The Gourds
Cow Fish Fowl or Pig
Sugar Hill Records
by William Michael Smith

I always believed that more time should be spent in bed
Whoever said that sleep is a thief just ain't right in the head

In a town known for killer bands, The Gourds are Public Enemy Number One, Austin's Dillingers of song and mirth, a submachine gun roots musical syndicate, the Mafia of the Muse.

If you don't pay me back forget it
I won't track you down
You have no debt
You already paid out your mouth
I'm crawling in time
Give me back my wig

The brewer's yeast ferments and forgives all that you did

The secret of the Gourds' infectious Penicillin-resistant appeal is their ability to throw all the styles commonly referred to as roots music into a sauce pan, douse in firewater, parboil five minutes on the gas stove of their creativity, smush with a potato masher, strain through South Louisiana and East Texas and East St. Louis, season with rural gospel and a pinch of barefoot blues and a vial of belladonna seed, slop on some Mississippi water gravy, smoke the concoction over tender shoots of sugar cane and Panama Red in a laser-fired barbeque pit, and come up with a disc that rocks. In a funky way. In the traditional tradition.

With their trippy lyrics and a supercharged traditional sound that has been taken to a Hells Angels chop shop and with the help of acetylene and a MIG welder reformed into something entirely 21st century, Kevin Russell, Jimmy Smith, Keith Langford, Claude Bernard, and former Wilco-er Max Johnston have become one of Texas' most beloved and critically recognized traveling circuses.

Paradoxically they somehow manage to sound traditional and entirely nouveau, country and rock and folk at the same time. (Pop? No, no pop.) There is no logical explanation for how their music got to where it is or how it took form, although the usual suspects were certainly present to clean up the after-birth mess: Louis Armstrong, Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Bill Monroe, Levon Helm, Jerry Garcia, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Little Johnny Fader, John Henry Faulk, Clifton Cheniere, Sonny Terry, Marie Laveau, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The invention process was certainly more shade tree mechanic intuition than operating room science, less exacting mathematics than inexact chemistry. However they got to where they are musically, what The Gourds have is an entirely precious gift, a thing as light and pure as simple joy. It's alchemical. It's that funky Austin voodoo. It's way, way cool. The face this music doesn't put a smile on belongs to a tightass philistine. An embalmed tightass philistine.

Underneath the skies unbroken ground
Side by side a-walkin' 'til we've found
No one on the road gets left behind
Every single one is first in line

There is jazzman's jive to Gourdian lyrics and a zydeco lilt to their music, thanks to Claude Bernard's accordion. They may be from Austin, but musically The Gourds tend to dredge up lots of South Louisiana musical impressions. And while they seldom throw a Texas reference, Louisiana frequently bubbles just under the surface of their music.

There was catfish with the Kingfish
And a culture spice gumbo
There's coonass music playing
On a glowin' radio
Klan and crackers on the side
At the Last Chance Cafe
Crawfish etouffee
Warm red river Beaujolais

As soulful and earthy as The Gourds' music is, there is no doubt it's music for thinking folks. Or, as their website proclaims, "Music for the unwashed and well read." There are voluminous literary ("I once sold me an apple to William S. Burroughs/He shot up his dope, his Wine sap, his girl"), lyrical, and historical references, most thrown into the lyrical mix as casually as salt in a stew. The Gourds also have a strong penchant for howling, not-quite-as-ludicrous-as-they-seem biblical bastardizations

Texas tinys they never thought
The rotation or the ring of the rock
Could make the women wantingly mock
The prohibition on cursing the cock
While the temple was under construction
It came down that there was corruption
The lord told 'em detailed instructions
How to build a wagon of destruction

Through some form of cosmic algebra, The Gourds have managed to derive a formula for what we loosely term "Americana" music that is acoustic and traditional sounding but that is undeniably rooted in blues, soul, and rock -- all with punk attitude. This is no easy feat for a band that relies on mandolins, accordion, acoustic guitars, fiddle, upright bass, and the occasional banjo, washboard, or ukelele. Listeners can learn much about The Gourdian musical soup recipe from a verse from "The Bridge," where the irony is thicker than a hot lick from one of Dan Hicks' Lickettes.

