Earl Scruggs by Gordon Castelnero

Author:Gordon Castelnero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Unbeknownst to Flatt and Scruggs, within those massive crowds, a “Beatles-esque” frenzy was brewing for them as Earl described to Doug Hutchens in 1989 on Bluegrass Today:

It was just unbelievable—how they accepted us and the crowds that we did have. It was really—it just blew my mind. I didn’t know how popular the banjo—well, I had no idea how popular the banjo was over there, but I met one guy who was teaching banjo, and he had a little over 200 students just himself. So it went real well, and I’ve had a lot of personal contact with Japanese people ever since.

The first night, we [were] playing this auditorium, and it was equivalent to Carnegie Hall. It was a real elite auditorium. Apparently, there’d been a band there that didn’t want to do any autographs. So this manager asked if we would sign some autographs after the show, and we said, “Sure, we’d be happy to.” Well, behind the stage they had a little corridor and one side of it was glass, as well as I remember. But they had a table setting to where they couldn’t get by us except but one side. In other words, [they] would come by me first, and I’d sign and Lester signed, then go on by [to] the end of the table. Well, we signed until the time was running low and people knew that they wasn’t going to have enough time to get an autograph. So they got to trying to push in so fast until they pushed this one glass panel down. Well, that wound it up with the promoters. They rushed us into a room, cut out all of the lights, and it took a couple hours, I guess, before we ever got out—and they got us out with cigarette lighters, showing us down the exits. I had fun with the guy on the rest of the tour while I was over there. Each night I’d say, “Can we autograph tonight?”—“No, no, no, no autographs, no autographs.”

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