photos by Bob Makin
When it comes to discussing his vibrant and variegated career as a bandleader, songwriter and pedal steel virtuoso, Barry Sless is quick to deflect. He’s much more comfortable extolling the virtues of longtime collaborators such as David Nelson or recent cohorts like Stephen Inglis.
But make no mistake about it, Barry is a badass.
This assertion can be quickly corroborated by the range and renown of the artists who have enlisted him over the years, including: Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Chris Robinson and fellow members of groups such as the David Nelson Band, Moonalice, Skeleton Crewe, Dead Ringers and Cowboy Jazz.
Sless continues to push forward crafting new music in the moment and in the studio setting, including the latest Moonalice single which he wrote, as well as a forthcoming duo album with Inglis that also draws in Tim Bluhm and Wally Ingram.
The following conversation explores Sless’ artistic sweep from Baltimore to the Bay Area. Of immediate note is this weekend’s DNB Rides Again Campout which David Nelson will sit out due to health complications, resulting in a blended Nelson Crewe performance on Saturday, which will meld the David Nelson Band and Skeleton Crewe, followed by a Nelson Crewe Play Dead set on Sunday.
Let’s start with your early days back in Maryland. Is there a live show you attended growing up that set the wheels in motion for you as far as becoming a musician in your own right?
When I was in high school and had just started playing guitar, some friends of mine were in a band that was covering music by this group called the Grateful Dead. They turned me on to the Europe ’72 album and I was like, "Hey, that's cool." Shortly after that I went to my first Grateful Dead show and I was on the bus. That was Baltimore in March of 1973 [3/26/73].
From there things sort of came together gradually. I never expected that I was going to be playing music for my life. I just started playing gigs. I was in a band and we got a house gig at a bar in Maryland.
People kept hiring me and at some point I had to make a decision because I had an opportunity to go into management for a real job or stick with music. Had I taken that other job, it would have affected me playing music. So I made the decision to stick with the music thing and it eventually paid off.
What led you to the pedal steel?
The first time that I became aware of pedal steel was on the song “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
I knew nothing about the Grateful Dead at that point. I just remember hearing that sound on the record and thinking to myself, "What is that instrument?" Then I got the album and I looked on the back cover and it said that the pedal steel guitar on “Teach Your Children” was by Jerry Garcia.
I was like, "That name kind of sounds familiar.” I came to find out later who it actually was. So that caught my ear. Then I was listening to country rock bands like Poco, Flying Burrito Brothers, The Byrds, Pure Prairie League and New Riders. They all had pedal steel. I started trying to emulate the pedal steel on guitar until I eventually wound up getting one.
What was your learning curve on the instrument?
I picked it up pretty quick, believe it or not. The most challenging part was the right hand finger picking and playing with finger picks, which I had never done before. I figured out pretty quickly which open strings sounded good together and made chord tones together. There was a guy around where I grew up who played a little bit of pedal steel and showed me. I might have taken one or two lessons with him just to get the basics. From there I just started listening to records and picking up stuff from there. I'd say I was probably playing it out live within six months of picking it up. I was playing simply, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Let’s jump ahead to Cowboy Jazz. You were still in Maryland at the time when the band released two albums with Rounder. [That's What We Like About The West (1981) and Swing Boogie (1982]. How would you characterize the sound of the group?
Some of the reviews said Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys meets the Andrew Sisters. We primarily did original stuff. We weren't really a cover band other than a few Bob Wills songs. There was three women who had beautiful harmonies and wrote original music. They were all singer-songwriters, and one of them was a fiddle player, one was a guitar player, and one played both piano and sax. Then it was three guys—me on pedal steel guitar, a bass player and a drummer.
Segueing a bit into Grateful Dead world, I’ve heard that Dan Healy began playing some of those tracks either as walk-in music or during set break. Were you ever at a Dead show when he did that?
Yeah, this was sometime during the early 80s. The albums came out in ’81 and ’82. and around this time people started telling me, "Hey, I went to a Dead show and I heard Cowboy Jazz during the break."
