BR5-49: Mead Aims for Identity with Songs

BR5-49’s Chuck Mead has a history with the music he plays that began way before he ever hit Nashville or saw the syndicated show “Hee Haw” from which the group took its name. He loves to talk about growing up in Kansas and playing Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, his eventual meeting with Gary Bennett and the formation of BR5-49.BR5-49’s Chuck Mead has a history with the music he plays that began way before he ever hit Nashville or saw the syndicated show “Hee Haw” from which the group took its name. He loves to talk about growing up in Kansas and playing Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, his eventual meeting with Gary Bennett and the formation of BR5-49.

Mead also had a good deal to offer in terms of his progress as a songwriter. Given that the band has played a major role in the rockabilly and country swing resurgence, I was particularly interested in how Mead felt about writing songs for a band that performs a lot of music that’s seen by many fans as “retro” country.

“Some people have the impression that all we do is old country songs,” Mead observed. “While we do that, actually we do whatever we feel like doing when we play. We’ve also always played originals since the very first time we got together.

“On the next record that we’re gearing up for,” he continued, “we want to break away from our reliance on writers like Johnny Horton and Ray Price.

“I’ve been doing a lot of writing and Gary [Bennett] is coming up with new material that’s pretty cool. We really want to concentrate on getting out our point of view through our songs, to establish our identity. I want to write songs that sound like us, you know, so that if one of my songs ever got on the radio, you’d hear the first few bars and think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s BR5-49.’”

Mead’s songwriting situation seems to be similar to that of modern blues writers, in that they’re working in the here-and-now, yet often dealing with musical forms that are much older than they are. Is this a problem or not?

“In the first place,” Mead said, “when I write a song like ‘Goodbye Maria,’ which is on our current album [Big Backyard Beat], that’s not retro, that’s just a song. The same with ‘Change The Way I Look.’ I mean, whatever comes out, comes out, and the way we sound is who we are. I’m not trying to gear anything toward a specific sound. I don’t mean for my songs to sound retro because that’s not really what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to write something I like, something the band likes. My songs invoke the same sort of spirit as the old material we play. And it’s true that we’re inspired by what’s called retro material. We like those rhythms.”

Mead added that it’s particularly useless to aim for a retro vibe in terms of subject matter. “You know, I can write a train song, for instance,” he said. “I rode a train, once, in the United States. My grandpa worked for the railroad and I got to hop on the caboose once. But how can you write a train song when nobody knows that experience anymore? The key is to write something that everybody can understand but that still says something to them individually, because they can relate to the experience.”

He added: Take that great Muddy Waters lyric: ‘I can’t be satisfied/but I just can’t keep from tryin’. That pretty much sums up the entire human experience, yet it’s so simple. Anyone can get that.”

When asked the classic songwriting query: What comes first, the music or the lyrics, Mead said that he doesn’t work in a set pattern. “Sometimes I hear a melody, or there’ll be some sort of riff running through my head and I’ll write a tune around that. Other times I’ll have a whole verse of words that have a certain meter and I’ll have to match it up with some melody line I’ve got going, or I’ll have to make up something that fits. It’s different all the time. The more I think about the question, however, I think the music comes first a lot. But, then, I’m always writing stuff down on scraps of paper. I throw all those ideas in my notebook and then find them three months later,” he chuckled.

“I get up in the middle of the night and write down song lyrics,” he continued. “There’ve been so many times that I’ve been lying in bed at night thinking, ‘Yeah, that sounds really cool. I’ll remember that in the morning.’ Never. I’ve learned that I have to get up and make a note or play it on the guitar.”

He remarked that his inspiration comes from all over the place. “Songs are everywhere, man. Just from the way people speak. I wrote a song just recently that came from something one of my girlfriend’s co-workers said. It was 4:30 in the afternoon and he said, ‘Well, it’s too late to go home early now.’ I thought, ‘What a great song.’

Then there are some songs that I’ve written that are based in fact,” he said. “For instance, ‘Goodbye Maria’ actually happened to someone. My girlfriend’s sister told me about a guy she knew in high school who fell in love with the high school tramp – you know, she’d slept around quite a bit. He totally dedicated his life to her and they ended up getting married. Then she got tired of playing house and proceeded to name all the men she’d slept with while they were married. So he went back to the hotel room in Wichita where they’d spent their honeymoon night, wrote her a letter and blew his brains out.

“You can’t make up something better than that. I wrote the song to a polka beat so listeners wouldn’t get too bummed out,” he laughed. I noted that putting that song to a polka beat creates a good bit of tension between music and lyrics, which is a desirable stroke in songwriting.

“I’m a big fan of Nick Lowe,” Mead replied. “He creates tension like that in some of his songs. He can get you going and then all of a sudden you realize that this is a song about a woman who died in her apartment and her dog ate her.”

In Big Backyard Beat we’ve got a Chuck mead song about a guy blowing his brains out in a hotel room and another Chuck tune about a psychotic trucker running over innocent motorists with his rig (“18 Wheels and a Crowbar”). Is this a trend?

“That’s just a coincidence,” he chuckled. “I actually wrote those songs at different points in time. They just ended up together on the album. Of course, they’re both about things that really happened. I don’t se why I should be writing songs to make people comfortable. I like to write songs that make people think, or songs that intrigue them.”