Writers don't talk, they write. Bands talk, and if they're Dallas' Old 97's, boy, do they ever. The following exchange took place after the band's sound check at Liberty Lunch last weekend, behind the club in the band's spacious van, and features a certain intrepid Chronicle scribe discussing the phrase "insurgent country" with the four members of the band: Guitarist Ken Bethea, drummer Philip Peeples, vocalist Rhett Miller, and bassist Murray Hammond. Not only do they explain the term, and that "sound," they describe the whole movement, and their place in it -- all of which comes spewing out of their mile-a-minute mouths.
Austin Chronicle: So, let's get to the bottom of this "insurgent country" thing.
Ken Bethea: We had never heard that word or anything until we met 'em [the folks at their label, Chicago's Bloodshot Records, considered the "home base" of "insurgent country"].
Philip Peeples: We were more or less playing music that was indescribable for the most part.
KB: That's what we still sound like. Then we made that record [their first] and played those songs for about a year and a half, two years, just kind of playing around.
Rhett Miller: It had some accordion on it. Weird stuff.
PP: I heard "insurgent" come through Mike [Schwedler] one day. "Some people in Chicago have a label, Bloodshot..."
RM: ...Mike's our manager...
PP: "...and they're doing whole a bunch of insur-gent country bands." We're like, "What is that?"
KB: "What's `insurgent' mean?"
PP: "Yeah, look that word up!"
Murray Hammond: Yeah.
PP: And then the next thing you know, we're...
KB: ...We're "insurgent country." At the forefront. Suddenly people start going, "insurgent country!"
PP: "Oh, like the Old 97's!" The whole Americana chart and all that stuff was kind of happening at the same time... luckily, it happened at the right time.
RM: Don't get the idea that we don't like that tag. We don't mind it.
MH: We've gotta be identified with something, or else we're kind of way out there.
KB: Murray was in Borders Books. Do y'all have that here?
AC: [Not knowing if there's a Borders franchise within 500 miles of the Greater Austin area]: Yeah.
KB: He was in Borders the other day and he was looking in the country section for records...
PP: Oh, yeah...
KB: ...and there was a little tab and handwritten on it, it said...
PP: No, it was printed!
KB: Oh, was it printed? For real?
PP: Yeah, it was printed.
KB: "...insurgent country," and he looked behind it, and there was one Bloodshot CD, one of the compilations.
MH: Oh, yeah. [laughs]
KB: [The term] is out there. It's actually being used.
RM: Holding its own.
KB: Like rap or something. Bebop.
RM: It's been a good thing for us.
KB: It's been great.
RM: We've gotten to go all over the country and play with everybody. We could probably write the best article about the "insurgent country" movement...
KB: ...because we're the ones that go around and meet all the bands.
[Author's note: although the Old 97's have had some sort of contact with just about anyone who ever had the alternative/insurgent country tag tooled into their belt buckle, they go particularly apeshit over fellow Dallas bands like Slobberbone and Cowboys & Indians.]
RM: We've opened for them or they've opened for us, every one of 'em. And the thing about it is that everybody that kind of falls into the category is so cool, just generally speaking.
MH: A lot of like-minded bands, and they tend to be pretty high-quality.
RM: Yeah, if we were running the punk circuit, we'd run into a bunch of shitheads.
PP: I think most of the bands that we run into were already doing what they were doing just like we were and then the moniker "insurgent country" came along -- just kind of like to give us a home or something, because there was a lot of bands out there doing this before any of us had heard of it.
MH: The thing is, in this thing, I haven't really yet seen any followers...
KB: ...or people who've jumped on --
Old 97's: Yeah!
MH: It's not old enough, for one thing.
RM: There's nothing to jump onto.
PP: Ain't no money to be jumpin' onto yet.
MH: What I've seen is everybody that's doing it now was doing it before.
KB: There's a few young bands that have the sort of Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt sound that we run into, but even that, they do it because they like 'em. Obviously, Son Volt is not rich; it's not like they're going, "Oh, man, let's cash in."
PP: It's not "let's be like them." They just like 'em. So that's what they sound like.
RM: The music's good.
PP: Everybody's in this whole thing, more or less, for a good reason.
KB: Everybody likes C&W, and everybody likes good rock bands like the Clash.
Whew. Sitting in a van with the four Old 97's is like an opening scene from ER: Everybody talks at once. But the same thing that makes them hell to interview (actually, a hell of a lot of fun to interview, just hell to transcribe) makes them hell on wheels when they take the stage. Bethea wasn't kidding when he alluded to the Clash: the high-octane country meth spewing from their instruments -- often in the unlikely guise of a Bob Wills tune or Bill Monroe's classic "My Sweet Blue-Eyed Darlin'" -- and the genuine Texas-brewed sweat pouring from their bodies would make even Jones and Strummer green. (For a real allusion to the Clash, check out the bands' labelmates, The Waco Brothers).
The Old 97's insist they're a rock band; that whatever country trappings swath their music are a simple function of location. Or something like that. "The country's just kind of accidental, because we're all indigenous Texans, and that's how the rock comes out," says Miller before Hammond chimes in with, "We've always been basically in rock bands, and we still are, only we're making it all real basic, and the country kind of bubbles up."
Even though the phrase "bubbles up" gets a big laugh from the band (not nearly as hearty as "that's how the rock comes out," though), it's obvious Hammond has a point. What the Old 97's are doing isn't new, isn't terribly innovative, and may take years (Months? Days? Weeks? Who can tell these days?) before they see a profit for their labor. But it's honest. It has integrity. These are four guys who can spend 45 minutes finishing each other's sentences, then get out of the van and do the same thing on stage. And when they do, it rocks. n