Hostile Amish here and coming at ya! Now let me tell ya'll bout the gig coming up this weekend. I't sounds almost too good to be true O.D is actually playing with other country bands(and we thought we were the only ones.) Which means country fans, beer, whiskey, wimmen, and an all out redneck good time. So we been practicing. Enter the angel of disease.  Me and Ian (guitar and dobro respectivly) have been struck down with an evil plague of sickness. Me I've been fighting this hateful cough and basically adriatic bird flu like symptoms fer the better part of two weeks now and Ian had to go to the hospital with a swollen throat(god its hard to leave that 1 alone!!!haha).So we've had some obstacles to overcome health wise. The good news is that the lord is a huge O.D fan and just happens to love country music and there is no way he would let us miss out on such a grand event and spectacle as this. So bust out yer airborne and zicam, throw back a couple thousand milligrams of vitaman C and come hear some country music done right by local columbus acts. And pray to god this creeping death sickness dosen't infect all of  c-town!! yours truly H.A a.ka dartagnan.

Note From Slim:  This is gonna be a two parter because I’m a terrible editor and I can’t seem to trim the content down.  I’m glad I decided not to do a "graphic novel" of this shit, because then it would never see the light of day.  Plus, I hate "graphic novel".  Isn’t that just a comic book?

The band is greater than the sum of its parts, ideally.  If it ain’t, it ain’t a band.  So what are the parts of OutLaw DeLuxe?   Let’s find out.

When OutLaw DeLuxe takes the stage for another night of sturdy, ass-kicking country music, we’re a very different band than the one you might have seen on a Sunday night at The Rack two years ago.  Notably, we’ve relieved ourselves of one front man too many, and we’ve traded up to a real bass player.   Since then, though, we’ve refined and expanded in other ways.   The guitar sound was always big, but since he came on board full-time, Ian has added a level of nuance that I wanted to investigate in this essay.
 

The guitar sound of OutLaw DeLuxe is a blend of three distinct musicians: Andy on the Thinline, holding down a steady, percussive rhythm; Josh on the Kramer, wailing and grinding out bluesy, melodic leads; and Ian slipping and sliding in between the two, floating a gauzy scrim of shimmering slide riffs, filling out the sound and massaging the groove.   Back when Justin was in the band, there wasn’t hardly enough room on the stage for Ian.  (Hell, there wasn’t enough room for Justin, but that’s another story.)  Once Justin stepped off, seems like Ian became a little more available.  I asked Ian about that when we sat down last week at his apartment over on Third Avenue.
 

He put on a Raconteurs CD, and I cracked open a High Life and started to ask questions.  Ian enjoyed rum and coke while his cat Levon lounged around the floor for the duration.  That’s Levon as in Levon Helm, not the Elton John song Levon off "Madman Across The Water".   It’s telling that Ian would name his cat after the drummer and vocalist from The Band.  Not that the cat can sing, mind you.  It’s just that Ian is committed to the music; he’s a student of American music, and he pays tribute every time he picks up a guitar.  Or when he names a cat.

OutLaw DeLuxe had been jamming for better than a year by the time Ian signed on full time.  He would show up at The Rack once in a while, and he generally made the stage for shows at The Thirsty Ear, but he wasn’t humping his shit out to The Pit Stop every other Wednesday or making the scene real regular.  I asked him about it: "Was it your schedule or you didn’t really want to be in a band or was it Justin?"

"It was a combination of all those things, I think", he said.  "I just didn’t think he was that good.  And I thought, if these guys think he’s good, how good can they be?"

"Yeah," I said, "We labored under that burden for too long."

Ian grew up in Gallipolis, OH.  It’s a beautiful village down south, on the Ohio River just this side of West Virginia.  The whole band got a good look at Galli when we drove down to play our first show at the Courtside.  Ian took us around to see all the landmarks- his old high school, the house he grew up in, a dumpster where he threw up Junior year.  We met his folks, who are great people.  They gave us the back yard to camp in, the pool to swim in and a nice cookout to boot.   I drank a lot of beer and got a terrible sunburn.  I thought I would die.  It was great.  I asked Ian about growing up in Galli and his earliest encounters with music.

