Within an hour, the music begins: a singer-songwriter followed by a country-rock band. The bar slowly fills with stragglers, most of whom seem to know each other, and the stage becomes more and more crowded with musicians, beer mugs and all varieties of acoustic instruments. The little room is awash with the sound of two-part harmonies, blues harp and National steel guitar. All in all, it's a veritable cliche of an afternoon in Austin -- except for one little detail: all the musicians performing on this particular Saturday are from a little Northwest city called Seattle. At the center of the hubbub are Chris Eckman and Carla Torgerson, vocalists and guitarists of the Walkabouts, whose most recent LPs, "Satisfied Mind" and "Setting the Woods on Fire," came out so close together that the band wound up touring behind both at the same time.
This decade-old five-piece band has come a long way since 1990, when their nascent chainsaw-folk sound made them best-known as the Sub Pop band that didn't sound like a Sub Pop band, even though the group had already logged five years and two previous records by that point. Since then, the Walkabouts have quietly become a group to be reckoned with, dark and eloquent and elegant and epic in their broad stylistic reach and vision of American life and music. Along the way, they've worked with such iconoclasts as Brian Eno, Ivan Kral, the Tindersticks and Peter Buck. "We haven't gone away," Eckman says with a laugh. "Pre-grunge, post-grunge, we're still there."
Most often, "there" means the Continent. The Walkabouts' transition from a stirring, rootsy-sounding indie band ("Buzzcocks meets Fairport Convention" was the early analogy) into something more sweeping unfolded entirely in Europe. It's like the joke in "Singles," admits Eckman: "We're strangely famous in Greece." Until the Creative Man label began reissuing their records this past summer, 1992's "Scavenger" was the last Walkabouts album available in America. Since then, they've recorded for the German label Glitterhouse (a company that served as "Sub Pop Europe" until the Seattle label's distribution was taken over by WEA), although the Walkabouts are so popular there now that they are on the verge of a bigger European deal.
Since 1993, they have released no less than six records -- three by the Walkabouts, two by Chris and Carla on their own, and one limited-edition live CD. "That's not bad," Eckman jokes. "One of the few advantages of being obscure is you can pretty much decide when you want to record, how you want to do it, and just go ahead and do it. I'm trying to catch up with Giant Sand's Howe Gelb; he's up at about 17 records, so I have to be productive the next few years."
Chris and Carla's show at the Hole In the Wall is part of their first U.S. road gig in about three years. "Austin seems more exotic to us now than Europe does," Eckman says. "I mean, Europe has become - and I never thought I'd say this - it's become roads'. I love going there, and playing is great, but honestly, you get that way when you've been there seven times in two-and-a-half years.
All artistic expression is autobiographical. Cezanne paints a bowl of fruit and we learn as much about Cezanne as we do fruit, or paintings of fruit. "Tommy" reveals Pete Townshend much more clearly than it does any universal truths about deaf-dumb-and-blind boys, or pinball, or religion. Rock critics' ceaseless raves about "Live Through This" tell us a whole lot more about rock critics than they do Courtney Love or Hole.
So it is with the Walkabouts' "Satisfied Mind," a record that captures the essence of a band via 13 songs by artists like Nick Cave, Charlie Rich, Robert Forster, Johnny Rivers, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Gene Clark, Patti Smith, John Cale and the Carter Family. Within this list of kindred spirits and influences is a fairly game description of the Walkabouts' aesthetic -- the boundaries they've crossed and the connections they make between disparate veins of rock'n'roll and country and folk and punk and crooning. Not that the connections haven't been made before -- the contemporaries covered on "Satisfied Mind," such as Cave or former Go-Between Forster, have redrawn the same lines themselves.
This all became clear to the Walkabouts when they first ventured off to Germany under the aegis of Sub Pop Europe. Unlike the situation at home, "being on that label didn't hurt us in the European audiences' eyes," Torgerson says. "We weren't lumped in with a gang of people that were doing a certain type of music. In Europe, people make up their own mind about whether they can like Mudhoney and also like the Walkabouts. They can have both in their record collection; they don't see the dilemma there."
