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“I stopped an’ saw my truck-stop
friends / I tried to buy five, an’ they gave
me ten ... ”
—“Lucky Moon” by Jon Dee Graham, 1986.
Coming of age in the vast, sprawling expanse of Southern Texas, the muddy Rio Grande on
one side, No-Man’s Land on the other, it’s no wonder a young Jon Dee Graham
developed a fixation on the huge yellow orb floating in the night sky above. Not only did
it mirror the barren world around him, it also represented the ultimate escape from the
tiny, sparsely-populated town of Quemado, where |
he was born.
“It was kind of like growing up on the moon,” says Graham
from his current home in Austin, “I was removed from the people who were removed from
the people who were removed. I was way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere. It was sort
of like a compound.”
The 42-year-old axe-slinger laughs about his lunar obsession these
days, but from his early work as singer/guitarist/songwriter with legendary alt-country
outfit the True Believers (With Alejandro and Javier Escovedo), to the name of his
publishing company (Lucky Moon), right on through to his latest solo album, Hooray for the
Moon, Graham’s left no doubt as to where his main inspiration lies.
Though Quemado was about as far removed from the thriving Tejano music
scene of the early ’70s as one could get and still be in Texas, the naturally
curious, music-hungry youth began listening to pirate radio early on.
“There were tons of those stations,” he says, “and
a lot of them, particularly at night, were so powerful that they’d just boot
everything else off the airwaves, so that’s what you had to listen to! They’d
play soulful pop from the ‘50s, hard rock from the ‘70s, to Sonny & The
Sunlighters, so it was pretty much what I hear in my head now—this mash of
everything.”
And although his father never quite understood Jon Dee’s musical
bent, the fact that his parents met at a Bob Wills Barn Dance influenced him right from
the start—“I come by it naturally,” he shrugs.
Graham also credits his early exposure to the music and culture of
nearby Mexico with informing both his guitar-playing style and his outlook on life in
general. “Growing up so close to Mexico,” he ruminates, “you could walk out
my front door and be standing on the banks of the Rio Grande. My high school was like, 96
percent Mexican-American; the whites were definitely in the minority. I think I grew up
being kind of Mexican-by-proxy. [laughs] A lot of that cultural stuff rubbed off on me.
The bloody passion that was sort of indented where I grew up, that kind of works its way
in [to my music]. One of my fondest memories is hearing those Latin bands across the river
beatin’ out [Doug Sahm’s] ‘Mendocino’ and ‘She’s About a
Mover.’”
The impressionable young Graham quickly graduated from playing piano in
church to playing bass in a local country band, to strumming a guitar in his room every
chance he got—incorporating the muddle of genres and styles he’d been weaned on
into his own trademark sound. Along the way, he mastered the lap steel as well.
“There was this weird blend of hard-core, shit-kicker
country,” he recounts, “and that sort of wailing, passionate Mexican music, and
hard rock. Somehow, all of that sank in.”
He put together his own band, virtually becoming the town’s only
option for live music at school dances and social functions. As he neared legal drinking
age, though, curiosity eventually got the best of him, and, after several inspirational
forays into the swinging saloons South of the Rio Grande, he lit a shuck and headed for
Austin.
Graham intended to pursue a law degree at the University of Texas, but
the fall of 1977 in Austin was the wrong time and place to be for a boy with a hankering
to play loud guitar.
“My family had high hopes for me to do other things,” he says
with a hint of a grin. “My older brother was a doctor, and my younger sister is a
nurse now. I came to Austin to study pre-law, and that lasted about a year. [Then] I
started playing in punk rock bands, and ended up in The Skunks. We were the main punk rock
band here for a while.”
Graham still recalls the moment (it probably happened under a big,
bright, Texas moon) he discovered punk rock: “One night, I was driving around
listening to a San Antonio hard rock station, KMAC/KISS, and [usually] they’d play
Kiss live, lots of Aerosmith—and right in the middle of one of those sets, they
played Patti Smith’s version of ‘Gloria’—the whole thing! I
immediately knew it was different, but I also knew it was coming from the same place as
the hard rock stuff. I loved that this radio station was like, punk-schmunk, whatever!
It’s loud, it’s got a bunch of guitars, and it’s crazy as shit. Let’s
play it! So they started doing this blend—they’d play the New York Dolls, The
Ramones, but tucked in with UFO and The Scorpions, so it was like this weird blend of
proto-heavy metal and punk, and they drew no distinction between the two, so neither did
I. To my mind, the punk rock thing was exciting and new, and at the same time, it was
taking the music back—it was still just all loud guitars.”
