They're not old, these three 97’s dutifully assembled on this Saturday morning in March for their last round OF SXSW press chores of the week, but they do look beat. Or, closer to the truth, past the point of beat and coming around the bend to second-wind giddy as the finish line gleams in the distance. Two more interviews and a quick performance for Austin’s ME TV to go, and they’re outta here.
Although it seems like the Old 97’s have been SXSW staples ever since they were the belle of the ball at the 1996 edition, this is only the long-running Dallas band’s fifth time around at the big music-industry rodeo. And though the buzz spotlight has long since moved on to other, younger acts, overall, the 97’s held their own and made every minute of their ’08 trip count. They killed when they premiered songs from their new album, Blame It On Gravity, during a short set at the New West Records party two days ago, and even more so when they closed the night out at Stubb’s outdoor amphitheater. Off the clock, they got to take in a couple of shows by one of their own favorite bands, the reunited Los Angeles cow-punk outfit X, and frontman Rhett Miller even hopped onstage Friday night to sing an Old 97’s cover with Canada’s Blue Rodeo. But this morning, they’re all ready to stick a fork in the week and head home.
Drummer Philip Peeples, who wiggled out of this morning’s interview at the South Congress Café with an upset stomach excuse, will head directly back to his family in Dallas. Guitarist Ken Bethea is Big D-bound, too, but first he’ll hook up with his wife and two young children and drive south for a lazy afternoon in his old college stomping grounds of San Marcos. Bassist Murry Hammond, whose breakfast order of “just chamomile tea for me, please” earns him an “OK, Grandma,” rib from Miller, will fly home to his wife and toddler son in Pasadena, Calif. Miller’s got the longest trip home out of the bunch; although his flight’s in four hours, he doesn’t expect to reach his front door in New York’s Hudson Valley — just north of Manhattan — until midnight. But it’s clear from the moment he orders his coffee and orange juice that his heart and mind already have a head start.
“Man, I’m glad to go back to my kids today,” he sighs. “My daughter’s got bronchitis, and my son is suddenly hitting people and throwing things at people a lot. He’s 4.”
In contrast to his bandmates, who for the most part all look like dads in their early 40s — cool dads who happen to go to work playing in a rock ’n’ roll band, but dads just the same — the 37-year-old Miller could still pass for a kid himself. Maybe not quite 16, the age he was when he first began playing music with Hammond (six years his senior), but certainly young enough to probably get carded as often as not when he doesn’t have the wife and kids or band in tow. But like a living portrait of Dorian Gray, his doe-like features hide a tested and duly jaded old soul that’s weathered two decades of ups, downs and near-derailments in the music business. He released his debut solo album, 1989’s long-out-of-print Mythologies, at 18. His third, The Believer, was put out by Verve in early 2006, shortly after New West Records issued the Old 97’s’ first (and long overdue) live album, Alive & Wired. Both albums scored highly with fans and critics, but only one was given time to really find its legs.
“My daughter was just born when The Believer came out,” he says. “I went out on tour for the first two months of her life, and when I got home, I got the call from the president of the label, saying that they’d killed the record.”
The subject comes up not five minutes into breakfast, as Miller looks rather apprehensively ahead to the three weeks in June that the 97’s will spend on the road for the first long round of Blame It On Gravity tour dates. Like the rest of his bandmates, he’s unabashedly — and justifiably — jazzed about the album, but the very idea of being away from his family for longer than a week is enough to scratch open a 2-year-old wound that hasn’t quite healed yet.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s great. I’ve just wasted the first two months of my daughter’s life working a record that you guys are going to fuck over,’” Miller recalls. “Verve had promised me a year. The president said, ‘This will be a slow record — we’re going to have to really work it, blah, blah, blah.’ And two months in, I’m literally holding my daughter in my arms, and he calls and goes, ‘Rhett, the record’s dead.’”
“They should have funerals for records, and invite you to them,” Hammond offers reflectively while fixing his tea. “You deserve to get to go to your own funeral. Otherwise, you just hear about your funeral, and that’s not right.”
