I never met Woody Guthrie.
I never met Huck Finn, Will Rodgers, Ghandi, Jim Dickinson, Bob Marley, or the Cat In The Hat.
I haven’t met Jimbo Mathus, either, but I’ve talked with him. And I can honestly tell you this, boys and girls: take the soul, the humor, the funk, the mysticism, and the wisdom of those mentioned above – both real and fictional characters – mix it up with a bit of gris-gris and some Mississippi mud, put a guitar in its hands and what will you have?
Jimbo Mathus. I kid you not.
Mathus, known for his years at the helm of the eclectic Squirrel Nut Zippers, has put together a band totally in sync with his vision of “interplanetary honky tonk.” The Tri-State Coalition (Eric Carlton, piano; Matt Pierce, guitar; Justin Showah, bass; Austin Marshall, drums) match Mathus’ every whim, quirk, groove, and hoot on their new Confederate Buddha album. The music may be rooted deeply in Mathus’ beloved Mississippi Hill Country, but the messages contained within the dozen tracks came from – and reach out to – some place far, far away.
Transcribing a conversation with Mathus is a challenge. Once he gets going, the rest of the piece could be in italics with breaks for laughter every few sentences.
But there’s lots worse things.
Come spend a few minutes in the Hill Country with Jimbo Mathus. From where he’s standing, you can see the whole universe.
BR: Jimbo, before we get into the album itself, I wanted to ask you how the floods in Mississippi were affecting where you folks are.
JM: Right now I’m at my studio here in Como, MS – in what we call the “Hill Country” – so I’m a ways from all that. We’re fine where we are.
What’s bad is the levee situation. The lowest point of the Mississippi levee system is down around Yazoo City up to Greenville – physically, those are the lowest levees at that part of the river. Those are overflowing and having some slide-offs and sand boils, where the pressure pushes water under the levees. They’re working pretty hard down there to maintain them. I have a lot of good friends and family down around that way.
BR: Man, people always joke with me about our winters when they find out I’m from Maine, but … so what? We don’t have anywhere near the kind of weather and worries that you folks do down there. We feel for you, believe me.
JM: Well, when you live in the wake of the Mississippi River, anything can be expected, man. You never want to be complacent, because that river is draining the entire continent down here. It’s quite a beast.
BR: Which brings me to “Cling To The Roots” off the new album. “Cling to the roots and you won’t wash away when the river starts rising.” The first time I listened to that, it made the hair stand right up on my arms.
JM: Wow … well, thank you.
BR: I know nobody wants to be a prophet when it comes to things of that nature – the last thing you want is to be proven right. When did you write “Cling To The Roots”?
JM: One of the reasons I’m putting it out is because I do want to talk about it; I wrote it in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill and the floods in Nashville. It was just kind of a feeling that I had that more was on the way.
BR: Oh, man …
JM: Yeah … right after the oil spill last year, we took a trip to the coast – my wife and I and my band, The Tri-State Coalition. I said, “Boys, let’s load up the van; we’re going down there.”
There’s a place I play – a chain of barbeque huts down there called The Shed. They have good P.A.s and have blues and rock ‘n’ roll bands come in and play. I called my friend Brett Orrison and I said, “Hey, we’re coming down to the coast – I want to see this first hand.”
A lot of the people that were at The Shed concerts we played in the evenings were Coast Guard and people that were there to help. It was a very moving week for me … and that’s when I really put that song together.
BR: What you were feeling comes through, but as tragic as the circumstances in the song are, there’s still hope … it deserves to be heard by anyone who’s known that kind of hardship.
JM: Yeah, it’s a song of hope – but it’s also saying that the earth and nature are bigger than all of us. No matter what our perspective is; our attitude; our political party; whatever – one thing will equalize us and there’s no denying it: Mother Nature, man. (laughs)
BR: We learned that growing up and working on the water.
JM: (laughs) Oh, yeah – you know what I’m talking about!