The Skunks cut their first album on a four-track in a friend’s
garage, and were soon local darlings on both the radio and clubs around Austin. Through a
connection frontman Jesse Sublett had with Velvet Underground alum John Cale, the band
became Austin’s premier punk openers—warming up local crowds for such luminaries
as The Ramones and The Clash. Soon, they were using those connections to book gigs as far
away as New York City, where they eventually relocated. Graham, a true-blue Texan, was not
at all swayed by the bright lights of the big city.
“I didn’t relate to it at all,” he grimaces. “It
was too much scene and not enough music for me.”
In 1980, he left the band and did a stint with blues diva Lou Ann
Barton.
His seemingly-abrupt moves from countrified Tex-Mex classics to punk to
blues weren’t planned, he explains, but now seem more like a natural progression.
“I just got tired of being in this punk rock box, and not being
able to write,” he says, “so I left the band to do some writing. I toured with
[Barton], but I was catching hell from the ‘blues mafia’ because I didn’t
play ‘real blues guitar,’ and I was catching hell from the punks because
I’d sold out and gone across the tracks!” [laughs] “That was probably the
most positive thing about it-—I got to piss people off! That’s what I
wanted.”
Graham returned to Austin, determined to take a self-imposed sabbatical
from live music and do some writing. He found himself drifting back into the clubs soon
enough, however, and found that the folks back home hadn’t forgotten his crunchy,
cow-punk style—not that he was much impressed.
“I met Alejandro Escovedo around that time,” he recalls.
“He was in this band called Rank and File, and I didn’t care for them. Hardly at
all, in fact. It just seemed like punk rockers playing dress-up cowboys.” He did,
however, admire Escovedo’s gutsy, original guitar playing and innate Latin charm.
“When he split off from Rank and File and started the True
Believers, I would go see them and think, this is really cool, but I couldn’t quite
put my finger on it. I knew that, by and large, it was the most interesting thing going
on.”
The True Believers were, in fact, taking Graham’s childhood
influences and grinding them up into a delicious blend of pepper-y Latin fire, country
git-up-an-go, and raw punk abandon. Escovedo, weary of balancing frontman and axe duties
and eager to do more songwriting, asked Graham to sit in one night.
“I was just kind of in the band after that,” he chuckles.
“I was sort of trying to stay in the sideman spot again, and he was like, ‘No,
no! You sing!’ So I ended up being one of the writers and singers in the band, and I
still owe him greatly for that.”
Featuring Alejandro and his brother, ex-Zero Javier, on guitars, in
addition to Graham (prompting one critic to describe the band as “one big
guitar”), San Francisco bassist, Denny DeGorio, and a Spinal Tap-esque lineup of
drummers, the True Believers fused their individual songwriting and axeman talents with an
in-your-face stage attack to which neither of the albums they ended up recording was able
to do justice. With a few bucks for gas and a couple cases of Longhorn safely stashed in
the back of their van, the band hit the road, and it wasn’t long before a Rounder
Records label rep caught wind of their groundbreaking, genre-busting act and offered them
a contract.
Rounder, a label usually more readily identified with blues and folk,
had been expanding their stable over the past few years before that fateful True Believers
tour. They’d recently signed the commercial radio-friendly George Thorogood, and,
with the help of a distribution deal with the mighty EMI, seemed poised to back the Troobs
for the long haul. The band used their old punk rock connections to reach legendary
producer Jim Dickinson (Big Star, The Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me) and coax him
into the studio. On a shoe-string budget (under 10 grand), and in a mere three days, the
band cut their self-titled debut—and it showed. Even with Dickinson at the helm, the
gutbucket live impact of the band’s triple axe attack was decidedly muted on the
tapes they sent EMI.
The label was impressed, nonetheless, and teamed up with Rounder to
release the record and provide financial backing for a follow-up. Their self-titled 1986
debut featured two Graham originals, “Lucky Moon” and “Sleep Enough to
Dream,” a slew of Escovedo-penned numbers, and a Lou Reed cover, “Train Round
the Bend.”
Critics and audiences across the country gave the album and the
band’s subsequent tour a warm reception. Rolling Stone and Spin raved; legend even
has it that Iggy Pop himself danced with abandon to their live reading of his
Stooges classic, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (which Alejandro still performs live,
usually much to modern audiences’ delight) at an L.A. record-release bash.
Thrilled with their seemingly never-ending self-promotional tour
(during which they opened for the likes of Guns N’ Roses and an early incarnation of
The Black Crowes), EMI fronted the band $130,000 for studio work, and hired slick producer
Jeff Glixman (The Georgia Satellites) for their next release. Glixman, hot off of
producing the AOR single “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” for the Satellites,
advised the group to record their new batch of songs with a different rhythm section to
get that “radio-friendly groove.” Graham and the Escovedo brothers—stars in
their eyes from the adulation they’d been receiving nationally and exhausted from
incessant touring—agreed. DeGorio and drummer Kevin Foley were dismissed posthaste.
