This year’s fourth annual Golden Road Gathering, May 15-17, at the El Dorado County fairgrounds in Placerville, promises to be another weekend of family fun and great sounds. With headliners such as Lettuce, Sonic Tribe Sector 9 and Leftover Salmon, performances will feature funk and bluegrass music.
Thursday opens early-bird registration with Little Mischief, Little Hurricane and Yak Attack.
Friday lineup with Lettuce
Friday kicks off with Ryder Thieves, The Sam Chase & The Untraditional, Cimafunk, The Hip Abduction and headliner, Lettuce.
Lettuce began the summer of 1992 on the East Coast. All of its six members attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass. as teens. They were brought together through the influence of a variety of funk bands including Herbie Hancock, Tower of Power and Earth, Wind and Fire, but most importantly, James Brown. Although they jammed during the summer of ’92, they went their own way and finished high school. The players joined up again at Berklee in the fall of 1994, when they were still undergrads.
“We all attended and met at a summer program there [Berklee],” said percussionist Adam Deitch, who calls Denver, Colo. home. “We now have a Lettuce scholarship program through Berklee for one 16-year-old music student.”
Since they were all underage when they began playing together, most of their performances were at dorm parties.
“We would just show up and ask for the other performers to ‘let us play’; which pretty much is where our name comes from,” Deitch said.
With one of its members, Erick “Maverick” Coomes, from Los Angeles, the West Coast soon came to know the band, which created a strong following, generally through word of mouth, in Tokyo, Chicago, New York City and San Francisco. They also have fans in Humboldt and elsewhere throughout California.
“We don’t get to play Cali often,” said Deitch. “But we love it out there.”
The band’s first release, “Outta Here,” was in 2002. They followed that with “Live in Tokyo” in 2003.
“We had a gig in Tokyo with connections through our brother band, Soulive,” said Deitch. “A friend of ours came with us and had recording equipment, unbeknownst to us. We got a great album out of it, and had some great engineers in Japan as well. It was great, ‘cause we had no budget then.”
In 2008, the band released its second album, “Rage!” It drew from leaders of the 1970s funk movement featuring covers of Curtis Mayfield’s, “Move on Up,” and Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s, “Express Yourself.”
Later, in 2011, Lettuce toured on the Royal Family Ball circuit with Soulive, a jazz/organ trio with former Lettuce members Eric Krasno and Neal Evans. Select shows featured Rashawn Ross of the Dave Matthews Band. The tour also featured new songs from the band and helped produce its next album, “Fly!,” in 2012.
In 2015, the band released “Crush,” which reached No. 1 on the U.S. Jazz Albums chart. In 2020, Lettuce’s album, “Elevate,” was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Instrumental Album category.
“A lot of artists are nominated as much as 25 times and never win,” said Deitch. “To even get that nod for us was exciting and a total honor. It was mostly for our parents,” he added. “They figured if we were nominated for a Grammy, we must be doing okay.”
Lettuce’s most recent album, “Cook,” comes with a recipe book of “all our family’s favorite recipes,” said Deitch. “It’s a ‘funky pairing’ of music and food.” He added that when they play the Golden Road Gathering event, “it’s going to be a fun dance party. Be sure to bring your dancing shoes. We’re looking forward to throwing it down.”
Current members of the band include: Deitch, drums and percussions; Coomes, bass guitar; Adam “Shmeeans” Smirnoff, guitar, who also calls Denver home; Ryan Zoidis, alto, baritone and tenor saxophones, who lives in Maine; Nigel Hall, vocals, Hammond B-3 organ, clarinet and piano, living in New Orleans; and Eric “Benny” Bloom, trumpet, another Denver resident.
Smirnoff has toured with Lady Gaga and Robert Randolph & the Family Band. Former member Rashawn Ross is a full-time member of the Dave Matthews Band.
Lettuce will be joined on Friday by Lab Rats, Suika T and Lindsay & The Cheeks. Late Night performances will be heard by High Step Society and Lespecial.