BR: We can talk and be as cocky as we want, but Mother Nature will always put us in our place when she wants to.
JM: And that’s when all you can do is cling to the roots. The Bible says, “He hideth my soul in the cleft of a rock,” you know? The rocks and the roots are the foundation that we walk on, so … I say whatever your roots are, cling to ‘em. (laughs)
BR: Right on, right on. Well, let’s see … I guess before we talk more about specific tunes on the album, I wanted to ask you about the production and the sound you captured during the sessions. When I wrote the review, the way I described the sound of the album was, “Sometimes the music is right in your face; sometimes it’s right in your lap; but it’s always right there.”
JM: (laughs) I’ve basically been using the same recording techniques since back in the 90s. We use a big room and a big ribbon mic and we usually don’t have headphones – we play at a quiet enough volume that you can hear. That’s the old-time recording technique: balance the musicians off the mic by putting them in different places in the room.
I remember listening to Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes all the time in my early 20s. You could hear them moving around the room – you could actually feel it, man. Me, I’m not a technology person; I really just came across my gear by random accident. I’m not a gearhead at all. I just worked with what I had and came up with a sound of my own. But, yeah – listening to those Basement Tapes and knowing that they were moving around in the room … it added more to the music, you know?
BR: There’s something about the drama of a picker closing in on the mic so he can drive something home that’s altogether different than someone sliding the fader on a mixing board …
JM: You got it! (laughs) Yeah – you got it. And not only that; you don’t have the safety net of technology. The way a lot of the music that we all admire got recorded wasn’t with technology … it was recorded with primitive tools. It was a singer walking up to the mic. He and his band at that point in time had to come together to make that recording, man. It’s a sacred moment … and it’s kinda crazy if you think about it too much, you know? (laughs)
BR: Was there one particular room that you used for this album?
JM: It was all done right here in my Delta Recording Service in Como, MS. We share a building with the Post Office here in Como – it’s a one-horse town. (laughs) We’re in a big, high-ceilinged, long building – an old grocery store.
BR: Yeah – I can imagine it.
JM: I just used those same sound techniques I’ve used over the years: dampened the sound, set my mics up, and started recording. (laughs)
BR: Cool. How about we take a look at the rest of Confederate Buddha track-by-track?
JM: Yes, sir.
BR: “Jimmy The Kid” – to me, what makes that song is the acoustic guitar that’s underneath everything, driving it along.
JM: That guitar you’re hearing is my old Martin; I put that on pretty much everything in the studio. That’s the heart of a recording to me – whether it’s the Stones or whether it’s Elvis Presley, you know? You got that Martin six-string banging out the rhythm.
BR: I hear you, man.
JM: You’ve got to have it in rock and roll – you’ve got to have an acoustic guitar.
“Jimmy The Kid” is me writing this song in the Southern myth-making tradition of Casey Jones or Jesse James … the different characters that we’ve singled out in our stories to the point where a real human becomes a myth or a folk lore character. I wrote that song for my father … but it’s actually 100% autobiographical, okay? (laughs)
BR: I listened to “Wheel Upon Wheel” with one set of ears and I heard darkness – but I listened to it with another set of ears and I heard hope in it, as well. How does it work for you?
JM: Well … I guess, for me, it’s a song about hope. It’s about being in troubled times and clinging on to the rays of hope; looking for the good in what’s happening. It’s “darkness on darkness,” but then at the end it’s “brightness on brightness.” The line “wheel upon wheel” is about the interconnectedness of all the different philosophies and all the different religions and how they all help these larger cogs in the universe. And how the wheels all fit together and how they layer in ways that we don’t even understand.
You know, it’s kind of based on readings from Hindu stuff and different philosophies that I’m interested in. And it’s using a lot of stuff from the Bible, too – the Four Horsemen and the seven seals-type imagery … it’s a little puzzle I put together. (laughs)
It’s not a normal song for me by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think I’ve ever come up with a song like that … but I felt compelled to. I was going to give it away to [bassist/vocalist] Amy LaVere, but when I played it for my wife Jennifer and a couple of the boys in the band, they told me, “You’ve got to keep that; you’ve got to sing that.”
