Twelve years ago Laurie’s twin brother, John (now the Wilco bassist), called her in New Orleans, across Lake Pontchartrain from their hometown of Mandeville. John was going to college up in Oxford, Mississippi, had this band called the Hilltops with a guy named Cary Hudson, and they needed a bass player.
“It was the opportunity I had been waiting for,” Laurie remembers. “I had been trying to play with some people in New Orleans, and it wasn’t really working out. John and I had both played guitar for years, but I’d never played bass before so it was a crash course.”
She shakes her head. “It was really bad at first. Believe me, it was horrible. I ended up taking a real shine to bass. I enjoyed playing guitar a lot, but I feel a lot more natural on bass.” (The results are summarized on a posthumous Hilltops disc, Big Black River, released by Black Dog in 1996.)
Two years later, Cary and Laurie fixed on the notion that moving to Los Angeles was a good idea.
It wasn’t.
They lasted exactly eleven months in the City of Angels. “If it hadn’t been for the Rodney King riots, we might not have wised up so soon,” Cary says. “But that capped it for us.”
“I told Cary after that, ‘You know what? I’m leaving,'” Laurie says. “‘And I’m leaving in a month. If you want to come, I hope you do. But I’m leaving, I’m out of here.'”
They left together with the beginnings of a new band they called Blue Mountain, named for a small Mississippi town they were homesick for, and a renewed interest in Southern music.
Meanwhile, a fellow named Jeff Pachman had gone to work for Roadrunner Records, a New York-based label that specializes in emerging heavy metal acts. Pachman had once upon a time signed Uncle Tupelo to Rockville, and soon enough he signed Blue Mountain to Roadrunner for five albums, partly on the strength of a self-released disc they’d recorded back home in Oxford.
A pretty serious roots-rock scare was under way by the time Dog Days (produced by Eric Ambel) emerged in 1995, reprising many of the songs from their local debut. Son Volt and Wilco were emerging from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown, Freakwater, the Jayhawks (and many others) seemed poised on the brink of…something…and this magazine was born.
None of it quite turned out the way anybody had planned. Mark Olson left the Jayhawks. Whiskeytown dissolved moments before replacing Savoy Brown in the record books as the band with the most former musicians. Many rock-centered groups drifted (or ran, screaming) away from their dalliances with country music.
Except for Blue Mountain. It is easy to trace a straight line from the Hilltops’ music through to the newest Blue Mountain disc, to hear the constant refinement of a singular, rooted musical impulse — even if that impulse draws equally from Delta blues and ’70s Southern rock. Nevertheless, Dog Days proved to be their commercial high water mark, having sold just over 25,000 copies to date according to SoundScan figures.
After 1997’s Home Grown (which SoundScanned around 16,000), the band began to sense that maybe things weren’t working out at Roadrunner, where they remained one of the label’s few non-metal acts. It is, by now, a very old story, one that every musicians seems to know by heart.
