My Morning Jacket – Reverb rebels
For James, reverb not only adds a warmth and spaciousness to the band’s sound, “It’s almost like putting on a costume. It takes me from being an ordinary person to being, like, a superhero with lightning shooting out of my fingertips. With reverb, it feels like nothing is too far out of my reach.”
In order to simulate reverb’s effects while songwriting, James wrote in his bathroom, or at Johnny Quaid’s grandparents’ farm in suburban Shelbyville, half an hour outside of Louisville. The farm has become My Morning Jacket’s studio, and its de facto headquarters. They record above the three-car garage (sometimes actually in the garage itself), in a makeshift studio in the bathroom, and in the grain silo, chosen by James for its reverberative properties.
“It’s amazing to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city and just play music,” James says. “And Johnny’s grandparents are so nice.”
Aside from a few positive reviews in the indie press (most of which featured some variation on the ‘flannel-clad bumpkins make stoner country records in silo’ theme), The Tennessee Fire met with rousing indifference from just about everyone — until a European children’s writer fell in love with it and wrote an article praising its childlike qualities. The band suddenly found themselves on several Benelux critics’ top-ten lists, and things got progressively stranger from there.
Though it’s now almost expected for an indie band to be accepted in an obscure European country before finding success in their own, the fervor of the Dutch surprised everyone. My Morning Jacket, who had logged only one or two gigs outside of their hometown (and slightly more than a dozen altogether), toured the region at least six times, and was the subject of a documentary, “This Is Not America”, which aired on Dutch television in the winter of 2000.
“It was our first taste of people caring about what we did,” recalls James, who was 22 at the time.
Back in Louisville, home to aggressively indie bands such as Slint, Squirrelbait, Freakwater, and various incarnations of Palace, My Morning Jacket was having a hard time getting any traction. It didn’t help that James wore flannel shirts and spoke openly of his love for Disneyland and Christmas. To that end, the band released a 2000 EP, My Morning Jacket Does Xmas Fiasco Style, which offered a sludgy, bluesy rendition of the old Lieber/Stoller-penned Elvis number “Santa Claus Is Back In Town” as well as a cover of Nick Cave’s “New Morning”. This may only have made things worse.
“It was tough, especially when you’re playing music that’s real and not a big gimmick. It was hard to get anyone to care,” says James of the band’s struggle to find a following on its home turf. “We realized we had to give it 110 percent or we’d never get out of there. It really makes you want it, badly.”
After enlisting Danny Cash (a distant relation of Johnny), who taught himself how to play keyboards so he could join the band, My Morning Jacket retreated to the farm to make 2001’s At Dawn, their 70-minute, two-disc coming out party. Trippier and louder than The Tennessee Fire, it suggests Neil Young (a frequent point of reference ever since) in James’ wobbly, mournful vocals, and a more contemplative Lynyrd Skynyrd in other aspects.
The opening title track plainly references the band’s local troubles: “‘All your life is obscene/Forget the papers, forget your musical dreams!/But that’s when my knife rises, their life ends/And my life starts again!”
It gets a lot more opaque from there. In fact, “At Dawn” is one of the few My Morning Jacket songs that seems specifically about anything. James’ songwriting, in its ruminations on failing relationships and the difficulties of leading a decent life, is alternately moving and inexpert, suggestive of 16 Horsepower (“Try to walk this earth an honest man/But evil waves at me its ugly hand”) and the cheerier Flaming Lips in equal measure.
Though At Dawn was more of a unified effort than its predecessor (and It Still Moves even more so), James, with rare exceptions, writes and produces everything the band has ever done. If this puts him in an awkward position with his bandmates — My Morning Jacket is, after all, populated with relatives and childhood best friends — he isn’t saying.
“It’s a fine line [to be the group leader], but I feel really lucky because all of us really understand each other and what needs to be done,” he says. “I get a picture in my head of what needs to be achieved, and they take it and make it better. They know that it’s about the band, it’s not just about one person.”
My Morning Jacket continued to tour constantly, and released two EPs in 2002 — a split disc with Songs:Ohia and their own Chocolate And Ice, a predictably epic outing that famously contained “Cobra”, a 24-minute, mostly instrumental, shape-shifting mixture of funk and rock, as well as answering machine messages from James’ cousin.
As the band’s albums got spacier, their live shows were getting harder, and louder, turning into propulsive, florid, hair-flinging affairs that emphasized the gritty, southern rock side of their nature. The band spent the better part of 2002 on the road, opening for Beth Orton and Doves, surviving a supporting stint on a Guided By Voices tour, and attracting attention for both the fervor and the sheer weirdness of their shows. On any given night, sombreros, Simply Red covers and band members wandering around in tie-dyed muumuus were not out of the question. Critics, of course, were fascinated, though much of what they wrote re-envisioned the group as backwoods savants, southern-fried mystics who smoked a lot of pot (probably), and looked like very badly groomed park rangers.