Enlisting skinman Mark Shaffer and bassist Gordon Copley, and with a
name-brand guest-star (Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo), the True Believers laid down their
best work to date, an untitled album set for a late summer 1987 release. With their
familiar rhythm grounding pulled from beneath them, the three guitarists found a fierce,
near-magical poise—all chunk-’n’-thunder—and more evenly-divided
songwriting (Graham contributed two more classics, “One Moment to Another” and
“Home”) and vocal duties made for what could have been a formidable contender in
the doldrums of the late-’80s, pre-indie-revolution music scene.
EMI, which was about to merge with Manhattan Records, assured the band
that their record would carry over into their new stable, but Jon Dee recalls discovering
the ugly truth a few weeks before the record was due to hit the streets: “We got this
letter saying, ‘You’re off the label.’
“At that point, we had enough notoriety that there were several
labels that were willing to buy it and put it out,” he shakes his head in disgust,
“but EMI wouldn’t release the master because it was worth more to them as a tax
write-off. I think that was a good lesson for all of us on how this beast works—or
where its teeth are, anyway. Nowadays, I think back to that Steve Albini piece [“Why
the Music Industry Sucks: The Problem With Music”] exposing the record industry. Back
then, it was this big, heretical thing, now it’s all been proven so right and so
true, it’s kind of quaint when you read it. But it’s been happening forever and
ever—look at Sam Phillips [of Sun Records/Elvis fame] and those guys. It’s
nothing new.” Fans and the curious can now hear both albums, re-issued by Rykodisc in
1994, on a collection called Hard Road.
Disheartened by their brush with the majors and sans rhythm section,
Graham and the brothers Escovedo soon disintegrated as a unit, and the disillusioned
guitarist jumped at an offer from X frontman John Doe to guest on an upcoming solo album
he was working on.
“That was a great experience,” he says brightly. “And
the live band! The guitars were me and [Television’s] Richard Lloyd! [1990’s
Meet John Doe] was a great record, and John is a good man. L.A. was a good time for me,
but it’s just so hard to live out there.”
Graham may not have been inspired by the So-Cal lifestyle, but he
continued to write songs during this period, using his private pain as a springboard for
future solo classics. His first son, Roy, was born just as his personal life began
crumbling under the pressures of constant recording and touring.
Songs like “Soonday” (written for little Roy with the
heart-in-throat line, “Just don’t grow up / So goddamn fast / Wait a little
while, ‘til I get home”), “Faithless,” and “When a Woman
Cries” would eventually populate his debut solo album.
“My first marriage was falling apart, so [after the tour with Doe]
I went to Europe to play with this expatriate Texan named Calvin Russell,” he recalls
with a grimace. “When I came back, I moved back to Texas.”
By this point, the John Doe experience aside, Graham had had enough of
the music business—period. “I started doing construction work,” he recalls,
“and I wasn’t going to do anything [musical]. My express purpose was that I was
NOT going to play, I was not going to write; I was going to work with my hands,” he
laughs, “I was going to get out of the whole deal.”
Once again, fate would play a hand in dictating Graham’s musical
direction. Tired as he was of the music scene, he wasn’t exactly raking in the cash
as an unskilled laborer in early ‘90s Austin. When he got a series of calls
requesting his presence onstage from a longtime fan who was making a name for herself as a
singer/songwriter in both the alt-country and commercial scenes, he couldn’t resist
checking it out.
“It’s funny,” he recollects, “Kelly Willis
didn’t know me, but we had a really good friend in common. I started getting those
phone calls, and she really wanted me to come and play guitar. And honestly,” he
grins, “it was more about money at that time—I could make more money with a
guitar than I could with a hammer. But after I went to one rehearsal [and heard her sing],
I was like, ‘OK!’”
The excitement being generated nationally by the then in-full-bloom
indie revolution, steady touring with Willis, and a chance meeting with an old pal
cemented Graham’s immediate future—he was soon back to writing and playing for
the pure enjoyment of it.
“I ran into my buddy Mike Hardwick,” he says, “who was
producing a session, and he asked me to come down and play on it. He’d played guitar
with Jimmie Dale Gilmore [and had] produced some records. While we were working, I started
playing him some of the stuff I’d been writing, and he thought it was interesting. So
we started getting together just for coffee and stuff in 1995.”
