If Top 40 radio of the ’70s and ’80s meant something to you, if you consider “Baker Street,” “Rosanna” and “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” standards and if you like this music played note-for-note to a packed house of enthusiastic fans, then a Yacht Rock Revue show is for you. On Saturday, January 27, the Atlanta-based septet performed in the WorkPlay Soundstage to a sold-out crowd and we were there to capture the event.

Photos by Brent Thompson

 

By Brent Thompson

A scan of the satellite radio dial is all it takes to grasp Michael McDonald’s impact on Pop music. The vocalist/keyboardist/composer can be found on multiple Sirius XM channels including The Bridge, 70s, 80s, Classic Rewind, Yacht Rock Radio and Classic Vinyl. As a solo artist, frontman of The Doobie Brothers and session musician, McDonald has amassed numerous hits including “What A Fool Believes,” “Takin’ It To The Streets,” “Sweet Freedom,” “On My Own” (with Patti Labelle) and “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).” In 2017, McDonald released Wide Open, a 12-track collection and his first new album in nearly a decade. On Sunday, February 25, the five-time Grammy-winner will return to Birmingham to perform at the Alys Stephens Center. Recently, McDonald spoke to us by phone from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Birmingham Stages: Michael, thanks for your time. Where is your home base these days?

Michael McDonald: Nashville has been my home base, musically, for a few years now but I live in Santa Barbara these days. We kind of live a little bit of everywhere. My wife – I don’t know who’s more of a gypsy, her or me. We seem to be all over the map in the last 20 years. Right now we keep a home in Santa Barbara and I have my studio in Nashville, so I get down there quite a bit.

Birmingham Stages: We are looking forward to your return to Birmingham. The last time you played here you performed at Iron City and your son, Dylan, opened the show.

MM: That was a great venue. We are a fortunate generation in that there’s Classic Rock radio and more venues that cater to music than existed when we were younger. You were either in a nightclub with sawdust on the floors or old auditoriums.

Birmingham Stages: We are really enjoying Wide Open. If you will, talk about the creation of the album.

MM: It was a record born out of circumstance in the sense that a lot of [the songs] were demos that I had cut during the Motown records. I did these demos with the guy who wound up producing the record, Shannon Forrest, a drummer out of Nashville. He’s a world-class, A-list drummer but also a producer. He and I were co-oping on space in a building where I stored a lot of my old keyboards and my old gear. He had a vintage console, so we combined our stuff and put together a haphazard recording situation where we could make some decent analog records and we are both fans of old gear. So, he was working out of there pretty regularly and doing sessions and I would come back into town and – if I had a song idea I’d thrown down on my iPhone – I’d call him up and say, “Hey, if I buy you a pizza, will you make a demo with me?” So that’s what we would do after-hours a lot of times. He’d be done with his day and, rather that let the poor guy got home and see his family, I would ask him to stick around and play drums. It sounded pretty good so there were some fairly decent starts for tracks, even though they were just two-man demos.

He built another studio and, when he did finish it, he used those old files we’d recorded and replaced the drums he had done in my studio. When I came over to see his new studio, he told me he’d been using those files as a reference to record the drums to hear the sound here as opposed to over there. He said, “They sound pretty damn good – I think you have the start of a record here.” So he played them for me and we started pulling in musicians to help build the tracks around the original demo vocals that we’d done and those are still largely the vocals on the record  – the original demos we did at my place. We found that, to a great degree, we were well into this project before we even knew we’d started it. It was nice to have a jump-start.

Birmingham Stages: With a lengthy career so full of hits, how do you comprise your set lists these days?

MM: I try to look at it from the audience’s perspective because that’s what we’re there for. We’re getting up to play for them, so I try to keep that foremost in my head. It’s a lot of trial-and-error but I try to keep a good cross-section of older stuff that I think people will want to hear the most along with older stuff that I think the most ardent fans would appreciate us pulling back out. We compartmentalize the show to address all of those different things and then play as much of the new stuff as we can get away with.

Birmingham Stages: When you play fan favorites – so many including “What A Fool Believes” and “Sweet Freedom” immediately come to mind – how do the songs stay fresh and relevant to you after you’ve performed them hundreds of times or more?

