Supersuckers
Must've Been Live
Mid-Fi Records

by William Michael Smith

Rock bands turning to country music is an instinct that goes back to the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Rolling Stones. Hell, even further back than that, Elvis and Ray Charles gave country a turn. Tom Jones, B.J. Thomas, Englebert Humperdink...well, you get the idea.

Yet as Supersuckers' frontman Eddie Spaghetti said during the band's recent performance at Houston's Continental Club, it is impossible to imagine Supersuckers contemporaries like Metalica or AC/DC or the 'Suckers' primary spiritual influence Motorhead trying to do a country song, much less a country album or a country tour. The Supersuckers are a unique, one-of-a-kind phenomenon among hard rock, heavy metal, punk-informed modern rock bands. They do country and they do it like they mean it. It's not just some schtick or novelty.

Originally from Tucson, Arizona, the band has been a fixture on the Seattle scene for a decade. After a series of manic, substance-fueled, hit-the-wall-and-go-right-through-it rock albums for Sub Pop Records, they took a turn into country after recording a track for Justice Records' Willie Nelson tribute album, Twisted Willie. During the Twisted Willie period, they went into a Seattle studio with Texans Jesse Dayton and Brian Thomas (not so coincidentally signed to Justice at that point in their careers) and recorded a "country" record, Must've Been High. The success of Must've Been High showed just how loyal their following is as the record sold well and attendance at their dates continued unabated. Who says the Lollapalooza Nation doesn't like country music?

Following Must've Been High, the band left indie-trendy Sub Pop for a major label deal with Interscope. They found themselves stalled as they met with two years of recording and delays while Interscope went through various management changes and was eventually swallowed by an even larger label. Tired of being lost in the corporate shuffle, the Supersuckers got control of their record and out of their deal with Interscope. They went back into the studio, re-recorded some tracks they felt the label had forced them to "sterilize," and released Evil Powers of Rock and Roll which, despite being a bottle rocket of a rock album, was the worst seller of their career. After the mandatory support tours of the States and Europe (where they have a huge, manic following), they came to Austin's SXSW in 2001 unsigned and looking for a record deal. The band hoped to convince a label to put up the money to record another studio rock album and a live album. They had "meetings," but the deal never happened.

So the Supersuckers did what they've always done ­ they got back in the van and kept playing. Needing a change of musical scenery after touring hard behind the Evil Powers record, they put together a new show of the Must've Been High tracks and some hell-for-leather covers of country classics like "Driving Nails in My Coffin" and Harlan Howard's "The Image of Me," along with some less well known covers of songs like "Cowpoke" and "Alabama, Louisiana, Or Maybe Tennessee." The amazing thing in all this is that their metal-headed, piercings-and-tattoos, gas-station couture fans just kept coming to the shows. The band played Houston on the Tuesday after SXSW this year when the town had been saturated with quality acts for a week, yet they packed the place (two days before I'd seen The Yayhoos and Tito and Tarantula at the same venue and I doubt the crowd totaled 75).

After the disappointing sales of Evil Powers (which I considered to be an excellent rock disc) and with no record deal in sight, the band's next recording project was up in the air. The band itself was somewhat up in the air as maturity began to have an effect on four guys who had been playing music and raising hell together since high school (they'd relocated to Seattle on a coin flip; New Orleans was the other choice). Spaghetti and guitarist Ron Heathman married and their wives were expecting. Drummer Dan "Dancing Eagle" Siegel began living part of the year in Fredricksburg, outside Austin, while Dan "Thunder" Bolton, the band's other guitarist, migrated to Southern California. Spaghetti recently moved his family to San Diego.

The band wasn't aware that sound engineer Dave Fisher had been recording the country shows to two-track tape and archiving them at his home. But when Spaghetti mentioned the possibility that it might be a good idea to record a live country album, Fisher told him about the tapes and Must've Been Live was born. Recorded mostly at Trees in Dallas with Willie Nelson harmonica player Mickey Raphael augmenting the band, Must've Been Live, complete with a few less-than-stellar musical bruises and scars (Amy Nelson's duet with Spaghetti on "Hungover Together" may be one of the band's lowest musical moments ever), represents a "mid-fi" document of this amazingly nimble rock band's country alter-ego. Must've Been Live is truly a "live" record. These days when bands record "a live album," they rehearse for days, honing the set, perfecting everything about the show, micro-managing the smallest details, usually to the detriment of spontaneity. On Must've Been Live, with its occasional flubbed pickup or sour note, we truly get a live show, an unplanned recording much like the bootlegs of old that fans prized exactly for the chance to hear their heroes in spontaneous moments, in unmapped territory.

