Gourds – Appetite for agglomeration
Russell voices a similar opinion. “I’m 37 now and started writing songs when I was 14, and I’ve been writing constantly since then. I love it. It’s the best thing in the world. I’d be doing this regardless; if I were working in a bank, bagging groceries, I’d still be writing songs.”
And the lessons they started learning with Mike Stewart out at the farm are still paying off, too. “I’ve got a whole recording setup now,” Russell says. “Technology has gotten so cheap, you can do it for nothing. This record, we did it all at home. Jimmy did his tracks on a four-track at his house and duped it onto a sixteen-track digital recorder at my place, and we just sort of went with it, and even if it’s not the best fidelity in the world, who cares? For us, that’s the great coup on this record. We did this all at our houses, at our leisure without the clock running. Nowadays everybody has the luxury of what the Beatles had for a thousand bucks.”
One change the new songs have made in the band, though, is that they’ve started using electric instruments onstage (and drummer Keith Langford has started playing harmonica). There have always been touches of electric guitars on the Gourds’ albums, but the live instrumentation had always been acoustic. Stewart doesn’t see anything unusual about this. “The tie to their past is that they’re treating electric instruments the way they treat acoustic ones,” he says. “Claude’s accordion style is backwards and upside down, just like Jimmy’s guitar style. So the counterpoint of instruments playing together, it’s really odd.”
But the songs on Blood Of The Ram demand it, particularly the ones that sound to me like they’ve been very heavily influenced by 1970s soul music. Kevin’s “Escalade” is a flat-out homage to Al Green. “I’m really proud of ‘Escalade’,” he says. “The number one most-stolen car in America! I didn’t even realize it was a car when I wrote the song! Claude’s gotta learn the organ part, but it’s beginning to sound right live.”
Which brings us to another heavily soul-inflected track, the closer, which bears the radio-unfriendly name “Turd In My Pocket”. Its tricky chorus sticks in the ear easily, sounding like it might have been lifted from some Ohio Players wannabes, but the words have a different origin entirely. “The tagline of that song came from The Dancing Outlaw, Jesco White,” Smith explains. “It was at the SXSW film festival, we saw the documentary on him and then we did a couple of Elvis songs with him. He’s this crazy guy from West Virginia. He was sitting next to my wife, and she was talking to him and he said, ‘You can’t shit me, I already got a turd in my pocket.’ So I decided to write a song about that. It was sort of like changing a diaper.”
But midway through, the song erupts in violence as an angry black man starts shouting and berating white people. “Jimmy wanted to put that in there,” Russell says. “He had kind of a rap going at first, but he thought this was better. That sample is Freddie Hubbard from Celebrities At Their Worst, Volume 1. That record’s the kind of stuff that everybody who’s on the road listens to — musicians, truckers, odd traveling folk, that gets picked up by them. We’ve been listening to this in the van for years, because it’s got that famous Buddy Rich tape on it, and at first we thought that was one of Buddy’s musicians going off on him.”
And then there’s the title track, which simultaneously manages to evoke the old New Orleans marching song “Didn’t He Ramble” and a medieval English mystery play. Not that Russell is unaware of that. “The title track just totally wrote itself,” he says. “The end of the chorus is an odd chord change, kind of Beatle-y, which I really like. I sort of go into stuff after I write a song; after I write, I’ll usually pick up a book or research it and find out what I was doing there.”
But, like much of the Gourds’ material, there’s a lot of seemingly religious content in it. “I spent many of my formative years in the Church of Christ, in southwest Texas,” Russell explains. “My dad was music director there — no instruments, just shape-note singing. Eventually my dad got disenchanted with them and we eventually quit the church in my later teenage years. My lyrics have always been influenced by myths. I saw that PBS special on Joseph Campbell when I was a kid, and really got into it. It freed me from my frustration with the Christian myth: I don’t have to be Jerry Falwell, I can be Joseph Campbell! There’s a different model, a different way of looking at this.
“Jimmy also got into that, so that’s where it came from. I’m not studying it so much as I just like to read, and I enjoy reading anything from the Brothers Grimm to the Bible. I’ve been formed by that mythological imagery. It’s dangerous, though; you could become Iron Maiden or something if you don’t watch out.”
ND international correspondent Ed Ward championed uncategorizable bands in Austin for 13 years before moving to Berlin, which he complains about regularly in his blog at www.berlinbites.com. He wishes more bands like the Gourds would come through there, while simultaneously recognizing that there aren’t more bands like the Gourds.