Old 97’s – More fun in the new world
Yet the Old 97’s come to the new era with a measured optimism about their future, a justified feeling that their seventh record is among their very best. Bethea sets the tone. “This is going to sound goofy, but it’s kind of the truth. I knew I was going to have a chance to have unlimited recording, and I wanted to make the best guitar record I have personally ever made, which I did. There’s no question in my mind.”
It didn’t quite sound like false modesty when Bethea said he didn’t get good at guitar till the last few years; on this record, he says, he finally found the time and the space to prove his mettle. “Anything I can think of in my head, I can play. I wanted the chance to actually sit down and do it and not have any reservations.”
No easy state of mind to achieve after a stretch of hard luck and division that culminated in the 2004 release of Drag It Up. Miller, Hammond and Bethea each have their own ambivalent way of talking about the experience of making that record, a bare-bones effort cut in a few weeks in Los Angeles. Striving for a sense of immediacy, they worked on a vintage eight-track recording system.
For Bethea, whatever the result, it wasn’t much fun to make. For Miller, the end result lacked “pizzazz.” “When we all listen to it now,” he says, “we don’t hear that spark.”
Hammond is more philosophical. “The last record is unique in our catalogue,” he explains. “It was medicine. It was an attempt to try to restore ourselves, to try and resuscitate ourselves. When Rhett went solo, it was a hard time in the band. He didn’t talk about it in the press that way. In fact, he spun it the other way. According to Rhett, we were big cheerleaders of the solo thing. What we were, we were cheerleaders of him as a friend, but the solo thing was very difficult for us, because we’d lost our record deal, and we didn’t play hardly at all. We were sitting around unemployed while we read about Rhett going out and doing shows and playing Old 97’s music with another band, and we’re sitting there looking at our finances, thinking maybe we should get a job. We felt disconnected from the band in a way we never had before.”
No one quite says it, but if there was ever a moment when the Old 97’s might have disbanded, it was then. Shortly after the band’s fifth album, 2001’s Satellite Rides, hit the Billboard charts — a feat the band had never accomplished before — Elektra Records dropped a bomb: They dropped the band. A year later, Miller, still with Elektra, released The Instigator, his first solo record since high school. Produced by Jon Brion, The Instigator received all the major-label love that Satellite Rides had lacked, and it got great reviews. If it had been a hit, who knows? The 97’s might never have found their way back to each other.
But they did, and the stripped-down Drag It Up was the result. “We needed to do something kind of radical to get us back on our feet,” Hammond said, “and that was the radical pill we needed to swallow.”
The course of treatment worked, and a few songs on it have become as beloved as anything in the Old 97’s catalogue, in particular “Won’t Be Home”, with which they opened a show at La Zona Rosa in Austin last December to wild enthusiasm. Still, in the record’s wake came several projects that seemed to put a period on an entire era in the life of the band: a hits package put out by Rhino, with liner notes by Robert Christgau; a live album, Alive And Wired, showcasing the 97’s at Gruene Hall in Central Texas; and Miller’s sophomore solo disc The Believer (released by Verve Forecast in 2006), a creative high point that turned out a commercial disappointment, at least to the label.
“I felt like top to bottom it was a really good record,” Miller said, “and then it came out, and 60 days in, the record label pulled the plug and called me at home. I’d missed most of [daughter] Soleil’s life, because she was born two weeks before the record came out, and I’d been on tour. The record label president called and said, ‘The record’s dead’. I said, ‘You promised a year. It’s been three months.’ He said, ‘It’s only sold 30,000 units.’ Three months? For me? I mean what did he expect? That was rough. It took a bunch of months to get my mojo back.”
By his own account, Miller did, and when it came time to go back into the studio and record something new with the Old 97’s, a compelling idea had begun to form in the band. Why not go back to Dallas, where it all began, to the studio of Salim Nourallah, a producer who had known them from the early days, whose operation sat in the midst of their old stomping grounds, rich with memories of their earliest gigs in vanished, beloved bars like Naomi’s and the Barley House, thick with ghosts of the audiences that had loved them first and maybe best?
Bethea and Peeples still live in Dallas, and for them, the choice boiled down to logistics. It would be easier to take time on the guitar tracks and oversee the mixing process in their hometown. For Miller and Hammond, Dallas turned out to be the indispensable muse, or, as Miller puts it in “The Easy Way”, one of the record’s standout tracks: “Big D/a.k.a. the City of Hate/Deep in the big black heart of the Lone Star State/If you’re a good old boy, they’re going to do you fine/The Easy Way gets harder all the time.”
When Miller sings about the Easy Way, he’s not just turning a phrase. As is often the case, his lyrics riff on two or three meanings at any given time, and on this song, he’s delving into local, musical and personal history all at once.
For years, Roscoe White’s Easy Way sat on the corner of Lovers Lane and the North Dallas Toll Road, a Big D dive nicknamed by its habitues “the Greasy Way.” I know this because I grew up nearby, a few dozen blocks from where Miller grew up in the north Dallas suburb of Highland Park. My family and I went to the Easy Way for ribs and burgers more times than I can count. Miller is seven years my junior, so it’s unlikely but not impossible that we sat in that place at the same time.
Miller recalled something I had forgotten, and it’s key to understanding the back-to-basics ethos of the new record. The tables at the Easy Way each had their own jukeboxes. “They had Loretta Lynn on it, Tammy Wynette, even Waylon Jennings,” Miller said, and those boxes of classic three-minute songs were some of his earliest encounters with the country music that became a key influence on the band.