Hot Rize, based on Colorado’s Front Range, took its name from the secret ingredient Martha White Flour, a long-term bluegrass sponsor. Best remembered for the 12-year stretch from 1978 to 1990 when it was a full-time touring band, the members were banjo player Pete Wernick (aka Dr. Banjo), mandolin/fiddle player and lead singer Tim O’Brien, guitarist Charles Sawtelle, and bass player and emcee Nick Forster. The four had met while working in different capacities at the Denver Folklore Center. From the beginning band members shared an affinity for old songs, but original songs like “Nellie Kane”, “Just Like You”, “Shadows in My Room” and “I Am the Road” became a key component of the group’s sound, as did songs from genres other than bluegrass.
While the group members revered the first-generation bluegrass masters, dressing in suits and vintage ties and singing around a single microphone, they sought not to be respectful imitators but rather, “second generation originals.” Their unique sound, built upon the strengths and limitations of its members, and a free-form stage presence that included their alter-ego honky tonk personalities Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers, endeared the band to a world-wide audience. Sawtelle’s artful and distinctive, often surprising guitar, Forster’s innovative electric bass, and O’Brien’s high-voltage jazz-infused mandolin underpinned Wernick’s creative Scruggs-style banjo and O’Brien and Forster’s vocal duet. With unique approaches to instrumental roles and record production, Hot Rize sounded like themselves – and nobody else.
Touring extensively in the US, with occasional tours in Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada in those years, the group released nine critically acclaimed recordings, including three in its Red Knuckles persona. Ironically the group won the IBMA’s first Entertainer of the Year award in 1990, the year they disbanded, and their track “Colleen Malone” won IBMA’s Song of the Year in 1991.
All four members went on to successful solo careers. Wernick’s banjo and jam camps and the development of his Wernick Method teacher network have combined with recording and touring with his wife Joan and his group Flexigrass (aka the Live Five). Wernick also served as IBMA’s first president from 1986 to 2001. Sawtelle toured extensively with Peter Rowan and produced records at his home studio, including his posthumous solo recording Music from Rancho DeVille. He also fronted his bluegrass band, the Whippets. Forster was a member of O’Brien’s band in 1990 before he and his wife Helen launched the longrunning nationally syndicated radio show eTown. As host and multi-instrumentalist music director, he continues to record and perform with a wide variety of artists. O’Brien has continued to tour and record prolifically, winning two Grammys and producing and guesting on many albums. Several of his original songs have been hits for others, starting with Kathy Mattea’s top ten Country hit “Walk the Way the Wind Blows”, originally recorded by Hot Rize.
Post-1990, Hot Rize made occasional reunion appearances and recorded a live album, So Long of a Journey in 1996, a few years before Sawtelle’s untimely passing in 1999 from complications of leukemia. In 2002, award-winning guitarist Bryan Sutton, who had grown up listening the group’s recordings and gained prominence in Ricky Skaggs’ band and as a Nashville studio musician, joined Hot Rize. The group recorded When I’m Free, a set of mostly original songs. at eTown studios in 2014, and later a live album from their 40th Anniversary Bash reunion in 2018.