In fact, having both bands in their collections is what it's all about. "You go to a Townes Van Zandt show in Germany and there'll be the sprinkling of alternative rock people there," Eckman says. "I don't think that's really pervasive in America."
When it does happen here, it's usually by way of a similar process. "I grew up on Aerosmith and whatever else horrible, and then got into punk rock," Eckman says. "But I think that we all used to be into country music, even if we didn't know we were into it. There was always that countryesque element in a lot of music that people listened to, some of it good, some of it bad. Everyone experiences that collision somewhere on, from people like Neil Young or Emmylou Harris or Gram Parsons, people who were sort of the first to experience it. And then that whole early- to mid-80's thing: Green on Red, all of that.
"So you listen to that stuff," Eckman continues, "and then you kind of go, What sources are these guys citing?' Same thing with the blues. I used to really dislike blues music until I started to have a renewed interest in the Rolling Stones. And then I said, Wait a second, you're not going back far enough.' Then I really started to get into the country-blues."
Eckman and Torgerson, both Washington natives, were classmates at Whitman college in Walla Walla. But they went all the way to Alaska before they actually met while picking up extra cash working at a fish cannery. Seeing as how there was little else to do, they began fooling around together with acoustic guitars. After another year of school in Walla Walla, they went to Seattle and got a band going with two of Eckman's brothers: bassist Kurt, who left early on, and drummer Grant, who stuck around through "Scavenger."
Torgerson's musical genesis was more of the folkie variety, "mainly because that's all I could play." While still in college, she went to Germany, where new wave and punk reshaped her musical tastes. "It was like 78, the Clash and Kate Bush, Nina Hagen, things like that," she says. "And then I knew, when I go back to America, I'm going to be in a rock band." But the folk tradition remained a big part of the Walkabouts' music -- in Eckman's lyrics, about death and love and land and booze, and in the way the band exists, as Townes Van Zandt would say, "for the sake of the song."
"Folk is very important, especially for people who don't get raised religiously, who don't have any story," Torgerson says. "Y'know, you learn a song and usually you carry it with you for the rest of your life."
"I think rock music works in the same kind of way," adds Eckman. "But rock tends to be more idiosyncratic. After a certain point in its development it became this really artist-specific music. Y'know, Patti Smith is Patti Smith; she brings all that weight of her own obsessions and personality to it, so it becomes a little more removed from community-type music.
"Folk music was never really artist-specific," he continues. "It was always songs that got passed around a room. Folk and country musicians -- and this is something I've never experienced myself, because I'm not a country musician -- these people can just sit in a bar and play for five hours without ever having played with each other before."
With that in mind, the Walkabouts don't consider themselves country/folk professionals, even if "Satisfied Mind," with its lush tapestry of lap steel, mandolin, bouzouki and banjo, has the ring of authenticity. "We feel like, OK, you can get country out of it," says Eckman, "but we always feel a little more comfortable when we're circling around it, never quite nailing it on the head."
To prove the point, the band hurried back to the studio three months after completing "Satisfied Mind" and cranked out "Setting the Woods on Fire." Their subsequent shows at once played up and dissolved any dichotomy between acoustic and electric music. Oddly enough, that served them well when they found themselves playing a hometown gig the weekend after Kurt Cobain's suicide.
"Seattle was so weird for two days there," Eckman recalls. "We were convinced that no one would come to the show. But everybody went out to hear music. It turned out to be one of the biggest shows we ever had in Seattle, draw-wise."
"So we did our acoustic set, and we dedicated Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone' to Kurt, and people were crying," adds Torgerson. "Then we did the rock set and people started drinking and went crazy."
(Jason Cohen is the Austin-based co-author of "Generation Ecch!")
