Over a dozen years down the road, it’s hard to remember the exact wording of the message that Mark Rubin of the Bad Livers sent to the Postcard music listserv. The post was about Austin, Texas, band the Gourds, specifically the band’s debut album Dem’s Good Beeble, and it went something like this: “You need to check out this record. And you know it’s out of character for me to say that because I don’t like anything.”
The Gourds have gone on to make a whole bunch more records for people who don’t like anything. And conversely thanks to a no-filters blend of country of both the cosmic and classic varieties, folk, gospel, ribs of both the spare and shiny varieties, zydeco, punk, cover songs, weed, rock, and soul for people who like everything.
Kevin Russell, who plays guitar and mandolin for the Gourds and writes the songs that his bandmates Jimmy Smith and Max Johnston don’t write, laughs when this fuzzy recollection is shared. “Yes, the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon,” he says of Rubin. The two go back a ways, back to when Russell’s country-punking pre-Gourds outfit the Picket Line Coyotes shared a scene in late-’80s/early-’90s Dallas with Killbilly, a rock/bluegrass experiment in which Rubin did time. Russell describes that era as “the heyday, or dark days, of the white funk movement.” The Picket Line Coyotes had started in Shreveport with a lineup that included Robert Bernard, future Damnations guitarist and older brother of Gourd-in-waiting Claude Bernard, and then moved on to Big D. Shortly after, the Coyotes added a young, green, naive kid from the suburbs of Plano named Jimmy Smith. That’s how Russell puts it, anyway.
The next relocation was to Austin, coaxed there by John Croslin after the Coyotes opened a few shows for Croslin’s band the Reivers. Once there, they kept their cool-connections streak alive by opening shows for Alejandro Escovedo at Waterloo Ice House during Escovedo’s days working at the similarly named record store next door. When the Coyotes faded, Russell and Smith continued to play together, and with Claude Bernard they formed the initial incarnation of the Gourds in 1994. Those three, along with drummer Charlie Llewellin, released Dem’s Good Beeble in 1996, and followed it the next year with Stadium Blitzer, a big ol’ slice of Texas impressionism. The current lineup was established in ’98 when Keith Langford left the Damnations to take over drumming duties, and multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston signed on after stints with Uncle Tupelo and Wilco.
The rest is history nine more albums’ worth, in fact, if you count both the odds & ends collection Gogitchyershinebox and the expanded, even-more-covers-heavy edition Shinebox as well as the brand new Haymaker! At the very least, in terms of longevity, it’s an historic surprise. “It’s shocking,” says Russell of the Gourds’ staying power. “I mean, I know I’m going to be playing music my whole life. I knew I was a lifer from the time I was a little boy; that’s all I ever wanted to do. But the Gourds, I just didn’t think we’d take it that far. It was just really for fun. We were nowhere near as serious about the Gourds as we were about the Coyotes. You know, we really tried in the Coyotes. It’s still a mystery to me how these things work out.”
One possible key to the mystery is a certain consistency to the way the Gourds approach the recording process. “We make guerrilla records,” Russell says; by that he means they’ve always done everything in two weeks recording and mixing and done so on shoestring budgets. “We’ve never had a concept or an idea before we went in to make a record. It’s really just going in and flying by the seat of our pants,” he explains. “Well, we always have songs written, and most of the songs are fairly arranged. But often there are songs that aren’t fully realized until we’re in the studio.”
The goal might seem obvious get the best performances of the basic tracks in the studio but the results have a truly live feel. “That’s it, really,” offers Russell. “From there, we just sort of make it up, be playful with it, be as spontaneous as we can.” Even with those unconventional methods, the Gourds have gone over budget only once, on 2002’s Cow Fish Fowl Or Pig. Stuart Sullivan of Wire Recording studio was the engineer; the Gourds played his wedding, and Sullivan called it even. The rock ‘n’ roll barter system.
