WATERMARKS

From the very beginning, the Walkabouts had the mojo hand upon them. Like far too many teenage garage combos from the '60s, they could have just as easily called themselves the Chosen Few. Because that's what they were-and still are.

Their name was inspired by Walkabout, the 1971 Nicolas Roeg movie about two kids, abandoned by their father in the Australian outback, who were taken under the wing of a young aborigine on his year-long pilgrimage toward manhood. "Curt (Chris' brother who played bass with the first version of the band alongside a third Eckman brother, Grant, on drums) saw the name one night on a movie marquee," reveals Torgerson. "That film was one of those life-changing experiences for me. I also loved the idea that in Native American culture you would leave the tribe for a year on a vision quest, to figure out who you wanted to be. When you got home you gave yourself a new name and you entered into adulthood."

The lingering message of Roeg's film served better than any Michelin guide as a roadmap for the coming of age of the Walkabouts. "Self-actualizing is very important for people because it gives them a course of action," says Torgerson. "Four years of national touring allowed us to grow up together. When you realize who you are, you've got to go down that road you've picked for yourself." After all but abandoning hope for U.S. success, the long and twisted trail the Walkabouts chose pointed straight towards the European continent where they would command true audience respect. They haven't looked back since.

"Sometimes it just comes down to dumb luck," says Chris Eckman, explaining why European Sub Pop (which eventually became Glitterhouse) offered a better label situation for his band than its Seattle-based U.S. counterpart. "It always seemed that [U.S.] Sub Pop was apologizing to people for the fact that we weren't a grunge band." European tastes, Eckman stresses, were more in tune to what the Walkabouts were all about. "I often feel like Americans approach it the same way they approach whiskey: straight with no chaser," he chuckles.

"The Walkabouts are a hybrid affair," adds Eckman. "We mix and match genres rather than embrace. I guess we are a whole lot of chaser. And it pans out with other acts, too. Calexico and Lambchop are, at best, critics' darlings in the States. In Europe they are legitimate stars." And so are the Walkabouts, who have carved out a handsome life for themselves far from their native shores.

The Walkabouts rumbled out of Seattle 20 years ago, something of a punkishly askew update of that revered Nancy Sinatra-Lee Hazlewood blend of years past. Torgerson's pristine pipes contrasted sharply with the vocal wail of Eckman, the anti-Neil Young. Where Young had soared into the falsetto ether, Eckman's creaky voice, just as eggshell fragile as Young's, poked around in the cobwebbed corners of the low-register basement. It was a perfect one-two punch, exacerbated by Eckman's dank and threatening, bipolar electric-guitar excursions.

Eckman and Torgerson met working at an Alaskan fish cannery while both were on summer break from tiny, liberal arts-minded Whitman College in Walla Walla, located in the southeastern corner of Washington. Torgerson had been attracted to a Pete Townshend-like photo hanging near a friend's bunkhouse bed at the cannery, a picture of Eckman in shiny vinyl pants, suit jacket and shades, his legs tucked up behind him, elevated two feet in the air. "He had seen me get off the tiny bush plane, says Torgerson. "I made a beeline for him and said, 'I want to be in your band.'" Eckman, who fronted the Contusions back at Whitman, and Torgerson swapped material during downtime at the cannery. "I played him some of my songs that had six or seven chords," says Torgerson."He was fascinated with that. He was teaching me punk. I was teaching him more chords."

Torgerson grew up in Auburn, Wash., in what she calls "redneck country," 45 miles south of Seattle, in a home that worshipped classical music. "Every Saturday my parents had the New York Metropolitan Opera on the radio, blaring as loud as it could be," she recalls. "They would try to guess not only what city's symphony was playing the piece but who was conducting. They were like Grateful Dead fanatics," she jests.

"I was hoping there was better music out there," says Torgerson of her high school days when neither Elton John nor Led Zeppelin did very much for her. Then came the Clash, the Jam and, especially, German punk chanteuse Nina Hagen. "Even in her interviews she would make everything rhyme," marvels Torgerson.

"The first album I bought was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's Deja Vu," says Eckman. "We had a foster kid who was five years older than me living in our house, a delinquent kid who bounced from home to home. But he knew late-'60s rock n' roll, and he taught it to me. We got our parents to buy the first Doors album and Sgt. Pepper on 8-track tape. Then I spent a year trying to play like Bad Company before I realized that was never going to happen. That's when I got into punk rock. That stuff was playable." Enthralled by the tortured genius of the Only Ones and the Stranglers, Eckman founded a punk band called the Innocents—our motto was "No one is innocent," he cackles—and then finally the Contusions.

