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Features Cindy Incidentally Tuesday, November 06, 2007 Cindy Cashdollar, a guest at the Adelaide Guitar Festival, is an exceptional talent on Lap steel and Dobro and has worked with Asleep At The Wheel, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Rod Stewart and Ryan Adams. Brian Wise reports.
You might not have heard of Cindy Cashdollar but chances are you have heard her. Probably best know for her years with Ray Benson’s Asleep At the Wheel, Cashdollar (yes, that is her real name) has recently toured with Van Morrison, Rod Stewart and Ryan Adams.
Added to that are appearances with Bob Dylan, Garrison Keillor on The Prairie Home Companion radio show, Marcia Ball, Jorma Kaukonen, Leon Redbone and Beausoleil. And, if you are in Austin, Texas at the right time you might get to see her playing in one of the local clubs with Redd Volkaert.
Cashdollar moved to Austin, Texas back in 1992 when she was asked to join Asleep At The Wheel and after eight and a half years – and five Grammys - with that outfit she decided to stay there because ‘it was a neat place to be.’
“It’s very music oriented,” she says of Austin, “but more in a live sense than a business sense. I like it for that. The clubs offer a lot of variety. It really feels like a small town dumped into the middle of a big city. It reminds me of where I grew up in Woodstock. Plus they have great Mexican food and barbeque too!”
Cashdollar first became intrigued with the Dobro in Woodstock where she was raised and where she got to play with bluegrass legend John Herald, Paul Butterfield, Levon Helm and Rick Danko of The Band.
“At home my Mum’s record collection was I guess what you would call ‘world beat’ now,” recalls Cashdollar. “She listened to so many different things. She listened to Japanese music, Ravi Shankar, Dave Brubeck. So you had American jazz plus roots music from other countries. My Dad was a huge country music fan and always had country music on the radio. So those two influences were to start with at home and growing up in a town like Woodstock there was such a melting pot of music there.
“You had the folk musicians like Happy and Arty Traum and people like The Band. You had Van Morrison living there. There was a club called The Joyous Link which had name people: people who played in New York City would drive two hours north and play that club. So at a really early age I got to see Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Willie Dixon, Bonnie Raitt, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, getting to see Van Morrison when I was twelve. Plus my guitar teacher – who was very good friend’s with Van - was a huge influence. There were also these mini-festivals at this woman’s farm outside of town and my friends and I would get dropped there and run loose at these festivals. It is incredible when I look back and think about the music I got to hear. That was my influence and I think that’s why I ended up playing so many different styles because there is so much good stuff there.”
Cashdollar has dedicated her CD to her late father who she says was very supportive when she started playing, buying her first Dobro for her.
“He was one of my biggest fans,” she says. “Later when I was on the road he would drive many hours to see me. He would have been very proud to see that CD.”
“The sound of it,” answers Cashdollar when I ask what motivated her to play slide.
“I started playing guitar when I was eleven and I got kind of bored with it after a while,” she laughs. “Everybody played guitar! Then one night I was waitressing in this little bar in town and saw somebody playing Dobro and thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I had heard John Fahey’s bottleneck playing and tried to imitate that on my guitar. Then when I saw someone playing Dobro I thought that looked like even more fun. So I got hold of that person’s teacher and that is what started me out.”
Cashdollar joined Asleep At the Wheel after she moved to Nashville where she heard that the band was coming into town and were looking for a steel player to replace the great John Ely. Taking the bull by the horns she found the band’s tour bus, gave Ely her ‘promo pack’ of demo recordings and after he passed it on to Benson she had the gig.
“It was just a fluke,” she says. “I overheard in a bar that they were looking for somebody. I really had only been playing steel for a year and quite poorly. When Ray heard the tapes he said, ‘Well, you can’t play steel but your dobro playing is great and you have potential so I’ll give you six months, which I spent living eating and breathing all that stuff and tried to sound as if I knew what I was doing. It was like boot camp for quite a while – to keep up with the calibre of musicians.”
Perhaps the ultimate tribute to Cashdollar’s skills is the list of the other musicians who have also asked her to tour or record. Van Morrison was so happy with the show at ACL Fest last year that he released the show as a double CD set on his website. It was a bonus for me because, having previously seen four Morrison shows over the years that might be described as ordinary (although others have said worse) I finally got to see him in top form with a brilliant band. (It completely erased the other shows from my mind).
“I think they found me through Ray Benson,” says Cashdollar when I ask how she came to work with Morrison. “He was looking was looking for a steel player to tour the States because his Pay The Devil album had just been released. I believe Van had also seen me at some point with Asleep At The Wheel. At first I was doing the more country-oriented material and after we did a Ryman show the steel was added to more and more things as well as the Dobro. It was nice because I grew up listening to Van’s material and had seen him for the first time live when I was twelve so I had never forgotten that. So it was very thrilling to not only meet him but to play that music I had heard growing up for so many years.”
“I am glad he seemed happy,” says Cashdollar when I tell her about Van’s demeanour, “because I only see the back of him! At certain times it would really hit me that it was Van Morrison and that I was playing with him. His band is so incredible. There were a lot of moments of the hair raising on the arms and goose bumps.”
On the other hand she had the chance to play with Ryan Adams on his Cold Roses album and also on tour.
“He’s very much his own person, his own man,” she says of Adams. “He’s very like Van in the sense that he has a lot of integrity in his music and doesn’t want to play the game that one must play sometimes in the larger business. He just does what he wants to do. He’s another very intelligent guy when it comes to knowing all kinds of music.”
Cashdollar says that she was initially surprised to learn that Adams was producing Willie Nelson until Willie called (from Ray Benson’s tour bus) and played her a track from the album.
“I thought it was great,” she says, “a very interesting pairing of people. But it works. Willie does not care what he does as long as its music and he likes it he’ll do it. He is one of those people who goes in the studio, does a few takes and there it is. He has a great time.”
Cashdollar has produced four instructional DVDs but, surprisingly, only one solo CD so far, Slide Show, which features guests such as Marcia Ball, Sonny Landreth, Lucky Oceans, Steve James, Mike Auldridge, pedal steel guitar legend Herb Remington, Johnny Nichols and the aforementioned Redd Volkaert. It is a superlative album and, as you might expect, crammed full of magical playing from Cashdollar and her guests.
The lead off track alone, ‘Sliding Home’ with guest Sonny Landreth, provides more than a few ‘chicken skin’ moments. The sort of moments you are likely to experience when Cashdollar plays in Adelaide this month. If you love Dorbo and steel guitar make sure you do not miss her.
Cindy Cashdollar will be at the Adelaide Guitar Festival. Slide Show is available on Silver Shot Records.
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