The Thrilling Truth
(the dark story)
As told by Mark Kronar

To try and make this long boring story thrilling, I first saw the Dark Hollow band playing bluegrass music in a local restaurant called Radio Valencia about 8 years ago.

I just had arrived from New York and was looking for a place to eat. This restaurant offered local entertainment and was only a couple blocks from my new dwellings in the city.

At that time,roughly 1993, the band consisted of John Kornhauser singing, playing guitar and fronting the band while Larry Cohea was playing (believe or not) the bass. The other musicians were local folks and are members of other bands which I won't mention because they haven't paid us for the advertising. Anyway what I noticed with the band was there was no fiddle player. I forget who I talked to but whoever it was told me to bring in my fiddle and sit in the following week. Result... 8 years later a CD was hatched.

In the course of time John and I saw many bass, banjo and mandolin players come and go. We even, at one point, formed a dark hollow subgroup with Jennifer Kitchen and called it "Pioneers on a Rope". These turbulent swirls of chaotic member changing all took place within the walls of Radio Valencia, god rest its soul. Slowly, dark hollow began molding itself into a group of moldy individuals.

I can't remember exactly how it happened but one night we were playing at the restaurant, I looked up and saw this big fellow on the mandolin. After about his third gig with the group I learned that his name was Alan Bond. We couldn't get rid of him. Larry eventually settled into the banjo spot after adding a few days to his calendar and as soon as the bass player we had been playing eventually left for Tennessee Jennifer filled the dog house slot. The Dark Hollow band was finally farmed. Now all we needed was a name for the group.

We hung on to the name as well as the players and after about 3 years have finally gotten around to putting together this production of bluegrass as we know it. Hopefully it will reflect the resonance of the Radio Valencia years, which kindly got us out of the starting gate. In any event we are having a lot of fun playing this music trying to stay as close to the letters of the music as possible. We sincerely hope you too will enjoy this collection if not as much as we do at least a whole lot more.