The musical “heroes” that soundtracked Steve Martin’s job at Disney
If you bring the words “comedy legends” to mind, then it’s not long before Steve Martin comes along. The actor and comedian has seen it all when it comes to the comedy game, from his early work of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to the wildly successful movies The Jerk, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Cheaper by the Dozen.
Long before all his success, though, Martin had taken a job at Disneyland, even though he was just ten years old – that “was still legal back then”, he said in a feature with Pitchfork, adding: “I really enjoyed working at Disneyland, and by the time I matured to age 15, I was working there until 2am doing magic.”
It was during his time working at Disneyland that Martin was introduced to the world of bluegrass music. He listened to the likes of the Dillards and Flat & Scruggs through the recommendation of his friend John McEuen, but when it came to seeing a live band, there was only one real option.
Fortunately for Martin, there was an in-house Disney bluegrass band called the Mad Mountain Ramblers. “This girl I worked with at the magic shop always wanted to take long breaks to see her boyfriend, and I wanted to take long breaks to see the Mad Mountain Ramblers,” Martin said, “So we made a deal: ‘Don’t tell anybody.'”
Martin went on to explain his love for the Dillards, who, unlike the Mad Mountain Ramblers, had a comic element to their music. “You would be laughing your head off, then they would start a song going at 90 miles an hour,” he said. “It was thrilling to see.”
While the Dillards provided the humour for Martin when it came to bluegrass, he found the music of Flatt & Scruggs to be equally captivating despite it not being comedic in nature. “They were my heroes, too,” he said. “When I got interested in the banjo, I just went to a record store and found Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Banjo; when you’re interested in an instrument as aggressively as I was, you do everything you can to find out about it.”
The comedy legend expressed how banjo music provided the backdrop for much of his childhood. “Orange County was a big home for folk music back then, and a lot of clubs and coffee houses sprung up,” he said. “There were so many varieties of music being played on banjo at the time, including folk and bluegrass, which are two different things.”
Martin added: “Folk is very Kingston Trio and strumming the banjo, while bluegrass music is picking the banjo. And then I got into clawhammer banjo, which is more American and English – Appalachian, we call it, but the Appalachian music really came over from the British Isles.”
