It’s perfectly natural for musicians to suffer through a case of nerves before stepping on stage at a major concert like Saturday’s Sound Summit, the daylong music festival on Mount Tamalpais.
But for Tim and Nicki Bluhm, a divorced couple who will be fronting the country rock band Brokedown in Bakersfield at the show, the anxiety will be on another level entirely. It will be the first time they’ve performed together since their painful breakup eight years ago.
“We spoke on the phone about it,” he says. “I think we’re both a little nervous about it, but I think it’s going to be fine. At least I hope so. We’ll see.”
It’s also a reunion for Brokedown in Bakersfield — a collective of six seasoned musicians who came together in 2011 to pay homage to the Bakersfield sound, a style of honky-tonk country rock popularized by the likes of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. It will be the first time the band has played together since 2014. According to Nicki Bluhm, she and her former husband were scheduled to rehearse with the band at different times, so they likely won’t see each other until the day of the show.
“There’s a level of professionalism that everyone will bring to the table, so I’m excited to have this band back together again and see how it feels to play,” she says. “I’m a little bit more concerned about the band and what we’re going to play and less concerned about the personal side of things. There’s no way to know or prepare for that.”
A 53-year-old singer-songwriter, Tim Bluhm is best known as a co-founder of the Mother Hips, a band he started at Chico State in 1990 with Novato’s Greg Loiacono. The Hips, as their fans call them, has become one of the most popular and enduring indie rock bands on the West Coast since, releasing 14 studio albums over the past 33 years.
Bluhm has also been part of numerous side projects, including with singer-songwriter Jackie Greene in a duo they call Skinny Singers, and with members of the Grateful Dead. After he and Nicki married in 2007, they began performing together as Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers, a band that had a viral video hit with a cover of Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” that was recorded as they drove in their touring van. It’s been viewed more than a million times.
In 2011, the two signed up as the lead singers with Brokedown in Bakersfield, teaming with multi-instrumentalist Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz on pedal steel, guitarist Scott Law, bassist Steve Adams and drummer Dave Brogan. The band made its debut at the High Sierra Music Festival.
That same year, Tim and Nicki Bluhm twined their voices in harmony on “Duets,” an intimate eight-song collection of mostly original songs that they recorded with just their vocals and Tim Bluhm’s acoustic guitar.
Former glamour couple
They were the glamour couple of the Bay Area roots rock scene. Until they weren’t.
“I’m not sure it was a midlife crisis, but I was definitely unhappy and searching for something,” he says, speaking by phone before a Mother Hips gig in Colorado. “I found something, but it wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be.”
In a confessional article he wrote for Talkhouse in 2019, he talks about his lifelong addiction to “high-risk recreational activities” — rock climbing, surfing, back country skiing — and his desire to “fly free like a bird” by taking up the dangerous sport of “speedflying,” which involves soaring down a mountainside at eye-watering speed under a small fabric wing that some glider and paraglider pilots sardonically call a “death rag.”
“I had wanted to fly for years but never had the nerve to actually do it,” he wrote. “But by the summer of 2015, I had torpedoed my marriage, walked away from my wife of eight years and our home at the beach, and from our promising career together. I felt terrified, guilty and hopeless.”
It would get worse. Not long after the breakup, he was gravely injured in a horrific speedflying crash. He underwent 20 surgeries to repair his left ankle and pelvis. He spent six months in three hospitals over three years and was on powerful intravenous antibiotics to battle infections for months at a time. His parents moved a hospital bed into the living room of their San Anselmo home so he could recover and recuperate with the help of his family, bandmates and friends. The long road back included weaning himself off the opiates he needed to handle the pain. When he was well enough, he moved into his own place in Fairfax, which has a home studio where he produces and records Mother Hips albums as well as aspiring local bands like Forever Goldrush.
“It was pretty life changing,” he reflects. “I really went through some tough times, a lot of medical procedures, a lot of learning about pain. I was in and out of hospitals and wheelchairs for two years. It was hard to stay positive. It was impossible to stay positive. Luckily, I had a really good support system, my parents mainly, my friends and the larger community, which I’m incredibly grateful for. I got really lucky in lots of ways.”
With support from his label, Blue Rose Records, he recorded a couple of albums, the aptly titled “Sorta Surviving” in 2019 and the dark-humored “Gone with the Windshield” a year later.
Starting over
After divorcing her husband, Nicki Bluhm packed up and left her native Bay Area (she was raised in Lafayette), leaving behind her family, fellow musicians and everything she had known, and moved to Nashville, looking to vent, heal and start over on her own.
In 2018, she went into Sam Phillips’ legendary Memphis recording studio and cut “To Rise You Gotta Fall,” an album soaked in heartbreak and pain and no small dose of anger, which she made no effort to hide, titling one of her songs “I Hate You.”
“Her subject matter of sadness and betrayal never relents from start to finish,” says a review in Country Standard Time. “But in pain great work arises and ‘To Rise You Gotta Fall’ hits that mark.”
During the pandemic, she followed up with the softer more conciliatory “Avondale Drive,” an album she recorded with producer Jesse Noah Wilson, who has become, in her words, “my musical partner and my life partner.”
But she’s still dealing with the shrapnel from her shattered marriage. One of the songs on the record, “Last to Know,” includes this bittersweet refrain:
“And if you wanna feel free, take all the time you need/ And if you wanna touch the sky, well that’s fine by me/ And if the choices that you’re making leave you empty and feeling low/It’ll be news to me, I’ll be the last to know.”
“There’s a lot reconciling, healing and forgiveness in the writing and the songs on the album,” she says. “It takes a lot of time to move through hard things, so this is another stepping stone on my journey.”
At the end of August, she was back in her old stomping grounds to co-headline Terrapin Crossroads’ Daydream Vol. 2, a daylong festival at Stafford Lake in Novato. After a few days off in Inverness, the 43-year-old singer traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to perform at the three-day Horseshoe Music Festival. After Sound Summit, she jets off to Europe for a weeklong festival in Porto, Portugal.
Summer of gigs
Like his former wife, Bluhm has a full schedule of gigs and shows ahead of him with the Mother Hips and others, including a Skinny Singers reunion with Jackie Greene on Sept. 16 at the Santa Cruz Mountain Sol Festival.
“It’s kind of like the summer of reunions for me,” he says. “It’s kind of cool.”
At this point, Sound Summit is a one-off for Brokedown in Bakersfield. No other shows are on the books, at least not yet.
“Sound Summit was kind of a no brainer,” she says. “Being on the top of Mount Tam is such a wonderful, special place to play music. Time is healing. And it felt like the right time to get back together. I’m looking forward to playing music with musicians I respect and enjoy collaborating with.”
Bluhm is hopeful that Brokedown in Bakersfield has a future as a band. But first he and Nicki have to get through this one.
“Nicki and I had to have our time of figuring out if we could do this together,” he says. “We still don’t know, but we’re gonna try. If it goes well enough, we may do some other shows, probably next summer. It will be interesting to see. I’m very curious.”
• Details: Sound Summit runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday in the Mountain Theater on Mount Tamalpais with Lord Huron, Sierra Ferrell, Kevin Morby, Brokedown in Bakersfield and Vinyl. Go to soundsummit.net.
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net
