Safe at Home: Gary Louris Takes the Jayhawks Back to Basics

Baltimore City Paper
Published: January 16, 2002
By John Duffy

Another year, another tour, another game of musical chairs for the Jayhawks. Following the lackluster sales performance of the group's 2000 Columbia release, Smile, the band is once again in flux--with respect to its membership, its sound, and its record label. This unrest is not at all unusual for the Jayhawks, who have gone through more drummers than Spinal Tap and more labels than they would care to remember. But guitarist, songwriter, and leader Gary Louris is used to the by-now semiannual incidence of forced tactical withdrawals.

"It's going to happen to a band that's been around for 16 years, I guess," he says with knowing stoicism by phone from the group's Minneapolis rehearsal space. "If we were a much younger band, it might be a bigger deal." Louris' damn-the-torpedoes attitude notwithstanding, badly timed personnel changes have arguably led to some of the group's biggest career snags. But the band seems to bounce back every time. Over the past year, the Jayhawks lost second guitarist Kraig Johnson and keyboardist Jen Gunderman, but Louris isn't worried, and most anyone who has followed the band for any length of time shouldn't be either.

After the sudden departure of co-founder and songwriter Mark Olson in 1995, nobody expected the band to recover the masterful form country-rock gems Hollywood Town Hall (1992) and Tomorrow the Green Grass (1995)--but the Jayhawks did.

The group's first post-Olson recording, 1997's harder-rocking Sound of Lies, was highly praised, but due to label American Recordings' financial chaos, it became impossible to find it in stores within weeks of its release--and it's rather difficult to get people to buy an album that isn't there. In addition, keyboardist Karen Grotberg, key to the group's more fleshed-out sound since 1992, left to raise her newborn daughter. 2000's Bob Ezrin-produced Smile was a much sunnier affair than the dark and moody Lies, and it got a healthy promotional push from Columbia, but its use of electronic beats and tense looped percussion didn't sit well with the Americana crowd.

Things started to change again in mid-September 2001. When commercial air travel became more problematic, the North Carolina-based Gunderman and Johnson --who was on tour with his other band, Iffy--were unable to appear at several Jayhawks dates, forcing Louris, bassist Marc Perlman, and drummer Tim O'Reagan to play as a trio. "The power-trio dates," Louris recalls. "Those gigs were fun, very liberating." With almost no time to prepare, the group found a way to play with the most basic of rock elements.

And performing as a trio made Louris realize that the Jayhawks could work without keyboards, which had been a part of the band since 1992, and a second guitar, which it had never been without. The group could save a bundle on road expenses by shrinking down to its barest essentials. Touring costs have always been a thorn in Louris' side. "It had gotten so complicated logistically, always flying people in," he says. "We just couldn't afford to tour as a five-piece anymore."

The group has toured Spain twice in the last year, however, thanks to the sponsorship of Mondo Sonoro, a Barcelona-based rock magazine. Twice in one year? "Have you ever been there?" Louris asks. "Trust me, you'd want to go back. The people are wonderful [and] the food is great." But the second Spanish tour was the last for the five-piece Jayhawks, leaving many dedicated U.S. fans quite peeved. This month's all-acoustic mini-tour is the first outing of a four-piece version, with Long Ryder Stephen McCarthy on guitar and pedal steel.

Fortunately, Louris is quite familiar with retooling old songs for different situations. "Waiting for the Sun," a signature tune from Hollywood Town Hall, has been played live at least three different ways since its release--as a loose hard-rocker over chords borrowed from David Bowie, as a countrified ballad, and as a swaggering Led Zeppelin-type smoker.

Not surprisingly given the recent instrumental changes, the tunes Louris and O'Reagan are writing for the group's next album embrace the more streamlined sound. "I hate to overuse the word 'rootsy,' but that's what they are," Louris says. "When we do get around to recording them, we want to do it as live as possible." But don't expect Hollywood Town Hall Part II. "Mark Olson was a big part of that album, and we're a different band now," Louris says. The new tunes may, in some less obvious ways, though, bring to mind that record.

The group, with McCarthy in tow, is set to begin recording soon in Los Angeles, the Jayhawks' first studio sessions as a quartet since their 1986 self-titled debut on tiny Bunkhouse Records . After recording for Rick Rubin's American Recordings imprint, the now label-less band is employing Rubin as producer--a function, perhaps, of Louris' mixed feelings about the busy sound of Smile. But if the upcoming album is likely to be more sonically straight-ahead, but Louris doesn't expect it to be easy.

"I'm never really satisfied," he says. "So it will be a challenge. I never listen to our records when they're finished. I'm pretty hard to live with that way."