MM: Along the way, when you play a song long enough, it morphs and certain things become part of the arrangement almost accidentally. We kind of fashion the songs as we go because there’s no better place than a live performance on stage to see what a song can do. But what keeps a song fresh to me more than anything else is the audience reaction. When you play a song you’ve played for years, it might be boring if there was nobody in the audience to listen. But when the audience recognizes it and they show the enthusiasm of being able to hear a song that’s familiar to them, it becomes that moment and experience unique to itself and it’s unlike any other time you’ve played the song.

Birmingham Stages: Is there any chance we will get to see The Dukes of September – your project with Donald Fagen and Boz Scaggs –  again?

MM: I would love to think we would. That’s Donald and [Fagen’s wife] Libby’s franchise that started as The Rock & Soul Revue that we just played around New York. We took it on the road and it became The Dukes Of September and it was great fun to play with that band – such a stellar group of musicians. It was great to be onstage with Donald again and being onstage with Boz, I always love touring with him. I hope it happens again. I don’t know that it will, but I’d certainly be up for it again. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that when I was in my twenties onstage with Steely Dan that I’d still be working with those guys all of these years later.

Michael McDonald will perform in the Jemison Concert Hall of the Alys Stephens Center on Sunday, February 25. Tickets to the 7 p.m. show are $59 – $85 (limited $10 student tickets are available) and can be purchased at www.alysstephens.org.

David Rawlings and The Lyric Theatre made for the perfect artist/venue combination on Wednesday, January 24. Though the touring names may change (David Rawlings, David Rawlings & Gillian Welch, The Dave Rawlings Machine), any five-piece string band that includes Rawlings, Welch and Willie Watson gives the audience a satisfying night of music. Of the course of two sets, the quintet played old and new favorites, including songs from Rawlings’ latest release, Poor David’s Almanack.

Photos by Brent Thompson

Touring in support of his latest release, The Nashville Sound, Jason Isbell played the first of a three-night run at the Alabama Theatre on Thursday, January 18. Backed by the 400 Unit, Isbell’s two-hour set included “Last Of My Kind,” “Dress Blues,” “Tupelo,” “Flying Over Water” and a scorching version of “Never Gonna Change” (a song from his days in Drive-By Truckers). Stalwart singer/songwriter James McMurtry opened the show.

Photos by Brent Thompson

By Blake Ells

Photo Credits: Alysse Gafkjen

David Rawlings has become a fabric of the Americana community, notably announcing his presence at the beginning of Ryan Adams’ seminal debut album Heartbreaker in 2000. He’s since worked with Old Crow Medicine Show, Ani DiFranco, Robyn Hitchcock, Bright Eyes and Sara Watkins among others. His own Dave Rawlings Machine has featured his longtime collaborator and partner Gillian Welch, Willie Watson, Paul Cowert, Brittany Haas and occasionally former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones over two records and the touring that followed for nearly a decade. And while the band is the same, they decided to release the latest effort under his name alone.
He talked about that decision before returning to Birmingham. He also chats about coincidentally writing a song that shared a title with a song by Jason Isbell, he offered a look into his songwriting process and he explained the argument with Ryan Adams concerning Morrissey.

Birmingham Stages: Why was it important to you this time to release the album as “David Rawlings?”

David Rawlings: After we had this collection of songs together and we recorded it—we were just starting to understand what we thought it might be, we’d played it for a few people—and we were trying to figure out what to title the album, it just felt—for whatever reason—that the “Dave Rawlings Machine” name didn’t fit very well on it. And a couple of people had asked, “Are you gonna put this out as the Machine? Are you gonna do something different?” And that hadn’t really occurred to me to do something different, but I knew that we were struggling to come up with a name a little bit.
We thought of the Poor David’s Almanack title and it just felt like if we were going to do that, we had to just call it “David Rawlings.” We wrung our hands about it a little bit; we weren’t really sure. You always think about—if you’re in the car and a song comes on and you see the song title and you see your name—we spring from a tradition of singer-songwriters and people just play under their names. So the band is kind of a different thing—if you see “Dave Rawlings Machine,” you’re maybe not thinking the music is gonna sound like what it sounds like. But there’s something about Neil Young or Bob Dylan; Richard Thompson or Paul Simon; all of these musicians that I grew up listening to, that’s what you did.
So we thought, “Well, let’s go ahead and do that. It’s not gonna confuse too many people.” [laughs]

Birmingham Stages: Does that effectively dissolve “the Machine” or is that something you may go back to?

