Life can sometimes turn on a tune and it was a tune from singer and guitarist Lester Flatt and banjo player Earl Scruggs that propelled a young man named Greg Cahill away from his guitar and job as a social worker and put him on a bluegrass path that would lead to the formation of a band named Special Consensus, as well as to thousands of performances in towns and cities across the country and in foreign lands, many thousands of devoted fans, a few bumps and incalculable joys.
Now, here we are, and here is Cahill, white-haired and white goateed but still fully devoted to his bluegrass music and telling me, “I am having a difficult time wrapping my head around the fact that when I started Special Consensus, little did I know how long it might last.”
He knows now, and here he is, and here we are. Astonishingly, that road has lasted for 50 years and reaches that point with a glorious new album, “Been All Around This World,” and a concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music with current band members — Cahill, Dan Eubanks, Greg Blake, Brian McCarty — being joined by such band alums as Chris Jones, Dallas Wayne, Robbie Fulks, Andrea Roberts, Marc Edelstein, Don Stiernberg, Scott Salak, Justin Carbone, Keith Baumann, Rick Faris, Chris Walz and Tres Nugent.
It will be a celebration, a chance for the music and stories to spark memories and provide “a wonderful night of reminiscing and love and laughter,” said Cahill earlier this week, after a Monday spent teaching banjo at Old Town School, as he has done for more than 50 years.
Growing up in a musically-minded family — one grandfather was a talented harmonica player, his dad sang in a church choir and his mother was a piano player — he learned the harmonica by the time he was 5, took accordion lessons for nearly a decade and then took up the guitar and banjo, focusing forever on the latter.
He earned a degree in social work in college but music soon took full control and he formed Special Consensus, the name inspired by a book by Carlos Castaneda. The band hit a road rarely traveled by local musicians.
As Mark Guarino puts it in his 2023 book “Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival,” “to purists, a bluegrass musician in Chicago in the mid-1970s was akin to a surfer in Dubuque. … Then came Greg Cahill and the boundaries disappeared.”
It was never easy, and all but impossible to calculate the number of miles in vans and station wagons, the dive bars and honky-tonks, the crowds, friendly and not so. As Cahill tells me, “I would guess that Special Consensus was not taken seriously as a full-time touring and recording bluegrass band for more than half of our 50 years because we are from Chicago.”
But the band attracted devoted fans. Among them was David Royko, a writer, licensed clinical psychologist and the eldest son of columnist Mike Royko, who was passionately knowledgeable about music and wrote about it in the Tribune for many years.
He told me over the weekend, “Twenty-five years ago, I thought it was amazing that Greg was able to keep Special C going for a quarter century. Actually, that degree of commitment makes me think he might be at least a little insane. The bluegrass touring life is not the life of Paul McCartney and private jets. And to be leading that always-excellent, multiple award-winning band all that time, always an excellent band, making turnover an asset, that’s another, completely different talent. And then to boost so many terrific musicians and careers. … Greg is like a bluegrass version of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, a finishing school and launching pad. And any hometown boy that makes it big on the international bluegrass stage, Chicago being anything but a hot-bed for bluegrass talent, for a half-century? Yeah, I was amazed back then. I’m awed now.”
Brian McCarty, Greg Blake, Greg Cahill and Dan Eubanks of bluegrass band Special Consensus in Millennium Park in Chicago. (Karen Murphy)
The new album is the band’s 22nd, its eighth on the Compass Records label, produced by Alison Brown. It has 11 tracks that offer a sort of “best of” gathering. It comes on the heels of “Chicago Barn Dance,” a celebration of the largely forgotten but powerfully influential “National Barn Dance,” a radio program that started in Chicago in 1924 and, airing on WLS, inspired similar programs including one from Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.
If you don’t know the music, snag a ticket to the Saturday show.
Cahill and the others would love to see you. As for plans for the future?
“After the show, we will be heading to teach at a bluegrass music camp in California for four days, then to a festival in Arkansas, a show in Wisconsin, a couple shows in Door County, a concert at the violin shop in Skokie and finish this year with a concert in Clay City, Kentucky,” Cahill said. “We take several weeks of December off every year to be home with family and then our first show of the year is always the Sunday after New Year’s Day at Maple Street Chapel in Lombard. That is a tradition we have kept for at least 30 years. Then we head back to California, then Nashville, then …”
And the road goes on.
6 p.m. Oct. 18 in Maurer Concert Hall at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.; tickets $61 at 773-728-6000 and www.oldtownschool.org
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
