A little "method acting" in honky-tonk bars helps the rockers find their twangy flip side.
By PHILIP BOOTH
Published March 7, 2004
Cracker is best known for sarcastic '90s gems such as Eurotrash Girl and Teen Angst. But last year, the rootsy rockers decided to get in touch with their inner outlaw-country selves.
So, singer-guitarist David Lowery, six-stringer Johnny Hickman and collaborators including bassist Brandy Wood and drummer Frank Funaro rechristened themselves Ironic Mullet and worked up a new set of tunes, the kind that put the red in redneck.
"We booked ourselves into the local NASCAR rock 'n' roll country redneck bars, scattered along the south side of Richmond and around Norfolk, and up towards the Chesapeake," Lowery said recently by phone.
"We did this until we developed a repertoire of country songs that we felt fit, that were natural to Cracker," he said. "We went into the studio for, like, three days, set up in the daytime to record and rehearse the songs, and in the evening we'd invite our friends in to drink beer and listen. Method acting, I guess, is what we were doing."
The result is Countrysides, featuring rambling, gritty covers of such tunes as Ray Wylie Hubbard's rowdy Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother, Hank Williams Jr.'s Family Tradition and Merle Haggard's The Bottle Let Me Down. Lowery and his band mates offer a giddy, smirking approach that nevertheless reveals their affection for the material.
The band also takes on Haggard's Reasons to Quit, Dwight Yoakam's Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room, Bruce Springsteen's Sinaloa Cowboys (from The Ghost of Tom Joad), Terry Allen's Truckload of Art and Ike Reilly's Duty Free.
"A lot of the songs we drew upon were taken from the outlaw-country tradition, or related to that stuff. Okie From Muskogee (not on the CD) was the rednecks against the hippies, and Up Against the Wall was hippies against rednecks. There was this sort of march toward war in the United States, for probably some dubious reasons. A lot of things started to resonate with us. In a way, we tried to reflect that in the record."
Countrysides displays the twangy flip side of Cracker, but it isn't really a radical departure for the band. Lowery and Hickman last year teamed with bluegrass-inspired Leftover Salmon for Oh Cracker, Where Art Thou?, a collection of partly unplugged versions of Cracker favorites.
"We always drew upon country and folk music before alt-country was a cool thing to be," Lowery said. "Camper (Van Beethoven, the band Lowery formed in 1985) was totally playing around with our country roots. Cracker did the same thing as well. Countrysides is what has been underneath Cracker all the time that sort of colors what we do."
Countrysides is capped with Ain't Gonna Suck Itself, a typically profane and riotous Cracker tune that has Lowery venting about Virgin Records dismissing Cracker and several other major artists from the label in the late 1990s. Lowery had been associated with Virgin since 1987, when the label signed quirky college rock darlings Camper Van Beethoven, responsible for the cult hit Take the Skinheads Bowling.
Cracker's self-titled debut CD was released on Virgin in 1992. The band's last disc on the label, 1998's Gentleman's Blues, was followed by several independently released albums.
"I was there (with Virgin) longer than almost anybody who worked at that record label," he said. "I was there when it was owned by Richard Branson, and he would come in and have talks with the staff and do wacky stunts. I thought I was more a part of that label than many of the executives.
"I never heard anything from Virgin (in response). I heard from plenty of people who were laid off from Virgin who took that as their anthem. Before it was even released, all these people in the music business had heard it. A lot of Virgin people really like it."
Cracker in recent years has played double-bill shows with a reorganized Camper Van Beethoven. Victor Krummenacher, Camper's original bassist, is playing with Cracker for the band's winter tour, headed to Skipper's Smokehouse on Monday night.
"We've evolved into this legacy kind of band, including the Camper Van Beethoven material," Lowery said. "I try to do things (in concert) from every record, with maybe just a little more emphasis on the latest record. The next record will be a Camper Van Beethoven record."
Preview
Cracker, 8 p.m. Monday, Skipper's Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road, Tampa. $15 advance, $18 day of show. (813) 977-6474.
