Bob Runyon
Ain't We Got Fun!
The nicest thing about the music business today is that it doesn't matter how you started out. It's where you're coming from right now. Bob started out as a kid. Like most of us do. Liking music so much that h [+]Bob Runyon
Ain't We Got Fun!
The nicest thing about the music business today is that it doesn't matter how you started out. It's where you're coming from right now. Bob started out as a kid. Like most of us do. Liking music so much that he forgot to listen when knowledgeable people started telling him what kind to like. Giving that sort of person a guitar screws up the rules we all live by in the music business, we who love to identify a sound, classify it real quick like some birdwatcher making a life-list, and cram it into to the proper file drawer. Bluegrass. Blues. Funk. Shape note.
If Bob Runyon had a file drawer, he'd keep files in it (the kind you saw through bars with.) He doesn't even keep files of the songs he has written. Which would make a considerable pile. This guy is so weird he thinks a musician has to create all the time and can never get comfortable with just laying back and doing the stuff other people chiseled out.
There is a small, but select group of people in the entertainment business who insist on having fun at what they do. Of these, John Hartford, The Dillards, Bryan Bowers, Taj Mahal, The Dry Branch Fire Squad, and Jim Stafford, pop to mind, and there are countless others, who, if music wasn't fun, would cheerfully do something else instead. I don't know if Bob learned his particular view from these people or whether it never occurred to him to get grimly determined about his talent. But they were there for the observing anyway. And Bob doesn't miss much.
One of the things that makes Bob such a good solo performer is that he has opened for more people than the bathroom door at the bus station. And an opening act learns and develops fast the talents of entertaining people who didn't pay specifically to see them.
All those nights of opening for such people as McEuen and Vassar Clements, the Newgrass Revival, and "Gatemouth" Brown, taught Bob the responsibility of being the first person an audience sees. He has never forgotten those days and carries a sense of fun-about-to-happen up there with him on stage along with his instrument and projects it like a dynamo.
The key word to remember here is fun. Bob understands, like most humorous people, the difference between fun and funny. From the moment h
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