BR: It’s beautiful.
JM: Thank you, sir – thank you.
BR: Listen: it’s not a compliment – it’s a statement of fact.
JM: Yes sir! (laughs) I love it!
BR: You were channeling ol’ Hank on “Town With No Shame”.
JM: Well, if you’re going to play a honky-tonk song, you’re channeling Hank Williams. If you’re not, you’re not doing it properly, you know? (laughter) You’ve got me 100% on that one.
BR: That must’ve been a blast for Forest Parker to play pedal steel on, because he got to do every heartbreaking steel lick he could think of.
JM: (laughs) Oh, yeah. Forest is a veteran around these parts. He’s a world-class pedal steel player, but he’s hardly known outside of this region.
BR: I guess Forest isn’t an official member of The Tri-State Coalition –
JM: Correct.
BR: But he’s an MVP, for sure.
JM: He’s an honorary member, man – you got it.
BR: You know, I like to think I’m a decent rhythm guitar player for an old white boy from up North, but “Unleash My Pony” really knocked me on my butt. You think there’s going to be another four, but it shifts …
JM: (laughs) That shift is something actually that I’ve been doing for a while. The first song I did it in was “Who’ll Sop My Gravy When I’m Dead And Gone?” that I put out back in, like, ’96 – Luther [Dickinson] played on that.
That shift comes from Charlie Patton. He’d jump the four; and, of course, John Lee Hooker would jump the four; Hound Dog Taylor – the list goes on and on. It was accepted and expected that you could move around like that and the band would follow you.
BR: It’s cool – everybody’s got to be right there. I think there are people who play the blues who start to get lazy –
JM: That’s right! (laughs) You got it: they get complacent. This way, it’s complete improvisation and it’s not codified. But yeah, that jog is from Charlie Patton – he’d jump time a lot. It propels the song … it has a real purpose in the blues – it keeps it moving.
And I was trying to do something funky with a second-line beat; just throwing some stuff together. I put a VI-II-V chord change in it – like a New Orleans change. I try to keep a little New Orleans feeling in all my stuff, you know? Like “Kine Jo”; I like a little second-line feel in my music.
BR: Ah – “Kine Joe”. Tell me the story behind “Kine Joe”.
JM: In New Orleans and different places you got all those little stores that carry these candles and oils and unguents and shit, you know? Gris-gris and all that kind of stuff – little powders and everything. And that’s always fascinated me … like when people light candles and do different things for good luck. Hey – I believe in it. (laughs) It’s my business and I believe in it, so I was thinking I wanted to make up a kind of a voodoo powder name that I had never heard before, you know? You got the “Secrets of the Shifting Sand”, “Come To Me”, “Law Stay Away”, “Adam & Eve” – all these different kinds of powder. So I made up “Kine Joe”. (laughter)
BR: Wicked. Next is “Walks Beside” – Eric’s piano is beautiful on the intro.
JM: It sure is.
BR: That song is just chock full of love.
JM: “Chock full of love” – you hit the nail right on the head, my friend. (laughs) I wrote that for my wife, man.
BR: Sweet. That tickles me to hear that.
JM: She’s my girl – show her the love, you know?
BR: That’s so cool. Sounds like we’re two lucky guys: I can honestly say that my wife is my best buddy in the world.
JM: I hear you, man. It took me a while to figure that out – believe me, I had my trials and tribulations.
BR: We all do – that’s where some of the songs come from, right? (laughter)
JH: Exactly!
BR: I have to tell you, though, as much as “Walks Beside” was full of love, “Glad It’s Dark” just gave me the creeps.
