![]() ![]() More recently, he often swaps record-store finds with DuPlantis and Son Volt drummer Mark Patterson. Louis as part of an ad-hoc country band whose repertoire included songs by Sahm. Back in the early ’90s, he and Brian Henneman from the Bottle Rockets played a few shows in St. He was animated inside, too, playing with such intensity that he inadvertently whacked a microphone with his guitar, producing an audible clunk that the band did its best to mask afterward.įarrar has long counted himself a fan of Sahm’s. Sahm made a memorable entrance, pulling up to the Austin, Texas, recording studio in a vintage Lincoln Continental. (Sahm died of a heart attack in 1999, at 58.)įarrar got to know Sahm when Uncle Tupelo covered his song “Give Back the Key to My Heart” on their 1993 album Anodyne and invited the self-styled Texas Tornado to sing on the track. “Doug came from that generation where that was his social media, just getting on the phone and calling people,” says Farrar, who unearthed the answering machine tapes from some shoeboxes full of old cassettes. Phone calls from Sahm weren’t unusual: Tony Margherita, who managed Farrar’s previous band Uncle Tupelo, says Sahm frequently rang him, too, to talk about baseball. Son Volt bookended Day of the Doug with scratchy snippets of messages that Sahm left on Farrar’s answering machine in the ’90s. Going from psychedelic rock to country and then a heavy blues thing, he kept jumping around the whole time.” “The guy was into so many styles of music it’s too much for most people. “Doug’s an example of why music is interesting, and it’s not about accumulating large amounts of money,” Chadbourne told Magnet magazine in 2002. Sahm has been the subject of three separate tribute albums over the years, starting with respective LPs by jazz/psych guitarist Eugene Chadbourne and roots-rock band the Bottle Rockets in 2002, and rounded out this year with Day of the Doug, a new collection from the alt-country band Son Volt. Maybe that’s what has prompted some of his acolytes to keep alive Sahm’s legacy, a distinctive blend of British Invasion-style pop, psychedelia, country and Tex-Mex. Yet he was always more of a niche taste for those in the know than a household name. Sahm also collaborated here and there in the ’70s with the likes of Bob Dylan, Dr. Sure, the hippie-cowboy singer, songwriter and guitarist landed a handful of songs on the pop charts at his height in the ’60s with the Sir Douglas Quintet, establishing a template that Willie Nelson later used to bring his outlaw country sound to a rock ’n’ roll audience. ![]() Union features long time band members Mark Spencer (piano, organ, acoustic slide, lap steel, backing vocals) Andrew DuPlantis (bass, backing vocals), returning member Chris Frame (guitar), as well as newest member Mark Patterson on drums and percussion.Doug Sahm is one of those musicians whose influence has resonated well beyond the scope of his success. The legacy of Woody Guthrie helped to inform Union’s closing song “The Symbol” which was inspired by Guthrie’s classic “Deportee” (“Plane Wreck at Los Gatos”). ![]() Three songs were tracked at the Mother Jones Museum in Mount Olive, IL and four others were recorded at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “While Rome Burns” emphasizes finding unity during times of turmoil while an album highlight, “Devil May Care,” offers the distraction we need, an effusive tribute to the fun of playing and creating music.Ī unique aspect of Union is that eight of the thirteen songs were recorded at places associated with two figures in American history whom Farrar considers important – labor and community organizer Mary Harris “Mother Jones” and iconic folk hero Woody Guthrie. “What can we do to bring our society back together?” Initially intended to be an entirely political statement, Union morphed into a combination of politically inspired material balanced by a cluster of new songs reflecting the power of love, time and music that sustains us. “There are so many forces driving our country apart,” observes Farrar. Jay Farrar channels folk music’s enduring legacy of the troubadour on Union. Son Volt’s ninth studio album, Union (Transmit Sound/Thirty Tigers), will be released worldwide on March 29th.
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