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Brothers on the Scene
Travers siblings team up for show
Friday, Feb. 5, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by DARWIN WEIGEL
Lifelong musicians Lee and Fred Travers pose in the foyer of Lee's Westlawn Inn in North Beach. Lee is hosting his dobro-playing younger brother and his popular bluegrass band The Seldom Scene tonight at 8 p.m. A couple of weeks ago Lee and Fred played a mix of rock and bluegrass tunes at the inn to a packed house.
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It took less than a week for this news to spread and for dinner reservations to sell out: Tonight, four members of The Seldom Scene, a legendary bluegrass quintet, will perform a free concert at The Westlawn Inn, a North Beach restaurant known for upscale fare and Saturday night jazz.
Owner Lee Travers has a final concern: Though he won't have enough seats to accommodate the assumed crowd, will he at least have enough space?
(There is, as well, a developing concern: Weather reports are calling for heavy snowfall, and numerous events have already been canceled.)
The Scene last played on New Year's Eve at The Birchmere. The famed venue in Alexandria, Va., is known for its intimacy but still seats about 500 people. The Westlawn's first-floor dining room seats more like 50, and a small lobby and bar is all that remains.
According to Fred Travers, the Scene's dobro player, the idea for the concert was as last-minute as it was spontaneous. Practically speaking, the show will allow the band to practice before it departs for Rhonda Vincent's bluegrass cruise, for which it will perform for audiences aboard a ship sailing through the Caribbean.
The short story behind this concert is that Lee and Fred are brothers, not to mention longtime county residents.
But the story really starts, believe it or not, as the 1950s segued into the '60s — at a roadhouse in Prince George's County.
The bar's official name was Maryland Sport Club. Patrons called it Popey's, which was also the nickname bestowed upon the owner, William Pope Travers.
Imagine a real-deal beer joint pulsing nightly with live rockabilly and country. Popey did sheet metal during the day and ran the bar at night with his wife, Evelyn. (His parents managed the bar during the day.)
The children, too, Lee, Ron and Fred, would be at the bar with their parents until 3 a.m. At a certain hour, however, chairs were pushed against the walls in the kitchen and the kids went to sleep — until they were awakened and carried home.
In 1962, Popey bought his oldest son Lee his first guitar and even hired someone to teach him how to play it. A year or two later, as rock ‘n' roll was really taking hold, Popey converted the garage into a studio for Lee and his classmates.
By 1965, Lee's band had impressed Harv Moore, an area disc jockey. Moore took the band under his wing, changing its name to Nobody's Children and helping to get a record deal with United Artists.
Nobody's Children recorded several 45s and toured the East Coast for six years. Incidentally, a more appropriate moniker for the band might have been Popey's Children. After all, when Lee's band got signed, Popey was the one who bought a van and drove the group to gigs.
In the early '70s, Lee decided the rock experience had run its course and went into the construction business with his father and Ron.
At 61, he still has hippy blood, he explains playfully at his six-year-old restaurant on a recent weekday morning, but his business has made him more staunchly capitalist. He guesses his business is down 50 percent in the past couple years. Even still, he remains determined to break on through to the other side of the recession.
As Westlawn opens for dinner, Lee is hours away from putting on a tie. Rather, dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and a cool cap, he's fulfilling his carpenter/janitor role while accepting deliveries. The thermostat, meanwhile, is turned so low that you can occasionally see his breath when he speaks.
After his father died in 1993 (his mother passed a few years later), Lee thought about buying a small bar and grill in Prince Frederick. However, his friend and North Beach's then-mayor, Mark Frazer, directed him to a place for sale on Chesapeake Avenue, just off 7th Street, a former boarding house built in the 1920s which had recently been a Caribbean-themed bed and breakfast.
Lee did all the renovation work. In the dining room, he cleared out a spot for bands and put in a sound system, for which a wood ceiling and floor, acoustically, were the perfect compliment.
"I brought it back to the way it felt," he says, and then let the chefs take care of the rest. His first head chef had come from fine dining restaurants in the District, so Lee simply let him prepare the food he knew best. Asked if he was a fan of fine dining, Lee said, "I was a rock ‘n' roller. We were eating bologna sandwiches all the time."
Growing up in a bar, he did know about alcohol (though he says he's never drunk it). He knew about music, too, though nothing about the jazz that would eventually define his weekly lineup.
Meanwhile, local jazz musicians couldn't help but notice some photos — and Nobody's Children's 45s — which hang on the wall in the dining room.
