“I’ve known Gary for eighteen years,” Robinson recalls in a separate conversation. “The only two bands George Drakoulias ever signed [to Def American] were the Black Crowes and the Jayhawks. When Hollywood Town Hall came out, we were on our second album tour, and we took them out in the States [to open for us]. That’s where our friendship started. We like a lot of the same roots music and have a lot of the same influences. And of course, he’s sat in on my solo gigs and with the Black Crowes; I’ve sat in with the Jayhawks a few times. Music has always been the catalyst.”
For Robinson, getting Louris into “a good headspace” involved encouraging him to be “more visceral,” especially given the nature of the material. “[If] the songs are intimate,” Robinson says, “and there’s a lot of dynamic emotional ground, then you want to [create] a place where he really shouldn’t be thinking, he should be feeling.
“I tend to do that, because I’m a musician first and foremost, so I have a good relationship to the vibe. There’s no reason to be uptight about this stuff: Making a record should be fun. Getting to those places where you are expressing yourself should be enjoyable.”
In Los Angeles, Robinson introduced Louris to some kindred souls for whom that vibe has become a bond. He cites shared influences of folk, country, blues and psychedelic music in what he calls, “a pretty fertile community, at least the group of us that gets together occasionally to shake off the cobwebs.” The result allowed Louris to be, and Robinson chooses this word thoughtfully, “trusting.”
“Chris hangs out with this group of musicians who are really cool and love playing off each other,” Louris echoes from his side of the story. “I’ve never been a big jammer, but I found myself getting into it and enjoying these people. They had a musical vocabulary born from Wednesday night jam sessions, not from studio sessions. And while they are not necessarily new kids on the block, they didn’t come with a lot of baggage. They were earnest about the music and it wasn’t about any agenda. So that was all happening in L.A.”
And more specifically Laurel Canyon, both literally and what those two words together evoke mythically in terms of musical history and the spirits of Gram Parsons, Crosby Stills & Nash, et al. circa 1970 — but only to a point. Louris fell in not with the legends of the canyon, but its new residents, players such as bassist/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson, drummer Otto Hauser (of Vetiver), pedal steel player Josh Grange, and keyboardist Adam MacDougal (a new member of the Black Crowes).
“It’s not like we went up there and played a bunch of Flying Burrito Brothers covers,” Louris asserts before conceding, “there’s a little bit of that retro vibe.” It would be hard to deny the CSN vocal-harmony homage applied to the end of “We’ll Get By”, while “Omaha Nights” moves up the coast into Skip Spence territory.
“I’m a bit all over the board,” he contends justifiably, “which has always been my strength and weakness as far as genre-hopping. But I certainly have a soft spot for that period, and it was a touchstone [for the sessions]. I don’t think any other era eclipsed it. There were great things in the ’80s; late ’70s punk and the New York scene; England [around the time of] Joy Division. But for my voice and what I do, 1970 was a good year.”
Vagabonds should sound familiar to any Jayhawks fan, but fresh, too. “I’ve had some musician friends say the record sounds like me, but it didn’t sound like I was waiting for the other guy to come in and sing harmony,” Louris offers. “What also makes it sound a little different — and this came out of the Olson/Louris record — is we got into a folk-picking style more than just strumming.” One of the album’s best tracks, “D.C. Blues”, glides on just such a bed of picking.
Though a solo album represents a departure in terms of going it alone, Louris faced similar uncharted waters when he assumed leadership of the Jayhawks following Olson’s exit. “We started playing shows and I was the lead guy,” he recalls. “I remember having a bit of a ‘fuck you’ attitude: If they like it, they do, and if they don’t, they don’t. [It’s the same thing] in this case, as I have very humble expectations. But I think people who get the album are really gonna get it. And hopefully there are enough of them to make it worthwhile for me to tour.”
Is that really in question? “Everybody I talk to says it’s tough out there,” he admits. “Tough to get people to come to shows, to buy CDs. Everything is free. And I know the reality of what happens when you’re in a band and you go solo — not everyone who bought your CD in the band is gonna go out and find you solo, no matter how many stickers you put on the front.”
To that end, Robinson’s production approach isn’t all vibe, it is pragmatic, too. “Part of my solo career was about getting out of a Black Crowes place,” the producer says, “which is bigger budgets, more people, more stuff, and into a self-sufficient thing, which I think is the future for those of us who want to continue making music and do it outside of the system that is given to us.”
That new world order includes such pesky matters as making one’s peace with the means by which so much music gets broadly exposed these days, with television and commercials supplanting radio. Louris calls the situation “a necessary evil,” and he already experienced the concession first hand when “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” (from The Jayhawks’ Smile) was featured in a TV advert for Ralph Lauren’s fragrance Polo Blue. Call him a pragmatist with standards.
“As long as it is not for adult diapers or something to do with a four-hour erection, I’m probably not going to say no,” he says. “We have said no, way back in the day when it wasn’t cool. In the early ’90s Levis asked us to write a song about 501 jeans in the style of ‘Waiting For The Sun.’ At the time we were like, ‘No, that’s a sellout.’ And Levi’s was a cool company. But things are different. If they asked me to write a song now I’d probably say yes because times have changed so much.”
