Photo by Adam McCullough
Like his music, JJ Grey has a healthy respect for the past while remaining vibrant and contemporary. On Georgia Warhorse, the latest by Grey & Mofro, the Muscle Shoals, Memphis Soul, blues and swamp rock influences combine for a sound that echoes that of his previous four studio releases yet maintains its own vitality. Like the album’s title, a reference to a resilient southern grasshopper, Grey has been a persistent musician – working blue collar jobs to stay afloat and slowly building a national reputation as singer, songwriter and performer. A tenacious approach in the demo phase and familiar recording surroundings in Jacksonville, Florida, bring out the best in Grey on Warhorse. Guest appearances by Derek Trucks (“Lullaby”) and Toots Hibbert (“The Sweetest Thing”) add extra spice to what’s already a wickedly potent album.
Similar to our 2008 conversation, my time with Grey finds him eloquently and modestly discussing this current chapter in his career. One of the major differences this time around is that it opens with his 15 month old daughter (the youngest of his two children) toddler demanding the attention of daddy, as Grey opens the conversation by explaining, “I’ve been playing with my little baby all morning, yellin’ and carrying on.”
JPG: So, you have two new additions right now, a new addition to your home and a new addition to catalogue. How have you been able to work out the two things?
JJG: Well, it’s tough going out on the road (at this point her screams can be heard over the phone) Excuse me. As soon as I get on the phone she starts screaming. She don’t want me on the phone. It’s tough but that’s part of the stuff. I don’t like to leave, especially with my little girl here right now. Hold on one second, let me pick her up. Now, she’ll probably want to take the phone out of my hand.
JPG: So, are you home right now or is she on the road with you?
JJG: I’m at home. These 14 days is the longest I’ve been home since March.
JPG: Oh , really?!? I knew that were you doing some touring prior to the album’s release but I didn’t realize that you were also on the road so much earlier in the year.
JJG: In March I went out and did the solo tour, just myself acoustic, opening up for Mavis Staples and Booker T. After that I brought out the full band and started doing dates all summer. Some bussed but mainly flying here or flying there. So, put you home for a couple days and then you turn around and leave again.
JPG: Is it so much that touring a financial reality or getting out word about this way in advance or…?
JJG: After Halloween last year, I only did Jam Cruise and two or three dates in Florida, right around New Year’s Eve. All the guys that play with me, they’ve all got their own bands and other band that they play in to keep the money coming in but I want to keep ‘em working, too, so I can keep together as many of the guys as I can for as long as I can. So, I go out on the road and say. I got to make a living and I want to get out there and play, to be honest with you. I miss being at home but I just want to go play anyway.
JPG: Your music has that lively feeling from the studio but there’s also the sensation about it that you want to break out of there and give it volume and another dimension in a live setting.
JJG: It’s all I’ve known. I’ve only known live music. Don’t get me wrong I’ve worked in a studio, too, but it didn’t work from having a breakout record or having a bunch of money from a label to try to help out and start you that way. Just the opposite. Play live all these years and then the records finally catch up with that instead of the other way around.
JPG: Now, is that true what I read in the press release, something about as a teenager you played clubs with chicken wire in front of the stage?
JJG: (slight laugh) Yeah, I’ve done that. As a matter of fact, I drove by one of the clubs today and it’s closed up. There’s a “For Sale” sign there.
JPG: I bring that up because, as I listened to Georgia Warhorse, the music sounded like something that should be played in a smoky club that had chicken wire.
JJG: Nice. Right, right, right.
JPG: Did the experiences there resonate and they now run through you now like blood?
JJG: I would say yes. It’s certainly there for the experience. It’s been so long. Honestly, I’ve gotten more comfortable over the years playing on in a big theater or on a big festival stage. I got a lot more comfortable doing that but that took some getting used to. I was used to people being (slight laugh) two feet from you the whole show. Always. People right there in front of you. So, that’s what I was used to.
JPG: I would think two feet in front of you. That could be a good thing or a bad thing.
JJG: (laughs) Yeah, that can be. That all got cleaned up eventually. Somebody buys the bar and says, ‘I ain’t tolerating this,’ and don’t put up with it no more. At first it was like that movie Roadhouse but there weren’t any Lamborghinis in the parking lot.
JPG: Back to the album. Its title, Georgia Warhorse, references a resilient southern grasshopper but it could also describe you. Do feel like a Georgia Warhorse?
JJG: Well, I wish. I mean I see those attributes— the calm, the toughness, the tenacity – I see all that in my grandmother and my father and other family members, my grandfather on my mom’s side as well. I guess I aspire to, maybe, one day get there. Who knows if I will? That’s something to strive towards. Honestly, the only way you can do it is to not strive towards it.
