XL Cover Story

Gourds, ripened with age

With the stellar new CD 'Heavy Ornamentals,' this band's co-leaders move closer to the same page

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Ho hum. The Gourds have been tagged "Austin's best band" for so long that the designation is almost boring (plus it ticks off fans of Spoon and the Flatlanders). The title is deserved, however, when you realize that the five-piece country/rock/folk/kitchen/sink caravan rolls out such rich, evocative, steamy sounds that they've actually been able to outlive a novelty hit.

Oh, they still play their back porch hoedown version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice," which gave the frat boys something to hoot about back when the Longhorns were still rebuilding, but the Gourds have moved on, as evidenced by their brilliantly romping ninth album "Heavy Ornamentals," which hits stores hard Tuesday. Here's a band not defined by a ditty du jour, but by a sturdy torso of material that sweats through its work clothes.

Lead hayseed Kevin Russell is still biting rap, but it's a line from Mystikal, not a full-on hip-hop smash, that provides the tag for "Shake the Chandelier," the band's party anthem salute to Sir Doug Sahm.

Gourds fans, who've been known to fly to gigs in Montana or other exotic locales, range from the fervent to the obsessed. In that latter group you'll find several who feel the band has never made a better album than the 1997 debut "Dem's Good Beeble," which laid the blueprint for organic freshness and consistent insight, dark themes and light touches, that would mark the band's recorded output.

Listen up: The Gourds have just made a better record than "Beeble" by reprising the debut's loose and lowdown feel, but giving it a sonic uplift that comes from 10 years experience.

The majestic "Our Patriarch," which Russell wrote on a ukulele (a favorite writer's-block decimator), would not have soared as much on "Beeble." The swamp waltz underpinnings of "Hooky Junk" wouldn't have been as apparent during that early period when the band was finding its groove at the expense of bureaucratic production values.

This "fraternity of curmudgeons," as Russell calls the veteran group, has developed the instinctive language of motion you'd find with a playoff basketball team. But the chemistry hasn't always come easy, especially off the stage.

"There were a couple of years there where me and Jimmy (bassist Smith) didn't communicate at all," Russell says of the band's other chief songwriter, whose whacked-out soul chanties gave the band a split personality when paired with Russell's crusty roots strolls. Signing up fiddler/mandolinist Max Johnston before the third album, "Ghosts Of Hallelujah," helped link the pair, the wicked fiddle adding a layer of weirdness to Russell's songs and an earthy feel to Smith's odd rants.

But until recently, it seemed, as Smith puts it, the co-leaders "were just sharing a band." Although Smith and Russell go back more than 15 years, when Smith joined Russell's Picket Line Coyotes in Dallas, they were drifting apart musically.

Yet, first with 2004's band-produced "Blood of the Ram" and now with "Heavy Ornamentals," the former two-headed monster is starting to sound like a cohesive unit. Smith's "Weather Woman," which echoes like an old classic rock cover, and the album-opening "Declinometer" fit nicely with Russell songs that veer far from his old bluegrass reels.

It used to be that you were either a Kevin guy or a Jimmy guy, and I was a Kevin guy. (Michael Hoinski, who chronicles the band's album-by-album evolution, is an admitted Jimmy guy.) With a tuneful drawl that approaches "Swingin' " era John Anderson and a confident strum on a wood guitar, Kevin Russell is one of the most engaging singer-songwriters in all of Texas. The most enduring Gourds songs to my ears — "Web Before You Walk Into It," "January 6," "Hallelujah Shine," "Ants on the Melon" and "El Paso" — are Kevin songs.

Smith is a quirk, a wounded jughead with a poet's soul and a hobo/fabulous fashion sense, who sings songs of a structure all their own. But something exciting's going on here and you don't know what it is.

In a recent interview, sitting at a picnic table outside the window of his Northeast Austin home where his little boy is napping, Smith explains what's changed.

"I used to sometimes try too hard," he says. "I had unlimited freedom to create, so music was my complete focus, and that got kinda boring and unchallenging in itself. But now that I have a family, I have none of that freedom, so it's something special when I can sneak a little time to myself."

Smith's situation since the birth of Desmond two years ago is in marked contrast to his years at the Steamy Bowl, as he called his East Hyde Park party/jam house, which was recently torn down. That's where Claude Bernard (brother of Coyote guitarist Rob Bernard), original drummer Charlie Llewellin, Smith and Russell first started experimenting together as the Gourds in 1994. The band and their friends would get together on Bottle Night, pooling their money for quarts of hooch, then jamming until the sun came up. New songs were sketched out with Sharpies on the walls.

It was anarchy of the soul.

The modest house Smith shares with his wife, Jen, and their kid is dominated by toys all over the living room. It's a scene no doubt repeated at the domiciles of Russell, drummer Keith Langford and accordionist Bernard, who all have infants at home. Stringman Johnston is the only toddler-free Gourd.

"I think having kids in common is a big thing in bringing the band closer," says Russell, who also has two older children. "When I was the only one with kids, the other guys didn't always understand why I didn't want to tour all the time." When the band was offered an opening slot on five East Coast dates with rising soul/blues star Susan Tedeschi, it took the pleading of booking agent Davis McClarty for the group to agree that the opportunity was worth leaving Austin for.

Russell says he was particularly cautious because this jaunt will be his first time on the road since he was diagnosed with diabetes. "Exercise and a good diet aren't always readily available when you're living out of a van," he says.

The way you fall in love with the Gourds is to be mildly impressed the first time you see them, then one night you stumble into a perfect Gourds set, when the right covers, like "Ramblin' Man" by the Allman Brothers or some forgotten Echo and the Bunnymen song, come at the right time, and the originals sound like easy gifts of pure instinct.

Then you got to know the band a little after their shows and you sensed that Russell and Smith had a bit of a Lennon/McCartney rivalry thing going on. Russell, the unquestioned leader of the Coyotes, exuded as much confidence as Smith did insecurity. Two completely different cats co-fronting a band.

"Uptight," Smith uttered leaving the dressing room at Stubb's one night. "Freak," Russell answered back. Icicles hung on the words.

It's much better now, both agree.

"We just finally decided, a couple years ago, that the way to keep this thing going was to be honest, blunt even," Russell says. "It's like with every relationship. The ones that don't make it are the ones where there's all these unsaid things and passive aggressive (stuff)."

The only problem now, Russell says, is that the band members are sometimes too considerate. "We're too nice about everybody's songs and that allows some weak material into the set," he says, figuring about 30 percent of the stuff the band plays live is mediocre. "You can't be a dictator, so you step back and play the song as well as you can, but sometimes the crowd will go nuts after one of our songs and I'll be thinking, 'They've gotta be kidding.' "

As a Kevin guy, I understand.

But Jimmy guys would counter that without the wiry bassist with the wondrous ache and the "All My Labor" song that makes the chicks tingle, the Gourds would lose much of their distinct personality.

Yeah, there's that.

There's also this thing in common: Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith love to sneak away to the room where their respective four-track recorders are. In the trance of self-expression they're the same, opening up the gates to try to find something they didn't know they had.

mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652