"I was like ten.  We had a piano, I was screwing around on it, so when I took lessons didn’t sound as bad.  That lasted about six months.  Then, fifth grade, school band, saxophone."

Wow, I thought.  Frickin’ Ian started on piano and sax.  He probably used to be able to read music.  Not bad.

"It was considered a promotion to move me over to tuba come seventh grade" he said, " but they didn’t give me summer lessons so they just put me in the ’sped’ band as I called it."

"Sped?"

"Special ed band.  The teacher didn’t understand why I couldn’t just go from saxophone, a woodwind, to tuba, a brass instrument."

"Totally different instrument."

"Yeah, so I finally said screw this. I’m just gonna play guitar.  I had a  Peavey Rage amp, little tiny ten inch combo, and an Aria Pro-II Cat.   All that came to like a hundred and fifty bucks."

"So your sittin’ in your room playing along with records?"

"I took lessons, the basics, scales, Mel Bay guitar book.  Whatever song I was into, the teacher’d show me the riff or the chords.  I became better really when I joined my first real band, The Dragginflies."  (Ed: not sure on the spelling here- could be Draggin’ Flies) Ian’s guitar teacher worked out of a music store, but he eventually opened a record store, and he gave Ian a job.  "By the time I started at the record store, I was in the Dragginfles, so I stopped taking lessons, ’cause band practice was like a lesson every time we got together."
 

Ian slings the booze behind the bar at The Thirsty Ear.  He’s been hitting all the obligatory Rock Dude cool jobs from an early age, starting with the job at the record store in high school, and the bartending, and of course summer stock stock theater tech crew.  Um, wha…?
 

"After high school, I went to school in Athens for a semester and then to Cherokee, North Carolina and did outdoor drama for a summer."

"Outdoor drama?"

"Yeah."

"Doing what?"

"Actor-Technician"

Turns out Ian did a lot of community theater when he was growing up.  Seems he wasn’t much of a football player, so naturally he turned to the theater as means of picking up the ladies.  He even majored in theater at OU, but "I wasn’t into it and they weren’t into me," so he quit that and headed down to Memphis.  This is another time honored Rock Dude strategy: half-hearted attempt at a college education followed by a cross-country move to a fabled music mecca.  Some guys end up in Austin or Nashville, or if they’re jerks they go to Hollywood.  My personal post-collegiate music destination was Boston, but Ian wisely chose Memphis.  He went down there with Reese from Smokestack Lightning, and was joined later by Smokestack drummer Big Jay.

Ian got another record store job, at a place called Pop Tunes, the legendary Memphis record store where Elvis hung out as a kid, listening to the latest R&B and gospel records, and where, later, his first ever 45 RPM was sold.  

"We spent almost two years down there, me and Reese and Big Jay and another guy from Galli.  We got two whole gigs.  Mostly it was just practice."  They were The Dragginflies in Memphis, too, and  they stuck to a program of covers by the likes of the Stones and Free and The Black Crowes, with a couple of originals penned mostly by Reese.  Big Jay found a gigging outfit and stuck it out for a while, but eventually Ian and Reese bugged out and ended up in Columbus, where they crashed together until Reese got married.
 

Right about this time, late ’97 or so, is when Ian followed through on a couple more Rock Dude ritualistic rites of passage.  For one, he did The Recording Workshop, which is an eight week kind of crash course in recording engineering.  That’s the one Rock Dude thing I personally haven’t done, so I can’t address the subject with the same authority that I can talk about the half-assed pursuit of a college education or the inevitable pilgrimage to (insert music scene city here.)  As it happens, Ian tells me he didn’t do much, professionally, with his Recording Workshop experience.  Given the rapid pace of change in recording technology over the past ten years, Ian’s skill set was probably hopelessly out-of-date within six months of the course anyway.
 

I guess Ian’s had a Fostex recorder on hand most of the time, and he’s used it for sketching, but he’s not a big home-recording guy, in spite of the Recording Workshop experience, and that sounds about right.  I don’t think Ian has an aversion to technology, but if you look at his gear, it’s pretty clear the dude likes things simple and reliable.   He’s not a gear head.  Of course, he doesn’t use e-mail and barely maintains his MySpace page, so maybe he is kind of a 20th century boy.

