May 2004: Eugene Chadbourne and local harmonica wizard Walter Daniels sit outside of San Antonio’s punk emporium, Taco Land. As they wait to begin their set, Chadbourne pries a crumpled piece of paper from between the planks of a picnic table. Scrawled across its finely ruled lines is a plea from a young man to the mother of his daughter.
“I’m leaving to Austin today on the bus,” it reads, honest, confused, and brutal with resignation. “I came by to say goodbye. I’ve got a few dollars to give you or to get you a bus ticket out of here.”
The next day, as Daniels sets up equipment with piano man Earl Poole Ball at Million Dollar Sound’s former studio in South Austin, Chadbourne produces the letter from his pocket with chords scribbled above the words. The resulting song, which leads off his upcoming album, This Is Our Gordito, is a haunting missive, Chadbourne breathing desperate life back into the discarded note while accompanied by Daniels’ quivering harmonica and Ball’s sparse piano.
Chadbourne’s work thrives on happy accidents, the moment of found inspiration jolting songs from their roots into an alternate realm of sound. His music is a revel of improvisation, playfully outpacing generic conventions and skirting stylistic thresholds with an eccentric exuberance, a collision of folk delivered with a free-jazz aesthetic and punk rock ethos, a sound perhaps best represented by the title of his 1987 album, LSD C&W.
“There’s a local sculptor and painter here, and he’s got all this junk,” opines Chadbourne from his home in Raleigh, N.C. “He spends the whole day sorting through it and making different piles, making a painting with one thing and maybe a sculpture with something else. I’m like that too, to real extremes. I keep different things and just start connecting them, and all of the sudden, once you put these two things together, they look like they were meant to be.”
With a wild nest of gray hair wreathing his head, Chadbourne, like his performances, whether on banjo, guitar, or his infamously fashioned household instruments such as electric rake and plunger fiddle, is unpredictable, weaving his experiences into hilarious ballads and biting political screeds through a constantly contorting musical virtuosity. Over the course of three decades, he’s collaborated with everyone from John Zorn to Camper Van Beethoven and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to the Violent Femmes and fronted the raucously eclectic trio Shockabilly.
This Is Our Gordito, which was finally finished in a 2007 follow-up session with Austin axe-slinger Redd Volkaert, marks the fifth album of an extensive catalog that Chadbourne has recorded in Austin. It’s a connection extending back to 1987 and his teaming with onetime local Evan Johns on Vermin of the Blues and 1993 re-pairing Terror Has Some Strange Kinfolk.
“One thing about Austin: There is a very open listening audience,” offers Chadbourne. “Going back to even the first time I came down there to play with Shockabilly, it was one of those places that had a lure for me.”
In 2000, Chadbourne paid tribute to Austin’s country music legacy with Texas Sessions, a diverse interpretation of compositions by Doug Sahm, Willie Nelson, and Ernest Tubb, among others, that featured Daniels, pedal steel maven Susan Alcorn, and trombonist David Dove. At the invitation of Sir Douglas Quintet and Texas Tornados drummer Ernie Durawa, he returned two years later to record Texas Sessions: Chapter Two, revamping Sahm’s already wild style with his own explorations, while Durawa and Speedy Sparks rocked Chadbourne’s lo-fi unravelings with a hefty Texas rhythm section.
“I think he’s a musical genius,” offers Durawa on Chadbourne. “He just has his own bizarre way of doing things, and playing with him is great. It’s totally off the top of your head. When we went in the studio, there were no rehearsals; just go in, roll the tape, and go for it. Most of the time, when you’re in the studio with an artist, they’re trying to tell you what to do, and what ends up happening is that it kills your groove. And once they kill your groove, you’re just kind of going through the motions. With Eugene, you just want to stay in there.”
Interestingly, Chadbourne’s most enduring connection to the River City is his long friendship and collaboration with former Austinite and Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black, who passed away last month. Given the opportunity to invite 11 musicians to Germany for an improvisational project at the Moers Festival in 1991, Chadbourne recruited Black to join him. After Black moved to Europe, the two formed freewheeling drum-and-banjo duo the Jack & Jim Show.
“We played a tour of Holland and Switzerland and Germany, and because of the schedule and everything, we barely even had a sound check. We just got up and started playing songs,” laughs Chadbourne. “Right away, [Black] says, ‘This is some of the freest music I’ve ever played in my life!’ I said, ‘What about Zappa?’ and he goes, ‘Well, none of that was improvised; everything was completely controlled!'”
Over the past 15 years, Chadbourne and Black toured the world extensively and released more than 17 albums together. Even as late as last summer, the two traveled to Japan for four dates and Black’s first opportunity to visit the island nation.
“He was my hero as a kid,” says Chadbourne. “I thought that one thing I could do now was help him at this point in his career and get him some good work playing really interesting music and get him out in front of a really interested audience all over the world, get him doing something really creative, and then bring out a lot of things about his humor and his wonderful kind of outlook about things. I put a lot of energy into that, and it worked out really great for both of us.”
The second of Eugene Chadbourne’s shows at Salvage Vanguard Theater is Tuesday, Dec. 16, 8:30pm. The first set is in duet with Walter Daniels, and the second features Chadbourne with a local percussion ensemble. $10.
This article appears in December 12 • 2008.