Miller nods, but he’s still just gathering steam. “He says, ‘It’s only sold 30,000 copies.’ I go, ’30,000 copies in 60 days, for me, is pretty good.’ He goes, ‘You know how much money we spent on marketing? We’ve spent $300,000 marketing your record so far.’ I’m like, ‘Doing fucking what, man? Did you all fly together from L.A. to N.Y. to meet up and talk about it?’ … They spend so much money on car services and that kind of bullshit, and then they fight you tooth and nail over giving you, like, five grand to live on for a year or whatever. So I’ve got very little money, I gave up the time with my family, I gave up the time with this band to do that record, and I was like … I wanted to sue them, I was so pissed. I still am, obviously.”
Hammond shakes his head. “No, I think you’ve moved on,” he says encouragingly. “You’re able to see it in a really positive light now.”
This gets the desired laugh out of Miller, and a smile from Bethea, who up till now seems to have effectively tuned out his bandmate’s rant (having, no doubt, heard it before). And just like that, as true here at breakfast as in the rest of this band’s life, once the frontman’s solo sidetrack is out of the way, it all comes back to the Old 97’s. By the time the waitress comes around to take everyone’s food order, the cloud over Miller’s head is long gone and they’re all fondly reminiscing about that SXSW 12 years ago when they rolled into town, beat to hell at the end of their first nationwide tour, and rode out on top of the world.
“We had just spent 40 days in our old white van, and we ended that tour feeling really disconnected and spiraling completely out of control because we were so worn out,” Bethea says. “This was back in the day where, in those 40 days, all 40 nights were spent on some fan’s floor. And you just get really sort of freaked out, because you don’t have a sense that anything you’re doing is any kind of permanent. We were all, like, ‘We like having this band, but how long can it go on? Six more months? Two more years?’”
The band had recently released its second album, Wreck Your Life, via the fledgling Chicago label, Bloodshot Records. By the end of the ’90s, Bloodshot would be one of the hottest indie labels in America, the Sub Pop of the alt-country scene. But the label was still taking baby steps in ’95, and had trouble getting the 97’s’ record in stores — let alone providing much, if anything, in the way of tour support. In order to continue, the band members were convinced they’d have to find a better deal. Luckily for them, by the time they got to Austin for their first SXSW, the Old 97’s’ reputation as a not-to-be-missed live band had preceded them. “There had been this kind of undercurrent in the music industry that said we were a good band with a good sound, but we didn’t know about it, because we’d been touring in that van without any laptops or anything,” Bethea says. “So when we got to Austin that weekend, we were excited to play our show, but we had no idea it was going to be any kind of big deal.”
The line outside of the Split Rail on Red River Street (where Beerland stands today) clued them in. “It started at the front door, went down
around the corner and almost all the way to the access road on I-35,” Miller marvels. “I was walking past it, thinking, ‘This is for us?’ And the head of Sub Pop was in the line, and he goes, ‘Hey Rhett, you think you can get me in?’” That would be the same head of Sub Pop who had only recently expressed fleeting interest in signing the band, before opting for the Pernice Brothers, instead — calling Miller to tell him, “We don’t believe in the Old 97’s.”
“I told him, ‘I don’t know man, I’ll see what I can do,’” Miller laughs.
All the buzz around the Old 97’s that night wouldn’t have amounted to much had they not delivered a great show — great enough to stand out on a bill that also featured fellow mid-’90s alt-country up-and-comers Blue Mountain, Slobberbone, Whiskeytown and the Waco Brothers. But deliver they did, and by the time they came offstage, their manager had collected a stack of business cards from interested agents and labels, including several majors. And the band — which soon after signed with Elektra — enjoyed every minute of it.
“Of course, at the end of the night, we still ended up sleeping on someone’s floor,” Bethea says, “but we were still giddy. And I’ll never forget what Rhett said. We’re laying in our sleeping bags, it’s like 4 or 5 in the morning, and he goes, ‘Man, I’ve always come to South By Southwest as a fan, and you go see the ‘it’ band for that year —the Vampire Weekend of 1992, or whatever. And I always looked on that stage and thought, ‘Man, look at that shithead up there. How did he get to be there, and why am I still out here?’”
Miller and Hammond both grin, ready to chime in on the punchline. “And then he goes, ‘And tonight, I got to be that shithead!’” Bethea finishes with a laugh. “That night was so much fun, because we saw then that this band was going to be permanent.”
