SLO LIFE Feb/Mar 2018

he Miller has taken the
road less traveled—living
for a time in a teepee
in Oregon as a young
child and hitchhiking
to Guatemala with his
parents at the age of six.
In his early teens, he
Cdiscovered heavy metal
and started playing guitar. Then, at 16, his dad took
him to his first concert: the Grateful Dead. “It
changed my world,” he recalls.
For much of his life, Miller surrounded himself
with music and theatre, but he never really formed
a band. After some years working in Hawaii and
then some time in San Diego, Miller and his wife,
local artist, Colleen Gnos, decided to relocate to
Shell Beach to be near family.
Gnos was out surfing when she met musician Jeff
Pienack and suggested he connect with Miller
since the two were both Dead fans. They struck up
a friendship and began hosting a Wednesday night
jam session around the backyard campfire. The
jamming progressed to performing after monthly
Surfrider Foundation meetings at the former SLO
Down Pub in Arroyo Grande. Miller and Pienack,
the harmonica player, guitarist, and backup vocalist
for the band, built a following, added a few more
band mates, and started performing at other
venues along the Central Coast. The Mother Corn
Shuckers had sprouted.
Describing themselves as a “ragged band
of ‘surf-a-billies’ and ‘shuck-adours,’” their
music embodies a fun-loving sound they dub
“beergrass.” Miller explains, “We’re not really
bluegrass because bluegrass doesn’t have drums,
but we have all the instruments of a bluegrass
band. We just play a little harder, like a mix
between the Rolling Stones and the Grateful
Dead with a bunch of acoustic instruments.”
Next year marks the ten-year anniversary for this
nine-piece acoustic Americana band, and Miller
couldn’t be more proud. “We’re all one big happy
family,” he says. “We’re all unique musicians with
different backgrounds, and I love the sound we
make together.”
Six of the nine band members have been around
since the band’s inception in 2009: Miller and
Pienack along with Mark Hughes on banjo and
backup vocals, Kurt Michels on drums and percussion, Lillian Dennis
on fiddle, and Chris Dennis on slide guitar. For the band’s third album,
“California Grown,” in 2015, they added Greg Steers on upright bass and
backup vocals, Mark Travis on mandolin, and Curt Miller on drums and
percussion.
The majority of The Mother Corn Shuckers’ songs are original “roof-raisin,’
foot-stompin’” jams, and while the band’s first two albums featured Shawn
Canon and Cody St. James, respectively, who wrote songs along with Miller,
their most recent album features Miller as the sole songwriter.
While Miller’s songwriting is influenced by “all the craziness going on
in day-to-day life with a wife and kids,” he is also moved by Americana
lore. “California Grown” was borne out of Miller’s drive on Highway 49
from the town of Oakhurst in the Fresno foothills to the High Sierra
Music Festival in Quincy. “My idea at first was an entire album about
the gold rush, but two songs in particular came out of that trip: ‘Old
Miner’ and ‘Mountain.’”
All three of the band’s albums were produced by local musician Tyson
Leonard, violinist and composer of the electronic group, Tropo. The band
plans to head back to the studio this summer to record their fourth album,
which will be released in 2019 in concert with the band’s anniversary—or, as
Miller quips, “To commemorate ten years of shucking.”
With three years of jamming and performing live together under their
belt, there’s a recognizable cohesiveness to the nine-member band. “We’ve
melded and can more easily anticipate what the others will do, which makes
our improv better.”
Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing something right because The Mother
Corn Shuckers have a pretty big following in San Luis Obispo County.
They appeal to a wide audience, and that’s how Miller and his band mates
like it. “At our shows, we have the really young and the really old and
everyone in between,” he says, “and I just love that people go out to see
music—they respect it; they enjoy it; they take their kids to see it.”
The Mother Corn Shuckers perform regularly at Sea Pines Golf Resort,
host an annual Merri Shuckin’ Christmas party at the Merrimaker in Los
Osos, and have played at the San Luis Obispo
Concerts in the Plaza for the past three years.
“It’s great—everyone comes out, a lot of families,
and a lot of kids, and we just want our audience
to dance and have fun.” The band also does
private shows and is known as a wedding band.
“I don’t know how we got hooked up in that way,
but a website voted us best wedding band of the
year, and then we got all these wedding gigs even
though we don’t play any covers,” chuckles Miller.
For Miller, the bottom line is this: “The Mother
Corn Shuckers is a good time, and that’s the
whole point—a good time.” Go check them out,
and have fun shucking it up. SLO LIFE
DAWN JANKE, Director,
University Writing & Rhetoric
Center Cal Poly, keeps her
pulse on the Central Coast
music scene.
FEB/MAR 2018 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | 49