These musicians struck up conversations with Lee and now fill the space with music that was popular when Westlawn was built. On occasion, Lee plays what he calls "AM rock ‘n' roll" here; just recently, he, Fred and two other musicians came together for a casual show billed as a one-time event, for which they alternated rock and bluegrass numbers.
"That's my past," Lee says, looking at the photos.
There he is with Nobody's Children. There he is with Moore, with Neil Diamond, with The Mamas & the Papas.
Nobody's Children once played a national television show in Cleveland with Duane and Gregg Allman. From that, there's a picture of the Allman brothers when they were still The Hour Glass.
And there's Lee playing in Popey's bar. Lee thinks he's 16. And who's the one in the center — on tambourine, with a cap obscuring his eyes?
That's Fred. If Lee was 16, Fred must have been 6.
Fred Travers grew up surrounded by music, and he would travel with his brother and father to concerts. Speaking from his home in Huntingtown, he recalls taking a liking to the country music he heard at the Sport Club, and particularly the sounds which emanated from pedal steel guitars.
He dabbled in drums during high school and later picked up acoustic guitar. In his early 20s, though, he took an interest in bluegrass and eventually started playing casually with friends. He remembers a co-worker at Anne Arundel County Fire Department, where Fred worked for 29 years, giving him CDs by Tony Rice and The Seldom Scene.
In the early '80s, Travers went to a Doc and Merle Watson concert, and The Scene turned out to be opening act. "They had me from the first song they played," he says. "That was it."
Founded in Bethesda in 1971, The Scene were initially known as trendsetters, the rare band willing to adapt popular songs by the likes of James Taylor, Elton John and Bob Dylan to bluegrass.
The musicians, in turn, were known for being as serious about their day jobs as they were about their music, and all involved agreed that the band would never play too much to disrupt that balance — to be just seldom scene.
A decade later, when Fred saw the Scene play for the first time, the group was still with its original dobro player, Mike Auldridge, and Fred was amazed. Auldridge's sound was exactly what Travers had long been searching for.
Before he got a real mandolin, though, Fred started out by raising the strings on Lee's Sears Silvertone guitar. His playing got a major jumpstart, however, when his wife, Kyle, surprised him with a wedding gift: dobro lessons from Auldridge.
Fred met with Auldridge about half a dozen times, showing up with a list of things to practice, he says, and leaving with six months worth of stuff to work on. He wound up playing for Gary Ferguson and also spent a few years with Paul Adkins and Borderline.
One of the first local musicians Fred played with, though, was Mike Phipps, a longtime Calvert County farmer and president of the Maryland Farm Bureau. Tonight, Phipps will serve as The Scene's lone sub, sitting in on mandolin for Lou Reid, who lives in North Carolina. These days, Phipps plays in a Country Gentlemen tribute band led by Bill Yates, who played in the Gentlemen for two decades.
Fred heard the rumors — he was The Scene's newest member — a year before he was invited to join.
But it was indeed the truth: Auldridge was leaving the band to form Chesapeake, and who could better handle the job than a former protégé.
Fred was thrilled. For one, he was a huge fan of the band. As well, The Scene's keep-your-day-job ethos would allow him stay with the fire department and not miss too much family time.
Technically, Fred was an automatic replacement for Auldridge. But when The Scene's longtime band leader, John Duffey, passed away less than a year after he joined the band, Fred's soulful tenor also helped ease the band's transition to becoming the modern Scene.
The last original member, banjoist Ben Eldridge, has assumed the role of bandleader and the lineup has been intact since the mid to late '90s — with him, Travers, Reid, Ronnie Simpkins (bass) and Dudley Connell (guitar and vocals).
Still, you have to wonder … What would Popey think of all this?
Fred went from banging on a tambourine in a beer joint to playing virtuously with a group whose last album was nominated for a Grammy. He only retired from the fire department two years ago.
In Westlawn, Lee proudly shows a visitor a photograph on the wall. He's in the picture with his wife and son, William, the restaurant's manager.
William is not only a talented guitarist, notes Lee, but the fourth generation of Travers to enter the business. "I guess I've become my father," he says. "I'm just a little more upscale."
If you go
Snow reports notwithstanding, The Seldom Scene will perform at 8 p.m. tonight, Feb. 5, at The Westlawn Inn, 9200 Chesapeake Ave., North Beach.
The show is free but tables are sold out. If you want to see this show, your best bet is to show up early and claim a spot in the lobby or bar; show up and enter as people exit; or make a reservation for dinner on the second floor, where you might still be able to hear the music and eventually make your way down below. Call 410-257-0001.