DR: [laughs] No, we’re still playing with the same people. It was just a name, you know? We did more touring as “the Machine,” and we thought about leaving that as the touring name, but that seemed like it might be more confusing than it was. In the end, “Gillian Welch” has always been the name we’ve used as our sort of band name, and we thought, “Well, ‘David Rawlings’ can be the same thing.” And it’s just simpler.

Birmingham Stages: How did you and your friend Jason Isbell react when you realized that you’d both written a song titled “Cumberland Gap?”

DR: I didn’t know—I guess—until I saw his pop up on the radio. I think his came out first—ours wasn’t out yet—we had mastered it and the artwork was done and I saw his title come up and thought, “Is he playing that old tribe song?”
We got a couple of good laughs about it. “Cumberland Gap” is up for American Roots Song for the Grammy against “If We Were Vampires,” and he like, “Man, I wish it was “Cumberland Gap” against “Cumberland Gap.” [laughs] “So we could let people vote on which one is better. But I guess yours wins because yours is up for a Grammy and mine isn’t.” [laughs]
I don’t think that’s true. I really like his. You know sometimes, it makes you wonder about the cultural zeitgeist and what’s popping around in people’s heads and why. I have a clear memory of how that title popped into my head—obviously I know the traditional song—but I was working on that melody and working on that song and I guess I had a couple of lyrics that I wanted to put in the chorus, but I didn’t have a title; I didn’t really know where the song was gonna go. “Cumberland Gap; a devil of a gap” literally just popped out of my mouth.
I wasn’t thinking—sometimes you just open your mouth and see what you say—and that’s what I said. It came from nowhere as much as anything, but as soon as I talked to Gillian about it and she got her mind around what kind of story that made her immediately think of and we started developing that story and working on it, we were really happy about it. There seemed to be a real feeling of a journey or of exploration or of freedom or frontierism; all of those feelings were in the music and in the melody for me. So it was easy to focus those thoughts around something as important as the Cumberland Gap was in history—a gateway to the west back then.

Birmingham Stages: All of these songs in this collection have an extremely timeless quality about them—they feel like they were written 30 or 40 years ago, and I imagine they were all written fairly recently, especially a song like “Airplane.” How do you do that when you’re writing songs? Where do you draw that timeless quality from?

DR: “Airplane” is something that Gillian had started—as far as these songs, that was maybe the one that got started the longest ago. That was maybe three or four years ago, Gill had written the top part of that chorus—which was just beautiful—and we always liked it, but we didn’t really finish the chorus the way we wanted to and it didn’t connect to much else of a story, so it was something she’d sung some; we’d thought about it—it probably hung around a couple of weeks, but eventually, it just kind of stayed in my head as this cool thing. In the spring of 2016, I was sitting around and I started playing that and I had a couple of ideas—and it did kind of connect to songs from the 1970s—that thing that has a Southern feeling to them. I started to hear it that way; it wasn’t how it initially was. So I thought, “In a song like that, I’d want those chords to stay pretty much the same the whole song and write a verse that connected to it; that had kind of a different feeling, but was over the same music.” And I managed to wrap up the chorus in a way that we thought was cool.
So I think sometimes it’s good to have written a little piece of music and get some distance on it. Then you come back and you view it through another lens and you think about it relative to some different music and then you can kind of shape it a little bit to use some of the things that those songs use to make you happy.
In songwriting, you need to kind of be inside yourself, finding things that work; and then outside yourself at the same time, looking back at what you’re doing and thinking, “Well, how would this make me feel if I was just listening to it?” So when you say, “How do you do that?” it’s being able to toggle the switch between wanting to express yourself, but also wanting to use things that you’ve heard or feelings that you’ve heard that have moved you; trying to use those same kinds of devices.
I’m glad that it hit you well.

Birmingham Stages: You and Gillian have always backed one another on tour—how do you balance that at this point in life? Do you make a conscious decision that, “This is going to be a Gillian Welch year” or “This is going to be a David Rawlings year?”

