Pete Bernhard just happened to be blessed by growing up in a family of musicians. As the songwriter and guitarist for The Devil Makes Three, he learned to turn the rhythms of his childhood into a living.
Dec. 29 | 8 p.m. | 21+ only
Harrah’s Lake Tahoe | Stateline, Nev.
“I always loved old rock ‘n’ roll and old blues music, starting from when I was 12 years old,” says Bernhard. “My dad was a musician. He gave me my first guitar lesson. My aunt, my brother, my mother — they all played, too. It was my family that introduced me to traditional music. Later on, my older brother got wind that I loved old rock ‘n’ roll music, so he bought a lot of classic stuff home for me like Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt. He was a pretty cool guy and a big inspiration.”
“One side is redemption and one side is ruin.
The idea behind the record was to give people an ideaof where we were coming from.”
-Pete Bernhard
For their latest record, entitled “Redemption & Ruin,” The Devil Makes Three took their vision to a classic studio in Nashville once owned by John Prine and Cowboy Jack Clement.
“We recorded at a place called The Butcher Shopppe with an engineer named David Ferguson in Germantown,” says Bernhard. “It’s a pretty cool spot. The Johnny Cash American recordings were done there.”
On this album, the band cut loose and invited friends from the old-time music community to join them for an organic recording experience.
“I think my favorite thing about the new album is the collaboration we did with the other artists on it,” says Bernhard. “We recorded the album live and we were able to get Jerry Douglas, Tim O’Brien and Chance [McCoy] from Old Crow Medicine Show in there, amongst others. It was our first album where we got everyone together just to see what happens. I mean these are guests that are really great; for our genre, they are the best we could find. It created a lot a pressure, but if people were into it they’d hang around. Like the cool thing about Jerry is he stuck around and played on some more songs after the first session.”
The album is comprised of covers by blues and roots luminaries such as Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Ralph Stanley, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Bill Monroe and Doc Watson.
“It was done as a concept,” he says. “One side is redemption and one side is ruin. The idea behind the record was to give people an idea of where we were coming from. We recorded a bunch of tunes by a lot people who inspired us to do the things we do, a lot of our heroes. We wanted to showcase the power of gospel.”
The first half of the album covers songs about the wild lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, music and traveling, while the second half is comprised fully of classic bluegrass gospel tunes penned to sing the lost listener back on home.
“[Addiction] has been a personal thing for me in the past,” he says. “It’s a common topic in a lot of the music that I love. If you listen to country music, it’s a reoccurring theme: hard luck tales, songs about addiction. I do have experience with personal addiction, but so often these are songs that everybody loves and so many people can relate to. The idea of screwing up your life and getting it back together is a universal theme and one I’ve been attracted to as a songwriter for a long time.”
The themes of the album in some ways echo the career of Bernhard and his musical companions who continue to travel the world spreading their love of traditional Americana.
“I hear these people today complaining about how they’re not going to play such and such song because they’re not getting paid,” says Bernhard. “When we first started, we spent five or six years not getting paid. Then we’d go out on the road and we’d make just enough money to pay rent before we headed back out. Now it’s like night and day to be honest with you, but it’s happened so slowly that we hardly noticed. We were never the band that came out with a record that people just loved. It was growth over time. The way we do things now seems completely natural and the way we did it then was totally natural, too.”
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit harrahstahoe.com.