The records that emerge are all clearly Gourds records, all clearly descendents of Dem’s Good Beeble. Yet it’s not like the Gourds keep making the same record. There’s enough different about each one, a shifting of emphasis on ingredients from that long list perhaps, to dodge such charges and give each release its own personality. On Haymaker!, gospel rhythms and country comfort play a bigger role than on the last couple of albums. The more ornate chord progressions that decorated several numbers on 2007’s Noble Creatures are set aside in favor of more basic settings, a couple even plucked from Russell’s side-project, Shinyribs.
Russell’s Haymaker! contributions include kissing cousins “Country Love”, a jolly ode to getting a way from it all, and “Country Gal”. The latter, which sounds like a tune that got booted off the The Basement Tapes for having too much country funk, sports the line, “She’s like a ruby rolling round in a bucket of dimes.” (“There was this guy in Missoula, this African-American guy, who used to run a club we played at there,” says Russell. “I remember one time he referred to himself as a raisin in a sugar bowl. So it’s really a variation on that. I’m always thinking of variations of that line.”) There’s also “The Way You Can Get”, a rowdy gospel number that presents a spiritual problem without ever providing a solution, and “All The Way To Jericho”, which just might describe a journey to that missing answer.
Russell is most proud of “Shreveport”, which he calls the true story of his late-teenage years in Shreveport, Lousiana. In an economical three verses, he nails the whole experience. Verse one is a kid soaking in the freedom, and potential loneliness, that comes with a night license: “Roaches in the ashes, truck jamming “Limelight”/Looks like it’s gonna be just me and Geddy Lee tonight.” The harsh second verse takes a look around and concludes, “Fuck a bunch of hairdo boys and their spandex britches/And their big titty, fancy drunk ass bitches.” In sharp contrast, the concluding verse gets tender, as the night ends with two friends singing by the grave of one’s mother. It’s American Graffiti, Shreveport ’86 style.
Among bassist/guitarist Smith’s songs are two standouts. Lyrically, “Luddite Juice”, like many of Smith’s creations, requires a decoder ring and/or a hell of a buzz. Musically, it’s Booker T. & the M.G.’s, with Claude Bernard playing the part of Booker T., by way of Elvis Costello. In other words, it could be a great, lost Get Happy!! track (and, risking charges of blasphemy, I’ll nominate it as potentially the fourth best song on that record). In a similar vein, Smith’s “Fossil Contender” is all soul chord progressions and Warren Zevon-style chugging rhythms. On an album where almost every song is elbowing for space in your head, it’s the one that will claim the biggest and best spot. But the wildest card is the album-closing “Tighter”, written and sung by Johnston. It’s as close to a pure pop song we’re talking La’s territory here as the Gourds have ever done, and perhaps will ever do.
So yeah, as always, there’s that aforementioned country/gospel/rock/pop/soul/et al. blend. And also as always, going all the way back to Dem’s Good Beeble, the two most obvious reference points remain The Band and Doug Sahm. The interesting thing is that the influence and inspiration of that iconic pair has been more gradual than most listeners would think. Russell acknowledges that he’d heard The Band’s big hits and seen The Last Waltz and probably heard some of Sahm’s more popular songs, but he didn’t own a Band record until fairly late in the game, and didn’t know who Sahm was until moving to Austin.
(The Gourds covering Doug Sahm’s “Nitty Gritty”)
“By playing this music and then talking to writers and other musicologists, they’d ask us, ‘Do you know Doug Sahm or do you know these people?’ And we were like, ‘No, I don’t think so,'” Russell says with a laugh. “And they’d say, ‘Well, you should listen to them because you sound a lot like them.’ Which is kind of a neat thing. It felt like we came across it pretty honestly.” He adds, “We then started listening to a lot of their music because we found a kinship with it and learned a lot from it. And Doug Sahm definitely became a big hero of ours.” (The Gourds’ cover of Sahm’s “Nuevo Laredo” will be included on a Sahm tribute album due on Vanguard this spring.)
In a roundabout way, maybe this starts to get at why the Gourds were put on earth and continue to flourish. In a world where Sahm and Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, and Johnny Cash, Ronnie Lane, and D. Boon, are all gone and not coming back no matter how hard we wish, the Gourds provide a kind of comfort by, knowingly or otherwise, echoing their sounds and honoring their restless spirits. And the results feel downright curmudgeon-proof.
