The Jayhawks: The Bunkhouse Album

The Jayhawks
The Jayhawks (aka The Bunkhouse Album)
Lost Highway
[Rating: 4]

Any band worth its salt that stays together for at least six months will evolve into a different, and perhaps even better, band than it was to start with. The Jayhawks surely did. And few but the 2000 fortunate individuals who snagged a copy of their 1986 debut LP appreciated just how much. Now that Lost Highway is re-releasing that self-titled album—sometimes called The Bunkhouse Album as a nod to the indie label their then-manager Charlie Pine launched to release it–for the first time on CD, the contents of the time capsule are accessible to all.

The Jayhawks, led by the singing and songwriting partnership of Mark Olson and Gary Louris, solidified their distinctive jangly, harmony-rich alt-country sound with their 1992 landmark Hollywood Town Hall, and they’ve tweaked the formula plenty in the almost two decades since—especially after Olson departed—sometimes dialing down the country elements, sometimes stocking their songs with power-pop hooks.

This album shows that the Jayhawks were quite taken with some of the more rock-friendly country music developing in the ‘60s and ‘70s on the West Coast, things like the Bakersfield Sound and Gram Parsons’ Cosmic American Music. That stuff shaped their grooves (chugging chicken pickin’, train beats, country-rock shuffles), arrangements (prominent telecaster and pedal steel) and themes (classic country territory, such as fouling things up with a woman by drinking too much). As Olson observes in the liner notes, “We must have been into old stuff.”

And so they were. But they were also propelled by youthful energy; The bright-eyed humanism of the irresistible twang-pop number “People In This Place On Every Side” feels more believable than the world-weariness of “The Liquor Store Came First.” And they had good instincts. And they’d already hit on one of their greatest strengths—those Louris/Olson harmonies—though Olson was still handling most of the lead singing at this point.

Olson is right to caution that leaning heavily on “old stuff” would not have been the best way for the Jayhawks to make important, lasting musical contributions. But this first attempt by them was, and is, a scrappy, energized and thoroughly appealing album.