Barely three years into the band’s existence, such optimism certainly could have been premature. That was before Miller and Hammond both left the band’s hometown of Dallas. It was before some of the Old 97’s’ less adaptable fans hopped off (while new ones hopped on) when the band seemed to trade in much of its country-punk sound in favor of the decidedly less rootsy Fight Songs in 1999, and the full-on, Kinksy power-pop of 2001’s Satellite Rides. It was before Elektra dropped the band three far-from-blockbuster albums into its deal, then issued Miller’s first major-label solo album, 2002’s excellent, but commercially ignored, The Instigator. And it was long before any of the band members had kids and — in Bethea’s case — kiddie soccer teams to coach.
And yet, a dozen years later, here they are wrapping up another SXSW and primed to release what they rightly consider to be their best album in at least 10 years. If it’s possible for a band that never really went away to stage a triumphant, carpe diem “comeback,” this is it. Because however much they all may be itching to scatter for family time, 2008 finds the bonds of friendship, dogged determination and musical chemistry that hold the Old 97’s together as tight as they’ve ever been in the band’s 15-year existence.
“It’s a special thing, the Old 97’s — like a really warm, loving family,” Miller says. “The band’s had several lifetimes, and there’s been a lot of touch-and-go times where it felt like, ‘How can this band survive?’ But for all those dark, searching-the-soul kind of moments we’ve been through, I don’t think any of them ever really came close to being the end of the Old 97’s. So, knock on wood, we can’t be killed.”
Blame it on gravity, indeed.
“I’ve had it with Dallas, let’s burn down the Palace.
I’ll bring the kerosene.”
— “ST. IGNATIUS”
THE FIRST WEEK of May finds Miller, Hammond, Bethea and Peeples all settled back into their domestic routines of life outside of the Old 97’s. When reached one by one for follow-up interviews, they are variously occupied with hauling kids back and forth to school (Peeples), fixing air conditioners (Hammond), fighting with stubbornly unhelpful Internet service provider tech support goons (Bethea) and prepping for a pre-tour vacation (Miller).
“We’re getting out of here for 2 1/2 weeks tomorrow morning,” Miller reports via phone from his rural, 3-acre spread 90 minutes north of Manhattan. “We’re taking the whole family, which is always a big production.” Miller and his wife, Erica, are bringing their son, Max, and daughter, Soleil, back down to his native Texas, where they’ll spend a few days visiting his relatives before leaving the kids with his mother to sneak in a second honeymoon before the May 13 release of Blame It On Gravity. “After that,” he says, “Daddy will be gone … a lot.”
Miller hasn’t lived in Texas since February 1997, when he left Dallas for Los Angeles “for a girl,” albeit not the one he later ended up marrying and settling down with in New York. Hammond would do the same a few years later, moving to the West Coast the week of Sept. 11, 2001, to be with his girlfriend, singer-songwriter and animation voice-over actress Grey DeLisle; their 2002 marriage was documented on the Learning Channel’s A Wedding Story. Neither foresees a move back to their home state area anytime soon, though both still have their Lone Star pride; Hammond named his 16-month-old son Jefferson Texas Hammond, and Miller isn’t afraid to sport his Tony Romo jersey and Cowboys hat in Giants country. “I remember there was a guy from San Francisco who used to walk around Dallas with his 49ers stuff, and I hated his guts,” Miller chuckles. “And now I’m him.”
But unlike bandmates Bethea, a coach’s son who played football and baseball for the Chapel Hill Bulldogs during his high school years in Tyler, and Hammond, who played varsity basketball and left Boyd High School holding the track record for the high jump, young Miller was never a jock. Growing up in Dallas’ Highland Park, he was always the kind of stereotypical bookish kid that stereotypical jocks and even slightly bigger bookish kids preyed on for sport. In grade school, they called him “Professor Encyclopedia,” or, after his solo in the big school play in which he sang “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” in an alto worthy of the Mormon Tabernacle, “opera singer.”