With their new moniker in place, the Walkabouts recognized the Green Pajamas and the Young Fresh Fellows as their only true DIY competition in Seattle. "The Green Pajamas were so shy we hardly ever saw them," says Torgerson. "But we followed everything the Young Fresh Fellows did. 'Hey, they have a soundman. Oh, we'd better get a soundman. They're doing a recording? Maybe we can do a recording.'" With the three Eckman brothers and Torgerson on board, the Walkabouts did just that, releasing 22 Disasters, a five-song rough diamond of a mini-LP on the Necessity label in 1984. "We felt like we were flying blind," says Torgerson. "We put it out way too early," claims an overly critical Eckman.

Four years later and still nothing was happening with the band. "No one was coming to our shows," Eckman admits. "That was the time when we wished we were [L.A. paisley underground gurus) the Rain Parade. Finally we had a band meeting to see if we were going to keep doing this. We agreed to just document what we had done so far, and we started recording what would become See Beautiful Rattlesnake Gardens."

Conrad Uno of PopLlama Records (home of the Young Fresh Fellows) convinced the Walkabouts—now sporting new bassist Michael Wells—that with a little re-sequencing of the songs they had an album. He agreed to put out Rattlesnake Gardens, the band's debut LP, in 1988. "That album saved our ass locally," say Eckman. "It sold a few copies and people started taking us seriously."

Then came grunge. Totally ignored by the early-'90s national-media feeding frenzy for Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden and their woolly-capped brethren, the Walkabouts convinced themselves that it had nothing to do with them. "If we had been doing that kind of music I would have been completely defeated, just devastated," says Eckman. "But we were so left-field from that stuff. We've never been part of the Seattle phenomenon. We knew we could do it but we'd have been horrible at it. It would have been pointless."

When Capitol Records narrowed the field of its next major signing to the Walkabouts and the not-quite-legendary School Of Fish—and in their infinite wisdom chose the latter—our heroes had just about had enough. "We almost stopped trying," says Torgerson. "We opened for Tad and Mudhoney in London in 1991, two nights in a row at a thousand-seater venue, and then we'd come back to Seattle and play for the same 200 people down at the Central Tavern."

"That's when [U.S.] Sub Pop gave us a shitload of money—about $40 thousand—to record Scavenger in 1990," adds Eckman. "They were about to sell all their bands, including us, to CBS for distribution, and they wanted our album to sound really good. When that deal never came down, they ended up with a ridiculously expensive record. But that's the album that really blew open the doors for us in Europe. It made the top of the indie charts there." So, it was off across the Atlantic for the next twelve years, a still-unfolding saga that shows no signs of ending soon.

The Walkabouts began touring the European continent nonstop—with a stable lineup that would include keyboardist Glenn Slater (formerly of Cyborg Rembrandt and Melting Fish) and Terri Moeller (of the Beltanes) on drums. Slater signed on in 1989, Moeller in 1992. The bass spot with the band (now occupied, appropriately enough, by Joe Bass) has always been, as Eckman laughingly puts it, "a revolving door." "Having Glenn and Terri as permanent members changed our sound immensely," says Torgerson. "Glenn brought along his genius with string arrangements as well as his love of electronic sounds and vintage synthesizers, inspired by his devotion to prog-rock—Pink Floyd and Yes, in particular. And Terri really loves her drums. She's a musician's musician—a real student of her instrument. Terri's dad was also a musician during the big-band era. And Glenn was born in Japan, so he's this very charming blend of Eastern and Western cultures."

"I have a new resurgence of that kinda avant-garde thing," Slater told Peter Sjöblom of Swedish mag La Musik recently. "I like using the mellotron sound a lot—an instrument from the 70's that had the tapes in loops. Very eerie sounds. And I still love the synthesizer. I have a collection at home. This next tour, I'm thinking of bringing one of my real synths. I think it's time to be adventurous because people like that. Technology is getting more interesting again. In the 80's and 90's, technology got stupid. They took the knobs off the keyboards and gave you a little window and one knob. Now they've realized even electronic people want to have a real synthesizer."

Moeller told Sjöblom of the stylistic changes in the band during her tenure. "It's gone through some different phases. During the time of Setting the Woods On Fire and New West Motel it was more of a rock thing. Then Satisfied Mind brought it down a little bit in a more folk/country way. With Nighttown and Trail of Stars, those two records in particular, I had to really get the best tone I could get. And learn to play along with loops and stuff which is pretty hard to do on the drums. It feels like we're all just locked in more and in tune with one another more creatively. I feel more tuned-in and more spontaneous."

