South Austin Jug Band
Let’s just get it out of the way right now: There’s no jug-playing in the South Austin Jug Band. And the bluegrass connotation that name carries should be spilled down the drain along with any other moonshine-preconceived notions. Sure, there’s fiddle, mandolin, an upright bass … but there’s also drumming, occasional electric guitar and even digital looping. And Beck. The band’s latest album, Strange Invitation, gets its title from a lyric in Mr. Hansen’s 1997 charmer, “Jackass,” the only cover on this 11-song collection.
Comparisons, if they must be made, might meander more toward a low-intensity Grateful Dead (which, it should be noted, started out as a real jug band) or something with an even more melodic and laid-back vibe. Lead singer/acoustic guitarist James Hyland, whose tenor redefines mellow, would be quite happy if you’d just go with “bitchin’ tunes.”
“It’s the most accessible record we’ve made,” he says of the band’s third release, struggling somewhat to further clarify its style. “But it still has some of that whole acoustic — I’m not gonna use the word newgrass; throw that out the window — but that sort of progressive acoustic. …” He pauses, then finally admits, “It’s hard to come up with adjectives.”
Indeed it is. But “progressive acoustic” will do to define the far-beyond-bluegrass instrumentals “Trek of Beandip Perkins” and “Po’ Boys in the Glovebox,” in which Dennis Ludiker’s mandolin takes a Bela-Fleck-lead-banjo role and Brian Beken’s fiddle answers right back. They’re like nectar on an already-sweet collection full of Hyland’s musings on subjects as diverse as tripping into love too easily (“Fall So Fast”), the rhythms of a Windy City sojourn (“Chicago,” which nostalgically references “the lights at Wrigley Field”) and the bonds of brotherly love as manifested by Theo van Gogh’s unwavering devotion to his mad-genius brother, Vincent (“Wheatfield with Crows”). Hardly a lyrical lightweight, Hyland also conveys his thoughts about our government’s treatment of drug addicts (“Avenue of the Americas”) and addresses a general theme of mediocrity via allegories to Katrina, a breakup and other aspects of our cultural zeitgeist (“Neutral Ground”).
Regardless of how they’re played or what they’re about, the songs on Strange Invitation have one thing in common: They can’t help but sound melodic. Even the occasional melancholy verse can’t put “gravity shackles” (to quote Beck) on the uplifting sweep of that beautifully braided mandolin-fiddle combo. That may have something to do with the fact that Ludiker, a Spokane, Wash., native, and Beken, of Montgomery, Texas, are about as tight as brothers themselves; they’ve been making music together since they were kids.
Though he mainly plays mandolin in the band, fourth-generation fiddler Ludiker started “sawing” at 3. “I was getting trouble for touching a fiddle before I was ever allowed to even play one,” he recalls. “It was my grandfather who told my parents, ‘Don’t discourage this.’ He bought me my first fiddle, a 16th-size, tiny, tiny fiddle.” By 5, he was strumming a guitar. It didn’t take long for him to try mandolin, piano, bass, mandola and just about every instrument he could get his fingers on. He and his fiddling kid sister, Kimber, were so good, they became the nucleus of the Ludiker Family Band.
Beken, who handles fiddling in the Jug Band — along with acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, piano, organ and harmony vocals and occasionally, drums — started learning the Suzuki method at age 8. But he soon switched his style from violin to fiddle (the instrument’s the same, he says; “the only difference is the soul of the person who’s playing it”) and met Ludiker at an Idaho fiddle contest. They befriended semi-regular bassist/guitarist Noah Jeffries on the same kid-competition circuit, and the three progressed from sharing campsites to sharing rent — and stages.
Hyland, a Charlotte, N.C., native raised in Corpus Christi, started playing guitar until he was a University of Texas student. He bought one on a whim, along with a Willie Nelson chord book. Soon, he was writing songs instead of the screenplays he’d planned on.
Though the South Austin Jug Band is seven years old, its lineup, and dynamic, had been rather fluid for a while when the time came to start working on Strange Invitation. Core members Hyland, Ludiker and Beken decided they needed a latitude shift (and attitude lift) and headed to New York — to the fabled Chelsea Hotel — where, inspired by the pulse of “a place where big decisions are made,” they holed up and wrote songs together. It was something they’d never done before.
“(Songs on) all of our previous records (2003’s South Austin Jug Band and 2005’s Dark and Weary World) were basically written by their respective authors,” Beken explains. “This is a way more collaborative effort that felt so much better to produce, and, I feel, brought us closer. We decided to … get away from everything we know and try to be creative. And I think it worked.”
Hyland recalls, “We got two rooms (and) turned one of ‘em into a little recording studio. We’d just go in there every day and grind it out.”
“New York’s such a great place,” he adds, “because if you’re stale, you just go outside. You can find inspiration anywhere in that city. If you can’t, you just cut your head off.”
The actual recording, done all-analog at the famed Pedernales Studios outside Austin, went just as smoothly.
“We scheduled four days at first because that was all we could afford, and went in there and knocked out all the basic tracks in a day and a half,” Beken says. “We were kinda like, ‘What the hell are we gonna do now?’ So we just embarked on prettying it up, making it what it was supposed to be. It was really laid-back … just no pressure at all.”
He considers the result far more polished, though much warmer-sounding, than the earlier albums. It also reflects more of the band’s non-bluegrass influences. Like Beck. And Stevie Wonder. And former tourmate Todd Snider. And even (praise Johnny Cash) Nine Inch Nails.
All in all, says Hyland, “I think we knocked this one out of the park.”
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