Since ’92 he’s had the black Tele, which is about as basic as an electric guitar gets.  "That’s going in the ground with me…"  He’s got the Dobro, which is pretty old school too, and a Washburn round neck resonator, kind of Ian’s beater reso.  His amp is a classic Fender tweed all-tube model, (note to self: which model is it?) and he’s got an Ibanez acoustic and an Epi Gold Top LP, both in standard tuning.  That’s a good, no-nonsense cross section of guitar tools.  But then, of course, Ian’s got...... The Pod.

Yeah, I used to give him a little shit for having The Pod.  I have a bit of a purist’s attitude about guitar sounds, and I admit I can be pretty doctrinaire.  I’m always telling Josh to back off on the reverb.  So when I spotted Ian plugging in The Pod, I just couldn’t figure out why he was putting that thing between his Dobro and his tube amp.

"The Tampod!" says Ian.  "I bought that because I needed a volume pedal for the Dobro.  I was talking to Jimmy Lynch, and he had a Boss multi effects thing that, for like four hundred bucks, had every pedal Boss had ever made.  It made sense. All I need is the wah, the volume, the tuner, I like hittin that flange for Luckenbach.  Most of the shit I don’t even use.  Also, it’s a headphone amp.  For two hundred bucks." 

I have to admit that Ian shows a lot of restraint when it comes to the effects, and believe me- I’ve played with some guys that don’t know when to say when.  Ask KJ about that.  Ultimately, Ian’s attitude is not too different from my own.  That is, we’re both too lazy and cheap to bother with pedals.  Ian’s just a little less lazy and a little less cheap than I am.

Next Episode: Rock Dude Ritual No. IV: Putting Down The Guitar In An Attempt At A Slightly More Stable Lifestyle, Only To Take It Back Up Again

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

OutLaw Chronicles: From Here To Eternity

By the time the Outlaw Caravan had been together for about a year, we had a whole evening's worth of music and a solid foundation to build on.  It was time to get a little more serious, though, and see about tightening up some of those endings and putting a little shine on the vocal harmonies.   In fact, it was just about time to start actually rehearsing. For real.  Seein' as how Andy is so committed to the band, he bought a house so we could practice in the basement.  He also lives there with Christine, but that's just so they can keep an eye on the musical gear downstairs.  Over time, Andy has gotten to be a pretty expert sound man, and he's assembled a nice PA that works well in a live setting, and it's actually a great system for practice.  It's a real luxury, down there in the OutLaw Underground, having that professional quality PA.   Since he's also a skilled carpenter, Andy also knocked out a wall and put in a real honest-to-God bar, complete with a mirror and an array of illuminated beer and liquor signs.  This creates a rehearsal atmosphere known as the Gig Simulator.  I believe it's the only known Gig Simulator in the tri-state area.  The OutLaw Underground is the single most accommodating rehearsal room that I have ever played in.

..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O />

Once we started our Monday night practice schedule, it seemed like Justin sort of faded into the background.  He had a lot on his plate with work and school, so it was understandable if he had to back off the music.  The problem was that everyone else was still fully involved, and Justin wasn't able to keep up.  When Justin was there, he would get testy when folks would try to help him hit the harmony or try to teach him the opening riff to Guitars And Cadillacs.   It didn't help things that his girlfriend begrudged him his nights out with the band. 

Finally Justin sent an e-mail to everyone in the band.  He stated in no uncertain terms that he expected the rest of the band to show him the proper respect that he felt he deserved for his contribution, and pointedly informed us that he was able to bench press 300 lbs.  Now, I'm pretty sure this was directed at me, because I had kind of pushed him to hit a particular vocal note so that Christine wouldn't have to guess where her harmony should be.  I admit I got impatient with him, but I don't reckon it called for a beat-down.   He apologized at the next practice for his very thinly veiled threat of violence, but the damage had already been done.   He played a couple more shows with us, and then one night he just never came back.   One question remains: if a guy is the least experienced and least skilled member of a band, why wouldn't he want to take the opportunity to learn from his band mates, who have been patiently trying to help him improve his chops?  Either he didn't realize his limitations, or he was unable to sustain the blow to his ego that came with admitting he was lagging behind the rest of the band.