JPG: As far as tenacity, you have been doing this for years and years. So, maybe you’re just being too modest to acknowledge.
JJG: It’s just unfolding in front of me. I just sort of lived it. I just don’t think about it too much. In retrospect none of it seemed hard now. At the time there were times when I was like, ‘Omigod, one hour of sleep and three hours a night…’ And I was tour manager, booking agent, manager, driver and all the different things. Then, I’d come home and go straight to the lumber yard and go to work to pay the guys that were playing with me because I wasn’t making any money out there on the road. So, I’d have to go to work and pay them and support my family. That was tough, but it was never really that bad. It was always fun. Life has been pretty much fun. I just take it one day at a time.
JPG: Going through your whole catalog, there’s been a consistency in your music, whether it’s a Muscle Shoals feel, Memphis Soul feel, bluesy feel. Has that been a conscious choice in terms of how you want to present it?
JJG: I don’t really think about it. It’s hard to describe. I don’t really… Definitely, all those things influence me, majorly. They’re all a big part of it. At the time I did think about it and when I thought about it, it felt contrived at times and it felt stoic, forced to me. But, I just try to let it all unfold, unravel. You know what I mean? Right in front of me. I don’t even think about it.
JPG: Do you think the idea of working with producer Dan Prothero and recording at Retrophonics presents a kind of consistency that allows you to not think about things? You’re in a safe place, a familiar place.
JJG: Definitely. By the time we hit the studio I’ve already recorded the whole record at home, maybe a couple of times, and then I do it once and then I always do it at least twice just that I can make sure that I don’t have demo-itis, like some little thing happened and that’s what I’m keying on and not the tune. But by the time we hit the studio I trust that Dan’s going to get the sound, get the tone, that the arrangements are already done. Whoever’s going to play on the record they just learn. I come in and I either play it for them right there on the spot or I send them the CD in advance and they learn the tune and we just come in and jam. And they come in and play it. Funny enough, the record sounds really live. They all have and none of them are, really. But that’s because of the nature of that studio. It’s the only studio I’ve recorded in. It is a huge part and Dan is a HUGE, HUGE part of how this whole thing developed.
JPG: Overall, it sounds pretty self-contained so how did the idea of bringing in Toots Hibbert and Derek Trucks for guest spots. Derek, I think you know him because both of you live in North Florida…
JJG: Toots has always been one of my favorite singers. Him and Otis Redding. To me, he’s the best soul singer alive. I’ve listened to him for years and years. And we just met one time. I don’t go out of my way to bother people who are legends and stuff like that. I mean, I was like, ‘He’s got enough on his plate.’ His manager was actually there and he was like — I guess, my manager told him I was a big fan – ‘Come say hey. Toots wants to say hey to you.’ We just hung out for a second.
And then I sat in with him. My manager and I used to put on a festival, Blackwater Sol Revue. Now it’s called Blackwater Music Festival. Since then, a friend of mine’s taken it over and I let them run with it. That was more work than I ever dreamed of, especially when my band is there. But anyhow, got Toots and the Maytals to come and play one year and we just hit it off. I saw his manager one time when I was in San Diego and he came up and said, ‘You know, he really wants to do something.’ So I said, ‘I’m getting ready to do a record.’ It just worked out. We traded off. ‘I’ll come sing or play something or do something on your record and you come sing and do something on mine.’ ‘Let’s do it.’ That’s how it went.
And with Derek, like you said, Derek lives right here in North Florida. He’s the greatest guitar player I’ve ever seen, ever in my lifetime. And he’s probably one of my favorite musicians ever on any kind of musical instrument. He just came by the house one afternoon and knocked it out in 20 minutes. I told him, ‘Now, I really want to get some tracks away. Let’s do it.’ I’ve done stuff for him, writing some lyrics and stuff set to music for him, nothing they’ve released right now. He’s got a great studio, too. I’d like to do something over there as well. Just friends and family, so to speak. Makes it easy.
JPG: Speaking of lyrics, out of all the songs on the album why provide the lyrics only for “King Hummingbird?”
JJG: It’s a song that moves me the most on that record, lyrically. I mean, not moves me the most, but moves me in that way. I try to pick a song like that somehow or another, even “Georgia Workhorse,” the title track, it speaks for itself. For the lyrics, I’d rather use a song that is powerful and says it from a different angle as the title track.
JPG: With the subject matter in your work — the environment and preservation — do you have to be a “latte-drinking bleeding heart liberal elite” to have interest in such matters?
