When Greg Cahill formed the Special Consensus in 1975, he was 28 and had already been playing banjo for more than ten years—though for the first few he unwittingly wore his thumb pick backward. When he decided to give it a go as a professional bluegrass musician, he says, it was “to get it out of my system and to learn how to play right.” He committed to a year.
Born on the south side in 1946, Cahill grew up without hearing American roots music. But like so many other musicians of his generation, he got caught up in the 60s folk revival. He heard recordings by Pete Seeger in high school in Oak Lawn, and the summer after he graduated in 1964 he got his first banjo. He started coming into the city to hang out on Maxwell Street, where he was drawn to bluesmen like Robert Nighthawk, or to loiter outside blues clubs he was too young to enter, listening to the likes of Muddy Waters and B.B. King through the doors. That fall he left for Saint Mary’s College in Winona, Minnesota, where he quickly formed a folk-revival trio called the Rye Town Singers, playing banjo and guitar; they gigged mostly at local pizza parlors and coffee houses. Then in ’66 one of his bandmates played him Foggy Mountain Banjo, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs’s only instrumental album, and his days as a Kingston Trio-style folkie were numbered. “It was the first time I’d heard bluegrass, and that was it,” Cahill says. “From then on I was on a quest to figure it out.”
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Today the Special Consensus is a relatively traditional bluegrass quartet, with banjo, guitar, mandolin, and upright bass, but in its early going the band had five to seven members and often included nontraditional instruments like drums and electric guitar. Cahill threw himself into the music with gusto, practicing eight hours a day, and the band hustled for gigs, playing frequently on a strip of Lincoln Avenue north of Webster that was packed with venues like Wise Fools Pub, Orphans, Holstein’s, Lilly’s, Irish Eyes, Somebody Else’s Trouble, and the Clearwater Saloon.
The band’s slow and steady progress continued. By the early 90s they were touring Europe more or less annually and had made half a dozen albums. In 1996 they released their first record on prestigious North Carolina bluegrass label Pinecastle, and two years later Cahill was elected to the IBMA board as an artists’ and composers’ representative, a position that multiplied his industry connections. At the start of its third decade, the Special Consensus had become a popular and highly regarded bluegrass band, with a reputation for producing outstanding alumni. Joining Jones and Fulks on that list are country singer and guitarist Dallas Wayne (who played bass from ’89 till ’91), fiddler Al Murphy (’90-’91), and mandolinists Josh Williams (’99-’04) and Ron Spears (’04-’07), among many others.
Wed 7/21, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, 6615 Roosevelt, Berwyn, 708-788-2118 or 866-468-3401, $10, 21+.