So I went to a show and heard it myself. Then I went over to the sound booth and introduced myself to Dan. He invited me up into the sound booth and after that he was like, "Whenever you're here, feel free to come up. You can come hang with me back here if you want." At some point he wanted to produce a record for us, so we were in contact on and off into the late ’80s. The band eventually started to change members and it never worked out with Dan, but his intention was to produce a Cowboy Jazz record.
Continuing with the Grateful Dead extended family theme, was it through Cowboy Jazz that you met Matthew Kelly?
That’s right. Cowboy Jazz played in San Francisco at the Last Day Saloon in 1986 and somebody who was a fan of ours and a friend of Matthew Kelly brought him out to the gig. So Matthew came out, we invited him to sit in and we got into trading notes on harmonica and guitar.
From there we kept in touch and there was a point in time where Kingfish was in need of a guitar player for a gig that they had in Telluride, Colorado. I already happened to be playing at Telluride at that time with Cowboy Jazz and Matthew reached out to me and said, "Do you think you, your bass player and drummer could be part of Kingfish for a night?" That was in August 1987 when the Grateful Dead played the two shows during the Harmonic Convergence in Telluride Town Park where they hold the Bluegrass Festival. I told Matthew I’d do it and shortly after that they had asked me to join the band.
I think it was that same year and it might have been that same tour when we played at Sweetwater and Bobby was in the audience because he lived right up the hill from there. He was with Rob Wasserman and at the end of the gig he invited the whole band to come up to his house and hang out. So that was my first time meeting him. We didn't play music together at that point, but we just spent the night hanging at his house.
It was through my connection with Matthew Kelly and touring with Kingfish that I met David Nelson and started getting a little more involved in the San Francisco Bay music scene. I finally moved out here in 2000.
How did the David Nelson Band come together?
It all began when the Deadicated album was released with various artists covering the Grateful Dead—people like Suzanne Vega, Elvis Costello, Jane’s Addiction, Dwight Yoakam and Los Lobos.
This led a promoter to come up with the idea for the Gratefully Yours tour. It was a two act night. He put together two bands comprised of members of the extended Grateful Dead family and splinter groups. The first act covered the Workingman's Dead/American Beauty period of Grateful Dead and then the other act covered everything else. Along with Matthew Kelly, I was one of the people he picked to be part of that opening act and David Nelson was another one of them.
I met David at our first gig in Richmond, Virginia. This was in 1991. Eventually it was pared down to a smaller group that wasn't the two act thing. The electric act that was the second set of the Gratefully Yours lineup included Merl Saunders, Papa John Creach, Tom Constanten and Steve Kimock. Eventually it consolidated into one unit, which became Dead Ringers with David, Matthew Kelly, Tom Constanten and a couple others.
During that time period, David and I hit it off immediately. We gravitated towards driving in the same car together and hanging out. One day we were in our rental car driving to a gig and he was like, "Hey, do you want to hear some of my original tunes?" I told him that I would and he pulled out a cassette to play in the car.
I loved his music from the get-go. I told him, "What are we doing playing in a cover band? We should be playing your original music in our own band—the David Nelson Band." He was like, "I don't know. Do you think people would like my songs?" I said, "Well I do and I'm pretty sure there are other people like me out there." That's how we got started. Then asked me, "Well, who would we get to play and how would we get gigs?" I said, "I can handle all this." So I basically put together the band for him. Then we started rehearsing and started our first tour in May of 1994.
That was his first band under his own name?
That was his first band. David's always been very humble and self-deprecating. At one point he said to me, "I don't know. I've never fronted a band before. What would I say?" I had noticed when we were doing Dead Ringers together that whenever David would talk over the mic, it was so completely natural and organic and there was nothing put on or showy about it. So I was like, "Man, just be yourself. That's the real deal."
Can you talk about David as a songwriter? What drew you to his music?