JH: It gave you the heebie-jeebies? (laughs) Hey – it did its job. (laughter)
BR: It’s like Springsteen mixed with Larry Brown …
JH: Ha! [Then, off the receiver: “He says ‘Glad It’s Dark’ reminds him of Springsteen mixed with Larry Brown.”] (laughs) I’m in the studio and my engineer’s right here. (laughs) Oh, man … (laughs) Well, hey – it’s pretty much a Southern Gothic pop song, I guess.
I rented a room from a blind woman here in Como a couple of years ago. She lived in this big ol’ Victorian mansion right across the street from the studio here that used to belong to Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. I kind of got in the world of being with a blind person, you know? But she was also a person that lived a lot (laughs) and I’ll leave it at that. She was a fascinating person and I wrote that song for her, as a friend.
BR: Then we have “Aces & Eights”. There really was a Jack McCall, right?
JM: Yes, there was. They called him “the coward Jack McCall” – the murderer of Wild Bill Hickock. “Aces & Eights” is pretty much historically accurate – even the part about the cats. They needed ratters and they didn’t have any cats, so they had to ship them out there. That’s the oldest song on the album – I think I wrote that back in 2005.
BR: And the card hand was what Wild Bill was actually holding when he died, right?
JM: Mmm-hmm; that’s what they call “the dead man’s hand” – aces and eights.
BR: Who’s playing the mariachi horns on that cut?
JM: (laughs) That’s a little group I got together called the Clarksdale Horns. They’re just different horn players out of Memphis and the Delta.
BR: I laughed when I heard it; it sounded like somebody just barely dragging their thumb on an old 45 of “Ring Of Fire”. (laughter)
JM: Yeah – totally. I’m glad you got kick a out of that.
BR: There’s no turning back after “Too Much Water” – that’s it, right? That’s the end of something right there.
JM: You must’ve read my mail. (laughs) Yeah, that’s it, for sure – every possible disaster is happening and it’s all your fault.
BR: I’ve been told that before. (laughter)
JM: As far as that, it’s just different images, you know: like “our darlin’ wandered off” – that’s from Bill Monroe’s “The Little Girl & The Dreadful Snake: “Our little darling wandered far away/while she was out at play”. That’s from one of those old murder ballads … I allowed myself some dark numbers on this album and that was one of them.
BR: You know, as dark as it is, I love that break where Eric starts it on the piano and then hands it off to Matt to take over on the Tele.
JM: He just soars over that, doesn’t he?
BR: Sure does. “Shady Dealings” is your rock and roll song on the album, plain and simple.
JM: (laughs) You gotta have just a stupid rock and roll song every thirty minutes or so, you know what I mean? (laughter)
BR: And then we have the epic closer, “Days Of High Cotton”. What’s that 12-string you’re playing right at the very beginning?
JM: That’s an old Stella 12-string – and then Eric comes in with that great piano part. “Days Of High Cotton” is another one of those Southern Gothic twists, talking about the ironies and the tragedy of the South. It’s historical, but it’s also current. The quote came from Faulkner’s Requiem For A Nun: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” That’s where that quote came from. This is Faulkner country; this was his territory. He’s influenced a lot of my writing and he has for quite some time.
BR: It really is a beautiful song, Jimbo.
JM: Thank you so much, my friend.
BR: How about the year ahead?
JM: We want to get out on the road and let people know what we’re doing with Buddha and with the new website, www.jimbomathus.com I’ve been working on the site really intently for about eight months and it’s going to be something that really shows people what I’m up to – an authentic, creative, artful, contemporary site. I cannot even turn on a computer so I’m having to translate this out into the world, you know? (laughs) I’m computer illiterate. It’s gonna be beautiful, though: it’ll have a lot of my artwork on it as well as different stories and all the music. We want it to be focused and get the message out there in the world – to places like Maine. (laughter)
BR: Wow – even Maine? (laughter)
JM: Yeah – everybody! We want everybody to know what we sound like and what we’re doing … and hopefully we’ll be coming to a town near you. (laughs)
We believe in the band and we believe in our ability to make people happy. And that’s our goal – to get it out there.
For the rest of 2011 … and for the rest of time, my friend.