More fed up than beaten down, Miller took the initiative of researching private schools, and was able to attend Dallas’ St. Mark’s School of Texas thanks to financial support from his grandmother. “But high school was still rough,” he says. “Even at a school full of other smart, interesting, weird or curious kids who didn’t embody the whole jock aesthetic that I’d been running from, I had already identified myself as an outcast for so long that I decided I wanted to be an outsider. I was always the kid with the hair that was too long, or pushing the dress code. I remember hanging out at the mall with Lisa Loeb’s little sister, Debbie, when I was 13, and I would wear eyeliner.”
In retrospect, he allows that it was probably a “pretty normal” high-school experience, “but I was pretty traumatic about it at the time.” Almost fatally traumatic, in fact. A suicide attempt at 14 failed only because the lamp oil he guzzled while sweeping the house for anything labeled “poison” effectively coated his stomach from the pills he swallowed afterward. “It was stupid,” he admits, but laughs when asked if it was about a girl. “No, no, no. It was just the idea that we’re all only different from each other by a matter of degrees — that we’re all basically the same and doing the same walk through life, so what’s the point? And of course I’ve since realized that philosophy is baloney, because those matters of degree are where you find your joy. I don’t feel like that 14-year-old anymore, thank God. But it definitely informs who I am, I guess.”
Foiled in suicide by dumb luck, he soldiered on by immersing himself in that other great escape of disaffected youth, rock ’n’ roll. He’d been writing songs since he was 13, profoundly inspired by a David Bowie concert, but the Beatles, the Kinks and X all factored into his budding songcraft, too — as did Bob Dylan and even the Kingston Trio. As a 16-year-old sophomore, he started dating a “public high school bad girl” two grades ahead of him named Jennifer, and together they formed a band called Scarlett’s Garden. “That’s Scarlett with two T’s, as in Rhett,” he notes. Or, wink-wink, as in Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. (“It’s from the movie,” Miller says of his own name, which isn’t on his birth certificate. “My dad wanted to name me after himself, Stewart Ransom Miller II, which my mom agreed to only on the condition that I could be called Rhett.”)
Scarlett’s Garden was short lived, but it was through Jennifer that Miller met Hammond. The future Old 97’s bassist was then fronting his own band, the Peyote Cowboys, and dating Jennifer’s best friend, another Jennifer. The Jennifers arranged for Scarlett’s Garden to record some demos at Hammond’s house in the lower Greenville section of Dallas. Hammond came home and found them already rehearsing, and he was duly impressed with Miller’s affinity for writing short, simple pop songs that resembled early Beatles tunes more than overblown ’70s or ’80s rock. Having recently reconnected with his own childhood love of the Beatles following a lengthy teenage/young-adulthood obsession with hardcore punk, Hammond took to the kid’s songs immediately.
“After that, we became friends pretty quick,” says Hammond, who was 22 then. “Of course, he was much younger — he was a child, really — but he just struck me as cool, like he could hang with me. But he seemed a little wounded to me, too. I felt sorry for him that he had to finish high school, because I could tell right off the bat that school was probably kind of hard on him. I remember we talked about some of that the first time we talked, about how he’d get picked on a lot. I guess I really saw something of myself in him, even though I was already comfortably in the adult world and out of harm’s way from school.
“I felt like adopting him,” he adds with a laugh. “He was definitely like a kid brother to me, and he’s always kind of been like that. I don’t think he likes that idea too much now, because we’ve been peers for so long, but you never really get rid of all that dynamic.”
“I don’t think Murry’s ever been a father figure to me, necessarily, but I guess at the time I might have been searching for something like that,” admits Miller, who at 17 watched his parents go through a bitter divorce. “He was definitely a mentor, though. He produced the first record I made, and we were always excited by each other’s ideas about what we were doing with our songs. We just clicked, and I guess we’ve been musical partners now for … Jesus, over 20 years.”
That first record, a collection of somewhat Syd Barrett-styled folk-rock called Mythologies, is now out of print. But it made quite the impression upon its release in 1989, garnering Miller gigs around Dallas as a local teenage wunderkind. It even received a glowing review in Billboard magazine. “It said, ‘A&R guys will be knocking down this kid’s door,’” Miller says. “Which singlehandedly fucked me up for years, because I thought that it was true!”
At the very least, it was enough to curtail his college career — though Miller half-jokingly blames that on Hammond.
