Old 97’s – More fun in the new world
In Miller’s house, growing up, there was already a little twang. His parents both loved music, but their tastes ran in different directions — the perfect model for “how to build a songwriter,” Miller says. His mother had a special fondness for Olivia Newton John’s blow-dried hillbilly phase, and the 1975 hit “Please Mr. Please” made enough of an impression on him that he plans to record a version for an upcoming covers record. His mom favored anything that had melody and harmony, from Electric Light Orchestra to the Beach Boys and the Beatles.
His father, by contrast, “was a super lyrics guy, where it was all Peter Seeger and Tom Lehrer,” Miller explains, “and so we’d be quoting lyrics back to each other all the time. One of my big childhood memories was getting bounced off the tailgate of a suburban while trying to hold down a lawn mower that we were borrowing, and my dad and I were singing at the top of our lungs: ‘There will be pie in the sky by and by, Oh Lord, there will be pie in the sky by and by.'”
Like memories of the Easy Way, it’s a pleasant recollection among some that aren’t so rosy. Growing up in Dallas wasn’t easy for a sensitive kid. “I’m not going to cry victim, but I was a bit fey,” Miller said. “I wasn’t big enough for the football team I was trying out for, and I was starting to get picked on by these kids. The name of choice was always ‘faggot.'” That may come as a surprise to the rabid female fan base Miller has always attracted, and it sounded fairly ludicrous to the musician at the time. “I got beat up so much for being gay, and yet by the time I was 14, I was actually having sex with girls. I wanted to say to those guys who were beating me up, ‘Dude!'”
In the midst of his suburban Texas sturm und drang, Miller’s musical education expanded. On his 15th birthday, he saw the Smiths in concert, a milestone. The opening act was the lesbian folkie Phranc, whose version of “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” introduced Miller to Bob Dylan. Later that evening, the Smiths sang “Panic In The Streets Of London”, and the crowd went wild. The teenager from upper-middle-class Highland Park had never seen anything like it.
Around the same time, he caught David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour and had another epiphany. “Bowie had this moment where he came off before the encore,” Miller recalled. “The audience is chanting and applauding and getting the encore going, and someone hands him a towel, and someone else hands him a lit cigarette, and there’s a glass of water, and he had this moment. I wasn’t far away from him, and I could see his face. He closed his eyes and wiped his face off, and he took a drag off his cigarette, and it was just so human and so small, yet it was surrounded by such hoopla, all of which was centered on him. It wasn’t so much that he seemed unfazed, but that he seemed so proud to be doing this job, and so capable.”
Something like a rock ‘n’ roll work ethic began to form. Around that time, 22-year-old Murry Hammond, a hard-drinking punk-rocker from Boyd, Texas, entered his life; he played on and produced Miller’s first album, Mythologies, a limited release of 1,000 copies, every song on it performed in a British accent in homage to Miller’s heroes. It was a musical dead end, but, as the saying goes, only the end of the beginning.
These days, for the band, that old William Faulkner adage about the past — “The past isn’t dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” — seems to be ringing true. A month before the release of Blame It On Gravity, Hammond issued his first solo disc, I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way, a haunting raft of gospel-tinged songs that draw on his family’s history and religious faith going back generations.
Listening to the record in contrast to Miller’s The Believer, it’s hard to imagine that Hammond, who opens his solo debut with “What Are They Doing In Heaven Today”, has remained lifelong friends and musical partners with Miller, who penned that gorgeous ode to one-night stands, “Fireflies”. To put the difference in the starkest possible terms, it’s hard to hear much Jesus on Miller’s last record, or much sex on Hammond’s new one.
Hammond sets me straight. “On my record, we’ll just call it the God record, there’s sex all over it. I’ve had pretty good luck with regret songs, and beating yourself up songs, and that’s where the sex is. Sex is a character among the characters on that record. There are promises made and broken. And then on the Old 97’s stuff, God’s still kind of a major character, but he’s in the background. There’s a kind of undercurrent, when you’re singing about fair and unfair. Whenever you’re singing about dark and light, God is an undercurrent. You don’t name it, but it’s still a character. It’s still in the script.”
These aren’t idle questions to Hammond, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the singer-songwriter Grey DeLisle, and their 16-month-old son Tex. Hammond credits divine intervention with the happy shape of his life. He has been a believing, sometimes backsliding Christian ever since the early days of the Old 97’s, and if his faith helped him to overcome multiple bouts with the bottle, it also served as a connection to the mindset and music of his parents’ religious tradition.
“Until the last two generations, my family were either farmers or worked for the railroad,” he said. His mother’s family came to small-town Texas from Tennessee and Mississippi after a family-owned ferry boat sank in the river off Corinth, Mississippi, in the early 1900s. “You see that movie The Last Picture Show, and you know where I grew up,” he puts it.
Church was part of the picture. As a girl, his mother had been a pianist for a local congregation, and when Hammond was a child, the family went to services every Sunday. Now, decades later, he plays music on Wednesday nights for his Disciples of Christ congregation in Burbank, steeping himself in the spectral somberness of the Gospel according to Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and the Carter Family. The message is progressive and spiritual, a far cry from the conservative political agenda of evangelical Christianity, and the sound is darkly mortal.
“I told the pastor, if I can play all that stony old hardcore music from the 1920s and 1930s, I’d love it,” Hammond said. “I always jokingly call them the snake-handling songs, the real hardcore, bloody Church of Christ stuff. That’s what the Carter Family sang, and what they recorded, and I just love that stuff.”