Touring Europe hasn't always been a bed of roses for the Walkabouts, needless to say. One horrible night in Amsterdam, three thugs tried to board the group's bus, uninvited. "We were loading up at the Milky Way and these guys tried to kiss Terri," relates a still horrified Torgerson. "They pulled a knife on us and the bus driver told me to run to the police station."

Adds Eckman: "It was a full-blown fight. The evening ended with me touring the backstreets of Amsterdam in the back of a police car, looking for the suspects. The police went inside a secret club, but they stupidly left the keys in the ignition. And I was left caged in the back, my doors locked from the outside. Two drunks came out of the club, saw the 'empty' police car, and were ready to hijack the thing. Somehow, I convinced them this was not a very good idea." Most of the trek through exotic lands, dispensing their uniquely hypnotic brand of rock 'n' roll like a traveling medicine show has been a true joy, Torgerson insists. "We've been out here so long you start to meet people on the road, and then, after a while we start meeting the children of those same people. Two of those young kids, from Geislingen, Germany Fabrizio and Flavio Steinbach—are now playing with Barbara Manning as the Go-Luckys. We watched them grow up."

A major career highlight of the Walkabouts' lengthy discography was 1995's Devil's Road, their first outing for Virgin Records. "That album fulfilled a dream of ours to work with a large orchestra," says Torgerson. "We recorded Devil's Road in Germany, outside of Cologne, at Conny Plank's studio—the same place where Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and Devo once recorded. We'd learned about Conny Plank's from Dickon Hinchcliffe of the Tindersticks, who also plays on the album. Our engineer and co-producer, Victor Van Vugt, had been Nick Cave's sound engineer for eleven years and had done The Good Son album in Brazil, We realized this guy really knew how to record orchestras, so we took the train to Poland and recorded with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra." The band also flew in longtime collaborator Mark Nichols to work up the album's succulent string arrangements.

Eckman sums up Devil's Road best: "It was the crowning achievement of our evolution from folk-rock act to the symphonic sound we'd always dreamed of."

Another career benchmark for the band was 1999s Trail Of Stars. "We got to work with Phill Brown—who'd produced everybody from Talk Talk, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Bryan Ferry to Dido and Faithless," says Torgerson. "Phill has had this wonderful open-mindedness and a way of staying modern through four decades of music. You can throw any idea at him and he doesn't bat an eye. He just tries it." Brown also mixed the band's most recent longplayer, 2002's Ended Up A Stranger. "I'm quite proud of the sound we achieved on Trail Of Stars," says Eckman. "I can think of no record that we ever set out to do where we more realized what we were going for."

Adds Torgerson: "We've done 13 albums and we've done them all our own way. It's the only way to feel good about your achievements." That good feeling, of course, also extends to just being in Europe most of the time. Eckman raves about "the thrill of walking exotic streets in the middle of the night, the feeling of having a baguette in the morning in Paris, then some paella in Barcelona that same evening. Each tour is different," he says. "After a few years we began enjoying some success, and then the attractions became quite diverse. I've stockpiled 12 years of amazing memories and friendships by zigzagging the continent. Now we try to push into places we haven't been before: Portugal, Croatia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic. There is nothing boring about it."

"I run into people I knew in college," says Torgerson, "and they're so bored. We're not bored people. We started our band because we didn't find what we wanted to hear on the radio. So, we thought, 'We can do better than that—maybe.'" The Walkabouts have always cherished working with friends, Torgerson declares. "We thought it would be a great idea if Chris Peters, who did the woodcut design for the cover of Rattlesnake Gardens would do another one for our new compilation, Watermarks," she says. "Tony Kroes, our soundman for seven years, has also done the beautiful artwork for the stage backdrops on all of our European tours; and Ben Thompson has provided inspirational graphic design for practically every Walkabouts album."

Luc Wouters, another longtime band soundman, has recently provided an additional source of income for the Walkabouts. "We saw Howe Gelb selling bootlegs of his own material at a gig one night," reveals Torgerson, "and we thought, 'Hey, we have the best recordings of our own band. Why don't we just sell them ourselves and cut out the middle man?' All you can say is hats off to all our wonderful friends who have helped us so much over the years."

The best reason for being in a band, Torgerson firmly believes, is the pursuit of traveling and meeting people. "There are some eastern-bloc countries that we've never made it to," she says. "Our Czech roadie has changed his schedule around so we can come play at his wedding next year. I don't think we're giving this up anytime soon. I don't see why we ever have to quit. We're still fixated on this music thing." And so, the self-guided walking tour in search of mutual (and musical) enlightenment continues on, unabated, into a multi-hued sunset.

Jud Cost, Santa Clara, CA 2002

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