“I had a full scholarship to Sarah Lawrence in New York, and I went for one semester,” Miller says. “My parents thought I was fucking crazy, but it was Murry’s fault, basically. He went, ‘Come on, Rhett! If you get a degree, all you’re going to do is get a job.’ And he was right, because I kept looking around at all the people that were going to school who’d say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do music after college, along with a job.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Music is a young man’s game. This is it for me.’”
So he moved back to Dallas, where he and Hammond started throwing one rock band after another — the Sleepy Heroes, Rhett’s Exploding, Buzz, etc. — at the wall of the local music scene. None of them would stick, and those promised A&R guys still weren’t knocking, either. It seemed any and all buzz Miller had accumulated back when he’d released Mythologies had fizzled away to nothing.
“It was a couple of years where we just went through unsatisfying project after unsatisfying project,” Hammond says. “We just didn’t know what to do. We never really could find people like us to play with. Whoever we played with always determined what kind of band we were going to be. We’d play with hard rockers, and the next thing you know, we’re playing hard rock.”
But their take on hard rock was never hard enough for the early ’90s. “I’m an anglophile, and Murry’s a bit of an anglophile, so all our rock bands were real poppy, and they all seemed wimpy once Nirvana hit,” Miller says. “We finally got so frustrated that we just kind of shut it all down. I think there was a six-month window where we didn’t do any music at all.”
The hiatus came to an end the night Hammond heard Miller, deep in a melancholy funk, strumming quietly through a new song he’d written. In stark contrast to the alternative-rock fare they’d flirted with half-heartedly for too long, it was simple, unaffected and catchy — a throwback of sorts to the folksy kind of songs they’d recorded together for Mythologies, albeit minus the faux British accent. Borderline country, even.
Whatever it was, Hammond says it planted a seed.
“I went home, and I couldn’t get that song out of my head,” he says. “So I went out and bought an acoustic bass, and thought, fuck it, I’m gonna call Rhett and say, ‘Let’s forget all these phony-baloney rock bands and rock club gigs we’ve been trying to do, and let’s just go out and play saloons and coffee shops. That song you played me … that’s the beginning.’”
The song was “St. Ignatius.” And the beginning, sealed with the addition of guitar- and accordion-playing neighbor Bethea, was the Old 97’s.
PLAY IT ON A TELECASTER, SING IT LIKE A TRAIN DISASTER SONG
“I was in a real bad way when you turned
the power on
and you made me feel for all the world
like I was the king of all of the world.”
— “KING OF ALL THE WORLD”
The loping but restless “St. Ignatius” ended up being the first track on the Old 97’s’ 1994 debut, Hitchhike to Rhome. Lyrically, it’s a veritable template for Miller’s trademark flair for wearing his heart — or just as often, his lust — on his sleeve (“You’re a goddess/You’re the oddest oddity I’ve found”) while deftly flirting with the line between clever and cocksure (“You need help dear, and I’m sincere/Let me be the one/I’m not a big star, but I’ve got a big car/You’re too weak to run.”) Both live and on record, it still holds up as one of the band’s most endearing early songs.
But apart from pointing them in the right direction, neither Miller nor Hammond hang their change in luck entirely on that one song. Both suggest that getting over their own blind ambition had just as much to do with it. “This was back when the major-label system was so entrenched that the only chance you had of reaching a wider audience was getting signed, so that was our focus,” Miller says. “And that’s what kept all our other bands from working, because when just wanting to get signed is at the top of your agenda, that’s something people can really sniff out. So when we started again, the idea was, ‘Let’s just do something folky … let’s do something that has absolutely no chance of succeeding in the way that we’ve been trying to succeed … something unfettered by the expectations of big-time rock ’n’ roll.’ And of course, the irony is that that’s what worked.”
There’s undoubtedly merit to that theory, and it serves as a valuable lesson for any artist or band struggling to “make it” for all the wrong reasons. But it doesn’t take 15 years’ worth of hindsight to spot arguably the most obvious key to the Old 97’s’ success: None of those other bands Miller and Hammond played in had Ken Bethea or Philip Peeples.