I really enjoyed the quirkiness of his songwriting. There were songs where he wrote the lyrics and the music himself, and then he had an ever-expanding catalog of stuff that he was writing with Robert Hunter. He also had another guy that he was working with, an old friend of his named Earl Stillson, who wrote some of the lyrics to the early DNB songs.
David had a certain quirky style that I found really appealing and different. It incorporated lots of different elements—folk, country, bluegrass, rock-and-roll and psychedelia, all rolled it up into one.
When you talk about David and Robert Hunter, I’m reminded that they had a mutual friend during their Bay Area coffeehouse days named Jerry Garcia.
David met Garcia in 1962. They quickly became pals and started playing bluegrass together. David would tell stories about how Jerry would get a new record, then call him up and say, "Nelson, have you heard the new Bill Monroe record? Get over here." David would do the same. So they were kind of cut from the same cloth with the same musical influences.
Returning to the David Nelson Band, you mentioned that you set out on your first tour in 1994. Can you describe the evolution of the band’s lineup, leading to the roster of players you have today?
David, Mookie and I are the three original members who have been together for 32 years now, which is hard to believe. Mookie grew up in Baltimore where I did, so we met each other back there in the late ’80s. We played in a couple bands together. Then, when I talked to David about putting together the David Nelson Band, I said, "I’ve got this keyboard player who I think you'll really like, and he also plays accordion." Some of David’s songs had a little bit of a Zydeco flavor.
I told him, "You're going to like this guy. He sings, he colors the music beautifully with his keyboard sounds and he plays accordion." I actually got him into one of the versions of Kingfish. I also think he came out to a Dead Ringers gig and sat in with us. So David got to meet him and hear him before we actually decided on the personnel.
So the three of us have been playing together in the David Nelson Band since 1994 when we started. Our original bass player, Bill Laymon, happened to get sick with a tropical disease called typhus in 2005 when the Nelson Band had some gigs. At that time I was already playing in a band with Pete Sears, but Pete was the piano player. When he heard we needed someone, he was like, "I can help you guys out. I play a little bass." I had completely forgotten about that.
Pete and his wife came over to my house for dinner one night and I had a bass sitting there. He picked it up and started riffing on it. I picked up a guitar, we started jamming and connected instantly. I felt like I was playing with Jack Bruce or something like that when we were jamming.
We have a really strong chemistry, which was evident from the first notes that we played together. So he wound up filling in for our old bass player that weekend and became our bass player in 2005.
Pete Sears is someone who’s been at the top of his game for so long. I know a lot of people think of him as a keyboard player first but was doing some impressive stuff on bass back in the 70s with Jefferson Starship and a few other artists.
He's a great keyboard player and an amazing, wonderful, sweet human being. But yes, I used to tell people once I started playing with him that he's like Clark Kent on the piano—mild mannered, just laying it down. Then he picks up the bass and it's like he went into a nearby phone booth and came out wearing a Superman cape.
He's just such a monster bass player and always gives me stuff to play off of. We have great interactions and musical conversations. He's absolutely one of my favorite people I've ever played with.
So Pete joined DNB in 2005. Meanwhile, we had a series of different drummers, until John Molo started in 2006. When he couldn't make certain dates we’d bring in someone else. Bill Kreutzmann did a couple tours with us in Hawaii on drums. Then we started using Wally Ingram as well. For a while we kind of alternated the main drummers between John Molo and Wally Ingram. Then, once I started playing in Wolf Bros. and began getting a rapport with Jay Lane, it eventually morphed into where our drummers are Jay Lane and Wally Ingram.
When did you first cross paths with Wally?
I met him at a festival. It was called Lazy Summer Days Festival. In case you missed that, the acronym was the LSD Festival. I think he was there playing with Steve Kimock. At the time we were booking another tour in Hawaii and neither Molo nor Kreutzmann could do it, So I asked Wally about it. He was available and that's when we started playing together.
Jumping ahead to Skeleton Crewe, even though Stephen Inglis is from Hawaii where you’ve played regularly over the years, you met him in California?
