THE GOURDSSince the release of the critically praised Dem’s Good Beeble in 1997 and Stadium Blitzer in 1998, the Gourds have re-defined the Austin musical mystique with an earthy, organic sound that flickers like fireflies at dusk and sounds as good as cold orange soda on a hot Texas day. Yet it was the unexpected bluegrass spin of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” on the Gogitchershinebox EP that melded a college radio audience and the Gourds’ No Depression fans into a hardcore following. The acclaimed recordings that followed — Ghosts of Hallelujah (1999), Bolsa de Agua (2000), Cow Fish Fowl Pig (2002), Blood of the Ram (2004) — established the band as road-savvy carnies ready to steal the rubes’ hearts with shell-game lyrics and card-up-the-sleeve melodies.
For the Gourds, faced with working their mojo in the studio for the eighth time, the trick was to not simply deliver but keep the bar as high as ever. Here, after all, is a band who doesn’t just push the envelope, they’ve reshaped it. And with Heavy Ornamentals as a tool, the landscape of America is still ripe for discovery, unexplored turf to be carved out with words and music.
The 13 new songs on Heavy Ornamentals form a Gourdian knot of material written by chief band scribes Jimmy Smith and Kevin Russell. The tunes bear the traditional touch of knotty beats and poetic non-sequiturs for lyrics. With the band’s influences sewn as patchwork hearts on tattered sleeves, Doug Sahm and Johnny Thunders emerge as culture heroes while Schoolhouse Rock, Vincent Van Gogh, and Typhoid Mary inspire verses, and an old favorite returns.
“Shake the Chandelier” is the Gourds’ tip o’ the battered gimme cap to the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “She’s About a Mover” (though the title was inspired by a rap song). With Max Johnston and Claude Bernard subbing for its trademark Vox organ, Kevin Russell’s shout-out of “hey hey” is an arrow piercing the heart of every good Texan. It’s “a San Antonio groove expanded on in our little way,” explains Russell, the composer. Jimmy Smith agrees, “It’s awesome, I am loving Doug Sahm more and more as I get older. I wish he was still with us. I wasn’t as far along into his groove then as I am now. And I miss him more.”
For Smith, writing the songs “came in batches” save “Collections,” recorded previously on a solo album seven years ago. “The gist is that accumulating too much is what it’s about. I love to live life simple — less is better. Have you ever seen a drawing of Vincent Van Gogh’s room? It’s a beautiful drawing, just the bare necessities. I always had a romantic attachment to that drawing — table, a pitcher of water, and a bed. I thought, that’s perfect. It’s all you need. It’s totally the opposite now,” he chuckles. “I have a kid and there’s 5000 toys lying around the house.”
Smith’s lyrical style is often pegged as befuddling, yet words are a vehicle for his rocking-chair view of life. “A neighbor my dad used to call Mr. Betty” inspired the song but it is “more a criticism of behavior I can’t stand, and really more about Typhoid Mary. I read a book about her by Anthony Bourdain, which was fascinating. It was about her denial that she carried typhoid fever. She had no symptoms so she refused to believe she had anything and kept on working as a cook, killing a bunch of people. I was taken aback but maybe everyone’s got a little Typhoid Mary in ‘em.”
Fiddler and mandolin player Max Johnston, who joined the band after stints with Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, comments, “Kevin and I had a little fiddle-and-mandolin song and list of song names, and “Stab at Rehab” came to me.” The song ended up as a rare Gourds instrumental track titled “Stab.” Johnston also cites Russell’s “Pill Bug Blues” for its simplicity. “It’s more straightforward than what we usually do, not so scattered, like throwing darts at the dictionary.”
Claude Bernard, whose liquid accordion and bounding keyboards ferry the Gourds across open waters, also calls “Pill Bug Blues” a favorite “because it’s such a straight ahead, somber little country ditty.” He also feels that Heavy Ornamentals’ songs are “less wacky. We’ve had some crazy shenanigans on our records and I think this record is less off on a tangent and more mature.”
