Belle, Diana and Ted went up to Tahoe this past weekend and teamed up with Alhambra Valley Band's Mitch Polzak and 49 Special's Tyson Alteri to deliver a rocking bluegrass show on the deck at Sugar Bowl's Judah Lodge.  Due to a typo on the lodge's entertainment listing, we were billed as Belle Manore and her Brewglass Boys!  With Belle on bass duties, Tyson on guitar and Mitch on Banjo, Ted on mando and Diana on fiddle, Belle Manore and the random boys and girl pulled off a great show.  

We could try to describe the fantastic setting and awesome weather, but instead will publish here something that was scribbled on a piece of paper by a young guy sitting right in front and dropped into our tip jar. Enjoy...

The sun is bright and the day is shining.  A bluegrass quintet warms the air.  Everyone smiles. Sunday and a fiddle; beauteous.  Reflections of a white snow glitter in the eyes of the young, beer in the old.  One man has gin.  Momentarily I am engulfed.  Good as beer for the hangover, and less expensive.  Music runs through my heart, primarily because they put their hearts into their music. A band of cool cats with cool glasses.  Lonely and adventurous clouds pass the sky, though they can blot neither the sun nor the spirit.  Bluegrass!  Mandolin Man maintains.  Bass blasts.  Guitar to the lead, all smiles. I appreciate this!  Elvis rocks the banjo. Five-on-it says it ain't the first time he's encountered the comparison. Is the gray real? Outfitted retro with a young soul. Dichotomous or confused, we won't ask. The fiddler defies proper description, though my attention warrents lovely as a secondary substitute. Blush...Still engulfed. Encouraging for an ADHD kid. Thank you.

Nature nears springtime and the butterflies are blooming! 

Well it's April Fools Day, but this next piece of news is no joke.  We are very excited to announce we will be playing at the 2009 Rockygrass Bluegrass Festival!  Our set will be in the Wildflower Pavilion on Saturday or Sunday (to be determined). This is very exciting and a dream come true for some of us in the band who have been attending this wonderful festival for several years.  

We're getting excited for our solo show at the Freight & Salvage on April 17th!  Get your tickets in advance and you'll have some extra cash for a cookie on the night.

We had a great time up in the Pacific Northwest in February! Here are some tour highlights--and lowlights (so much more natural-looking!):

We stayed in Portland with yet ANOTHER lovely set of Tom's and Belle’s friends, who plied us with fine food and homemade liquor (wine and walnut brandy this time), came out to cheerlead at our show, and generally treated us like visiting royals.  Another valuable Portland supporters were San Francisco’s own Jeanie and Chuck Poling and former San Franciscan’s Ron and Rolf. Diana's fiddle got to hang out in a Portland bar (The Alberta Street Pub) way longer than she and its case did, in fact only meeting up with her again back in Wintergrass two nights later, having hitch-hiked naked to Seattle with Jeanie, Chuck and Ron.

We played for 500 K-through-8 catholic school students in the gym of the Holy Rosary School.  Ever tried editing a bluegrass set list for suitability for both tender young ears and religious sensibility?   "Doreen" had actually made the cut until we caught and axed it JUST before Jordan opened his mouth to start singing:   “When I first met Doreen, she was barely seventeen, she was drinking whiskey sours at the bar.  The way she tossed them back, I'd have a had a heart attack, but as it is I let her drive my car”.  But we knew we had the crowd with our somewhat b-list, tamer material, when we looked out to see the block of kindergarteners all playing air banjo, air fiddle, and air guitar along with us. 

Pickers infested every corner of the very swanky Murano hotel in downtown Tacoma.  What did your innocent civilian hotel guest make of "gravel yard" issuing simultaneously from two sides of the grand stairway landing?

Our emcee, "Aunt Mama", having introduced herself to us just prior to our first Wintergrass stage set and giving every impression of competence and tact, garbled our introduction and handed the show over to us with this high praise: "Belle Monroe and her Brewglass Boys--it's almost music!"

Four festival sets in just over 24 hours were capped by a balls-to-the-walls midnight acoustic set in the CBA tent, where, as one of only two California bands at Wintergrass, we tore it up despite running on fumes. This was maybe our fave set of the weekend. Thanks, Uncle Frank! Finally, all this was capped off by learning that Stephen Ruffo, the big honcho at Wintergrass, after hearing Ted's closing song in the CBA tent (Big Ol’ Pecker), actually calls himself "The Big Pecker" and has t-shirts for his assistants, The Peckerettes, which will be arriving in the mail for Belle and Diana soon…

The Brewglass Boys are excited to be hitting the road! We'll be making our first ever appearance in Portland, OR Thursday (2/19) evening at the Alberta Street Pub.

This weekend we'll be in Tacoma, WA for the fabulous Wintergrass Festival! We play on Friday at 11 PM on the Weber Ballroom Stage and Saturday at 3 PM in the Pavilion. Hope to see you there, and to party with you in the hotel!

If you can't make it to these gigs yourself, please tell your friends. And for our Bay Area fans... get ready for April 17 at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley!

Thanks,
Belle and the Boys