“People love the Old 97’s, and they’ve been loving them for a long time,” observes singer-songwriter Salim Nourallah, a seasoned veteran of the Dallas music scene who produced Blame It On Gravity after touring and recording with Miller on his recent solo albums. “It’s a real special thing that they have going, and it’s always been that combination of those four guys — you can’t swap any one of them out and still have the Old 97’s. You can search high and low for the right guys to fit that formula and never find it. In their case, they were just very lucky.”
When the group books hotels on tour, the roommate arrangement invariably finds Hammond and Bethea sharing one room and Miller and Peeples the other — a split mainly dictated by TV viewing preferences (the History Channel and documentaries for the former pair and Comedy Central and sports for the latter). But when the band first came together, Bethea and Peeples represented the perfect yang to the Miller/Hammond yin.
“Ken and Philip both had real jobs that they quit, and we all kind of lived for months off of their unemployment,” Miller says.
Peeples clarifies that he was actually “forced out with no unemployment — I lived off a very generous girlfriend who became my wife.” But unlike Miller and Hammond, who both bailed out of college quickly in order to get a jump on their music careers, Peeples and Bethea took a more practical approach, relegating music to a casual pastime while finishing school. Bethea graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in advertising; Peeples earned his bachelor of science degree at the University of North Texas in Denton.
“A lot of people go to North Texas to get a music degree, but I said, ‘No, I’m going to play music — I don’t need a degree in it,’” he chuckles. “A degree was for getting a job, and I never really thought of music as being a job.” Little did he know at the time that he’d end up playing drums for a living, rather than sticking with his old microwave integrated circuits gig.
Peeples and Bethea first played together in a late-’80s Denton band called the Smeg Wentfields. Peeples was still in college and Bethea was working at a newspaper, and neither of them considered the Smeg Wentfields to be anything more than a casual freakout. “It was heavily Butthole Surfers influenced — just really noisy, grindy racket,” explains Bethea, who had played guitar since high school and even taken lessons from country picker Larry Stanley in Tyler, but was still a ways away from the confident lead guitarist he’d grow into as an Old 97. In fact, it wasn’t even his guitar playing that first caught Miller and Hammond’s attention when they lived in the same Dallas apartment complex. It was his accordion. But he hit it off with them immediately — and ended up playing a key role in shaping the band’s early alt-country sound; Miller had his folk influences, and Hammond a deep appreciation for Johnny Cash, but it was Bethea who brought rockabilly and Joe Ely to the mix.
“Right off the bat, I liked playing with them,” Bethea says. “There was no talk of making it a band, but I was amazed at how much they rehearsed. The previous bands I’d been in were all about spontaneous chaos; but with Rhett and Murry, not only did we rehearse the songs we had, but we stopped and rehearsed parts. And that was in the fall of ’92, before we were even playing out live. But I thought that was a cool challenge, because I knew I’d need to step up and play good — like a man, and not just some, you know, 20-year-old alcoholic.”
Once they finally started playing gigs together, they recruited a guy named Darin Lin Wood to play drums. Wood would go on to front his own bands as a lead singer, but his stint as a 97 lasted only about three months. “Darin was hilarious, and he looked way more like a rock star than anyone else in the band,” Miller says. “But the problem was, he liked to tell stories through the whole practice, so we couldn’t get anything done. I finally asked him who he was borrowing his drums from, and it was Philip.”
And, as luck would have it, Peeples had recently been honing his shuffle beat while playing in a punk-rockabilly band.
“I showed up at my first Old 97’s rehearsal, laid down some shuffles, and they’re like, ‘Holy shit — this might go somewhere!’” he recalls. “At our first gig together, the first song was a complete train wreck — it fell apart and I had to restart it at least once, maybe twice. But the press that was there said, ‘Oh, it was a beautiful train wreck, these guys who call themselves the Old 97’s, after a train wreck.’
“That kind of made us feel good,” he laughs. “Like, ‘At least they’re talking about us in the press … it might not be for the greatest reason, but all right!’”
HERE’S TO THE HALCYON
“Some old year, we will renew
the love we had then when we were just two
In that moment, I’ll say to my friend
Wouldn’t you do it all over again?”