DR: The business has more to do with how it ends up than we do, because if we could set it up where we played a few shows with her name on it and then a few shows with my name on it; that we could records some songs one day and the other songs another day, we’d probably be happier with it. Maybe the hardest thing about trying to do both of our music is that you kind of have to do it in chunks. If you want to think about the most natural way it is, we’re sitting in the room playing songs—she’ll sing a couple, I might sing one, she’ll sing one, I might sing a couple—that’s kind of how it is; it’s just music. We both like singing lead and we both like singing harmony.
She’s such a great singer and writer that it’s easy to do; this record we just made, it was a struggle. Because we thought, “We just made a record with my name on it, do we really want another one?” and we thought, “Well, these songs just popped up, faster than we’ve ever done anything.” And we recorded them—we budgeted seven or eight or nine days to record—and really ended up getting most of it in a couple of days. So it was all of a sudden there and we just put it out into the world.
From the outside, the impression is that we’re focusing on that, but the truth is, since we’ve been doing this, we’re just working on new songs and trying to get something together so we can get our next recording out as soon as we can.
When you say, “How do you balance it?”—well, you just get up every day and start thinking about what you want to happen and try to make it happen. Maybe someday we will be able to do shows where we’re just swapping off like we would normally do.

Birmingham Stages: How did Ryan Adams’ argument with you concerning Morrissey begin?

DR: It’s confusing if you listen to the recording; it sort of seems like we’re talking about “Suedehead,” but we were talking about “Hairdresser on Fire.” I had gone looking for that song on Viva Hate the night before—I had a cassette of Viva Hate—and on the back of that cassette, the way the text lays, “Hairdresser on Fire” is on a line that gets kind of obscured by the way the plastic kind of goes together. The plastic is round and it refracts the light so you don’t see that line of text; so I’m looking at Viva Hate thinking, “I thought that was on here” and it was like, “That’s not on here!”
I knew it was on Bona Drag, because I listened to that a little more. So I grabbed Bona Drag and I listened to it and we were talking about “Hairdresser on Fire” and he was saying it was on Viva Hate and I was saying it was on Bona Drag. And I was like, “No, I just looked.” And that’s how it started. And of course it was on both. So there was no real definitive winner of the bet.
It cracks me up. That was a lot of fun and we were talking with Ryan; he’d lived in Nashville for a minute then and we used to get together and jam and party and have a good time. We weren’t even really planning on going and working on that record, but he started doing it at Woodland and he called us up and asked us to come in a play for a few days and we ended up playing a lot of the record over three or four days. It was just all loose, and I thought it was really smart that they started the record with something that showed just how casual the sessions were. I think that’s a really powerful record and a great collection of art and a great collection of songs. And I think it’s a real testament to somebody like Ryan whenever you can have done that quality of work, but keep that kind of spirit on the record and not make the record itself too precious.
I talked to somebody the other day that mentioned how different that record sounded in the face of whatever else was coming out at that moment—I think I said Stone Temple Pilots or something—you know what I mean? For people that wanted that kind of feeling or that kind of music, it was a real landmark. We were just proud that we got to be part of it.

David Rawlings will perform at the Lyric Theatre on Wednesday, January 24 at 8 p.m. There is no opening act listed on the bill. Tickets start at $36 and can be purchased at www.lyricbham.com.

By Brent Thompson

Highlighted by an album release (Bitter Words), a headlining WorkPlay show and an appearance at Sloss Fest, 2017 was an eventful year for hometown favorites Riverbend. On Friday, January 5, the quartet – Stanton Langley, Price Pewitt, Sims Ruffino and Max Simon – returns to WorkPlay Theatre with The Essentialists opening the 8 p.m. show. Advance show tickets are $10 and can be purchased at www.workplay.com.

By Brent Thompson

The word “Stalwart” is defined as “Loyal, reliable and hardworking” and it’s a definition befitting of Cowboy Mouth. For more than 25 years, the New Orleans-based band has toured incessantly, packing houses and leaving a trail of satisfied and sweaty audiences along the way. In 2016, Cowboy Mouth released The Name Of The Band Is…, a collection of re-recorded songs including the radio hit “Jenny Says.” On Friday, December 29, the band will return to Birmingham to perform at WorkPlay Theatre. Recently, Cowboy Mouth frontman and multi-instrumentalist Fred LeBlanc spoke with us by phone as his excited young children (after all, it’s Christmas time) played in the background.