Well, I don't remember this, but Stephen tells me his band opened for us the first time the David Nelson Band played Hawaii in 1999. He said we met then.
What I recall is that somewhere in the mid-2010s a mutual friend of ours said, "Hey, a friend of mine from Hawaii is a wonderful slack key guitar player and electric guitar player. He's playing at the Terrapin Crossroads bar tonight. Do you want to meet there for dinner?" So we did, and after he was finished playing she introduced us. That's when I remember meeting him for the first time.
But how we came to play together is that another mutual friend, who knows I'm a big fan of Hawaiian music, called me up one day and said, "How'd you like to play a night of Hawaiian music next Monday? My friend Stephen Inglis is coming into town and he had a house concert cancel on him. I told him I'd find a gig for him and I thought of you."
So he sent me some of his songs, then he got to my house an hour or two before the gig and we ran through a couple things. It was another one of those situations where we looked at each other and were like, "Yeah, we need to keep doing this.” It just fell together and it was effortless.
The music and the camaraderie has been great. We continued on as a duo for a while. We played tours of Alaska, Hawaii and the Northwest.
The story of how that led to Skeleton Crewe is Stephen and I had done a couple tours together, then Stephen got hired to play a solo opening set for Dark Star Orchestra at the Hawaii Theater in Honolulu. He met Rob and they discussed Rob sitting in on his set, at which point Stephen mentioned, "I also do a duo with Barry Sless." Rob told him that we were old friends.
Then after they played together and they fit together so well, they decided that we should start looking for some trio gigs. So that led to what's become the full Skeleton Crewe band [with Sears and Jay Lane].
You mentioned playing with Jay in Wolf Bros. When Bobby brought you into the band did he discuss what your role would be or give you a particular charge?
Bobby never gave me much direction. He kind of left it up to me. He might come over on a certain song and go, "Okay, on the solo, let's chase each other around.” That's about the only direction I got from him.
Every now and then Jay or Jeff Chimenti would be doing a song and they would say, "Do you think you could grab the Jerry part and play it on steel?" This was for some of the more iconic ones like “Estimated Prophet” or “Shakedown Street” which had very defined riffs that Jerry used to play but nobody was playing them. It was usually one of those two guys who asked me to play that riff.
Was there a song that you particularly enjoyed playing with that group?
That would change every night. I really enjoyed all of it. Bobby was wonderful to work with. I loved the freedom that he presented to everybody, the opportunity for musical freedom and his attention to telling the story of the song.
I also really enjoyed his attention to dynamics. You could tell from his body language what he had in mind. He might sing a line and the music was building up behind him, then he'd step away from the mic real quick, like, "Let's bring it down." The dynamics in the songs that he was singing were like waves in the ocean. They had a beautiful ebb and flow. As long as you were paying attention to what he was doing and how he was singing, you knew exactly what to do.
When was the first time you performed with Bobby?
The first time I played with Bobby was for some kind of benefit in the early 2000s. I think it was after I had already played with Phil for the first time, which was in 1999. Then there were a few things here and there in the Bay Area. The next big one I can remember was the Deadheads for Obama show at the Warfield in 2008. It was with both Bobby and Phil. Mickey and John Molo were on drums. I think Mark Karan and Jackie Greene were there as well.
Then we played together on random things here and there. When David Nelson went down with a broken shoulder in 2016, we had booked this three day run at a ski resort in Alaska. David wasn't able to do it so Bobby wound up filling in for him. That was three nights in a 400 seat nightclub and we just had a blast. He basically took the place of David in the David Nelson Band, but instead of playing David Nelson Band material, we were doing Grateful Dead and Bobby stuff.
As you think back on those Alaska shows with him, what comes to mind?
This was a place where you couldn't come into an empty room and do a soundcheck because it was like a bar at the bottom of a ski slope. There were always people in there and we gave Bobby the option of "Hey, do you want to go downstairs and work up this song with some amps?" But he was like, "No, we can just play in front of the people." So we basically soundchecked and worked on some music for whoever was hanging at the bar after a ski run. They could all hear it. He was fine with that and he was down to play.