— “THIS BEAUTIFUL THING”
Those early, (mostly) encouraging words from the local press aside, the Old 97’s didn’t really catch on in Dallas any quicker than any of the Miller/Hammond projects that preceded it. But their hearts were fully in it this time, so they took their show on the road — and hit paydirt in Chicago, a veritable boomtown for the burgeoning alt-country movement of the ’90s.
“In Texas, what we were doing seemed so different from what everybody else was doing at the time, and that felt good and fun because we were playing on a different playing field rather than trying to win at everybody else’s game,” Miller says. “But when we started going to Chicago and playing with these bands like the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, who liked all the country and Texas swing stuff we did, but were from punk rock backgrounds, too, that was exciting. Because eventually you felt like part of a scene, but one where you’ve all really got something in common, and it’s not just wanting to become the next big whatever — media darlings.”
Of course, by the time they came back to Texas with a little national press, a rollicking second album, 1995’s Wreck Your Life, and swagger to spare, Dallas welcomed them home like conquering heroes. “That seems to be the only way to make it out of Dallas on a bigger level,” observes Nourallah. “It’s a common story — you go off somewhere and get something going, and then the hometown goes, ‘Oh, wait a minute, maybe there’s something to this.’”
Although they’d continue to build a loyal nationwide audience, the buzz on the Old 97’s — and pretty much the alt-country scene in general — reached its crescendo at that SXSW in ’96. Elektra Records came out on top of the ensuing major-label bidding war, but it didn’t take long for the 97’s to realize they weren’t exactly at the top of the label’s list of priorities. All three of the albums they did for Elektra — 1997’s Too Far to Care, 1999’s Fight Songs and 2001’s Satellite Rides — were received warmly by critics and fans, but none of them caught on with the mainstream.
“It sounds strange to fans of Too Far to Care, but that record was the first moment of really any sort of failure we had ever happened upon,” Bethea says. “Because before that, we had released a little record, Hitchhike to Rhome, and the only expectation or hope we ever had for that was that we would sell 1,000 of them. And then we released our second record, and the goal with that one was just to be kind of popular nationally, to have a fan base in New York and Seattle, places like that. And that had happened real fast. And frankly, the goal in Too Far to Care was …”
“World domination,” Miller laughs. “There was a moment after we signed to Elektra when our A&R guy said, ‘The buzz around the industry right now is that the next big thing is either going to be alt-country or dance music.’ Hah! Guess who wins in that head-to-head? The next week, Prodigy went to No. 1.”
They all maintain that their goal was never about chasing a big hit so much as having a sustainable career. Still, the reality check was frustrating, if only in that it necessitated a second collective gut check. “When we were making Fight Songs, I remember that we were having to really look at the future and ask ourselves, again, ‘Do we want to keep doing this?’” Hammond recalls. “And it’s always scary to ask that question, because it means the answer might be ‘no.’”
The band survived Fight Songs, which featured the minor radio hit “Murder or a Heart Attack” (still the best song ever written about losing a girlfriend’s cat), and left Elektra in a blaze of glory (artistically, if not commercially) with Satellite Rides, a modern marvel of whip-smart power-pop so relentlessly catchy that its modest peak at No. 121 on the Billboard Top 200 chart stands as a monument to major-label ineptitude. Co-writers Miller and Hammond seemed to be striking back with the searing “The New Kid,” a standout track on the Old 97’s’ otherwise largely underwhelming New West Records debut, 2004’s Drag It Up — though Miller is quick to downplay the notion.
“It would be easy to get caught up in the whole, ‘Holy shit, are you kidding? How did that [Satellite Rides] not become a hit album? How did we not become stars?’” he says. “But if we had ever done that anywhere along the way, we wouldn’t be together anymore. I think you just have to be grateful for what you do get. We got a lot of years on a big major label, and though in some ways it turned out not to be a great situation, there were still a lot of people there who were fantastic, and they spent a shitload of money making people know about our band.
“With ‘The New Kid,’ I think it had as much to do with my son who was about to be born as anything else,” he continues. “Somebody told me once that they thought the song was about Jason Mraz, who was a kid on Elektra at the same time as us who ended up getting a lot of the money they didn’t give us. I was like, ‘The day I’m writing songs about Jason Fucking Mraz is the day I quit, OK?’”
