reynolds, Michael Sokolowski, John D'earth and even Greg Howard would play week after week, year after year.

The first band that he ever saw in Charlottesville was The Deal, fronted by Mark Roebuck, who became an early musical advisor to Dave Matthews. The first drummer that he played with was Spencer Lathrop, now owner of CD store Spencer's 206. The first group that he ever ran sound for (and did so for several years) was Tim Reynolds' TR3. Not a bad start.

The 80s were the heyday of Charlottesville music. Cosmology, the band that was the source of the whole scene, had already radically altered the musical landscape of the city, laying the ideal jazz-rock groundwork for Greg's newly-forged style of playing the Chapman Stick.

Things got interesting for Greg in 1986, when he started playing with guitarist Tim Reynolds. The first time they performed together, they were jamming at 4:00 in the morning at the wedding of internationally-known jazz musician John D'earth and his new bride, Dawn Thompson.

"We were pretty awful. I had only been playing the Stick for about a year and a half. Tim, while he's a brilliant musician, hadn't really gotten his chops worked out on drums. Shortly after that, he stopped bringing the drums and started bringing his electric guitar again. That was really fun. One of the most free-form creative periods for me, late '86 until summer of '88. I was really learning the Stick and I was playing regularly with Tim. We just started to make tapes. We would go down to WVTF and do this wild free jam stuff on Jeff Hunt's show. We went to Fort Lee, down in Petersburg, and so we're playing for all these boot camp graduates who are just so happy not to be in boot camp anymore. We could do a whole show and they wouldn't complain."

Greg also performed with John and Dawn, as well as another local musician, Tim O'Kane. They called themselves "The Zone." In 1988, Cosmology reformed, and Greg played Stick in the group. Before long, Cosmology consisted of Tim, Greg, John, Dawn, and Carter Beauford (who is now the drummer for DMB.)

In 1989 he encountered Dave Matthews, who was then tending bar at Miller's. Dave's first performance was with TR3; he sang on Bob Marley's "Exodus" as Greg ran sound for the show.

"[S]hortly after that," Greg says, "John got commissioned by the Miki Liszt Dance Company to write the score for a dance piece she was writing called 'Bypass.' John got Dave to come out and sing this song called 'Meaningful Love' for it that John and Dawn had written. Dave and Dawn came over to my house one time and did a little demo taping there. I guess I just started to get to know Dave a little bit from hanging out at Miller's."

Greg was also working with DMB saxophonist Leroi Moore through their jazz/rock/poetry/fusion group, Code Magenta.

"We started playing together in '89 at Miller's. I was doing a lot of composing in my studio with a lot of different instruments. I would program my drum machine and play keyboard along with it, and the Stick, and make these orchestral sound bits. Because of my work with John and Dawn, it occurred to me that it would be really cool to do a music and poetry kind of thing with Dawn. Maybe she and I would just do something. But we wanted to have a little more than that. So the very first night that we were going to play at Miller's, Leroi came. It was very impromptu. We had never rehearsed or anything. I have a recording of that show. I used to play with headphones on and mix the band from the stage as we were playing. And that's why the tapes sound so good. It was all recorded to two-track. And that's where the album came from. That's all that sounded good...it's not like there was a ton of stuff that I had to choose from. But it worked really well."

Their eponymous album, assembled from various live performances, does work really well. One would never guess that each track was mixed real-time.

Nervous Charlottesville Democrats and Republicans wander in and out of Mudhouse, looking for a cup of coffee, a brownie, and the latest election news. It's looking good for Gore, but not so good for my man Nader. Early returns show that former Virginia governor George Allen, a Republican, could usurp Democrat Chuck Robb's position in the US Senate. Greg is not surprised by the news. I am terrified by it.

DMB's Salad Days >>
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