Well, I don't want to be too hard on the guy.  He was a good sport for most of the time.  Then again, he made a point of staking his claim to the name Outlaw Caravan.  Justin told us that he'd actually trademarked the name, and that the band couldn't use it anymore.  I don't know whether he was just trying to flip us off on his way out the door, or whether he actually had plans to conquer the world of country music using the name, but it didn't matter to us.   A name change for the band seemed in order anyway, with Justin's departure, and Ian assuming full-time status at last.   I think it took about a week to settle on the name.  There were about three contenders, but it seems like a MySpace poll helped us decide on OutLaw DeLuxe.  Seems to work, eh?

Having the practice space at Andy's house inaugurated a whole new era for the OutLaws.  The most obvious benefit was the opportunity to fine tune song arrangements and really nail down beginnings, endings and bridges.  (Although, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but a lot of times there ain't a bridge in your country songs.  It's the damnedest thing….. )  Another great development was Andy going out and buying two identical all-tube Fender amps for himself and Josh.  When Justin left, he took his little Acoustisonic amp with him, which left Josh high and dry.  Andy had been playing through a little 15 watt job, I think.  Anyway, one day we show up and there's these two beautiful amps, all tube, 60 watts or thereabouts.  Now we were starting to hear what the OutLaws could really sound like.

Another nice thing about Justin taking the big vacation is the extra space that leaves for Christine's vocals.  Justin used to chime in on backups here and there, basically haphazardly, and it kind of crowded Andy and left Christine wondering where to fit her harmonies in.  Now Andy and Christine can work out actual parts, and Christine doesn't have to compete with Justin for lead vocal opportunities.  We're finally able to deploy what used to be one of our most underused assets, which is Christine's voice.

Once we settled on a practice schedule, Ian was able to make it more regularly, and he became a full time member.  With Justin's acoustic guitar no longer a part of the equation, the triple-guitar Outlaw attack began to take shape for real.  On the one hand you've got Andy over there on the Thinline, holding down that steady two-step or loping, heavy choogle; maybe he'll give up that chicken scratch or a little bluesy, Waylon-kind-of phrase when he and Josh get to talkin' back and forth.  Over here you've got Josh, and he's wailing a little and dropping some triplets in there and even shredding from time to time, but never stepping outside the pocket.  Then you've got Ian in between, and he's weaving in and out with some chunky open-G riffage on his black Tele, or he's slidin' on the Dobro, letting those glistening sheets of bottleneck heartache rain on down.  Meanwhile, Christine is keeping the high-end beats with those maracas and KJ and I are holding down the bottom, and it just doesn't get any better.   If I do say so myself.

Well, that's about how I got from ..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />Kansas City to here over the past 23 years  From here on out I'll be blogging on OutLaw developments, doing gig reports and gear talk.  I'm sure I'll have to devote at least one post to apologizing to some girl for grabbing her ass while I was drunk, and another post to apologizing to everybody for a lousy performance at a really important gig, but that stuff can wait.  Maybe I'll write some OutLaw Caravan Fan Fiction.  That episode will open with Josh waking up in a hotel room with three naked women who've all told him they're over the age of eighteen.   Hilarity will ensue. or so and I think that brings us up to date on the formation of OutLaw DeLuxe.

HSBXVLLXI: Flight Of The OutLaws

I don’t know about Andy and Christine and Josh, but for me, the first year of The OutLaws project was a real test of stamina.   We had a different routine back then, but we were also a different band.   You’ve got your Outlaw Caravan, and  then you’ve got the new and improved OutLaw DeLuxe.  The Caravan played Sundays at The Rack, and we did two Wednesdays a month at The Pit Stop.  These were unpaid shows that supplied free beer, intense rehearsals, and really good times. 

It’s a very unusual situation for a band to hold rehearsals in a live room.  You might see highly experienced and professional jazz guys play a gig with no rehearsal, working off the same list of standards that everyone’s been playing since 1948.  In your average workaday rock or country band, folks tend to work things out in a basement somewhere before taking the show in front of an audience.

Well, the Caravan didn’t have a basement, but we did have Andy.  He decided to have a band, so he assumed the responsibility of buying a PA and securing The Rack for Sunday nights.   Andy does not do anything half-assed.  And it was really a brilliant strategy, I have to say.    Sometimes a band rehearsal can get off track and there can be a lot of goofing off, maybe more partying than practicing.  You know how it is; we’ve all been there.   When you’re rehearsing live, you really don’t have the option of screwing around too much.  Sure, it’s just practice, but there is still an audience and you don’t want to look like a bunch of amateurs up there, even if that’s exactly what you are.

