David Bromberg Makes A Comeback

It was 1980 and David Bromberg was flying high. The country-blues rocker’s career was only moving up when it came screeching to a halt.

He lost his spark for the lifestyle, but not for the music.

The multi-instrumentalist took a hiatus to open David Bromberg Fine Violins, a retail store and repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, where he now lives. The move came as a shock to his legions of fans who have followed the musician—who has played with everyone from Bob Dylan and George Harrison to The Eagles and Carly Simon—for decades.

But, now, the fire is back and in a major way. Coming off the release of his second studio album since his break, “Use Me,”—which features collaborations with John Hiatt, Levon Helm, Los Lobos, Keb’ Mo’ and Tim O’Brien, among others—Mr. Bromberg will play the Stephen Talkhouse with the David Bromberg Quartet on Friday in Amagansett.

“I figured, what the hell, give it another shot. I got back some chops and started really enjoying playing again,” Mr. Bromberg said during a telephone interview from his home last week. “I won’t work enough to get burnt out. I won’t play places where I don’t think I’ll have a good time. I won’t do travel that will deprive me of sleep for a week, you know? I realized that I probably always could have controlled the whole thing better, but now I control it.”

In the beginning, Mr. Bromberg called the shots. Born in Philadelphia in 1945 and raised in Tarrytown, New York, he taught himself to play guitar at age 13—already proficient on flute and piccolo, with a few skills on the piano.

“When I was quite small, my mother used to play piano to my brother and me, and sing to us,” he said. “But she abruptly stopped. The reason she stopped so abruptly, I found out, was that she was tone deaf. And she stopped because we’d gotten to the age that she was afraid we’d notice.”

He chuckled to himself. “That’s perhaps the most affectionate thing my parents did for me,” he continued. “Hearing her sing to me, that music. She shared music with us.”

His passion led him to Columbia University, where he studied musicology. He found himself gravitating toward Greenwich Village, and it was on Bleecker Street that he met his inspiration and primary teacher, Reverend Gary Davis.

“I asked if he’d give me lessons. He said, ‘Sure,’” Mr. Bromberg recalled. “He gave me directions to where it was and he said, ‘Bring the money, honey.’ After a year or so, instead of paying him, he had me bring him around to church or gigs in exchange.”

In the mid 1960s, the musician took a leave of absence from Columbia, taught guitar on his own and picked up dobro, mandolin and fiddle along the way. He played coffeehouses in the Village called “basket houses,” he said, where the performers were paid from the contents of a basket that the owner passed around in order to skirt the cabaret laws of the time.

These same baskets houses are also where Bob Dylan started his singing career, and that’s how Mr. Bromberg met the music legend for the first time.

“I used to play for the songwriter who wrote ‘Mr. Bojangles’—Jerry Jeff Walker. We played at The Bitter End and Bob would come in and listen,” he said. “I always assumed he was listening to Jerry Jeff, but evidently, he was also paying attention to me. He called me up and asked me to try out a studio with him, by which he meant record.”

Their first sessions together were for Dylan’s record, “New Morning,” which was released in 1970.

“I was sick as a dog,” Mr. Bromberg said. “I would come back from recording and fall asleep in my clothes on the bed, and wake up and shower and go to the next set of sessions. It was kind of difficult, but in the sessions, I didn’t feel sick when we were playing.”

Not long after, Mr. Bromberg was invited to Thanksgiving dinner at his manager’s home. George Harrison, former lead guitarist of the Beatles, was also on the guest list.

“I was working with Bob [Dylan] and George sang me one of my own songs. He’d learned it from Bob. I was astounded,” Mr. Bromberg said. “The daughter in the family had a gut-string guitar, and George and I are both guitar junkies. We passed it back and forth and before long, we wrote a song. We didn’t try to write a song, we just did.”

After a decade of making music and touring with the David Bromberg Big Band, and as a solo artist, he took a different turn. He dissolved the band in 1980 and moved from California to Chicago. Though he played shows occasionally, his recordings slowed to a trickle and then stopped.

He was burnt out, he said. At one point, he was on the road for two years without being home for as long as two weeks.

“I looked around, when I was home for a good length of time, and realized I wasn’t practicing, I wasn’t writing and I wasn’t playing music,” he said. “I concluded I was no longer a musician, which was kind of stupid, but that’s what I concluded. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who drags himself on stage and does a bitter imitation of what he used to love. I wasn’t going to do that and had to figure out another way to live.”

Mr. Bromberg attended the Kenneth Warren School of Violin Making and opened up shop once he moved with his wife and fellow musician, Nancy Josephson, to Delaware. In his years off the grid, he worked on his singing, he said, and fell back in love with music.

And now the 66-year-old doesn’t show any signs of stopping.

“I think world domination. I think that should come next,” he laughed.

The David Bromberg Quartet will play the Stephen Talkhouse on Friday, June 29, at 8 p.m. in Amagansett. Tickets range from $65 to $80. For more information, visit davidbromberg.org.