The album also coincidentally serves as a loose musical autobiography of this hell-bent, pour-on-the-gasoline-and-burn-it-down band of hardened veterans. It's not just idle gig patter when Spaghetti notes in introducing the first track, "This song's about us and justeverything about us, really." The song is "Dead in the Water."

Make a hole, make it wide
Watch my career go down the slide
I guess I'll just go on out with the tide
'Cause I'm dead in the water, dead in the water

Don't worry about my ego, it ain't gonna burst
Had plenty of time to practice and rehearse
And I'll never ever die from thirst
'Cause I'm dead in the water, dead in the water

It doesn't take a music Ph.D. to realize one stanza into "Dead in the Water" that this isn't your grandfather's country music. It also doesn't take a Ph.D to realize this band is the antithesis of the bands that have become so central to the frat boy crowd in Texas. No, if there is anything certain in life other than death and taxes, it's probably a safe bet that the Supersuckers won't be playing the Ima Gonna Suckup pledge mixer this year. As the band lopes along, Heathman (who claims Thin Lizzy as his main influence, but says Willie Nelson is the guy whose licks he wants to steal) whacks away with a wah-pedal and Bolton hits the thunderous hard licks he's noted for. It's serious but it's also a sendup, which is exactly the sort of split personality this non-country lyric delivered in a country style calls for. Country bands don't play with this kind of intensity and inventiveness. Neither do 99% of the so-called alternative country bands.

Never a band to cut a performance short (I saw them play well over two sweat-soaked, beer-cans-flying hours in London during the Evil Powers tour), Must've Been Live is packed with 19 tracks (give or take a Bolton philosophical monologue or two on beer, sex, and law enforcement). Along the way, the band covers virtually all of the material from Must've Been High, and those songs come across even better in front of a live, rowdy Texas audience than they did in the studio. Highlights of the set are the jaunty "Roamin' Around," the dark, sinister "Must've Been High," and stunning versions of "One Cigarette Away," the great Heathman track "Non-Addictive Marijuana" ("just gimme a hit, son, I'll show you what that shit'll do"), and the hard luck, hard livin' anthem, "Peace In the Valley" (no, not that one, Alice!).

She spends too much time with herself every night
Just foolin' around with her fears
And in the mornin' she mourns her declinin' line
Drownin' in a bottle of beer
It's too dangerous just to think about
What she might've been
If she'd 've thumbed for salvation
If she'd 've danced on her dreams

But there's gonna be peace in the valley tomorrow
'Cause tonight she's gonna blow it all away
Lord, she feels so twisted, ain't never gonna fix it
She's just waitin' on the light to shine on a brand new day

Houston's Brian Thomas (Jesse Dayton band) joins the 'Suckers for the finale, "Blow You Away," and that's a pretty good description of what happens as Heathman, Bolton, and Thomas throw solos at each other at a breakneck pace. In getting to the finale, we get a booze-soaked, joint-fueled, country-can-be-really-cool record that shows what an amped-up, hell-or-high-water rock band with its heart and its head in the right place can do in a genre that has become known more for its stale, pop-oriented, housewife-attracting, dialing-for-patriotic-dollars hat acts or its fake-bad-ass, "I'm-the-bastard-son-of-Jerry-Jeff-and-Willie" wankers than for its vibrancy and relevance. Must've Been Live gives country (and alternative country) music a much needed kick in the rear, a double-shot-in-the-vein attitude adjustment that the ball cap crowd would like to believe its poster-children acts have given it. But where the frat boy poster-children acts have simply dumbed the music down and turned it into Shiner-Bock-in-a-baby-bottle chauvinistic Muzak, the Supersuckers have turned it into something with muscle and sinew, with meaning and life.

Maybe these old boys should go ahead and face up to the fact that Texas is the place they need to call home. And maybe we need to face up to the fact that we need them worse than they need us.

* With all our Texas frat-boy heroes sucking up to Nashvegas and commercial radio and Texas Monthly and Miller Lite as fast as they can, it's about time we took this thing in a new direction. The Supersuckers are showing one way that'll work. What's next for these musical chameleons? Another full-on rock record. Check 'em out at www.supersuckers.com

Contact William Michael Smith at: wms-at-rockzilla.net

 
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