JJG: Definitely not. My friends are the exact opposite of that and are staunch supporters of doing things the right way or I say the right way, just trying to do things a little more intelligent in terms of long term. Instead of clearcutting, you cut 300 acres and you want to put in a subdivision instead of clearcutting it and cramming one house on top of the other like they did and they’re sitting here empty. They’re empty and the other [development], they’re a third of the way full. And half of that third those houses are for sale. It didn’t work. It didn’t work because all that was a charade, as everybody knows. It’s all about pumped up money. The point was and then there’s a developer that comes around and says, ‘300 acres. I’m only going to put up X-amount of houses on it and we’re going to leave all these woods. We’re going to leave this lake. We’re going to leave this swamp. We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that and maybe have a nice trail, but we’re going to leave woods connected to woods.’ It’s just going to make sense in the long run instead of clear cutting and trying to sell a fantasy to somebody. In the end, that whole fantasy just caved in on lots of people. That was the greedy way.
I compare it to if you lived in the Pacific Northwest, and you saw salmon coming up the river and you moved there and you thought, ‘Salmon are going to be here. Look how many there are.’ If you got it in your head that it’s always going to be like this, always going to be this many fish coming up the river so you just started stringing up huge nets across, just grab ‘em all and then you based your life on that and then they stop coming. That’s the dumb way to do it. The smart way to do it is take a few salmon and let everything live to fight another day. Live to make it another day instead of I’m going to take it all now. Everybody can understand that. I don’t care how liberal elite or right wing conservative or how bourgeois liberal they are. I think everybody can understand that. As long as they don’t let their politics and identities they’ve built inside that get in their way of the reality.
JPG: By the way, I was just being sarcastic. It was just fun to say ‘bleeding heart liberal.’
JJG: (laughs) I’ve said it occasionally myself.
JPG: It’s interesting because I happened to see an interview with the author Carl Hiaasen (“Skinny Dip,” “Nature Girl”) and he has similar views. He’s from Florida as well, and he’s angry about what’s happened in your home state, which makes you the musical Carl Hiaasen or he’s the literary JJ Grey.
JJG: I’m sure he doesn’t know who I am, but I know who he is.
JPG: Well, I guess he needs to get schooled sooner or later. Another consistent thing on your albums – the cover artwork – which is created by you. Are those ink drawings?
JJG: I draw it with pencil and then I color it with a black pen. Then, I’ll scan it and clean up any little bits, pen marks or something like that. I like the grasshopper [on Georgia Warhorse ]. I threw that in. One day I just got a wild, I don’t know what got into me in Starkville, Mississippi. There’s an art store downtown. I went and bought a pad and some pencils and pens and started drawing. I realized I’d done some artwork stuff years ago for Georgia Warhorse. That title and the art work, I guess the artwork was done probably before Blackwater was made (released in 2001). In the end I didn’t like it and I just wanted to redraw the grasshopper; the same with the trees (on 2004’s Lochloosa ), the snakes (on 2007’s Country Ghett ”) and the orange blossoms (on 2008’s Orange Blossoms ).
Dan [Prothero], that was a photo he did on Blackwater. He kicked the whole thing off within a certain aesthetic and I just loved it. And I wanted all the records to have that certain artistic feel like that, stay true to that thing he started with. I really liked it. All the other albums that I did after that that, I did covers for. I kept it sort of in the vein that he started.
JPG: It makes each album like a chapter in a book.
JJG: Yeah, that’s the way that I look at it. The records are autobiographical in a lot of ways. I just try to keep it like chapters in a book, so to speak.
JPG: Last thing, I read that you were involved in the documentary, “The Good Soldier.” What did you do for that?
JJG: That has been nominated for an Emmy. They asked me to write some stuff for some certain themes, and they sent me those scenes. Started doing the music right here at home in the home studio. When I lay out a record I just use the same studio and I just started recording all that stuff for that. They also used a couple of tracks off of a couple of different records and the score of certain scenes throughout the movie. The film is about five guys from different wars — World War II, Vietnam, Iraq and the 2nd Iraq. I was really pleased with what they did when I saw it ‘cause I’ve seen the scenes and I’ve seen the rough cut without music in it that was a lot longer. That was still great but man, wow, they made a powerful documentary.
JPG: The music you did for that, was it more atmospheric?
JJG: Oh yeah, definitely more. One of them was called “Helicopter Fear.” It’s the guy telling the story of when he finally knew that this is real, ‘cause life can be that way. Life is sort of like a dream unfolding in front of you. It was when he was flying one of the Hueys (helicopters). He was a helicopter pilot and he could see the tracer bullets just coming at him and hitting the windshields all around him. Being in a helicopter, you can’t get down in a foxhole or hide behind something. You’re just up there.
Do something to bring attention. Actually used a cigarbox guitar, a Flynn made from Mississippi, and it sounds kind of banjo-ish. I just started to pick up the pace as he’s talking, playing along. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll just look at the screen kind of just play along until something started to materialize.