Birmingham Stages: Fred, thanks for your time. We are looking forward to getting Cowboy Mouth back to Birmingham.

Fred LeBlanc: We’ve been having a lot of fun in Birmingham the last few years. WorkPlay is a great place to play – everybody can see and everybody can hear. We played a really good show at Otey’s Fest for about 2,000 people. We’d played in Memphis the night before and our guitars had gotten stolen and we didn’t know what we were going to do. We came to Birmingham and people couldn’t have been nicer and arranged for us to rent some guitars for the night.

Birmingham Stages: You still bring incredible energy to every performance even though you’ve earned the right to dial it back at this point.

FL: I’m not worried about looking silly. No matter how outrageous people get at our shows or how much fun they have, they can always look at me and say, “I don’t look anywhere near as silly as that guy.” A lot of my energy comes from basic enthusiasm for what I’m still allowed to do, which is having people come see us and I’m very grateful to be able to still play in a great rock band, tour the country and have a great time doing it. I like to believe that people leave our shows feeling better about themselves, not just the experience. It’s always important to remember that you’re as much a part of the equation as anything. The audience is as much a part of it as I am and if it wasn’t for them, then we couldn’t do that.

Birmingham Stages: Though you’re known primarily as a drummer, you often write on guitar, correct?

FL: I can play guitar, bass and piano, but the songs come to me more or less fully-formed or I’ll have a riff. The riff in “Jenny Says” came to me when I was in a band called Dash Rip Rock and we played it for a little while. There was a John Cougar Mellencamp song called “Rain On The Scarecrow” and I was trying to play the opening riff [hums riff notes] and I hit the wrong thing and thought, “Hey, that sounds kind of cool.” I put a swing to it and there it is.

Birmingham Stages: If you will talk about your latest album, The Name Of The Band Is…

FL: It came out in the last year and a half and we’re getting ready to do another one. That was our “greatest hits” and this one will be our “greatest misses” [laughs]. We’re doing some of the old songs that I wasn’t pleased with in terms of how they were recorded or songs that never got as much attention.

Birmingham Stages: How would you describe your writing process and the manner in which you lay down ideas?

FL: They come to me whenever. The reason a lot of your creative types tend to be crazy is we realize we don’t really do anything – it’s just waiting around for inspiration to take hold. When that happens, you put whatever craft or energy you can to make it better but the diamond presents itself and I shine it up a little bit.

Cowboy Mouth will perform at WorkPlay Theatre on Friday, December 29. Tickets to the 8 p.m. show are $17 – $20 day of show – and can be purchased at www.workplay.com

By Blake Ells

Bully made a huge mark on Nashville’s new rock sound with this year’s Losing, a critically acclaimed sophomore effort that is topping everyone’s year-end best-of lists. Raised in Minnesota, Alicia Bognanno formed the band when she came to Middle Tennessee State University to pursue a degree in audio engineering.
On the band’s way into Birmingham, Bognanno talked about how engineering remains a passion, signing with Columbia Records and maintaining “cred” while on a major label.

Birmingham Stages: Bully is a Nashville band, but you grew up in Minnesota. Which do you identify with more?

Alicia Bognanno: Definitely not Nashville. I like Nashville, but I’m not a Southern person; I don’t have a deep love for the South. It’s cool, it’s a great place to live and it’s very practical to be a band there, but I feel more at home when I’m in Chicago or Minneapolis for sure.

Birmingham Stages: Is that because you feel alienated from mainstream Nashville?

AB: No, I grew up there. I like the weather there.

Birmingham Stages: When you were attending Middle Tennessee State, you managed to get an internship with Steve Albini. How did that happen?

AB: I was in school for audio engineering and they knew that I wanted to do an internship for credit points and I was interested in analog recording, so I emailed them and inquired about an internship.

Birmingham Stages: Were high profile internships like that common for MTSU students?