He was kind of a stickler for keeping the stage volume low, which was a very important thing to him. I appreciated that too. When you start with a lower stage volume, you have so much more room to build and grow. It just gives you the whole dynamic palette, which he was really good at.
He had a great time at those gigs and the first thing he said on the plane ride home was, "Can we do that every year?" But then he got busier with Dead & Company and stuff like that, so unfortunately it didn’t happen.
You appeared in many incarnations of Phil & Friends bands over the years. Did David make that introduction?
What happened was that somebody gave Phil our Visions Under the Moon CD. This was in 1999 when he was just starting to get out there again and he did a series of shows at the Warfield. I think his first one was with Trey and Page from Phish and then he did a couple other lineups. He used David, Mookie and me from the Nelson Band for one of them. Somebody had given him the David Nelson Band CD and he liked it. He was an old friend of David’s. They go way back together. When you listen to American Beauty that’s David playing guitar on Phil's song “Box of Rain.”
So David called me up one day, and said, "Hey, you're going to be getting a call from Phil Lesh. He called me to ask about playing a show with him. He told me that he was listening to the CD and that he’d never heard me play guitar in that style before. So I told him, ‘Well, that's not me, that's this guy Barry Sless.’” Then Phil asked David if I’d be into playing a gig with them and David told him he should reach out to me. So one day Phil called and of course I said yes. That lineup was me, David, Mookie, Phil, Bill Kreutzman and Steve Kimock. We did two shows at the Warfield in July of 1999.
Over the years, Phil brought a lot of musicians into his orbit. He was always mixing up his lineups. I didn't play as a regular member of his bands again until 2004. Then I kind of continued with him until about 2009 on most of the tours that he did. They all had different musicians. I was playing with people like Chris Robinson, John Scofield, Warren Haynes, Jimmy Herring, Carlos Santana and Joan Osborne. He was always bringing new people into the mix and introducing them to this music. Not all of them were ones that had been part of that scene or played that music before, so he was turning a lot of new musicians onto it. So you never knew what that next lineup was going to be like, what the chemistry was going to be like, but I appreciated his approach and I think it led to a lot of really interesting moments.
Since you mentioned Chris, is there any chance that the Green Leaf Rustlers might resurface? [This group, which focused on outlaw country music, included a core lineup of Robinson, Sless, Sears, Molo and Greg Loiacono.]
I would love that and I know a lot of people who would love it. We put that band together when Chris was living in Marin, where I live, and so that was kind of his local band. It was around the same time he was doing Chris Robinson Brotherhood and for a little while later.
After he and his brother got the Black Crowes back together, he moved down to LA. So he's not up here that often anymore, and it seems like he's hitting it pretty hard with them. We keep in touch every now and then, though. As a matter of fact, we texted briefly the other day over something. So I don't think the door is shut on it, but I think the circumstances just need to be right when he's got a little time off. He had more time off around that time, and it was a really fun band.
I got to know him from playing in that band and playing with Phil, so that was the Chris that I knew. I had never seen the Black Crowes, and then when I saw him play at Shoreline, I was like, "Holy shit, this guy's really got the rock star moves."
I love all of what he does, but I hadn't seen that side of him. I had seen more of the hippie side. He's actually one of the funniest guys I've ever had the opportunity to play with. He regularly had all of us in stitches laughing.
In addition to everything we’ve discussed relative to your playing, you’re also a songwriter. Moonalice just released your original composition, “How This World Should Be.” What are the origins of that tune?
I try not to get caught up in news cycles and that kind of stuff because I feel like they sensationalize everything. What's a big story one day is gone the next day, when they have another big story that's going to sell more subscriptions or whatever.
I got really fed up with the divisiveness that I feel like the news media puts out there and the general state of affairs where people were breaking ties with their friends who had different political views. So the song kind of rolled out from my frustration with that whole thing.
