Spotlight on Bruce Lang: A happy-go-lucky guy!

Local Music Makers

There’s not a nicer or more deserving person in the world than “my cousin Brucie,” Bruce Lang.

By Peggy Ratusz

One of the nicest fellows I’ve ever met is multi-instrumentalist, recording engineer and singer, Bruce Lang. I’ve known him and performed with him on and off for over fifteen years. He treats everyone he meets with kindness. He’s quick with a corny joke and his levity brings out the best in people.

Love is the reason Bruce landed here from Connecticut back in 1991. He followed a contra and swing dancing loving girl named Colleen to Swannanoa.

As he’s recounting the story, I’m envisioning a sort of Laurel Canyon situation when he explains, “Colleen shared a large home near Warren Wilson College with several interesting people. They were poets, actors, musicians and even an instrument maker, all living together in this very unique and cool situation.”

They had met a year earlier when both attended The Ashokan Music and Dance Camp, located near the Catskill Mountains of New York.

She had signed up for their Western Swing Dance program. Bruce had a band with his brother called The Dixie Dough Boys and they were hired to provide the music for that program.

“When we met, she told me about the mountains and how she’s drawn to their beauty and magic. A year later I packed up my truck and headed here; which really kind of pissed off my brother since we’d been playing together all our lives.

But it was time for a change. We’d been riding that wave of the whole ‘Urban Cowboy’ western swing music phenomenon and by then it was fading away and I could feel it.”

Since 1980, Bruce worked part time for the fledgling overnight courier service called Federal Express, and as fate would have it, they were hiring in Asheville at the same time he’d made up his mind to move here.

Soon he found work playing gigs through musicians Colleen knew within the contra dance community. One of his first gigs was The Farmer’s Ball that Warren Wilson still puts on today.

He was playing string bass a lot back then but the gig pay was low. He says, “I told myself I had to find other avenues if I wanted to still make a living playing music.”

Serendipitously, he and Colleen happened to go out swing dancing one night and they ended up at the Radisson Hotel where legendary pianist Steve Becker was playing along with guitarist Bob Zullow and drummer Perry Hines.

Incidentally, Perry Hines was actually my first drummer when I moved here ten years after Bruce. But I digress…

As can happen in this town when you’re as good and versatile as Bruce, you start getting offers to play for better pay and in steady situations.

Bruce gives context: “I was recommended to band leader, Maddy Winer who had a band called Maddy & Masterpiece and they played six nights a week on the Sunset Terrace of the Grove Park Inn. That gig allowed me to quit my day job.”

Always itching to sing, Bruce was a bit torn, but after three years he made the very hard decision to leave Maddy’s band to pursue a project that gave him the space to be more of a front man.

“The piano player in Maddy’s band was actually the guy who pointed me in the right direction, advising me to start listening to Sinatra and learn the standards. They were all songs I was very familiar with; songs I learned from my mom who was a Broadway singer in her day. She’s still alive and sings them with me over the phone every day.”

Learning these tunes expanded what he could do. He started his own dance and wedding band. Sometimes he’d add a horn section to really give the people a taste of that big band era sound.

It’s really no surprise that Mr. Lang manifested this long lasting niche for himself. Case in point, for the past fourteen years he’s been playing weekly back at the Grove Park Inn, in a trio called The 3 B’s.

It features Bruce on upright bass and vocals, along with Masterpiece band alumni Bill Covington on piano and Brian Hedgepeth on drums.

Another branch of his many talents is that of recording engineer. Lang has his own 24 track recording studio out in Barnardsville, NC which is on the same property that he and Colleen live.

It’s where they eat fresh eggs from the flock of chickens they raise, and where a babbling brook runs along the perimeter of their property, beckoning visitors, friends and recording artists to take a plunge on a hot summer day.

Bruce tells me the story of how the studio began. “When my brother and I had the western swing band, there was a guy who always came out to listen to us. He just so happened to have a recording studio located in the heart of Time Square in New York.

He let me and the band host a party there where we had all these people come into the studio and we just recorded live, our sets; while the party was happening! In the long run, that recording needed some overdubbing so he let me come in after hours and fix stuff.”

“I just fell in love with the process. His engineers were some of the nicest guys and I’d just observe what they were doing, how they were doing it. That was near the end of 1990 so when I moved here, that resource was no longer readily available to me.

But someone told me how people were having luck recording music on Macintosh computers. Colleen’s computer was a Mac so I just started tweaking its capabilities, and experimenting while reading a lot of manuals.

I was learning this technology as it was happening. Big Creek Recording has been going strong ever since we opened.”

There’s not a nicer or more deserving person in the world than “my cousin Brucie,” Bruce Lang.