Saturday lineup with STS9
Sonic Tribe Sector 9, hits the headliner stage on Saturday with its instrumental funk, hip hop, rock and electronic music. Group rhythm rather than individual solos is the band’s forte and it self-describes as post-rock dance music, mixing live rock instrumentation with their unique electronics.
Formed in 1997 in Snellville, Ga., outside of Atlanta, Sonic Tribe Sector 9 has headlined festivals across the country including Outside Lands and and High Sierra Music Festival both in California, Camp Bisco in Penn., Beale Street Music Festival in Tenn., Lollapalooza, Summer Camp and North Coast Festival all in Ill. and Electric Forest in Miss. Its activism efforts have raised at least $150,000 to the Make it Right Foundation, which paved the way to rebuild a house in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans.
In 2003, the band opened for The String Cheese Incident performing its first gig at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Col. The following night sold out in less than 15 minutes at the Fox Theater in Boulder, and the band continues to sell-out at venues throughout the country.
It released two live albums in 1999 — “Escape Vehicle” and “Sector 9: The Brown Album” both on Landslide Records. Three of its members, Hunter Brown, guitars and keyboards; David Phipps, keyboards, synthesizers and programming; and Zach Velmer, drums, electronic percussion and programming, have been in the band from the beginning.
Member Jeffree Lerner, percussion, keyboards and programming, joined the group in 1999; and Alana Rocklin on bass guitar has been with the band since 2014, following the absence of original member David Murphy, bass, keyboards and programming.
In 2018, Sonic Tribe Sector 9 produced and headlined the first Wave Spell Festival in Belden Town, where Phipps and Velmer also played solo sets. Additional performers at Wave Spell featured Sunsquabi, Ooah of the Glitch Mob and Manic Focus, to name just a few.
Sonic Tribe Sector 9 has played shows that begin at 2 a.m. and go until sunrise, played nine sets of music in one show, raised $20,000 for Hurricane Katrina victims and traveled across the country in a carbon-neutral bus also powering their concerts using renewable energy. They partner with environmental-friendly companies such as Renewable Energy Credits and Conscious Alliance.
New Year’s Eve shows have seen the band “Axe the Cables” for acoustic sets, which it also has played at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga and Red Rocks Amphitheatre. During one New Year’s show at the Fillmore Auditorium, the band opened and closed the show with a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Shakedown Street,” thrilling a sold-out audience.
Various members of the band now call Santa Cruz their home, performing at the Catalyst on nine occasions, Palookaville (which closed in 2002), and has headlined at the Santa Cruz Civic Center and have a huge following in the San Francisco Bay area playing at The Fillmore, Warfield Theatre, Regency Center and the Great American Music Hall and Golden Gate Park.
Sonic Tribe Sector 9 continues to ride popularity in its home state of Georgia and considers Chicago as a “go-to” city for performances.
The band has released 12 albums and continues to grow by incorporating disco and dance styles into its music.
On Saturday, Sonic Tribe Sector 9 will share the stage with Chali 2Na & Cut Chemist, Lespecial, Will Evans, Bella Rayne Band and Tracorum. Late night performances will be by Boombox and Boombassador.
Sunday lineup with Leftover salmon
Sunday evening headliners Leftover Salmon will finish out the festival with a day of music first from The Brothers Comatose, Craven Quartet (featuring Joe and Hattie Craven), Blu Egyptian with Junior Toots, Terrier, local favorites Red Dirt Ruckus and others.
Vince Herman, lead vocalist and guitarist for Leftover Salmon took a few minutes recently to provide some of his personal background and give kudos to the Golden Road Gathering production team of Ryan Kronenberg, Adam Northway and Justin Boyd.
“It takes a lot of guts to produce a festival,” said Herman, who originated the band Salmon Heads. “That area [Placerville] has a great history of music with Railroad Earth and the original Hangtown Halloween festival. It’s great to see something coming back. We have a whole lot of friends in that part of the country.”