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Listening through their recent Rag & Bone EP makes it clear that the Walkabouts are not a typical band, of the folk-rock variety or any other. "The Anvil Song" juxtaposes headlong, hammering, piano-driven thrash and doomy, descending, bassy guitar lines; "Ahead of the Storm" bounces along, as if on horseback, before bursting into a piercing electric guitar solo; and the apparently bleak statement of the urge to self-obliteration in "Medicine Hat" is framed by picked acoustic guitar, a lost-sounding harmonica, and low cello moans. All that before you get to the flip side's dramatization of a train crash in "Wreck of the Old No. 9."
"Wreck" does have its origins in a folk song. Just as on their last album, Cataract, the Walkabouts transformed the traditional work song "Drille Terriers" into a surging, defiant anthem, here they take an Ozark tune written by Amelda Riddle, with a fairly straightforward lyric of love blighted by fate, and give it an instrumental framework little short of astounding. I asked how they came to cover this song - and how they managed to summon up the impact of a train crash in the music.
CHRIS: We'd been playing a version of it live, but just a free-form mess, a drony, one-chord thing... Actually, the way it started was that Carla had aversion of it on an old record called Folk Song '65...
GRANT: You aren't going back far enough. The track called "Robert McFarlane Blues" on Rattlesnake Gardens, which is a snippet of audio manipulation, is based on an instrumental we did live, from a song we called "Death March"...
TONY: Or "Teenage Death Party"...
MICHAEL: Because all these kids were killing themselves in suicide pacts.
GRANT: Right. So that was there, that kept coming out of this song, and then we decided to change it a little at one point, and Carla started singing the Amelda Riddle song over it...
MICHAEL: It started as "The King of France," actually...
GRANT: Right. Then Carla started doing her thing, and we did that on the tour last spring, then we came home and arranged it.
CHRIS: It was Glenn who came up with the wreck idea. We were playing around with it in the studio, and he said we should stop here and make lots of noise. And we did. No one said, this is the train wreck - but all of a sudden we realized that's what it was. You can hear just a few train sounds in the background, underneath. Those are virtually the only overdubs. The rest is played live. The vocals were cut live, with Carla in an isolation booth, and she did overdub a little violin, I guess, but the actual noise of the train impact is not overdubbed. That's exactly what we do live.
TONY: Steve Fisk just put his stuff in around what the band had already developed.
CHRIS: Tony produces our records along with Ed Brooks, and Tony's a weirdo, but Ed's a song guy, and we thought he'd find "The Wreck" too out there. So we asked Steve to produce that song, because he's this noisemeister. We brought it to him and asked him to add all this stuff and make this dynamic train wreck, and he listened to it and said, "this is pretty out there... there's not much I can do." Initially he wasn't going to add a thing, and he ended up just adding these little train things to it.
CARLA: He did put the train whistles in the key he thought sounded right for the song.
MICHAEL: People have said it's a gimmick, as if it's this conscious thing we do with every record, our bastard folk song, but though the train wreck is a gimmick on a certain level, and I like that, it evolved into what it is very naturally. We didn't sit around a table thinking, we need a folk song to trash for this record.
GRANT: Beyond folk music, we're very into Negativland...
CARLA: And radio jammers...
MICHAEL: Which we now use on "The Wreck" live. It keeps Tony interested in doing sound.
GLENN: That and the food.
Their music range and the skill with which they carry it off make the Walkabouts one of the most striking bands of recent times. And their reputation is clearly growing, although the variety in their music has made broader acceptance more difficult than it is for bands with a clearly defined, one-track sound. Drummer Grant Eckman remembers, "when we were starting out, trying to get gigs, I'd be on the phone with bookers and they'd ask what we sounded like, and I'd say well, that's kinda hard, it's not any one thing -- elements of this, a little of that.... Sometimes it's be okay, but lots of times it would be, click."
Chris Eckman (guitar and vocals) recalls early shows in Seattle: "We'd play a quiet song and then a loud song -- and people would just walk away," or, adds co-vocalist/guitarist Carla Torgerson, "one group would walk up, another would go sit down."
