New Grass All-Stars, John Cowan headline benefit for Eastern Kentucky flood recovery

A Lexington concert is bringing a Kentucky musician back to his bluegrass roots to help flood victims.

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John Cowan, who has been a member of the Doobie Brothers for years, is bringing his New Grass All-Stars to Lexington’s Lyric Theatre on March 4 for a special concert to benefit Eastern Kentucky.

Cowan’s latest band brings full circle a musical career that began with the ironic band name New Grass Revival.

Popular with a new generation of bluegrass thrillseekers in the 1970s and later with a larger, more mainstream country-friendly audience during the ’80s, the moniker suggested the Louisville-bred band’s hybrid music was a rekindling of some long-abandoned tradition.

Origins of New Grass

Truth be told, the musical cocktail known as new grass – which colors bluegrass tradition with elements of rock, jazz, soul and more – largely came into fruition as the New Grass Revival began.

Revival? It was more like a beginning.

“As we went around in those early years, we found like-minded audience members who enjoyed bluegrass, but they were probably under 30 years old,” said John Cowan, bass guitarist and vocalist for New Grass Revival from 1974 until its dissolve in 1990. “These folks thought, ‘Yeah, I really get this. These guys aren’t just doing the same old thing that everybody else does.’ We found solace in our audiences in places like Lexington, Louisville and Richmond. We felt like, ‘We’re Kentuckians. We’re bringing an art form of Kentucky to the world.’”

In the three-plus decades that followed, Cowan’s musical adventures would take him into areas of rock (an ongoing tenure as a member of the Doobie Brothers), Americana (through multiple projects, include a new duo group with fiddler/vocalist Andrea Zonn called The HercuLeons) and varying shades of grass both blue and new.

In 2023, though, he is fronting a new touring ensemble to focus squarely on the legacy of New Grass Revival. Titled the New Grass All-Stars, the band allows Cowan to revisit songs he has not performed onstage for over 40 years.

“I’m rediscovering how wonderful this music was. It’s given me lots of pause to reflect. I think about those days, what it was like and the kind of places we played. This is very hard scrabble. This is what new bands are having to do again nowadays. They get in a car or a van, go around and sleep on people’s floors and try to make an audience one member, one night or one show at a time. That’s what we were doing back in those days.”

Backlash from bluegrass traditionalists like Bill Monroe

In that sense, rekindling a relationship today with music he helped pioneer is the real revival. But for Cowan’s bandmates in the New Grass All-Stars – guitarist Jim Hurst, banjoist Steven Moore, mandolinist Johnny Staats and fiddler Shad Cobb – such a repertoire was part of their musical upbringing.

“I’m very young at heart,” Cowan said. “I’m 69 years old. These guys are separated from me by 10 or 15 years – or, in Steven’s case, 30 years. They are all people who grew up playing New Grass Revival music, so they’re getting to revisit music no one has really heard live for a very, very long time.”

Much of the music Cowan and New Grass Revival co-founder/multi-instrumentalist Sam Bush created – from early recordings with banjoist Courtney Johnson and dobroist/guitarist Curtis Burch to ‘80s albums alongside guitarist Pat Flynn and then-newly discovered banjo journeyman Bela Fleck – may have excited a bluegrass generation searching for stylistic heroes of their own. More than a few elders, however, held different views.

“Sam had grown up playing bluegrass straight up and down, but he was a rock ‘n’ roll kid. He was a Beatles kid, so he, like myself, had listened to all this other music. Courtney and Curtis were a little bit more on the traditional end, but they also liked different kinds of music. The cultural piece to all this is that during the late ’60s/early ’70s, there was a big chasm in our country. Dr. King had been assassinated. Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. There was very much an ‘us vs. them’ mentality when it came to people who were in their 20s. It was the old ‘don’t trust anybody over 30’ bit.

“Bill Monroe and different people in the bluegrass music world simply weren’t having it. They were like, ‘We’re not having these drug-taking hippies ruin our music.’ That was a big piece of what was going on back in those days. We experienced it tenfold. There was a point when Bill Monroe would tell the promoters, ‘If you have those boys on this show, I’m not coming.’

“That was kind of startling to us, but the culture was the way it was. It was like the whole package exploded at the same time and we were the outsiders – we, being New Grass Revival. But I can tell you from a personal point of view, we loved and respected all those guys, so it hurt our feelings. We weren’t trying to bastardize their music. We were just trying to bring who we were honestly into our art. We were just for expressing ourselves.”

By the time New Grass Revival split in 1990, the country music industry had awakened and accepted their music. A 1989 recording of Dennis Linde’s “Callin’ Baton Rouge” became a Top 40 country hit for New Grass Revival, four years before returning as a chart-topper for Garth Brooks.

Curiously, it would be rock ‘n’ roll that would serve as Cowan’s most visible vocation in ensuing decades via two stays – the second now in its 13th year – with the Doobie Brothers. Working with the band underscored a performance philosophy he has applied to his work with the New Grass All-Stars.

“It’s funny, because I was only in the New Grass Revival for not quite 16 years, yet it’s still the thing people know me from. It made such an indelible mark. How that relates to the Doobies is this. I was a fan of theirs anyway, so I was buying their records and learning how to play their songs long ago, so I was already a fan. For me, I felt like my job is to be a steward of the music.

“It’s not that different from what I’m doing now, except that in the New Grass All-Stars, I was part of the original band. With the Doobies, I’m really sitting in someone else’s chair, which would be the one belonging to Tyran Porter (the bassist during the Doobies’ 1970s heyday). It’s helped me put kids through college. It’s the first real paycheck I’ve had in the music industry. In New Grass Revival, we never made a lot of money, but we always worked, so I never wanted for much.”

Recovery for Cowan, Eastern Kentucky

Finally, there is the reason behind Cowan’s March 4 concert at the Lyric Theatre with the New Grass All-Stars. The performance will help raise additional funds for victims of last year’s devastating floods in Eastern Kentucky. For Cowan, such benefit work is personal. In recovery for decades-past alcohol and drug problems, he sees servitude as part of a hard-fought journey to sobriety.

“What people do in recovery is service work. Our service is basically to give back what we were given freely. Basically, we were given our lives back when we got sober, so I try to live a life of service and that includes doing benefits. That always comes down to a local thing for me. How can I personally give back? What’s the best way? I can only do it on a personal level. I don’t have a bullhorn. I can’t go out and change the world in large swathes, so I do it on personal level. This is a way to do that.

“I live in Nashville, which is Benefit City. You end up doing one a month for somebody who needs something. That’s what I love about the musical community. We band together and help people out. It’s just that in this case, we’re helping other Kentuckians.”

John Cowan and the New Grass All-Stars: A Fundraiser to Benefit Flood Victims of Eastern Kentucky

When: March 4 at 7 p.m.

Where: Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center, 300 E. Third.

Tickets: $35 at tix.com.