Old 97's

Ken Bethea, lead guitarist for The Old 97's, writes:

11 years in, I still can't quite believe what I've been doing with my life.

We just finished recording our sixth album, Drag It Up. It’s the first for our new label, New West Records. After tinkering with our limits on the previous five releases, I think we've settled in with what we do best - solid writing and performances, with enough bells and whistles to make things interesting. It reminds me of our earlier recordings; we mix bluegrass, surf, country, rock, folk and some good old-fashioned psychedelia.

We started the recording on a frozen February day in Woodstock, N.Y. at Dreamland Studios, a 19th century country church, full of stained glass and ghosts. We finished up in sunny San Diego at producer Mark Neill’s vintage studio, four of us stomping, screaming and picking guitars into one microphone. Mark is a hard-core recording traditionalist, far removed from today's digital world. After working with modern technology on our previous three studio trips, we found old school 8-track recording both refreshing and challenging.

During the course of the project, we broke a $6,000.00 microphone and my poor old classical guitar. We ate New York barbecue twice and would go back again. I played guitar with a pencil and both Rhett and I tried to play some bass (we failed). We stood in a giant echo-ey church and stared at each other. We stood in a tiny 8x8 room and stared at each other. We sang about satellites, stars, moonlight, cavities, death, cheating, Texas, friendship, parenthood, God and storms.

It's hard not to compare an album with those that came before it. Drag It Up is our most personal. Whereas Too Far Too Care was an idealistic album made for big cars and air guitars, Drag It Up is better served by thinking and driving on Sunday afternoons in the middle of nowhere. Fight Songs was urban, hitchhike to rhome was a giant demo and Satellite Rides was hitchhike's opposite, that is to say, for us (four hacks from Texas) a wonderful recording of near-perfect performances. Wreck Your Life was the spiritual predecessor to Drag It Up - punk rock recorded over the course of a few days in a Chicago attic. We have grown - albeit kicking and screaming - into a complex, philosophical and mortal band. I feel good about what we've done. It's our brains, our breath, our fingers, our soul.

I hope you like Drag It Up.

A bit of history: Rhett Miller, Murry Hammond, Philip Peeples and I started the Old 97's in 1993. Everyone we knew was either in a grunge band or looking to start one. I remember talking music philosophy with Rhett and Murry and we wanted to somehow tie together the music of Elvis Costello, Hank Williams, X, The Clash, Johnny Cash, David Bowie and Camper Van Beethoven. We played small country and rock bars in Dallas, usually for tips, beer and the occasional barbecue sandwich.

Though we played a lot - two sets a night, sometimes four nights a week - nothing really felt like it was moving. Then in early 1994, a fan that had a small record label called Big Iron offered to give us $3,000 to record a CD. We recorded hitchhike to rhome over the course of three rainy days in May. To our shock, it changed everything. Until that point, we had never sold a club out. Never packed ‘em in. Never looked out over the faces and seen the crowd singing along to every word. Suddenly that was happening, not only in our home state, but in Chicago and in St. Louis and everywhere our desperate little Dodge (Vanna White) would carry us. I remember the sense of validation it gave me. It told me that what we were doing was right. We just needed to keep plugging away.

We hooked up with a Chicago label, Bloodshot Records, in 1995 and released our second CD, Wreck Your Life. It was less comprehensive than hitchhike, more meat and potatoes. Our fans seemed to like it and we began to build a national fan base. We toured around the country, sleeping on floors and living hand-to-mouth all of '95 and early '96. That spring, during our showcase at South By Southwest, Austin’s big music industry conference, we knocked the ball out of the park. Suddenly all the majors wanted a piece of the action, and we couldn't buy a meal in NY or LA.

We signed with Elektra and, the following year, released Too Far Too Care, our ode to what used to be called country rock and is now called alternative country. It was the type of high octane CD we had always wanted to make. We followed Too Far with Fight Songs in 1999 and Satellite Rides in 2001, both of which featured songs that got quite a bit of airplay and sold well. On Fight Songs we began tinkering with the format again by making things more poppy - although lyrically it was our darkest album. On Satellite Rides we experimented with a '60s vibe (we have some BIG Kinks fans in the band), and wound up with a bouncy rock and roll record.

After ten years of constant work, we took a hiatus. We knew we'd make another record. We just needed, as I said earlier, a breather. Philip and I spent some serious quality time with our little kids (two each, thanks), took our wives out to dinner and started a band called The Scrap Hotel. Murry got married, built a studio in his new home in LA and played beautiful music with his wife Grey DeLisle (Sugar Hill Records). Rhett made his solo record, The Instigator, and moved to upstate New York, where his wife Erica promptly gave birth to Max, the fifth (but probably not the last) Old 97's baby.

This is a family. Brothers. Friends forever. Rock and rollers.

One of the most popular bands in alt-country's rock & roll wing, Old 97's hailed from Dallas and drew their inspiration from classic country, bar band rock, the raw sound of early punk, and -- especially on their later records -- the tight songcraft of power pop. The band was formed in 1993 by singer/guitarist Rhett Miller and bassist Murry Hammond. Although six years younger than Hammond, Miller had previously played around the Dallas area as a folksinger and a British-style pop devotee; he'd also earned a creative writing scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College, but ultimately dropped out to return to Texas and concentrate on music. When he teamed up with Hammond, his original material showed traces of Texas country; this combination of country influence and pop sensibility would go on to fuel some of the band's best work.

Miller and Hammond expanded their project by adding lead guitarist Ken Bethea and recording their initial demo tape at Austin's famed Cedar Creek studio. Drummer Philip Peeples subsequently climbed on board, and Old 97's issued their debut album, Hitchhike to Rhome, on the indie label Big Iron in 1994. It received positive reviews and began to build the group's alt-country fan base, which they consolidated on the album's follow-up, Wreck Your Life. Issued on the alt-country stalwart Bloodshot Records in 1995, Wreck Your Life fleshed out the group's sound and presented Old 97's as a sharp, eclectic country-rock outfit with a pinup-worthy frontman. The positive attention given to the band's two indie albums led to a major-label deal with Elektra Records, on which Old 97's debuted in 1997 with Too Far to Care. Critics hailed the album as the best balance yet between the group's Texas traditionalism and pop leanings, and many publications placed the band among the leaders of the alt-country movement. Their next release, 1999's Fight Songs, began to move away from their country influences by offering a more polished, pop-friendly set of songs.

By this time, Miller had moved to Los Angeles and shed the thick '50s-style glasses that had become a major part of his image; he and Hammond were also performing in an informal side project dubbed the Ranchero Brothers. Released in 2001, Satellite Rides had an even stronger power pop flavor and once again received highly positive reviews, although Miller took a temporary leave after its release to record a solo power pop record, The Instigator, which was released in late 2002. A lengthy period of relative inactivity followed, as the bandmembers found themselves in different cities and starting families, only sporadically seeing and/or playing with each other. All of that changed in 2004 with the recording of the sixth Old 97's album, Drag It Up (issued by the band's new label, New West), and the subsequent tour, which featured prominently on the band's 2005 double-disc live release Alive & Wired. In 2006, Elektra issued Hit by a Train: The Best of Old 97's, which contained songs released prior to the band's 2004 label switch, and 2008 saw the band returning to Dallas for the recording of Blame It on Gravity. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide