Just as the definition of what type of act fits within the jamband category has expanded, the alternative rock scene of the early ‘90s represented nearly any style than bands infamous for using multiple cans of hairspray. Enter the Jayhawks among the flowing river of grunge, industrial, minimalism, jangle and pure pop artists.
As myth would have it, a chance listen of the group’s second indie effort overheard by producer George Drakoulias during a phone call led to the Jayhawks getting signed to a major record label. A combination of Neil Young Topanga Canyon-era melancholy and grit, Flying Burrito Brothers country rock flair and harmonies by Gary Louris and Mark Olson infused the group’s Def American debut, Hollywood Town Hall. The follow up, Tomorrow the Green Grass, toned down the Young elements but amped everything else as founding member Marc Pearlman, Karen Grotberg and Tim O’Reagan created a disc that displayed timeless perfection.
Despite the creative triumph, Olson left and Louris moved the Jayhawks forward until 2003 when the band was shelved for solo outings. Eventually, the singing and songwriting duo reunited for tourdates and an album, Ready for the Flood, that was produced by Chris Robinson. Taking the next steps, it’s led to the re-issuing of the out-of-print Town Hall with bonus tracks and “Tomorrow” in a deluxe edition with bonus tracks and second disc of demos, a brief tour last month supporting the releases, and, most importantly, the announcement of new music by the Tomorrow lineup due later in 2011.
During my conversation with Louris we discuss those early days, the re-issues, the importance of a brand to fans and the upcoming record.
GL: Where are you calling from?
JPG: Near Youngstown, Ohio.
GL: Oh, I thought you said, ‘Neil Youngstown.’
JPG: No, but that actually sounds much better.
GL: I like that.
JPG: Maybe I should get a spray can and deface some signs with name ‘Youngstown’ on it.
GL: I’m from Toledo.
JPG: So, I don’t have to explain too much since you know where it’s at. First off, how’s the tour going?
GL: Never better is all I can say. We’re home for a few days and then two days in Chicago, two days in Minneapolis. That’s kind of the end of our little re-issue tour but it’s never been better. The houses are packed and people seem to appreciate even more what we do just like I think we appreciate more what I do, and I couldn’t be happier.
JPG: That’s great. Not one to gush…
GL: Oh, gush away…
JPG: Like vitamins, why not?
GL: Right. Can’t overdo it.
JPG: “Tomorrow the Green Grass,” I’ve probably listened to several thousand times. I used to listen to it when I’d go to sleep with the headphones and then I’d listen to it later in the day. It’s just one of those albums that just fits…
GL: …fits going to sleep. I’m just kidding.
JPG: It’s just relaxing…
GL: Soothing.
JPG: Yes, soothing. Thank you. That’s a good word for it.
GL: That’s what people in Europe would always say. ‘I love your records. You sound like the wide open spaces of America.’ That’s what we represented a lot to the Europeans. Something about the music seems expansive. (slight laugh)
JPG: Back to the idea of gushing praise, you’ve received a lot throughout the years. Have you come to a point or did you ever come to a point where you felt like, ‘That’s nice and all but can I just sell a few more records and make some money at this and not have to worry about bills…?’
GL: Certainly, of course. I’ve sat across from rock stars, and I won’t mention any names, who said, ‘I wish I had what you had. We sell millions of records but you guys get the good reviews.’ And I’m like, ‘Shut up, man.’ It’s nice to reach people and there’s nothing cool about reaching an elite few. I think our band would be all in agreement that there’s nothing wrong with being successful, and that we’re not afraid of success. It’s not a sellout. If you do it on their terms maybe it’s that but if you do it on your own [terms] then it’s great. In the old days they used to go hand-in-hand. There were great records and they sold a lot and were on the radio but it’s different now. But if we can help change that that’s okay but we certainly would like to sell records. We’re not in the business to be cool we’re in the business to reach people on our terms. Definitely on our terms. We’d rather be leading than following, and that’s unfortunately what the world has become – the radio stations and the record companies, in general, have become followers instead of leaders. They used to be the tastemakers and now they just take calls and figure out what sells and then you see more of the same and that’s what’s the problem with the world of music.
JPG: In your case, using your words about leading not following, who led with the idea of re-issuing these two albums and how involved were you in the process?
GL: I’ll be honest with you, I led. And it stemmed from the situation where I was getting these phone calls from Rhino [records] saying, ‘Okay, we’ve got to pick out the best of the Golden Smog. We’ve got to find these b-sides and find what you think should be the best of.’ And I thought, ‘This is great.’ But then I thought, ‘Golden Smog, I love Golden Smog but they were always my side band, not mine, but I was part of that band and I loved it and it was important, but the band that I poured my heart and soul into is the Jayhawks and there’s no such thing going on. There’s no best of Jayhawks. Then, I researched it a little bit and found out our records were of print, basically. And I called Rick Rubin (who owned Def American and American labels which signed the Jayhawks) and I said, ‘Rick, I’m doing this thing with Rhino for Golden Smog and there’s nothing like it for the Jayhawks.’ And he was like, ‘You’re right.’ He didn’t fight me. He was totally amenable to the whole thing. When he gets into something he really gets into it. We got John Jackson at Sony/Legacy into it, and he’s a fan so everything was done right.
Immediately, we put out the anthology Music from the North Country and the expanded edition. From there it grew into the re-release all the records and get ‘em back in the stores and let’s get the bonus tracks…and so that’s how it started.
JPG: Now, I know as a writer I can look back at something I did and think, ‘Wow! I really had it that day…’ or ‘If I had one more edit I could have changed that sentence around or…’ Going back to these albums what is your view of them now?
GL: I guess I don’t have that feeling. I have a feeling of a magical time. It was difficult, it wasn’t easy. I think of Los Angeles. I think of [producer] George Drakoulias. I think of great studios and us rising to the occasion. I don’t look at anything and say, ‘God, I wish I would have done it differently with those records.’ I really don’t.
JPG: I guess you see film directors who have that mentality, putting out different editions or as one major example George Lucas who added things to his original Star Wars films.
GL: Well, maybe. I must say that I don’t sit and listen to my stuff at all. Maybe, it would be different if I sat around and listened to my own stuff and criticized…there’s certainly things that I would sing differently… But we had our moment and we seized it and I think we did the right thing. I’m a believer of this mentality is that was then and this is now. That was the moment and you don’t sit back and rework everything over and over again. You move on to the next thing. That’s always been our trait, especially me and Olson as far as songwriting. ‘Well, we wrote that let’s go to the next song and not think about how we can rewrite the last song.’ You shouldn’t pick apart things and go, ‘Oh, I wish we had done that slightly differently.’ In general, I look forward and I don’t look backwards.
JPG: The “Mystery Demos” disc on the “Tomorrow” expanded edition. Now, you could have just put a live performance on there, say the ’85 show that’s now available at your website, or something from the tour supporting Tomorrow the Green Grass, why put these particular tracks out?
GL: Well, for one thing we have a million of those live shows. I have everything. There’s practice, almost every radio show. There’s a treasure trove of things we did. There’s just something special about the “Mystery Demos.” It was just the purity of the two of us singing together and playing our songs. Most of ‘em are take one. I love that. We’re just trying to get things down so we can listen and evaluate what we had. Because we weren’t really thinking about it too much as a recording it became a beautiful recording just like the songwriting. When you come in the back door you don’t think about it too hard. Things happen. It’s when you start thinking about things that things start going wrong. There’s something about that it was like a record. It was nicely recorded, stripped down, and there’s a purity of what we were about — the songwriting and the two voices at the time.
JPG: When you originally got together with Mark…by the way I’m wondering if the story I read on the internet is true where it said that you attended an early Jayhawks show, which had Mark and Marc [Pearlman], and afterwards you and Mark Olson had a long discussion, which led to you being invited to join the band.
GL: You can go back further to when we were both in rockabilly bands. There was a bit of a rockabilly scene in the early ‘80s in Minneapolis. I was in the band called Safety Last, and Mark was in Stagger Lee. It’s kind of a boring story but our bass player wanted to move on to acoustic and be lead singer and Olson came stumbling down my steps with his giant standup bass and auditioned for my rockabilly band. And that’s how I met him.
From there I got to know Mark. The scene was pretty tight back then. I knew Olson and Olson knew me. I just ran into him late night at the Embers, a Perkins kind of place. He was having a coffee and an omelet, and he said, ‘My band’s playing down at the Uptown on Thursday. Do you wanna come down?’ I came down but I missed the show. They were packing up and coming off the stage. They came up to me and said, ‘We’re looking for a guitar player, do you know anybody…like you ?’ Well, they didn’t say that but it was kind of like looking at me. So, two weeks after the band started I joined the band.
JPG: Because everyone focuses on the harmonies between you and Mark, did you have any idea that your voices would link up that way or did it take a rehearsal or two or a particular song?
GL: No, it took a few years really. I remember my mentality back then was just like, ‘I just want to play guitar.’ I was kind of a seasoned touring dude even though I didn’t tour that much but compared to everyone else I had been out on the road. So, I was like, ‘I want to play guitar and kick back.’ Olson was on fire as far as cranking out songs. I just didn’t think in that duo vocal kind of thing. We did a little bit of it on the first record. But it was really after the first record that we fell into our own style. We started off as like a punk rock folk Woody Guthrie band, fast and loud folk songs and country songs. Then, our voices sounded good together and started writing together. So that was post-first record. “Blue Earth” started it, and then post-“Blue Earth” we really got into it.
JPG: At that time bands that were countryish punk, wasn’t that the cowpunk style of the late ‘80s?
GL: Yeah, we weren’t really cowpunk. There was some of that going on. We never really fit into any…We never fit in then, and we don’t fit in now in any particular style.
JPG: You’re on an island of your own making.
GL: I believe so. It works for longevity. It doesn’t work so much for the quick rise. The quicker the rise the quicker the fall down.
JPG: I was thinking that it was an interesting creative arc where it’s you and Mark in Jayhawks, Mark leaves, you continue with Jayhawks. Then, you make solo releases and rejoin Mark for tour dates and a duo album and you’re together again with Jayhawks. Can you have ever envisioned it coming full circle like that?
GL: Noooo…I never thought Mark and I would really…maybe once we reunited in the early 2000s, it started becoming apparent that we still had our thing. But, that’s a long jump between doing that and actually doing a full band.
It’s a complicated band. We’re not like U2. It’s not like the same four people through the whole thing. The band is complicated but we’re complicated people. There’s no straight role player in this band. Everybody’s smart, other than me, and they all have ideas and nobody just wants to troll along here. We’re an interesting band that has no real simple solution like how are we going to play songs after Olson left or whatever. I don’t worry about that. Right now, I’m concentrating on the new record and these shows and these re-issues.
JPG: Speaking of the band itself, if it was just you and Mark going out and doing shows to support these re-issues, and it was billed as the Guys from the Jayhawks, most people wouldn’t have a major problem with that. Why was it important to get the band together with Marc and Karen and Tim?
GL: It’s important for people to see the full band. Plus, there’s the personality to each of them that contributes. We learned that a lot by me just from me and Olson going out and singing, ‘Hey! We’re the Jayhawks! We wrote the songs and sang ‘em.’ But people want to see the band. They want to see the band they remember, and there’s a reason and it’s because they all contributed musically. There are different periods but for the Olson/Louris lineup this is the best one with Karen and Tim, and we’ve got four real singers and Pearlman who’s a great bass player and songwriter in his own right.
I don’t know…it’s like would you want to go see the Beatles, and see some other guy on bass. Well, it’s different for them ‘cause their bass player was McCartney.
JPG: I don’t know. You could say the Band.
GL: Oh yeah, go see the Band but you don’t have Danko or some other guy. I’ve seen the Byrds play and they had Gene Clark and Nicky Hopkins playing piano, which was great, but they didn’t have Roger McGuinn and Mike Clarke, who wasn’t the world’s greatest drummer but he was part of the Byrds. It’s just that people love that and you realize that there’s something about that chemistry. You can’t just interchange people all the time. They all bring their thing to the table. Part of it is a little bit nostalgic, people want to see the band like they remember it but for us and a lot bands, there’s a reason. There was a chemistry.
JPG: Now, is it going to be the same group of musicians who will be playing on the new album?
GL: Yes, as yet untitled but the new work doesn’t come out til late spring/early summer on Rounder. And, I’m very excited about it, of course. It’s got a lot of elements of…the idea was, ‘Let’s take Tomorrow the Green Grass, and what would have happened afterwards if Olson would have stayed.’ But it doesn’t sound like Tomorrow the Green Grass because we’re all different people. It’s definitely got a lot of the same elements. It’s got me plugged in and big and fuzzy and loud. It’s got Olson/Louris vocals. It’s got a little Karen and Tim vocals. It’s got six-seven minute songs, it’s got some two-minute songs. It’s a very interesting record, I think.
*JPG: I was going to say 2003’s Rainy Day Music, I hate to use the word “sequel” but it did seem like a follow up to Tomorrow the Green Grass minus Mark Olson. It also had, as the Europeans would say, that soothing feeling.
GL: Yeah, it was much more acoustic. This record is much more of me plugged in. There’s no denying that I love playing acoustically with Mark and the way that he and I can lock in together, acoustically, and do our picking…English folk picking is one of my favorite that we have ever done. But I love to plug in and hit on my fuzz pedal. That’s a part of me. That’s something I haven’t really done much in a long time so that’s something that has resurfaced here with this record.
JPG: Now, when you and Mark went out on the road together and then released the duo album, Ready for the Flood back in 2008 did that grease the wheels to where we are now?
GL: Oh, in many ways. You can put as many stickers on your posters saying, ‘From the Jayhawks’ or ‘Lead singers from the Jayhawks.’ But people would come up after the shows and 70% of them would say, ‘God, I love your show. It was so great. What’s the band doing?’ It was always, ‘When’s the band getting back together?’ They all want to see the band. And after awhile you start going, ‘I’m just fighting upstream here.’ People want to see the band, and who are we to deny it ‘cause I kinda want to plug in, too. And you can do both. That’s the beauty of it. Who says you can’t do the band and then have Mark and I go off and do our solo thing. There’s nothing that says you can’t. There’s hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the month, months in the year to do all that. Once again, I think our MO is that we can do the Jayhawks, that Mark and I can split off and do our Mark and Gary thing, and Mark can go off and do a solo record and I can produce and we can do it all. We’re hard workers. But the band is really fulfilling for me and for all of else.
The goal for me to get the love of a new audience, the people who didn’t see us back in the day. But for the real diehards it’s nostalgic and it’s not only trying to relive stuff but it’s important music to them and to us. We weren’t a party band. We’re not a dance band. We’re a music band. Hopefully, this time around we catch a few more people that missed us back then or were too young.
JPG: Well, it’s not like you were A Flock of Seagulls who had a couple big MTV hits and then vanished. There’s a timeless quality to what you do. You had a sound that bears interest then as much as it does now. So, the old fans are there as much due to a desire that’s not of the pop scene of the moment.
GL: We were never of the moment and we may never be. It’s bad for immediate success but it’s good for longevity. The bands that I knew that had huge hits now would warm up for us. It’s funny. So, if you stick around long enough and the music is good I think it’s better to have a slow build then a quick rise and fall.
Well, who knows, long and slow and steady wins the race, I guess. It’s much more fun to get rich quick but I think we’re like old money. It took us awhile to get there and we’re still here. We have a new record, and I’m excited about it.