The band has been together for six years now -- though they only became a five-piece last year, when keyboardist Glenn Slater joined Carla, Chris, Grant and bassist Michael Wells -- and their experience together has only strengthened the determination to preserve their distinctive music approach, as Chris explains:
"In the early stages we experimented with different types of music.... We didn't have the level of sophistication to say, 'We're gonna be a folk-rock band' -- or anything, really. And playing for years in Seattle, with zero recognition anywhere else, gave us the confidence just to do what we wanted to do. We started to approach the music as an end in itself-- we weren't going to narrow ourselves in order to be accepted.
"Now we've gotten to the point where we're rather a popular band in Seattle, which has given us enough confidence to say, that's the way we're to approach doing music, for better or for worse."
This attitude comes through when you're talking to the Walkabouts. For one thing, despite their individual characteristics, they're an unusually collective entity, "the band." During our conversation, the five members (plus sound man-coproducer Tony Kroes) all contributed, often finishing one another's sentences or filling in details, so that many of the quotations are really joint statements. And they seem completely self-assured, in the sense of being sure of what they're together and what each of them has to offer the group.
I wondered if they were as discouraged as I am by the rapid success achieved in recent years by bands, "alternative" or otherwise, who've stuck to a pretty narrow musical path. "You can't really get hung up on that," says Chris.
This is what we do, and we're willing to accept it .. because this is the music we want to make. We're not going to go through a major reevaluation be- cause things haven't necessarily worked as well as another band's career has worked. That ruins a lot of bands-if you worry too much about these things, then you start getting really far away from what motivated you in the first place. You have to keep having fun.
Chris did admit though to being a little envious sometimes of bands with a very specific sound:
"Not to pick on anybody, but take Galaxy 500-- there's a band with a very definable sound, and it's done great things for them, because people can say, I know what Galaxy 500 sounds like. Their first record sounds like their second record, you either like it or you don't. But if you like it, you can just immerse yourself in it.
"Whereas a band like us... we weed out a lot of people just because of our diversity."
The music business is more and more inclined to look for pigeonholes-- but it wasn't always that way. The Rolling Stones, to give a well-known example, used to put out (20 years ago) highly successful records that featured sparse country or blues arrangements alongside their more typical rock and roll songs. Chris sees that broader legacy as an influence:
"We're old enough that we listened to all the records from that era. Like Neil Young, who could do an acoustic ballad and then turn around and do a loud, 10-minute guitar thing. That seems real natural to us, having grown up on it. But the industry has moved more and more to the point that what they want to sign is something that's easily definable, easily marketable. Your business cynicism goes up when you deal with majors, but it's sad to see independent labels take that approach, when they used to define themselves in opposition to such generic thinking."
When bands start out, I reckon they're usually doing it for fun, and they usually begin by trying to emulate the music of bands they really like. In the last few years, a lot of bands have come along who grew up on '70s stadium rock like Kiss and Aerosmith -- and you hear resonances of that in what they play. I don't hear those resonances much in the Walkabouts, though.
"Well," Grant responds cheerfully, "we always emulated bands who weren't very successful! Our favorite band, collectively, when we started out, was Love, who were successful up to a point, but certainly not a household name."
"And it's continued over the years," says Carla, citing Young Marble Giants, the Triffids, the Mekons, the Go-Betweens. "We listened to a lot of Eastern music, too, for a while. We were trying to do ragas, and sing weird, we'd do all-night improvisational jams."
Chris reckons the diversity of the band's sound is mirrored by the diversity of their musical interests: "we listen to a lot of loud rock stuff-- Thin White Rope or Sonic Youth -- and of course we listen to a lot of folk music, older stuff like Fairport Convention plus the more modern folk music."
The process of creating Walkabouts songs is a collective on. Chris is responsible for "the basic skeleton of the song" -- lyrics, vocal melodies, and basic chords -- but from there on it becomes a group project:
CHRIS: They can go very far from where they started. And that's what's good about it.