AB: That’s hard to say. I didn’t really know anyone else from MTSU that had done it, but I think a lot of that is because it requires traveling and you have to be in Chicago for a while. But it was great. It was really awesome. It was a great experience.

Birmingham Stages: Did you intend on having a band, or was the original goal to go into the production side of the music industry?

AB: No, I always wanted to play music.

Birmingham Stages: When did you first start playing your own music and writing your own songs?

AB: When I was in high school, but mostly in college.

Birmingham Stages: Did you have a band in high school?

AB: No, I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and no one was really playing in bands, which is why I kind of went the engineering route. Once I was in college, everyone was playing music and in bands together and going to house shows. It was a little bit easier to get a band together or find people to play live.

Birmingham Stages: Being isolated from music a bit in Minneapolis, how did you first discover the bands that influenced the music that you make now?

AB: I had a couple of really good friends with really good taste in music that introduced me to a lot of the bands that I love now. A lot of it was the people that I was around and their desire to play music and listening to good music and being supportive of one another.

Birmingham Stages: Would you like to move forward as a musician and a producer? Is it something you want or is it even something you feel like you’d have time for?

AB: It kind of depends—I can always focus on engineering, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen anytime soon. So I’ll just keep going and balance the two of them when I can.

Birmingham Stages: Have you worked on anyone else’s record or has all of your focus been on your own music?

AB: Mainly just Bully stuff and stuff that I’m doing for friends.

Birmingham Stages: Did you have any reservations about maintaining “cred” when you signed with a major label or did the tour support make accomplishing the goals you have for Bully easier?

AB: I did—we were talking to SubPop at the time and I would have preferred to do that, but nowadays, most indie labels are owned by majors. So it’s not that big of a difference. But yeah, to be honest, at the time we really needed a van so we could tour. I was driving around in a $3,000 salvaged minivan that I traded my car for and all we wanted to do was play. So we were going to sign with whoever was best for that.
The people that we were talking to at the label were totally cool with us having creative control and me engineering it and producing it and we liked that part of it, so it ended up working out great. And they were awesome. And it’s been great with SubPop, too. We didn’t have any major label horror stories of them trying to manipulate our sound or tell us how to write or anything like that.

Birmingham Stages: Who do you think is most responsible for the new rock sound in Nashville and how does it coexist with the Nashville that everyone knows?

AB: Since I’ve been there, there’s always been a rock scene and an independent scene and so many people that contribute to it that it’s hard to point out one person. And we all [coexist]. When I was working the Stone Fox, we’d have rock shows, but there were tons of people around our same age doing their country thing. It’s totally cool; we’re all friends and definitely not competitive. Parts of it overlap, and it’s easy to like both things and bounce back and forth. It’s a very supportive place for a lot of genres to coexist in.

Birmingham Stages: Was Sleater-Kinney an influence for you?

AB: I loved Sleater-Kinney, but I think I was influenced the most by Kim Deal of The Breeders. Pod was a really, really special album for me. I’ll never forget listening to Pod for the first time and everything about it was just so incredible. When I think about albums that I just sat around and listened to on repeat, Pod was one of them. Also anything that Kim Gordon has been a part of has meant a lot to me.

Bully will perform at Saturn on Tuesday, December 12. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show begins at 8 p.m. Smut and Snacks open. Tickets are $14 and can be purchased at www.saturnbirmingham.com

Singer/songwriter brings his Manic Revelations tour to Saturn

By Brent Thompson

Photo Credit: Nate Burrell

In both his look and songs, Pokey LaFarge exudes the word “timeless.” Exposed to several classic American music genres in his youth – Blues, Folk and Western Swing among them – the modern-day troubadour has taken these same sounds and melded them into his own unique style. Earlier this year, LaFarge released Manic Revelations [Rounder Records], a 10-track collection that finds him breaking new ground (heard in the soul-tinged “Better Man Than Me”) while still retaining his musical sensibilities. On Thursday, December 7, the singer/songwriter/guitarist will perform at Saturn with The Easy Leaves opening the 8 p.m. show. Recently, LaFarge shared his thoughts on his new album in particular and the current musical climate in general.

Birmingham Stages: We are really enjoying Manic Revelations. Were these songs mostly newer compositions, older ones that had been around for a while in bits-and-pieces or a combination of both?

