Old 97’s: Play A Train Song

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The Old 97’s pride themselves on being a formidable live band, and it shows during their Milwaukee performance. Firing twin barrels of country and pop, they zip through a set that includes old standbys – “Timebomb,” “Barrier Reef,” “Rollerskate Skinny” – and cuts from The Grand Theater Vol. 2, which wasn’t released until two days before the show. Calling that album (and its 2010 companion piece, The Grand Theater Vol. 1) a comeback would be misleading, since the Old 97’s haven’t gone anywhere. But there’s something different about these songs – in the way they sound, the way they’re played, and the way the audience responds.

The real-life grand theater is actually Sons of Hermann Hall, a 100 year-old German lodge that doubles as one of Dallas’ top music venues. It’s not as majestic as the album title makes it sound – and the gaudy theater that graces Vol. 1’s cover, with its chandeliers and gilded curtains, is surely some other place – but it does have its own creaky, century-old charm, not to mention a long history of Old 97’s performances. Since making their Hermann Hall debut in 1995, Miller and company have returned countless times, even booking a four-night residency toward the end of 2009. Several months later, they booked the hall again, this time as a rehearsal space for the two Grand Theater albums.

“We wanted to put ourselves in a scenario where we could imagine what it would be like to play the songs in front of an audience,” Miller explains, “without having to actually go out and play them in front of that audience. People don’t want to hear songs they don’t know, you know? You can either look at them and think, ‘Ah, in six months from now you’re totally gonna love this! Can you just imagine that you already do?’ or you can close the doors, climb onto a stage that you’re really familiar with, and start to imagine, ‘Okay, if I’m playing this song in front of a crowd and I’m singing theses words, am I gonna feel like a dork?’ If the answer is yes, you change it.”

Miller wrote most of the songs during his 2009 solo tour, which found him traveling across Ireland, England, and Scandinavia as Steve Earle’s opening act. Spending so much time across the pond brought out the Anglophile in Miller, whose love of Merseybeat melodies has always made him the pop-loving yin to Hammond’s country-boy yang. He returned home with a new batch of tunes – including title track “The Grand Theater” (pronounced “thee-ate-er,” Texas style) – only to find that Hammond had been working on new material, too. With enough songs to cut a double album, the Old 97’s headed to Sons of Hermann Hall and whipped the music into shape.

When it came time to actually record something, they traveled 200 miles south to Treefort Studios, a cozy production studio in the hill country outside of Austin. Salim Nourallah, who produced 2008’s Blame It On Gravity, was brought back into the fold to oversee the sessions. Looking to maintain the speedy pace they’d adopted during rehearsals, The Old 97’s recorded most of the material live.

“On Fight Songs and Satellite Rides,” Miller says, “we were using the studio like most people do: working on the minutia, doing more with production, making sure everything sounds great. I remember using bells on one song. But I think our band is best in its live incarnation, so that’s what we went for at Treefort. More than half the vocals on the two records were recorded live as the song was being cut. All the bass and drums are live. Most of the guitars, too.”

Songs like “The Actor,” a blustery highlight from Vol. 2, were even arranged on the spot. Miller had originally written the song as a talking blues, but it hadn’t gelled during rehearsals and wasn’t faring any better in Austin. On a whim, Peeples and Hammond starting playing it “like a sped-up Psychotic Reaction kind of thing,” giving a frenetic, punky makeover to the bluesy original. Miller liked what he heard, told Nourallah to roll the tape, and counted the band back in.

On the album, you literally hear everything that happened next. “Yeah, let’s just stick with this key,” Miller says into the mic, while Peeples tries out a new drum pattern in the background, “and, uh, try it like that. 2! 1-2-3-4!”

“That was the take we kept,” Miller now says of the rowdy, unrefined song, “and we still haven’t worked it up live, because we only played it one time! Everything besides the background vocals was live to tape, as it happened the first time we ever played it through. And when does that happen? Like, who does that?”

“You’re listening to the actual discovery of what the song is supposed to sound like, which is pretty cool,” Hammond agrees. “We were setting the songs up and knockin’ ‘em down fast, but there’s nothing else on the record that caught it that early.”

The Grand Theatre was ultimately split into two volumes, the first of which hit stores last October. Vol. 2 followed in July. When Vol. 1 began earning some of the band’s strongest reviews in years, with special kudos going to “Champaign, Illinois” (a Bob Dylan-approved rewrite of “Desolation Row”) and the garage-rock nugget “Every Night is Friday Night (Without You),” the band began to worry that Vol. 2 wouldn’t measure up. So they went back into the studio for another week, re-cut several songs, and wound up with a record every bit as tuneful as its predecessor.

On an album dominated by British Invasion pop songs and stomping, horse-hooved country, Murry Hammond’s “White Port” stands out as Vol. 2’s most bizarre gem. It’s a modified sea shanty, sung by the bassist in a voice that alternates between an Irish brogue and a Jimmie Rodgers yodel. Miller and Hammond had played an earlier incarnation of the song as part of The Ranchero Brothers, the pair’s acoustic side project, but it never sounded like this.

“I always thought of it as a bluegrass song” Miller admits. “But when Murry told us what he had in mind for the album, which was to work it up as a punk rock sea shanty, I was skeptical. I thought, ‘That’s a lot going on. You’ve got a bluegrass song being sung as a sea shanty with punk rock guitars and yodeling.’ It’s like that thing they tell women: ‘Look in the mirror, and whichever accessory catches your eye first, take it off. You always have too many.’ But in this case, too many was just enough.”

Perhaps the same can be said for The Grand Theatre, whose two volumes comprise 85 minutes of music spread across 25 songs. Too many is just enough.