I wrote it specifically for Moonalice. Over the years, Moonalice has been through several different incarnations and the 10-piece band that we have right now with five singers, is the strongest our vocals have ever been. I remembered an old Temptations song, where they had four different voices on a verse. Each one of them would sing a different line, and I thought this song lent itself to being sung by the members of Moonalice, where each line of the verse is a different person singing. Also, the whole ethos of Moonalice is a peace, love, happiness and togetherness kind of thing.
So once I started writing the song, I thought this would be a perfect vehicle for the singers and the ethos of Moonalice, which has evolved into this 10-piece band that offers a little something for any kind of music fan.
With the T Sisters, Lester Chambers and Dylan Chambers it's evolved into something really fun that’s got a lot to offer. We started with this lineup in 2019. We played LOCKN’ that year and I remember at first I wasn’t sure how it would work with 10 pieces. Pretty quickly I was like, "Roger, what a great idea."
Since then we’ve grown so much and the repertoire has continued to expand. All three of the T Sisters are bringing in original songs. I bring in a couple. Roger [McNamee] brings in songs. Pete brings in songs and everybody contributes.
That brings us to the album you just recorded with Stephen Inglis, which also led to some trio dates with Tim Bluhm. How did Tim come into that?
What happened is thatTim lives in the same town as me and he has a studio in his house. We've known each other but haven't played together much. Actually, the first time we really played together was during the pandemic. He had a river rafting trip coming up in Idaho where you camp at a different spot every night and you play around the campfire for the people who have paid for the trip. That’s where we really connected and I got to hear his original songs and his wonderful voice.
We each kind of felt that we should do some more of that but the opportunity never really arose. Then when Stephen and I started doing our duo thing and decided to record some of our stuff, I was like, "Tim's got a studio at his house. I think you guys would really connect and your voices would sound great together." So we went over, we recorded and we asked Tim to sing some harmonies. I thought their voices blended beautifully.
Then we thought, "Well, why don't we book a gig with the three of us together?" So we did a house concert in Mill Valley and there was a guy who came over to us after the show and was like, "I want to hire you guys for the Mill Valley Arts Festival.” So we booked that and then we figured, "Well, as long as we're here, why don't we do a few other things?" Then we booked a few other Northern California gigs.
It'll be a duo record with a couple songs that Tim sings harmony on, as well as a couple songs where we have Wally Ingram on percussion. I hope to have it out by the end of the year. We're just going over the final mixes now, then we'll get it mastered and put it out.
It's got a bunch of Stephen's originals, an instrumental original by me, then a few Grateful Dead songs that Stephen just covers brilliantly. His take on the Garcia ballads is beautiful. When we're playing duo or even with the full band and he does one of those Jerry ballads, it's not rare to look out and see some people crying. He really nails the emotion in them. There also will be some traditional Hawaiian on there. He's a great traditional Hawaiian singer. He sings in the language and he does that falsetto thing that the great Hawaiian singers do.
Above and beyond all that you also have a Skeleton Crewe fall tour that kicks off in late October. Do you have any plans for studio sessions with that group?
Like most improvisational bands, the magic happens more live. So we've multi-tracked a bunch of shows. We're in the process of going through those things and trying to pick songs for a live release. That's a really strong band and we’re enjoying doing it.
All the songs that Rob wrote with Hunter are really good and there's something familiar about them, even if you’re hearing them for the first time. That’s a comment we’ll get from a lot of people. So that's been kind of exciting and something fun to pursue.
Finally, you just made the difficult decision to perform without David Nelson at the Campout. Hopefully he’ll yet return to the stage with all of you. What can say about the DNB for people who have yet to dig in?
That band and that music have been part of the fabric of my life for the last 32 years. Those songs are deep, particularly the ones David wrote with Hunter. I feel that because of David's ties with Jerry and their similarities—they’re cut from the same cloth—that there’s a similar depth in his songwriting with Hunter.
It’s wonderful music and I know that it really connects with people whenever they discover it. I feel that I’m still discovering it myself. I think that’s why I remain so passionate about it all these years later.