Pokey LaFarge: [They’re] all new tunes were written in a few months’ time around the early part of 2016.

Birmingham Stages: You seem to have a great foundation of American history and American roots music thanks to your family and upbringing. If you will, talk about how those translate to your career.

PL: I used to think about that and talk about that a whole lot more. These days I’m trying to relearn everything, so as to not get bogged down with what I think I know or what others think they know.

Birmingham Stages: Your can hear a mix of genres in your sound. Is that something you consciously strive for in your writing or is it the natural outpouring of all you’ve absorbed over the years?

PL: I don’t try and think of genres so much as I do the feeling I get from certain artists and personal experiences. That is what I try to capture very organically in my music.

Birmingham Stages: How would you describe your writing process? Are you more productive at home, on the road or wherever the inspiration strikes?

PL: I write all the time but it is at home – where if I can find the downtime – I’ll turn everything off and I finish my work.

Birmingham Stages: Some artists say this a great time because iTunes, satellite radio and Youtube provide instant accessibility around the globe. Others say that it’s a hard time to separate yourself and be heard among the crowd for that same reason. How do you view the current climate?

PL: I’d say both are true, in fact. I wouldn’t pretend to say one side is more right.

Pokey LaFarge will perform at Saturn on Thursday, December 7. The Easy Leaves will open the 8 p.m. show. Advance tickets to the 18+ show are $16 and can be purchased at www.saturnbirmingham.com.

 

A conversation with singer/guitarist Jimbo Mathus

By Blake Ells

Jimbo Mathus moved back to Taylor, Mississppi around 2003 and he’s been a big part of Oxford’s music community since, making frequent appearances on Thacker Mountain Radio. He grew up in Corinth, just south of Jackson, Tennessee and just west of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. When he was 16, he recorded with legendary Florence native Sam Phillips in Memphis. He studied at Mississippi State before leaving for Chapel Hill, North Carolina; he’d spend a decade there and begin a music career before moving back home. So he has a bit of a relationship with the South.
He talked about that relationship and about recording with Phillips. He talked about Buddy Guy and Mississippi State and Ole Miss and Memphis and W.C. Handy, too.

Birmingham Stages: How did end up recording with Sam Phillips at 16-years-old?

Jimbo Mathus: Well my shop teacher paid for it. We had a little rock and roll band, and he said he wanted to be our manager. [laughs] It was one of those things, man. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing; we had some 45s printed up and sold them at the sock hops and shit.
He opened up the Memphis phone books and looked up studios and that was the one he saw. He didn’t know Sam Phillips from Abe Lincoln. That’s just the one that was open and the one that we went to—I didn’t even realize until years later where the hell I’d been. Roland James was the engineer and all that. I didn’t realize all that shit until years later.

Birmingham Stages: Did you accidentally meet Sam when you had that session?

JM: No, because we were just a session for hire. We probably had half a day—two or three hours. But I do know that Roland James was the engineer, because he was the house engineer then.

Birmingham Stages: When you recorded that record, were you already writing your own songs or were you performing covers?

JM: I was just starting to get hip to the concept of writing my own songs. I didn’t start that in earnest until I was 17 or 18—about 18.

Birmingham Stages: Did you ever get grief in Mississippi for being a white guy playing the blues?

JM: I didn’t really do it in public; it was just kind of a private thing that I was learning on my own. By the time I started playing blues in public, I had already won a Grammy for the blues with Buddy Guy, so I didn’t catch a lot of grief behind that. [laughs]

Birmingham Stages: How important was his seal of approval and how valuable was the time you spent with Buddy?

JM: Oh my God—it was incredible. I learned so many lessons, man, and when you’re working with somebody like that—you ain’t just learning about the blues, per se, you’re learning about everything. You’re learning about music, handling your business and being a master at what you’re supposed to be doing. I worked with him on and off for five years.
After that experience, I was like, “Well, I reckon I’m a blues guitar player now.” I really don’t have a lot to be ashamed of, so I just jumped on in.

Birmingham Stages: How did you get hooked up with Buddy? How did he get the notion that you might be a blues guitar player when you weren’t really playing in public that way?

