"When Buddy Guy asks you to help him make a record," says Mathus, "you don't say no." After all, the 70-year-old Guy, whom Eric Clapton called "the greatest blues guitarist ever" drastically transformed both the blues and rock and roll. He played with Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. His amplified licks and ecstatic performances fanned the flames of the British invasion, and then paved the way for Jimi Hendrix's thermonuclear blues excursions. Along the way, Guy has embraced new sounds and stayed hungry for collaborations with the younger generation. So when he decided to record a more modern "hill-country-boogie" album this year, he called on Mathus. "When his producer called me, I nearly dropped the phone," recalls Mathus, still in disbelief. "I was so surprised. I mean, it's beyond a dream." But for anybody who's heard or seen the Squirrel Nut Zippers over their seven-year, five-album career, Guy's choice makes perfect sense. Like Guy, the Zippers conjure a musical past into a new living sound, mixing in a healthy dose of artistic invention with various strains of American music, ancient to the present. The result: unique, infectious music to unjade the jaded and to make the most leaden of feet move rhythmically across the floor. Nowhere is this more true than on the band's new album, Bedlam Ballroom, the latest chapter in a musical voyage that began almost a decade ago, when young newlyweds Mathus and Katherine Whalen settled down in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Jim, a native of Mississippi, was the veteran of dozens of bands stretching back to his childhood, when he played professionally with his family. As he and Katherine settled into the old house, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson took up permanent residence on the turntable. Katherine was reveling in her own deep fascination with jazz when she and Jim married. She sang along to standards, but only alone, usually in her car on the long drives to and from town. Since so many of their friends played music, guests at the couple's frequent dinner parties often brought instruments along with their covered dish or bottle of bourbon. On one of those warm, happy nights, sparked by a favorable moon, liquor and chicken grease, the music and Katherine's desire to sing combined and co-mingled, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers were born. In the name of fun, the Zippers began performing at smoky dives and area parties. Signing with Mammoth Records in 1993, the band recorded two albums of their homecooked musical gumbo - The Inevitable and Hot - and toured extensively throughout the South. Hot was an unexpected hit that placed the Zippers at the head of a retro-swing revival that they didn't understand, much less belong to. For one thing, they didn't really play Swing Music, per se. They played "Hot Music," a perpetually evolving, hybrid-stew of Southern roots traditions that one critic aptly tagged, "'30s punk." Their muse was always more menacing, more concerned with ghosts, love gone wrong, fever-dreams, and the razor's edge of sexual desire, than dance lessons, martinis and cigars. "When we started, we were just getting our sound together in our own little way," says Mathus, "making our first sounds as a band. There was no swing scene in North Carolina, but I saw it on the West Coast. I think swing is part of our sound but it's not what we are. I think a lot of swing dancers would tell you that, too. A lot of our music is too fast and too weird for swing dancing." The Zippers' latest offering, Bedlam Ballroom, links the band to their porch and parlor past. The title track, an instrumental, was written by deceased Zippers' trumpet player Stacy Guess. Guess had been a catalytic regular at the original farmhouse dinner-jams. Including the song, and naming the record for it is both tribute to a fallen friend and fond glance back to the original midnight revelry that became the Squirrel Nut Zippers. "I always loved that song, and when Stacy left us, we stopped playing it," Mathus explains. "But I never forgot it. It's great. It's raw, and twisted in a way that I love." To make the new album, the band reunited with Hot and Perennial Favorites producer Mike Napolitano at Kingsway Studios in New Orleans. The new line-up consisted of old-timers Whalen and Mathus, Stu Cole (bass), Chris Phillips (drums), Je Widenhouse (trumpet), and "Ghost Zipper" Andrew Bird (violin), and new recruits Tim Smith (alto saxophone), David Wright (trombone) and Reese Gray (piano). "We worked hard to get this one to be pleasing to the ear," says Mathus. "I wanted to do more with Katharine vocally, and was looking for more early rock and R&B sounds. I pulled some of the jazzier stuff, but left the crazier, cartoon stuff on there too, the songs that make people wonder." Newcomer Reese Gray, still only in his early twenties, first heard the Zippers when he was 14, and resolved that he would learn to play ragtime piano in the style of Fats Waller and Earl Hines. He picked it up, one key at a time, and spent his teenage years roaming around clubs and piano bars in the South. He did time in New Orleans, and by the time he was 20, was gigging in Chapel Hill unaware that Zippers even lived nearby. When Mathus and Stu Cole spotted Gray playing his weekly gig in a local restaurant, they were blown away, and invited "the kid" to join the band. "He's got it, man," says Mathus. "It's really difficult to play that way. 'The Stride' style has your left hand dive-bombing on the low octaves and your right hand filling in the rest. He's great, and so young, we're lucky to get him." Mathus took the basic tracks from the Kingsway sessions and reworked some of the songs over a snow bound week at Mitch Easter's Fidelitorium in Kernersville, North Carolina. He was trying to divine a new Zippers sound, one that embraced all of the changes in the band, while harkening back to the simple inspirations of their past. Back in Oxford, it's time for Jim to go to the studio to rehearse the band for a few hours before Buddy Guy gets there. He is wide awake now. "When the Squirrel Nut Zippers took a break from touring," explains Mathus, "I went after music big time. I played a bunch of shows with the Countdown Quartet, sat in with everybody who would have me, and I was just staying on that guitar. Now somehow, I'm here. I get to work with Buddy, the Zippers have a new record coming out, and this fall we'll be out on the road, pushing this baby hard." SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS are Stu Cole, Reese Gray, Jim Mathus, Chris Phillips, Tim Smith, Katharine Whalen, Je Widenhouse, David Wright
Andrew Bird appears courtesy of RykoPalm
PRODUCED and ENGINEERED by Mike Napolitano and Squirrel Nut Zippers. ADDITIONAL TRACKING at Fidelitorium Recordings, Kernersville, NC, Overdub Lane, Durham, NC, and Brooklyn Bridge, Austin, TX. |
