Old 97’s – More fun in the new world
He spent hours playing the same music for himself in the church when it was empty, and those sounds, down to a convincingly desolate blues yodel, serve as the foundation of the splendid I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way. The title could just as well stand as an autobiography of the band that has formed the backbone of Hammond’s musical career, inadvertently harking back to the early days with Miller, to the evening not long after they met when the two friends went to see the Ramones live.
“I picked Rhett up at his mom’s house,” Hammond recalled. “And one thing that struck me was that his cheeks were so rosy. I thought, he looks like Raggedy Andy in a leather jacket. He was really pretty and everything, and I was thinking, man, I bet he gets his butt kicked a lot at school. And sure enough, that was part of our conversation that night. He knew I grew up in a redneck area of Texas, and he asked me if I got picked on a lot. And I said, ‘Oh hell yeah. Are you kidding?'”
At their best, the Old 97’s spike right down through musical genre, through the pop and country and rock, and hit the paydirt of American myth. Their songs, from “Stoned” and “Victoria” through “Timebomb” and the most stunning cut on the new record, “Color Of A Lonely Heart Is Blue”, are huge in songcraft and effect, the aural equivalent of the Dallas skyline against a massive red sky at dusk. In the right light, those buildings can look a little like colossal glass and steel guitars, and Bethea’s work taps into the vista.
Miller told me he has developed a personal code for deciding which of his songs belong to his solo career and which to the Old 97’s. The decisive factor is “Ken’s guitar.” If a song sounds like it will fall under the spell of that big surf twang, it will stay with the band.
After all this time, Bethea instinctively grasps the nature of his contribution. Though he added a cut of his own to the last record, the latter-day slacker track “Coahuila”, which launches with a memorable line about chicken ravioli and grooves pretty well to the end, he has no attention of adding a future “Ringo” song, as he puts it, to every subsequent record. “I think the band got a little nervous about that,” he said.
Before I talked to Miller, I asked Bethea if he knew whether the song “The Easy Way” referred to the north Dallas dive, and the family man and soccer coach told me he doesn’t tend to think much about what a song means, just about what it needs. When it came to “Victoria”, a song written before he joined the band, he took a page from Pete Anderson’s work with Dwight Yoakam and gave the tune its immortal sex drive. On “Barrier Reef”, he wanted the sound of a bar band playing in exactly the kind of place where “Stewart Ransom Miller” could tell the gal at the bar that he’s a “serial ladykiller” and so applied the first few chords of an AC/DC tribute at the top.
On the new record, he’s everywhere, dressing up the joint, urged on by Miller, who at one point sings, “play it like a train wreck song,” unmistakably asking Bethea to do the usual favor. Live, on the stage, these relationships turn into pure energy, a Saturday night and Sunday morning concoction made up of Miller’s self-mocking and sweet-tempered lechery, Hammond’s hurting, God-smitten squareness, Bethea’s epic sweep, and Philip Peeples’ smashing discipline. When I saw the band last December in Austin, there was so much raw, racy joy in the mix that the show felt like a cross between a tent revival and an orgy.
“It’s the most fun thing I do,” Bethea said of playing with the Old 97’s. “I was a high school athlete, and being onstage with my band, if it reminds me of anything at all, it reminds me of playing high school football. You have that sense of immediacy. You’re a part of that larger machine that you kind of just get on and hang on.”
The Old 97’s have hung on intact; the four original band members are still making music together. That’s a big part of their glory. They flourished within the alt-country movement that gave them a sense of community and even definition, and then transcended the movement when its bounds no longer made sense.
The other piece of that glory is hard to name, but a trace of it might be found in the history of another band. This year, at South By Southwest, as both Miller and Bethea told me in rapturous terms, they got to see a reunion show by their heroes and mentors in X: John Doe, Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom and D.J. Bonebrake. Miller described the power of the show as a demonstration of “total commitment.” Bethea talked about how he could watch any single member of the band at any moment with amazement.
I saw X two years ago, on a January night in Massachusetts, and they played like what they are, one of the great American bands of all time, the closest we have come in this country to the musical and political urgency of the Clash. Before the Old 97’s, X melded punk, hard-rock, rockabilly and honky-tonk. As the Knitters, they helped to lay the groundwork for the alt-country scene, but never quite fit under that umbrella. Their moments of maximum exposure came and went. They broke up, personally and professionally, they worked their side projects. Yet here they are in 2008, unkillable, raging, righteous.
The Old 97’s have some of that same magic. They have the commitment and musicianship. They sound like no one but themselves. They’re no longer in it for the fame and money, though neither would hurt. Hammond claims he would gladly see an American Idol contestant sing one of their songs. Bethea says he wouldn’t mind having a career like the guys in Los Lobos, who have been making music and a living together for 25 years.
For his part, Miller remembers something a waitress in a restaurant where he had his last day job once told him. He made passes at her, but she always resisted, telling him that he wouldn’t be any good till he was in his 30s. He’s 37 now, and he thinks she might have been right. He calls himself a late-bloomer. Anyone who loves the band’s music has to hope and pray — I’ll nod to Hammond’s religious impulse here — that it’s true. Miller and his old friends have already given us a batch of unforgettable songs and one of the better live shows in the land. If they’re just now starting to bloom, there’s no telling where things might go.
John Marks is a novelist, journalist and filmmaker. His most recent book is a memoir and work of reporting, Reasons To Believe: One Man’s Journey Among The Evangelicals And The Faith He Left Behind. His first documentary, Purple State Of Mind, co-produced with Craig Detweiler, has recently been traveling the land like a rock ‘n’ roll band. His Dallas connections tell him that the Easy Way was torn down years ago to make way for a flower shop.