JM: At that time, I was in the heyday of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, which had little or nothing to do with what I was doing with Buddy Guy. But some people that had known me in some studios—particularly down at [a studio] down in New Orleans—recommended me for the job because they knew me and they had spent enough time with me to know. Here I was playing a lot of different types of music—including the blues—and they wanted sort of a wild card approach to it; they didn’t want the standard dude anyway.
So it came through word of mouth—the producer called me and he had never heard of me and didn’t know anything about anything pertaining to me. But he said, “Man, you’re recommended.” And he explained the concept to me and I told him I’d be perfect for it and he said, “I think you’re right.” And he hired me. He told me to get down there and that started a whole new path to my life. Pretty amazing.

Birmingham Stages: How did you first meet Luther and Cody Dickinson and what’s that relationship like now?

JM: I met [the Dickinsons and their father, Jim] at the same time. That was in Memphis at a place called Barrister’s; it was a club—one of the only times that the Zippers ever played in Memphis back in the day. [Luther’s] band Gutbucket was the opening act. We were just passing through town; I didn’t know anything about Luther, but I knew about Jim; I knew about his history and what he’d done and who he’d worked with and all that kind of stuff. Luther and I hit it off big time and started communicating and started collaborating almost immediately. And the same for Code-man, but Luther is more of my main collaborator.
I went on to work with Jim—I played on a lot of his records—I think Killers from Space, Jungle Jim and the VooDoo Tiger and he and I became really good friends around the mid ‘90s.

Birmingham Stages: You grew up in Oxford and you went to school in Starkville for a little bit—are you a Rebel or a Bulldog?

JM: I plead the fifth.

Birmingham Stages: So that’s as dangerous of a topic there as it is here?

JM: Hell yes! [laughs] I got arrested in Starkville more times than anywhere else, I’ll say that.

Birmingham Stages: Mississippi deals with a lot of issues related to its image. One that’s been a hot topic in recent years is the state flag. Is that something that you think should be changed or rectified in any way?

JM: Yeah. I think they oughta go back to the old magnolia tree flag. That’s just me.
I changed my mind about that over the years. And that’s the way I feel about it. Because that rebel thing—ain’t no way to spin that in the modern world—just drop it. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Birmingham Stages: Squirrel Nut Zippers was a lot different than everything else you did. Was that deliberate?

JM: Well, it was the first thing I was known for, so most people think everything I’ve done in the 20 years since then was different from that. It’s a whole different genre of art; it’s based on other things than the rest of my career, like honky tonk music, blues, rock and roll, psychedelic, swamp pop, gospel, all the other stuff. It’s not early American jazz, vaudeville, cabaret, calypso and all that other stuff. It’s just two different things. It wasn’t on purpose. It was by accident; I wanted to learn everything I could about music, art, everything that had gone down to lead up to where I was at in my life at that time. So I set about learning all about it and it was a product of me figuring out how to play W.C. Handy; how to play jazz. So naturally, as a writer, when I learned the moves, I started writing in that genre. And that happened to take off; it was really quite an accident that anybody ever heard that kind of thing out of me. It was a wild accident.

Birmingham Stages: I think in a lot of the other things you do, you can hear what geographically influences you. But you can’t with Squirrel Nut Zippers. So was that Handy?

JM: Yeah, it came from people like W.C. Handy, Stephen Foster, Louis Armstrong, “Fats” Waller, Bertolt Brecht. German theater—we had the whole costuming—look and style of theater. And my whole thing was Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht—German-type stuff; the calypso stuff—Lord Executor, Roaring Lion—they were like the first rappers, basically. New Orleans has quite a bit of it. That’s where geography comes in.

Birmingham Stages: I guess now that I think of it, Mississippi probably gets a lot of influence from New Orleans and Muscle Shoals and you’re in the middle of that weird molding together of two sounds.

JM: Yeah! And it comes out of Jackson, Tennessee. Memphis is the center of my universe. It pulled from the Delta, it pulled from the hillbilly music, it pulled from Muscle Shoals, it pulled from Tupelo—so Memphis is the geographic center of my music.

Squirrel Nut Zippers Christmas Caravan comes to The Lyric Theatre on Friday, December 1. Doors open at 7 p.m. Show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $28.50-$49.50 and can be purchased at www.lyricbham.com.