Maybe. The band is beloved for that rowdy exuberance. As drummer Keith Langford notes, “making records with the Gourds, the means justify the end.” It was at Langford’s behest that Kevin Russell’s “Burn the Honeysuckle” made the final mix. “Jimmy and Kevin have so much great stuff that hasn’t been done, it’s a shame you only get 12 or 13 songs on a record,” Langford avers. “Kevin gets so much going that songs happening a month prior get left behind.” Yet, the evocative “Burn the Honeysuckle,” steeped in Texas gothic, is also “my own personal experience,” Russell admits. “Like a ‘plate of bacon and a banjo on my knee.’ I’ve been in that situation and it’s great!”
Jimmy Smith’s songs yielded the opening track “Declineometer,” one that Max Johnston calls “my current favorite.” Recalls Smith, “I wanted a little gadget in one of my songs, so I was thumbing through the dictionary and saw ‘declineometer’ in there. It’s a real word. I didn’t make it up. I’d been listening to the New York Dolls lately and had to have a shout-out to Johnny Thunders. It’s also a shout-out to Joe Strummer for his bullshit detector.”
“Weather Woman” finds Smith puzzled “about the absurdity of meteorologists. It’s a crazy profession. Their accuracy is always on the line.” Accuracy wasn’t an issue for “New Roommate,” which Smith describes as “four vignettes about living situations. You got the deadbeat, the quiet suicide attempt, the lesbian . . . I thought it would be fun to write about, to come up with an idea. That’s the whole point of writing. You go to whatever place you need to go to with a blank page in front of you. Just trying to get down some verses, you don’t know what’s going to come. That’s the best part of it.”
Claude calls Jimmy’s “Pick and Roll” a “geeky British invasion song with Star Trek references.” Jimmy is more specific, defining it as a “filk song,” a nod to the genre of music commonly heard at science-fiction conventions. “I didn’t realize I’d written a filk song until I heard about filk in NPR but it would be great to get a new audience like that.”
Kevin Russell tapped into Schoolhouse Rock for the quirky “The Education Song,” with its “Mairzy Doats” singalong feel. “I don’t usually do message songs,” he asserts. “That one just came about riding around in my car with the cadence of ‘those that know don’t duh duh duh duh duh.’ It’s a positive message song about education. And ‘Our Patriarch’ surprised me. I didn’t think we could play music like that. It’s spacious and lazy and open, a beautiful little thing I wrote on ukulele in the van. I’ve always loved the melody and the chord changes.”
Aside from what Max Johnston calls “the band’s hodgepodge sound,” the Gourds are known for their close association with their rabid fan base. That’s the group most likely to celebrate the recording of longtime favorite, “Hooky Junk.” As Kevin Russell says, “It’s never been on a record and it seemed like the time to try it.”
“I was surprised Kevin pulled out ‘Hooky Junk,’” adds Claude, “but it’s a really great version. It took me a long time to compose my part for that song and have it rise and fall in the proper places.”
For the band, the analog recording of Heavy Ornamentals (which Jimmy Smith wanted titled Wizard Belch) was a throwback to their early CDs. The introduction of Pro Tools moved recording from the studio to the home but it has altered the psyche of songs. “People don’t leave mistakes in anymore,” Claude laments. “Everything sounds so perfect it requires less and less talent on the part of the performer.”
Keith Langford found the social aspect of studio work refreshing. “We were interacting a lot more than on the last record. That one we did in our homes and for me, I didn’t like that process. We weren’t together. For this one, we were all together at Crow’s place hashing it out. It was exhausting but rewarding.” Max Johnston affectionately called the process, “kinda old-school. My parts had to be more polished, not like Pro Tools where it’s like sprinkling fairy dust on it. [mm1] <#_msocom_1> I’m not a tape nut but I liked the sound.”
Heavy Ornamentals is weighted with classic Gourds elements: enigmatic lyrics, soaring melodies, and an unfettered sense of musical freedom. Those characteristics both intrigue and provoke the listener, who is often at a loss for words to describe the band. That’s okay, for the band itself hedges about defining their sound while keeping a firm grasp on that mystical mojo behind it.
“I have a hard time describing our music,” confesses Kevin Russell. “I usually describe it the same way I write. I’ll find impressionistic combination of words, more thought than just stream-of-consciousness. I wrote a song called ‘Tubgut Stomp and Red-eyed Soul’ which I think is a pretty accurate description. I like ‘red-eyed soul’ a lot.”
So will the fans.
—Margaret Moser
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