With bassist George Reiff, keyboardist Michael Ramos and former Bodeans
drummer Rafael Gayol in tow, the pair talked an interested friend into releasing an
album’s worth of songs Graham had written over the previous five or six years and a
few fresh tracks. “Freedom Records was just this guy [Andy
Taub] doing records he loved out of his house,” chuckles Graham. “He heard us
play and wanted to put out an acoustic tape. We were like, ‘For the same amount of
money, we could deliver you a real record.’ And we just sort of pulled it out of our
asses, gave him a $50,000 record for about 10 cents on the dollar. We pretty much killed
ourselves doing it, cut and recorded everything in three days.”
1997’s self-produced Escape From Monster Island showcased a
mature, world-weary Graham— he’d finally grown into his gravelly, Tom
Waits-meets-Richard Thompson voice—and Hardwick’s astounding guitar abilities
were a perfect complement to his own inimitable style.
“The weird thing is,” he puzzles, “I couldn’t even
tell you how it works, because from the get-go, there was no lead guitar and no rhythm
guitar. It’s just two guitars. He’s one of a handful of guitar players who can
go beyond what I hear. He plays so intelligently, we never have to work out parts, we just
sit and play. This band, in four and a half years, has had one rehearsal. And that was
before a recording! What we’re doing isn’t Al DiMeola. [laughs] I mean,
there’s no physics involved here, it’s just rock ’n’ roll.”
Hardwick, Graham, and a loose-knit group of locals he jokingly refers
to as “this little Austin version of The Wrecking Crew” played a steady string
of dates around town for the next year or so, and Graham eventually scored a weekly gig
with a pal, musician and producer Stephen Bruton, at an area club.
“Stephen had been talking to [New West President] Cameron [Strang]
about doing a record, and they were still sort of negotiating. Cam came to see us do this
show we do as The Resentments here every Sunday, this sort of funny thing where we play
and spend at least half the show fucking with each other. Cameron was like, ‘Where
did YOU come from?’ [laughs] So I gave him a copy of Escape, and he was like, ‘I
wanna do your next record!’ I hooked up with him and that was that. And as far as
I’m concerned, I will be on New West until the day I die.” The label has plans
to re-issue Escape ... sometime in 2002.
Graham’s New West debut, Summerland, was another giant step
forward. Though the band retained the production team of Graham-Hardwick-Taub, the sound
and feel of the record (mostly due to the freshness of the new songs) was crisper, more
immediate and decidedly more upbeat than its predecessor. Tough but friendly axe licks
melded sublimely with pedal steel, dobro, and Ramos’ tantalizing B-3 and Wurlitzer
teasers. Featuring backing vocals from Patty Griffin, final mixing at The Hit Shack and
tasteful mastering by Jerry Tubb at Terra Nova, it was Graham’s most cohesive work
since the Troobs. He attributes a new marriage, lots of downtime with his son, and the
liberation he felt working with a label where, “they actually listen to music and
like it! Not just mine, but music in general!” with fueling the creative fires that
burn throughout Summerland.
Kicking off with the serene, life-affirming “A Place in the
Shade,” the album fairly shines with positivity. “Big Sweet Life” rips out
of your speakers like a familiar classic you’ve really never heard before;
“God’s Perfect Love” celebrates honesty and self-sacrifice; and “At
the Dance” finds Graham giving a little something back to his boyhood influences,
incorporating Santana riffs, Sir Douglas grooves and backing Latin rhythms that would
shake the sombrero off of the sleepiest siesta-soaker in Quemado.
“I tried so hard to get [Carlos Santana] a copy of that
song,” he says, “because I have a friend working on his crew. But I haven’t
heard anything back. That whole song was me taking my hat off and getting down on one knee
for the forefathers. Growing up on the border, you couldn’t get away from ‘Black
Magic Woman.’”
New West backed Graham and Hardwick on a series of special acoustic
showcases in the winter of 2000, and the pair played spare versions of JDG classics and a
few select covers to attentive audiences. During this period, bassist Mark Andes (Canned
Heat, Spirit, Heart) replaced longtime sideman George Reiff—clicking so well with the
group that he’d go on to play on Graham’s third album. Meanwhile, a new
generation of critics, weaned on No Depression-era, Graham-influenced artists like Uncle
Tupelo, sat up and took notice of the reticent guitar hero’s latest release. Inspired
and reassured by both the critical acclaim and the birth of his second son, Willie
(who’s two and a half now), Graham wrote a new batch of tunes in record time.