If the billygoat was Bootsy
And the troll was Maceo
Only the godfather of soul
Can really take you to the bridge

There is also something sinisterly archeological about these boys. Archeological list-o-phobia runs rampant through stream of consciousness that in the final analysis proves to be more consciousness than stream. "Your typewriters, hand glider, shifty mobster and amplifier/Your golf clubs and bowling balls, gas heaters and bald tires/Microwaves and old pill bottles, video tapes with porno on them/Old birdcages and lame weed eaters, murder weapons and blown speakers."

Through some form of mental osmosis, even though the song writing on the 16 tracks is spread fairly equally between Russell, Johnston, and Smith (with the Levon Helm-ish "Smoke Bend" contributed by Johnston's father, "Dollar" Bill), it would be virtually impossible to determine songwriting credits without the songwriting credits. All three men seem to have mastered a Gourdian penchant for some kind of neo-traditional Band-meets-Sonny- Terry-on-the-bayou sound with lyrics pulled straight from the brain of a Breaux Bridge savant. Russell's "Ham Fisted Box of Gloves" typifies the lyrical playfulness and intelligence that are out of all proportion to what most bands can generate on a single album. The song combines oblique, arcane references that require a folksy literacy and an ability to see far beyond the literal. What begins with "O Suzanna, please radio to the tower it's time to go/To the furthest reaches of the ham-fisted box of gloves" ends with "O Lashonda, help the ugly ones purchase proper their vintage guns/Fly the flannel and put the dove in the ham-fisted box of gloves." Not to be outdone, Johnston follows with "The talk of chocolate covered wingspans/Was suspicious in the sunlight/The talk of wisdom in the bargain/Made me want to keep it for myself" on "The Prayer That Fell Upon the Mirror." In Jimmy Smith's "Ceilin's Leakin'," the seamless trend to translucence only gets more and more abstract, yet makes perfect sense and is entirely topical.

Oh my ceilin's leakin'
And the peeper's peekin'
It's prolly someone I know
I booby trap the window
Can't get ahold of my landlord
I watch the mold grow
It's on the tip of everyone's tongue

All of which leaves me with one question in this age of Homeland Security and Neighborhood Watches...where the hell's our vaunted Texas law enforcement when we need 'em? Some duly constituted Ray-Ban wearing, sawed-off shotgun toting moral authority certainly needs to take the medicine bottle away from these Gourd boys. With their songs that fall somewhere along the continuum between divinely perverse religious spasm to psychedelic regurgitation of the Classics to wet dream apocalypse, they are having waaaaaay too much fun with this music thing. Maybe Child Protective Services should intervene before the Gourds hurt themselves with their imaginations. Or hurt us.

Salt in the sorrow and the sugar blooms
Consign your bags to the hand of doom
Slick as death the velvet piston starts
Like fat blood in a dying swimmer's heart
Roll and tumble and lose your tunes
Life is a junker and a waiting room

* Get your "Reader's Guide to Literary Terms and References" and tell your spaceship pilot to stop your starship at www.thegourds.com for a nanosecond so you can stock up on the psychic sustenance of Cow Fish Fowl or Pig, certainly the best thing The Gourds have done since their last album or last show. This album even impressed our own Poet Lariat, Carter Monroe, and that fella ain't easily impressed. A single listen reportedly caused Monroe to dream about Dan Hicks and Bob Dylan discussing pornographic desires with Scarlett Rivera in the backseat of Hank Williams' Cadillac while being chauffered to a Gourds gig by Loudon Wainright, whom they were berating for his insouciance and anemia. Definitely stronger than Sleep-Ez.

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

 
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