GRANT: That's why Chris as a songwriter would want to be in a band, rather than be a solo acoustic guitar player.
CHRIS: Right, the big sound is what attracts me as a songwriter.
MICHAEL: And basically he's a pushover for a good, mean guitar solo.
GRANT: And the only way you can really get away with that is by having a great rhythm section to back you up.
CHRIS: But no one's afraid to strip it down if that's what the song needs. Like "Medicine Hat" on the new record, where Grant just plays a real light shaker. When we were arranging it, Grant wasn't saying, I have to play a drum part. It did start out with a drum part, but he said, I'm not going to play drums on this. I was the one thinking it had to have drums, but he said no.
GRANT: I just wanted to keep the rhythm, be like a metronome on that song.
CHRIS: And that's a real special thing to have in a band, because then you can do anything.
GRANT: I like it because it gives me a rest in the live show.
GLENN: Of course, we were a hundred miles into the woods at the studio when we realized we'd forgotten the shaker.
The imagery of Walkabouts songs seems to derive almost exclusively from natural phenomena. The lyrics are full of rivers, woods, storms, darkness. I asked Chris if he felt he was working in a sort of American Gothic tradition:
"Part of it is being from the Northwest. Washington State is mostly rural. Seattle is obviously urban, but it ends very quickly. Thirty miles beyond Seattle and, you're gone. And we've traveled a lot. Carla and I will just take off in the car and head out into Nevada and Montana. A lot of the American experience is not very urban. But a lot of what gets written about the American rural experience is very idealized-- beautiful small towns a la John Cougar-- and that's clearly not what's out there. It's a lot of trailer parks, with people eking out a rather precarious existence... what Carla calls "'Blue Velvet' scenarios." That's the reality of a lot of America and it's a reality people in urban centers don't see much.
"But you're right, the songs are excessively nonurban. I don't know exactly why that is. After writing lyrics for years, I found it was much easier, and much more creative for me, to write something that's beyond what's immediately in front of me. To go beyond the personal diary situation of, 'this is my bad love life.' Which can be done well-- Mark Eitzel of American Music Club, who I think is wonderful, does that really well. So do Robert and Grant from the Go-Betweens, and I really respect that kind of song. I just don't feel I do it very well...
"Plus, I write lyrics for Carla to sing, which is an odd thing in itself, and I don't want to make them like my male, middle-class, white viewpoint of things, although that surely comes out. I want it to be a little more universal.
"Then three or four years ago, I started listening to a lot of traditional folk music, and I realized there is an incredible wealth of clear-eyed fatalistic visions of the world available in those songs, stuff that's more on the money than a lot of intricate word-play, which is what I was into at the time. I've tried to simplify. People still come up to me and say they don't understand a thing I write. I don't think it's that obscure, but maybe it is.
"It's also the way I write. I don't write lyrics and then say, now let's have a song. The lyrics are the last thing written. We have a song, and then it's a question of what will fit in with this song. One of the worst things is when people interpret songs strictly from the lyrical content, as if the music has nothing to do with what the song means. It might as well be an essay if you forget the musical element. If the music is impressionistic and layered and textured, it makes some sense that the lyrics would follow in the same way.
"I do have a background in literature, and I think it's important, but it's something I try to work against as much as I use it for sources. You have to try and purge yourself, see what people really say. I borrow phrases, and titles, but I try and dig into it myself, too."
Despite their professed admiration for that clear-eyed fatalism/realism of great folk songs which the Walkabouts share with, say Nick Cave, there's no exaggerated tragic sense in their songs. As Chris points out, Cave, whom he greatly admires, will "go for the last nail in the coffin, every time, and I don't think that's what happens in the real world either." What you tend to get in a Walkabouts song is a sense of determination to resist fate:
"A lot of them end with people at least attempting to do something. Although a lot of it is failure, they're trying. And that seems to me to be where most of us are at. We get up, we do things, and most of them don't work the way we want them to, but we do keep coming back."
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