Now with longtime fan/New West VP Peter Jesperson on board as full-time
A&R man, a steadily-growing fan base, and feeling a tad more comfortable with his
“genre-founding” status, Graham set about to record his ultimate album. He
joined Hardwick, Andes and legendary drummer Jim Keltner (Gayol was summoned right before
recording to begin a short road-trip with The Flatlanders, but will be on tour with
Graham), in Canoga Park, Calif., to begin recording this year’s Hooray for the Moon.
“It took us a while to get this record off the ground,” says
Jesperson from his home in North Hollywood. “We had talked to a couple of other
producers before we settled on Don Smith. (Best known for his mixing and engineering work
with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Smith also produced Bash N’ Pop’s Friday
Night is Killing Me and Perfect’s debut EP, When Squirrels Play Chicken). But once we
got going, everyone was so ready to give it their all, you can hear it, loud and
clear.”
The co-founder of legendary Minneapolis indie label Twin/Tone and the
chap who brought The Replacements and Jack Logan to the world is absolutely aglow about
Graham’s latest.
“This record is just dripping with emotion and determination and
fire,” he raves. “I just love Jon Dee and his boys as musicians and as human
beings; they’re great people to work with.”
Special guests this time out included Mike Campbell (Tom Petty &
The Heartbreakers), Davey Faragher (Cracker) and Tex-Mex legend Little Joe. The album is,
to say the least, the man’s crowning achievement. Kicking off with a stunning remake
of the True Believers’ classic, “One Moment,” it’s clear right from
the get-go that Graham is out to put the past into perspective while fearlessly facing his
musical future. The newfound confidence and enthusiasm so ubiquitous on Summerland has
eased into a comfortable, if gritty, mid-life groove, lending the stories behind the songs
a hint of grown-up, trepidaciously-dispensed wisdom.
“I think this was the first record out of the three where I really
got to just sort of drop everything and do what I wanted to do,” says the band leader
on the eve of the first leg of a national tour to promote Hooray for the Moon, which was
released on Jan. 15. “Me and Mike Hardwick were leaving L.A. after finishing the
record, and he said to me, ‘I think we finally got to make the record we always
wanted to make.’ And I think that’s probably the truest thing you could
say—it’s the record we always wanted to make.”
Tight yet breathable production from Smith makes the album a pure sonic
joy to listen to, and took some much-needed pressure off of Graham, who’d helped
produce his two previous solo albums.
“It’s such a hassle,” he says, “trying to perform
and cut at the same time. You lose your focus after a while. But Don knew what we wanted,
and knew some stuff that we didn’t know we wanted. He brought stuff to this record
that I never would’ve been able to achieve.”
In addition to several joint songwriting efforts with Hardwick (“I
Go Too” and “Waiting for a Sign”); one with Hardwick and Andes
(“Laredo,” a terrifying tale of death and stalking behind growling guitars that
Graham says is “the darkest thing I’ve ever written, it should be in a horror
movie soundtrack!”); two remade Troobs classics (“One Moment” and
“Home”); and four new Graham compositions, there are several revealing covers on
Hooray ... . The first is a fire-and-brimstone reading of Tom Waits’ “Way Down
in the Hole,” a fierce interpretation of the old-time-religion barnburner that finds
Graham reveling in his God-given rasp and gleefully shouting the words—“Go back
to hell!”
The second is a raunchy, joyous romp through the Tex-Mex standard
“Volver,” featuring backing vocals from one of Graham’s longtime heroes,
the aforementioned Little Joe, aka the King of the Brown Sound.
“He’s the REAL Mexican Elvis,” Graham says, only
half-joking. “He’s the real thing! He’s this Tejano legend, like the
Godfather of Latin Soul, you know? I’m proud of [having Mike Campbell guest on the
album], but the fact that Little Joe sang on my record, I’m just beaming over it, you
know?”
With 18 dates scheduled in the Midwest and across the East Coast as we
go to press, and a West Coast run scheduled for the middle of February, Graham’s been
taking advantage of some welcome family time lately, keeping his chops honed playing his
weekly local gig with Bruton, and basking in the Austin heat before he heads out towards
the frozen North. Though he’s been through the proverbial ringer in both his
professional and private lives over the past three decades, he’s righteously proud of
his past legacy and understandably excited about the future.
“I’m happily remarried for comin’ up on four
years,” he says with a satisfied grin. “I’ve got my boys, a record label
that lets me call up the president anytime I want, and against all odds, I’ve got the
happiest life I’ve ever had right now.”
His faith in himself and that big ole Texas moon must’ve brought
the once-lonesome axeman a little luck in the end, after all. pulse
Jon Dee Graham & Band play The 7th Street Entry on Fri., Jan. 25. Dan Israel & The
Cultivators and Ol’ Yeller open. 8 p.m. $6. 21+. 701 1st Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8388.
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