Ellison Langford

Ellison Langford
Nov. 12, 2012
JOU 4111

Jon Gaunt wears a lot of black. Black cap pulled over his eyes, black T-shirts, black jeans, and black boots. It’s not a surprising wardrobe for a punk rocker in his mid-30s.

What is surprising is when he tucks a fiddle older than most American universities under his beard and plays so sweetly it sounds as if he’s drawing the bow across your heart.

He never planned to be a punk rock fiddle player.

“Shit, I thought I’d be married and be a teacher,” he said.

Definitely not playing with punk rock hero and saint Chuck Ragan; headlining The Troubador in Los Angeles, birthplace of Guns N’ Roses; or touring Europe.

Gaunt, 36, plays fiddle with Hot Water Music vocalist Chuck Ragan in Ragan’s folk punk solo project. He began learning classical violin when he was 5 but never planned to play professionally. Until he got a call from Ragan several years ago asking him to play a set with him at Gainesville’s annual punk festival called The Fest.

Gaunt had been a fan of Ragan’s since college. He spent weeks learning to play two songs on a demo a friend had given him. When show time rolled around, he did jumping jacks next to the stage to fend off his nerves.

“(Ragan) got up on stage and beat the hell out of a guitar and it didn’t seem too much different from what he did in Hot Water,” Gaunt said. “I just remember standing by the Common Grounds stage (a venue in Gainesville), scared to death holding a violin.”

He’s been playing with Ragan now for more than half a decade, but the nerves are still there. It doesn’t help that Ragan likes to show him off.

During their last East Coast run of tour dates, Gaunt went out first, warming up the crowd with Celtic traditional “Irish Washerwoman.” He likes to move around when he plays. Staying loose helps him forget how nervous he is.

He slides his left boot forward a couple feet, bracing himself on the wooden stage. Dark cap low over his forehead, he nestles the fiddle between his jaw and shoulder. His beard swallows everything below the strings.

He draws the bow slowly at first, taking his time with the opening notes. He begins to play faster. The crowd’s clapping builds. His fingers blur over the fingerboard, bow whipping across the strings. He bends forward and back, crouching over the long strokes. The song hits its Celtic zenith, full of merriment and fury. He draws the final note and lowers his bow to an eruption of shouts and applause.

“I’m happy that Chuck wants me to do that and affords me the opportunity to do that, but I never get excited up there by myself and start the show,” Gaunt said.

You would think after playing an instrument his entire life, Gaunt would have those stomach butterflies pinned to a display on his wall. But he still gets them. His nerves wind him so tight the week before leaving for tour that his friends notice.

A lifetime of playing and thousands of private lessons ought to give him some confidence, but he feels at a disadvantage to the as the self-taught, “three-chords-and-done” musicians he backs.

“Their memory and ability to learn songs is so much better,” he said. “And these guys have been doing it since they were 18 so it’s like breathing.”

It’s the verse-chorus format that gets him. He’s used to songs having a beginning and an end, not going in circles. When something happens on stage and they have to start a song again, everyone else knows what “third verse” means, but he needs the lyrics to know what to play.

When learning songs, he makes pages of notes that he hopes to not have to bring on stage. He wrote three pages for alt-country singer, songwriter Cory Branan’s “Survivor Blues,” wishing he could just get inside his head and know what he was thinking.

Gaunt has never been one to draw attention to his playing. In high school, his friends never heard him play outside the occasional high school orchestra performance. Except for one time when they showed up to his house to pick him up to go skateboarding and caught him during the end of a practice session.

It was the same way when he started teaching himself how to sing and play the guitar around the time he turned 30. He was so concerned about bothering his neighbors he bought two layers of eggshell foam to nail to his walls as soundproofing. He practiced in the kitchen, the only room where they didn’t share a wall. If he thought he was getting too loud, he took them a six-pack of beer or a bottle of wine.

But it was insecurity, not shyness, that led him to quit the violin when he got to college.

He went to James Madison University in Northern Virginia for a music industry program. His classmates’ playing intimidated him.

“I’ve been doing this all my life, and I’m not good enough to continue,” he thought. So he quit. For four years.

And then the early 2000s bluegrass revival hit.

“Something just grabbed me about it at first,” Gaunt said. “It was so different and so warm. I really liked the vocal harmonies. There was something super talented about it, but still raw.”

He says getting into folk was like getting into punk for the first time, all over again. The local public radio station had a bluegrass show and, on days when he had nothing else to do, he drove around listening. He would pull back up to his house and stay in the car, needing to hear “one more song.”

But no one else seemed to get it like he did. Recommendations came from a few acquaintances who had grown up in the mountains. People he didn’t know would hand him CDs at shows because they’d heard he liked bluegrass.

He started playing again. But, this time, he was playing fiddle.

“Just kind of this whole new world opened up to me instead of just playing symphonies and Mozart– Celtic music and bluegrass,” Gaunt said. “You could pick and choose. It was like a kid in a candy store.”

One day a friend was picking an acoustic guitar in the living room and asked him to join in on fiddle. It was the first time he’d ever tried to play with someone without a stack of sheet music to help him along.

It worked.

They started a band “Guerilla Grass” on the agreement they would never tour. Instead, they played restaurants around town a night or two a week for free beer and pizza. And for friends in their living room.

But he was nearing 30. It was time to stop this “imaginary lifestyle” as he called working in kitchens and playing one night a week at Satchel’s, a restaurant in Gainesville. His friends had all taken restaurant jobs when they moved down from Virginia, but it was because they were in bands that toured. He didn’t and wasn’t going to.

It was time to find some security and quit messing around.

Then his buddy Tony gave his name to Ragan.

“Wanted to give me a little call-up from the minor leagues I guess.”

It started with the Common Grounds show. Then flying out to Los Angeles to play the show that turned into Ragan’s Los Feliz album.

Then Ragan called him to do an actual tour.

He was terrified.

It was just a two-week run down the West Coast, but he was 30 and he’d never toured before.

He was also excited. He was playing with one of his favorite musicians, one of the nicest guys in punk rock. It would be OK if he lost his job.

It was two weeks of nerves and mistakes. But it was also two weeks of playing stages stomped by bands like Gun N’ Roses and fiddling next to Chuck Ragan as he beat the hell out of a guitar.

Six years later, he still doesn’t feel like a fiddle player. Too many years spent playing Mozart.

“That’s what’s hard about saying I’m a fiddle player,” he said. “I’ve tried to emulate (their sound). I’ll never truly be a fiddle player.”

But he doesn’t plan to quit.

He says Ragan will tour forever, and Gaunt doesn’t see himself touring with anyone else.

“But, then again, I haven’t had any real offers from anyone else.”

In five years, he’ll be 40. And with Ragan getting more active with his old band Hot Water Music, Gaunt isn’t sure that he’ll be on the road much more than a few months a year. He doesn’t know what he’ll do in the meantime.

“I’m never going to stop playing music and writing music and working with people in music.”