First inspired by polka music, then by old-time music, Herman said he discovered early on that music was universal.
“Most of these folks [playing the old-ime music] didn’t necessarily even know each other,” he said. “That’s when it dawned on me I could play anywhere with anybody.”
Herman soon discovered David Bromberg, an eclectic multi-instrumentalist, and was hooked on music for life. Although he attended West Virginia University, Herman said he didn’t study music.
“I played a lot of music, but I studied acting and anthropology,” he said.
He left college just six credits short of graduating to continue with his muse. Born in Pittsburg, Penn. In 1962, Herman ultimately found his way to Colorado, where he met and began playing with Drew Emmitt, who plays mandolin, fiddle and electric guitar in Leftover Salmon. Emmitt originated the Left Hand String Band. The band’s name comes from Herman’s Salmon Heads and Emmitt’s Left Hand String Band, combining portions of both band names into one. Left Hand String Band’s Glenn Keefe and other members of the Salmon Heads — Dave Dorian and Gerry Cavagnaro — came together to play a New Year’s Eve show in 1989 at the Crested Butte in Colorado, putting Leftover Salmon together in one night.
“We were all at the Colorado ski circuit at the time the band got together,” said Herman.
Although members have changed up over the years, Herman, Emmitt and Mark Vann, co-founder and original banjoist, have been the mainstay artists. Vann passed away in 2002, and the band went on hiatus for two years. During that time, Herman toured alone, broke his neck after a slip and fall in his driveway living at 9,000 feet, and then found time and good health to found Great American Taxi, with whom he still plays.
More recently, in 2019, he founded High Hawks, another band of “good friends and great musicians” made up of keyboardist Chad Staehly, guitarist Adam Greuel, bassist Brian Adams, drummer Will Trask and fiddler Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth. The band released its self-titled first album in 2021. Herman’s first solo album was released in 2022.
“We all feel lucky to be able to play together,” said Herman. “The band [Leftover Salmon] is based on our differences,” he added. “We have a wide range of interests which is a bonus for all of us.”
In 2006, the documentary film “Years in your Ears,” was released about Leftover Salmon, receiving an award-nomination. Nearing its 30th anniversary in 2019, author and friend Tim Newby profiled the band in the book “Leftover Salmon: Thirty Years of Festival,” at which time the band re-released a vinyl box set of its studio albums.
Herman will be joining his son, Silas, whose band is The Tone Unit, for Scotty Sloughton’s BajaFest later this month, and Emmitt’s son originated the Ely Emmitt Band, “moving the salmon eggs forward into the next generation,” as Herman said.
“It’s a bold move to produce a music festival,” added Herman. “The greatest way to make one million dollars is to spend $5 million,” he laughed. “Festivals are all about community, and we sure need more of that. We are indebted to these folks.”
Current lineup of Leftover Salmon includes Herman, vocals, guitar and washboard; Emmitt, vocals, mandolin, fiddle and electric guitar; Greg Garrison, bass and vocals; Andy Thorn, banjo, vocals, and electric banjo; Alwyn Robinson, drums and vocals; and Jay Starling, keyboards and dobro. Noted former members include, but are not limited to, Mark Vann, Michael Wooten and Noam Pikelny.
Additional performances on Sunday also will be by Matt Axton & Bad Moon. Late Night will feature Boot Juice and Moxie Barker.
This family-friendly, three-day music festival with more than 30 bands on three stages is produced by Tour Management Solutions with partners Adam Northway and Ryan Kronenberg, who also owns Bluebird Tahoe LLC and SoulTime Sound. Justin Boyd, of Marco’s Café in Lotus, also produces and promotes the show.
The event is coined as “a gathering built on connection, creativity and community.” Tickets for single-day and three-day performances are available at goldenroadgathering.com. Golden Ticket packages and RV passes are available.