Tune in to Acoustic Café’s 30th anniversary show this Sunday

WDET’s Ryan Patrick Hooper sat down with Acoustic Café host Rob Reinhart to talk about the show’s legacy and evolution since its launch in January 1995.

Collage of Acoustic Cafe sessions spanning 30 years

Rob Reinhart with Acoustic Café session guests from the past 30 years, including Rodney Crowell, Brandi Carlile, Bob Seger, Nathaniel Rateliff, Peter One, Regina Spektor, Rosanne Cash and Shemekia Copeland.

This week on Acoustic Café, host Rob Reinhart will celebrate the show’s 30th birthday by revisiting in-studio performances from the show’s first year on the air.

WDET’s Ryan Patrick Hooper sat down with Reinhart this week to talk about Acoustic Café’s legacy and evolution, as well as what inspired him to launch the show in January 1995. They also revisit a few in-studio sessions from legendary artists like Willie Nelson, Ledisi, Robert Glasper and more.

Listen: Rob Reinhart looks back at 30 years of Acoustic Café

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length

Ryan Patrick Hooper: This is something that you gave birth to, that you created. This is your baby. What was that original mission statement of getting this thing off the ground? What were you trying to accomplish?

Rob Reinhart: Well, if you are old enough to remember what music was like in 1995, “MTV Unplugged” had sort of reached its peak, starting in about 1989, and I was doing a show on a local rock station in Ann Arbor, and we called it Sunday Morning Unplugged, and I was trying to do something different than shows like 94.7 WCSX’s Sunday Morning Over Easy — nothing against that show, but I wanted something different than that, and I didn’t want it to be a folk show like just straight up picking and grinning. I wanted to explore different acoustic music that was happening at that point.

RPH: And at that time, it was following new releases. I mean, you were keeping up with music that was sort of exploding and evolving right then. It wasn’t just, “oh, historically, it’s been this,” it was like, “no, we’re heading this way.”

RR: Yeah. In fact, within first couple of years, we just kind of stopped playing artists like Beatles, James Taylor, CSNY; we just stopped because there was so much other stuff to play. And it was kind of fun because there were a lot of people who in that first five years were just starting out, you know artists like Norah Jones, John Mayer, Suzanne Vega and like all these people in the first chunk of years for us. So there was a lot of cool stuff to follow.

RPH: A big part of the show is having these musicians come through and spend some time with you. Talk about a legend — Willie Nelson is going to be the first one that we play. Tell me about this session from Acoustic Café?

RR: I think he was playing at the Michigan State Fair,  in 2000, and we got him to come. It was Willie and Bobby Nelson, his sister, and Mickey Raphael and the three of them just popped in and played a song, played a bunch of songs.

RPH: You’re very humble about it, but I think it’s cool. You gotta talk a little bit about going to meet Willie for that session.

RR: We did it at a studio that didn’t have adequate parking — it was hard to get a tour bus up the driveway, so we parked them about a half mile down on a side street. Then we sent a car over to get Willie and Bobby Nelson and Mickey Raphael, and then we knocked on the door, and the door opens up and this massive blue cloud just comes rolling out of the bus…but standing in the middle of it was Willie Nelson. It was like he appeared in a cloud of blue smoke and said, “Hi, I’m Willie.”

RPH: So he’s like, “this is truly who I am. There’s no fiction to it.”

RR: No yeah, I mean, it was really amazing.

RPH: You’re always finding things that sort of expand the idea of what acoustic means. When you started, did you think you’d ever end up with artists like Robert Glasper on your show?

RR: Not at all. But we were following new talent. So Brandi Carlile, we were there right at the start of that. Adele, we were there at the start of that. And I think I mentioned John Mayer and City in Colour and Iron & Wine, I mean that’s what was happening. Then, Robert Glasper. And that was kind of a weird thing, we were perfectly willing to do just a straight up jazz session with Robert Glasper Experiment. This is 10 years ago, maybe 11. He was playing in town with Ledisi. And at that moment, they were both on the same label, and I said, “well, since they’re both going to be here, why don’t you bring her as well, which is what we did. We did two separate interviews, one with Ledisi, one with Robert Glasper, and then recorded songs together with the Experiment. So that kind of started that accelerated pace into jazz and blues and R&B. It was harder to mix that in in the mid ’90s, but by the time the 2000s rolled around, it was super easy and super fun.

RPH: You’re following the natural evolution that I think a lot of people have seen in how our listening patterns have changed, where the genre lines are just kind of gone. They’re faint, but almost gone.

RR: Yeah there are a lot of people that we are paying more and more attention to. And actually, I get kind of surprised phone calls from people and they go, “Did you call about this artist?” I’m like, “Yeah! Because I think it would be cool.”

Tune in to Acoustic Café’s 30th anniversary show this Sunday from 1-3 p.m. ET on 101.9 WDET, or stream on-demand at wdet.org.

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