Kevin Caducci, one half of the North Bay country-music duo the Easy Leaves, was on an entirely different musical path when one day years ago he stepped into a roadside bar somewhere in rural northwest Pennsylvania.
Carducci grew up in the post-Nirvana era, playing a sludge of punk and hippie music in his band. Shortly after his drummer split, he and a friend went to a jam session at a tavern “way out in the sticks” called the Northgate Inn, obviously a place the Nirvana era never reached.
“So, there’s all these old guys in their NASCAR jackets,” remembers Carducci. “I mean, definitely people we would not have been politically aligned with, if we ever went down that road. But we all bonded over music.”
These guys were country purists—Hank, Willie, Merle, Waylon, etc.—and they were in the habit of singing old country songs all night long, backed up by fiddlers, guitarists, dobro players. The bar had a rule: If you brought an instrument and could lead the group in a song, you could drink for free.
“They threw us right in the fire,” says Carducci. “Y’know, ‘C’mon boys, sing us a song!’”
Thinking fast, Carducci and his buddy played a song from an old Garcia and Grisman album and Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel,” which at the time was the one country song every hipster knew. They drank for free that night.
Soon after, Carducci was finding himself singing the harmony parts in old Louvin Brothers songs while driving. He’d gone country.
Today, from their home base in Santa Rosa, Carducci and his musical partner, Sage Fifield, have carved out a path for old-school country as the Easy Leaves. With two full-length albums and two more EPs to their credit, the Leaves are making a stand for California-style country music, a kind of Sonoma County take on the Bakersfield sound of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens.
“Back in the ’60s, when Nashville was doing more lush, pop-oriented stuff, the Bakersfield sound was more rough and raw,” says Carducci. “Now, you’d associate the difference to Americana vs. pop-country.”
On Wednesday, Oct. 24, the Easy Leaves will play alongside Puget Sound-area country crooner Karl Blau at the Art Boutiki in San Jose, as part of their “Haunted Honky Tonk” tour. The performance comes on the heels of the release of their latest product, The Wheels EP, a collection of sweetly burnished honky-tonks and country rockers that would make the fellas at the Northgate happy. At the same time, the Leaves have a firm grounding in the kind of desert country-rock popularized back in the ’70s by Gram Parsons, the Eagles and others.
Though Carducci grew up in the Midwest, Fifield originally hails from California’s Gold Country, and much of their music is shot through with California imagery (The title song on The Wheels muses from the point of view of someone driving west through the Sierra foothills: “The Central Valley glowing like a lake of golden dust”).
The two often play as an acoustic duo with Fifield on guitar and Carducci on stand-up bass. But they’ll also perform as a full band, dipping deeper into the well of honky-tonk. For more than a decade, they’ve played the West Coast circuit from a home base in the venues of Sonoma and Napa counties.
“It’s a laid-back community, full of real down-to-earth folks,” says Carducci, “working people who support each other and have really supported us. We have the wine country up there, too, so people love to party up there, too.”
They’ve also toured widely and shared a bill with such luminaries as Ry Cooder, Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Even though they’ve been at it for more than 10 years, Carducci says that he and his partner are still students of the country tradition. “I’ve always loved digging into the old stuff,” he says. “There’s so much great music that existed before I was even alive in this world. You could almost spend your entire life just listening to stuff that was made before you were born and still not get to all of it.”
The Easy Leaves
Oct. 24, 7:30pm, $15
The Art Boutiki, San Jose