Hammond laughs. “That’s industry-centric right there,” he says, then deadpans, “actually, it’s about somebody in the accounting department.”
In truth, the only time in the last 15 years that the Old 97’s have really felt threatened by the notion of competition, it came from within. Although it was never intended as such, Miller’s decision to launch a solo career on the side with 2002’s perhaps unfortunately titled The Instigator proved to be the biggest test of the band’s collective mettle in their long history.
“That was really the first time the rest of us ever felt like Rhett maybe wasn’t interested in the band anymore,” Hammond says. “And anytime somebody pulls his energy out of the band, we feel it, and it’s either uncomfortable or it hurts. And that was a situation where it hurt. The thing is, I had kind of been encouraging him to do what he had already thought of doing anyway, because the solo stuff he was doing apart from the band had value in it. But the part that took me a little by surprise was the fact that instead of his solo record just being like an acoustic aside, it turned out to be him actually going out with another band. So yeah, that was sort of a sad time for me, and those were difficult times for the band. But you know, we got past all of that. And compared to the rest of our history, it was a very brief time. Rhett just had to figure out, ‘Am I a solo person? Am I a band person?’ And I think he finally arrived at the realization that he can do both.”
And not long after that, Hammond came to the same realization himself. After years of contributing one or two songs on every Old 97’s record, Hammond in April quietly released a solo album of his own, I Don’t Know Where I’m Going but I’m On My Way. A haunting mix of reverb-soaked traditional gospel songs and equally compelling originals, it’s as starkly understated as Blame It On Gravity is bold and assertive.
“I love Murry’s record,” Miller gushes readily. “I’m really proud of him, and I hope he goes out and plays a lot of gigs with it.” He laughs, though, when it’s noted that the rest of the band would probably never let him get away with releasing a solo record two weeks before a new Old 97’s album. He also can’t help but playfully lament the fact that Hammond’s “Lost at Sea” “really should have been an Old 97’s song.”
Not that Hammond held out on the band, though; his contributions to Blame It On Gravity — the melancholy “Color of a Lonely Heart is Blue” and the buoyant “This Beautiful Thing” — stand out as two of the record’s absolute highlights. The latter, an unabashedly sweet love letter to his wife and young son, could almost be mistaken as an earnest paean to the band itself — perhaps even more so than the album’s self-referential closing romp, “The One.”
Hammond’s songs on Gravity raise the bar, and Miller, Bethea and Peeples all rise to the challenge. It doesn’t really take a lot of prodding to get these guys to nitpick through their back catalog; Bethea still has issues with what he felt was a certain lack of focus and energy, albeit not song quality, on Fight Songs, and Miller admits that he’s gotten in trouble of late from his bandmates for dogging his own contributions to Drag It Up. But to a man, their pride in Blame It On Gravity is undeniable. Both the songwriting and the performances are imbued with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm that producer Nourallah says was palpable in the studio from day one of recording. It all but explodes off the album the second Peeples opens up a can of Keith Moon on the first track, “The Fool.”
“It’s the best record we’ve done in 10 years,” Bethea insists emphatically. “And after doing this for 15 years, the fact is that not every record is going to be better than the last one. I hate to say that, but it’s true. But this one … it’s everything that we do best.”
Having only been a member of the Old 97’s for roughly 14 1/2 of the band’s 15 years, Peeples is still “the new guy.” A self-professed non-confrontational Libra, he’s usually the last to weigh in on band matters. So it seems only fitting to offer him the last word on Gravity — and the state of the Old 97’s.
“The only reason I can ever come up with as for why we all still do this is that it’s fun,” he says. “Sometimes you look at this as the coolest job in the world, and other times you’re like, ‘No, it can’t be a job — it’s art! It’s passion!’ But maybe you can have both. I’ve always been proud of what I do, but I’m especially proud now because I feel like we’re all in the same mode. That’s how the band started — all for one, one for all. And then families and other things outside of the band started to carry more weight. But at the end of the day, this is still our passion, and it just seems to have come full circle. We’ve come back to being the band we were years ago, but we’ve all matured in the process."
“Maybe that’s the key thing to this record,” he continues. “It speaks to the power of a band. We’ve been the same four guys for this long now, so we must be doing something right.”
