“When I first met the Continental Drifters, even as they existed in 1991, I immediately fell in love. And I just tenaciously stuck to this band,” recalls Peterson, who had been on the road for much of the ’80s with the Bangles and felt disenfranchised from the local scene after that band’s demise. “I never really felt musically at home except for that one brief little time in the early ’80s with these other bands, when we’d go to Long Ryders shows all the time, and the Dream Syndicate. We went to each other’s shows and played on each other’s bills and nobody cared about who was playing first and it was really a pretty generous musical environment. And that’s what Raji’s reminded me of.”
Soon, McGough left the band and Holsapple shed his “auxiliary Drifter” tag for full-time membership. This lineup that released a 7-inch single for Bob Mould’s S.O.L. imprint featuring “Mississippi” and “Johnny Oops”, two twang-soul tracks that were highlights of the band’s live set. Cowsill and Peterson joined soon after; suddenly, the Drifters were a seven-headed singer-songwriter monster highly regarded enough to open for Bob Dylan at the stately Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard one night in 1992.
Still, the band’s casual attitude remained intact. “We would go up into the hills where Mark and Gary and Carlo lived and play these songs that we had written to each other,” says Holsapple, recalling his earliest days of Drifterdom that were often whiled away in a house nestled above the San Fernando Valley. “We’d all sit around with acoustic guitars and accordions and the bass and people’s girlfriends and a couple cases of beer and a bottle of tequila and whack these songs into existence.”
It took several years of metamorphosis to finally amass the current lineup. In 1997, the Drifters released a 7-inch single of Peterson’s rollicking road-trip tune “Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway”, backed with a spirited take on Richard Thompson’s “Meet On The Ledge”. By then, several changes had taken place, much of which stemmed from the decision by Nuccio and Ganucheau to return to New Orleans in 1993. Holsapple and Cowsill decided that would be a better place to nest than Los Angeles and followed suit.
Walton was also game, and, while Eaton decided against the relocation because of fatherhood considerations (he later formed the like-minded but painfully undernourished Kingsize), Peterson relocated too, albeit only after spending two years commuting between the two cities. There were more changes to come: Ganucheau left for health reasons, replaced by Mache, yet another talented guitarist within the Drifters’ commonwealth. Finally, after a self-titled release in 1994 on New Orleans label Monkey Hill that was a decent, if disappointing, affair of murky production quality, Nuccio departed. Ultimately he was replaced on drums by Broussard.
But time was taking its toll. This revolving door, coupled with the Drifters’ overall lack of output — just one CD, two singles and two tribute-album contributions through 1997 — suggested a band that was either underachieving, underwhelmed, or, in the least, too casual to be taken seriously, especially in light of the collective talent it possessed.
But that issue was put six feet under with Vermilion. Less Little Feat and The Band in favor of the Mamas & the Papas and Fairport Convention, the new album finally fulfills the promise that has always hovered over the band. Graceful, poetic, intimate and deliciously harmonized, but still plenty rock-minded, Vermilion demonstrates not only the strength and reach of the band, but also its uncanny ability to unify the vision of four songwriters and six strong musical personalities.
Granted, the loss of Nuccio’s ghost-of-Levon rasp, originally one of the Drifters’ most appealing charms, is to be mourned. But there’s also plenty of revitalization, including a more massive version of “Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway”; the bittersweet jangle-pop of “The Rain Song”; the fragile “Heart, Home”; the buoyant, Celtic-tinged “Watermark”; and the indie-rockish barn-burner “Don’t Do What I Did”. These songs are written by Peterson, Cowsill/Peterson, Mache, Peterson and Holsapple, respectively, but they’re all performed with a cohesiveness that is the hallmark of this band.
It’s a point not lost on Holsapple. “The synchronous behavior of six wildly different individuals each playing a different instrument sort of functioning as a different card in the deck, that’s pretty amazing,” he says.
Vermilion is also an album that cries of wisdom, as on the nearly hymnal “Drifters”, or the tender, commitment-oriented “I Want To Learn To Waltz With You”. Holsapple’s epic “Daddy Just Wants It To Rain” portrays, novella-like, the life and family of a broken man; Cowsill’s “Spring Day In Ohio” relates the fractured upbringing of a girl, replete with the hard-lesson chorus: “This is your life, how do you like it so far?”
Maybe most striking is “Who We Are, Where We Live”, Peterson’s haunting, eye-of-the-hurricane attempt to come to grips with her fiancee’s death from leukemia. Ignited by Mache’s Crazy Horse-like shards of lead guitar, Peterson sings: “You’re headed down the highway/Suddenly jacknifed/When somebody blows a hole in your life/Now the bed’s too big and the pillow’s too small/And you gotta try and make sense of it all/You are one of us.”
“You get over it, you move on with your life, you will eventually not be in classic grieving mode,” says Peterson of the song and the experience. “Eventually you will stop breaking into tears in the middle of the produce section, but you are never the same….It’s one of those songs I completely consider a gift from God. It showed up.”
Holsapple might consider the band a gift from God as well. More than once he refers to it as a “reward,” marveling at the fact that, as a fortysomething musician, he gets to be part of a project with co-members he “adores.” By no means is it an easy life: There are day jobs to tend to (Holsapple, for one, has a day gig at Borders Books & Music), children to provide for, screwy schedules to accommodate. And that Fleetwood Mac comparison Peterson offers — it’s not just because there’s several singer-songwriters in the band, if you know what I mean.
Yes, the Drifters have their issues, but they also have their hard-fought payoffs. Like Vermilion, like backing 13 talented artists at the Sandy Denny tribute in Brooklyn last November, like resurrecting the love-in that is the Tuesday-night residency at the Howlin’ Wolf, a New Orleans club.
“It has that kind of, um, healing nature,” says Holsapple, “such that you could be having the worst day of your life and the minute you get up onstage with the Drifters and hit that first chord — assuming everybody’s in tune [laughs] — it’s this kind of juggernaut of emotion that gets you from one end of the show to the next. And it just kind of buoys your spirit. It’s a real spiritual experience for a rock band.”
No Depression contributing editor Neal Weiss often looks back fondly on the days of wine and roses that was the L.A. club scene of the pre-Axl ’80s. In fact, it’s very possible he wrote this article just as an excuse to invoke the Dream Syndicate in print one more time.