Those early live practices at The Rack and The Pit Stop were just what I needed to tweak my shuffles and two-steps, and to learn a lot of classic Outlaw-era country songs that I wasn’t familiar with.  The band would launch into a song, and I’d just pick up the rhythm, following Jim’s bass line and paying close attention to Josh’s groove.  It didn’t take long for the band to establish the kind of musical chemistry that every player searches for.   It can be elusive, and most of the time it never emerges.  That’s why bands change personnel so often, or more often fall apart.   Developing a great band involves a perpetual search for the perfect mix of personalities, musical influences, experience and skill.  It’s a rare dynamic and finding it requires as much luck as it does perseverance.  I knew pretty quickly that the OutLaws had the potential for a great sound.

So that first year saw a lot of late nights and drunken load outs.  Like I done said, our appearances at The Rack and The Pit Stop were unpaid, but the beers flowed freely.  Really freely.  None of us are on a health kick, right?  I remember one day at work, after a late night playing with the band, my boss told me I smelled like a saloon.

Some random recollections from my perspective:  The Pit Stop has the classic dive bar vibe, which suits me just fine, but the on stage sound is far superior to most clubs of any description.  There was something about the plywood stage covered in beer soaked carpet and tucked into a corner beneath a bunch of Bud Light banners that really gave the low end a nice resonance.  You could also get some pretty good burnt ends and cole slaw out back from a couple of ladies that ran a completely illegal parking-lot barbecue operation.

 At The Pit Stop, Josh sort of specialized in taking his guitar out onto the dance floor and mixing it up with the few liquored-up dancers out there.   He was always trying to get me to move in on some haggard barfly, but I wasn’t that desperate, or drunk.  I may be a drummer, but I do have my standards.

The OutLaws were also the first time I had ever played with a percussionist.  Christine plays those maracas and the tambourine and shakers on some songs, and I had never realized how much that sort of thing adds to a song.  It’s like having a whole extra hi-hat going, and it makes my job a lot easier.  Believe me, I miss her if she’s not there.  Christine does so many jobs up there that sometimes I think we forget how hard she is working.  She’s singing lead and backup, she’s playing percussion, she’s talking to the audience and she’s also looking real damn good, which is more than some of us guys bother with most nights.

You might notice that a lot of OutLaws songs start with four measures of rhythm guitar from Andy, and they’ll end with a particular "shave and a haircut two bits" thing.  That comes from the early days when we never really worked out beginnings and endings live, but just looked at each other when the song was supposed to stop.  Nowadays, we have beginnings and ending other nuances that we’ve carved out in Andy’s basement, but that ad hoc approach still works great for stuff that we a.) can’t remember real well, or b.) never really knew that well to begin with.  You know, it’s a fine line between incredibly tight and shamelessly sloppy.  We’re still looking for that line.
 

Another thing about the Caravan that was different from DeLuxe is that Andy used play a lot more acoustic guitar back then.  He had Blue, the acoustic, and Josh played Andy’s Thinline quite a bit.  Josh is a funny guitar player because he will play the shit out of any guitar you hand him.  He is just not a gear-head.  His own axes were in various states of disrepair, or in the pawn shop or whatever.  He’d play Andy’s Tele or my Tele and rip it up, even though he was mostly used to those pointy shredders from his metal days.  Now, as time went by and Josh has got his own guitar to play, Andy could play his Thinline more.  This is the beginnings of what has turned into the mind-roasting OD three guitar wall-of-twang that y’all know and love so well.  This sound would not reach its ultimate expression until Ian became more fully integrated into the band, and that leads me to my next point:

Sure, some of you are asking "What about Ian, Slim?  And KJ?"   Calm down, I’m getting to those guys.  Don’t forget, we’ve still got Justin and Jim on board at this point.  There’s a lot of band politics and embarrassing  hissy fits coming up, but this episode is getting kind of long, so I’m going to wrap it up with the usual tease for the next installment:

Next Time:  Somebody in the band can bench press 300 lbs, and it isn’t me.