 Photo: Andy Goodwin
Since the music business wrapped its tentacles around Central Texas in the last few decades, phrases like “Austin’s Best Band” don’t mean much anymore—bandied about as they are by promoters and ad-men intent on selling their product. More than 20 years of South by Southwest and seven years of the Austin City Limits Music Festival have hardened the locals against the hard-sell. We’ll smile and nod when you tell us how good your band is, but we’re steeled by experience against believing it until we see it.
In this environment, The Gourds ushered in 2009 at The Waterford House at their quasi-annual New Year’s Eve Ball. After 15 years, the band sounds like they’re just getting started. And with the new year, comes a new album, Haymaker! (Yep Roc Records), and another chance for The Gourds to show off why many people in and out of Austin really do think they’re the best band around.
The New Year’s Eve concert is a reminder that the band earned their reputation as a live band intent on having a good time. The masked crowd shimmied and shaked as drummer Keith Langford laid down the rhythms of this music, borne of old-time country and ‘70s-era rock. Accordionist and keyboardist Claude Bernard added vocals in all the right places, locking in with Langford while the other guys traded off lead vocals. Max Johnston (the band’s utility man on fiddle, mandolin and banjo) picked up a guitar to sing lead on his country crooner “Valentine,” one of two songs he wrote for the new CD. The chief Gourds songwriters and singers, Jimmy Smith (bass) and Kevin Russell (guitar/mandolin), traded off a rousing mix of rollicking numbers culled from the band’s 15-year history.
With the New Years’ masquerade ball going strong, The Gourds’ tour manager, Jeff Cook, quietly wondered if it would be the year the band captured more widespread fame. A Mississippi native, Cook started following the band and recorded their shows—something a lot of Gourds fans do, a la the fabled Deadheads—before he got a job with them.
Like many of the band’s loyal fans, Cook harbors an almost evangelism about The Gourds. Cook says that all it would take just one song to get a lot of exposure and The Gourds would have an instant legion of new fans ready to buy The Gourds’ entire back catalog (nine CDs) and discover what a great band they’ve been missing out on.
Others might say that “one song” break already happened about a decade ago, and with mixed results. As acclaim for The Gourds begin spreading far beyond Austin, the quirky band inserted their now infamous cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” into their live set. The unlikely hit gained them some national exposure, but in some respects as a novelty. From that point on, the band has been dogged by requested shouts for “Gin and Juice” wherever they play. (The Gourds must know how Hervé Villechaize felt when strangers shouted “zee plane! zee plane!” every time they saw him.)
But it’s the original music that sets The Gourds apart. Haymaker! is a quintessential Gourds records: a jambalaya of roots-rock influences, recombined and reshaped into the band’s “literate redneck” style. Smith calls it a “badge of honor” that their music can’t be easily classified.
 “It’s the whole ‘dancing about architecture’ thing,” Russell says of the impossibility of writing about music. “Unless you’re hearing it, it’s hard to describe.”
When they’re making records, Johnston, Smith, and Russell write songs separately and bring them to the others more or less fully-formed. It’s up to the rest of the band to arrange it and make it a Gourds song.
Similar to Lennon and McCartney, Smith and Russell’s songs are usually easily identifiable from one another. Smith’s lyrics beguile and draw in the listener; Russell’s tunes are anthemic. There’s a lot of Elvis Costello and Tom Waits in Smith’s music, whereas Russell’s songs evoke distinctly Southern imagery.
In addition to obvious country and rock influences, Russell says the band always listened to “harder stuff,” and cites the ‘80s California punk band The Minutemen in particular as an influence. Some Gourds fans might also be surprised to know that Russell counts Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” and Prince’s “When Doves Cry” among his favorite tunes, and Bing Crosby among his favorite singers.
Like most Austin bands, The Gourds didn’t get a lot of attention in its early days. A 1994 show at Another Cup of Coffee near the University of Texas got the ball rolling. Russell was an employee of the bookstore BookPeople, and he convinced his coworkers to have their regular staff meeting at the coffeehouse, where, it just so happened, his band would be playing afterwards.
“After that it was just word of mouth,” he says.
KUT (90.5 FM) Music Director Jeff McCord first saw the band at Flipnotics Coffeespace in 1995.
“Even though they were playing an acoustic set for maybe 25 people, I have rarely been so impressed by a new band—and I’ve seen a lot of them over the years,” McCord says. “Their songs were assured, arranged, and most of all, highly original.”
McCord says the band’s work ethic has been key to the band’s longevity. “But first and foremost, they are, and always have been, a tremendous live band,” he emphasizes.
McCord asked the boys to appear on KUT’s LiveSet program for a one-hour, on-air performance. “It was one of their first, if not the first recording the band had made,” McCord says. “It got them a lot of attention. They sold the LiveSet tape at their gigs for a long time after that, until their debut album was done.”
“For a while just about every coffee shop I’d go into would be playing it,” Russell says of the LiveSet recording.
After releasing four CDs in four years beginning with Dems Good Beebles in 1996, The Gourds became darlings of the alt-country media, and word of their great live show was spreading.
In Austin, the best-known name in booking might be David Cotton. Cotton booked The Gourds for a series of shows at The Saxon Pub in South Austin. A few were broadcast live on KGSR (107.1-FM).
Cotton doesn’t remember when he first heard about the band, but says they came to the Saxon “fully-formed” and ready to play big shows in front of an adoring audience.
“Their draw was really bigger than the Saxon, even then,” he says, adding: “I think they helped me more than I helped them.”
 Photo: Andy Goodwin Haymaker! was recorded at Bruce Robison’s Premium Record Service in Hyde Park and engineered by Stuart Sullivan, who the band has credited with making the records sound like a cohesive whole.
Cotton is one of many who’ve known the band through the years to call Haymaker! their best effort to date. As for the band’s influence, he adds that he currently books about 20 bands that “aspire to be The Gourds.”
Not a bad legacy for a group Cotton calls “the best musical minds to come out of Texas since Buddy Holly.” |
