“I’ve committed well spent days driving parts of Highway 61 from New Orleans to Minneapolis,” says Jay Farrar. He roars up “Afterglow 61” again on Okemah and the Melody of Riot, the first new Son Volt album in seven years and one of Farrar’s best. Though he’s fronting a new Son Volt lineup at House of Blues on September 20, the band’s return to the Crescent City is something of a homecoming for Farrar. Back in 1995, when the original Son Volt was sprouting from the fertile soil of Uncle Tupelo, he lived in New Orleans and commuted to Minneapolis while recording SV’s debut Trace. “It’s long, long drive up there,” notes Farrar, who captures the spirit of 61 from the Civil War to Bob Dylan in a single “Afterglow” line: “It’s history breathing.”
“I’ve committed well spent days driving parts of Highway 61 from New Orleans to Minneapolis,” says Jay Farrar. He roars up “Afterglow 61” again on Okemah and the Melody of Riot, the first new Son Volt album in seven years and one of Farrar’s best. Though he’s fronting a new Son Volt lineup at House of Blues on September 20, the band’s return to the Crescent City is something of a homecoming for Farrar. Back in 1995, when the original Son Volt was sprouting from the fertile soil of Uncle Tupelo, he lived in New Orleans and commuted to Minneapolis while recording SV’s debut Trace. “It’s long, long drive up there,” notes Farrar, who captures the spirit of 61 from the Civil War to Bob Dylan in a single “Afterglow” line: “It’s history breathing.”
Farrar’s own history began just off 61 in Belleville, Illinois, a small town east of St. Louis where he and high school buddy Jeff Tweedy formed Uncle Tupelo, a hugely influential band that injected punk fervor into its sepia-toned portraits of hard times in the millennial heartland. When UT split in 1994, Tweedy and New Orleanian John Stirratt went on to form Wilco, whose bold forays into Sonic Youth country paid off with their 2003 breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Son Volt cleaved more closely to its Americana roots, producing three fine albums that Rhino revisited on the recent retrospective Son Volt: A Legacy 1995-2000.
Though SV never formally broke up, Farrar began following his own muse with solo projects like Sebastopol and Terroir Blues, which used tape loops to invoke the life and death of his dad, grassroots troubadour Jim “Pops” Farrar. Son Volt regrouped briefly in 2004 to record a song for the Alejandro Escovedo benefit tribute Por Vida, but that turned out to be a last hurrah. When original SV members Mike Heidorn and brothers Jim and Dave Boquist bailed on Okemah at the 11th hour, Farrar put a new line-up together almost overnight. Drummer Dave Bryson and bassist Andrew DuPlantis, both longtime Farrar associates, and crack guitarist Brad Rice (Whiskeytown, Tift Merritt) hit the studio running without rehearsing. It was a bold move, but the band clicked instantly with Farrar’s “Six String Belief” in the power of rock ‘n’ roll to redeem the American dream from the flipside nightmare of W’s world.
Like Woody Guthrie, whose Oklahoma birthplace gives Okemah its name and whose words ring in Farrar’s head in “Bandages & Scars,” Jay Farrar is both a minstrel with a mission and a real down-to-earth guy. When I reached him by phone in St. Louis, he was tickled to learn I once spent time with his dad in Belleville, where “Pops” regaled me with tall tales and sea chanties. Farrar’s looking forward to hitting the road after a long hiatus, and is glad the tour takes him back to ground zero: “Airline Highway is pretty much where Highway 61 starts.”
Terroir Blues was a personal tribute to your dad. But I also felt his mark on this album, too, in terms of the Woody Guthrie references and the whole musical legacy he passed down to you.
That’s how I first learned about Woody Guthrie, through both of my folks. My mom had the records and my dad played the songs. It was kind of a mission for him to teach other people what he knew and to foster an appreciation of music. He wasn’t really into rock music, and this record is primarily a rock record, but he would have liked it, I guess.
You ended up settling in St. Louis, not far from your old home in Belleville. But you actually lived in New Orleans at one point, right?
Technically, I lived in New Orleans for a year in 1995, but I was on the road a lot. The first Son Volt record Trace was being recorded in Minneapolis, so I was doing a lot of driving. I lived just off the Carrollton streetcar line on Hickory Street. I really enjoyed the time I spent there, there were a couple good music places. Carrollton Station was just down the street.
Did you absorb anything from the New Orleans music scene?
I did get out to clubs occasionally to see zydeco people like Boozoo Chavis. I even made it to a couple Cajun festivals. And I did two sessions at Chez Flames, that Keith Keller recorded. Several of those songs wound up on the Rhino retrospective. My friend John Maloney played drums on “Rex’s Blues,” recorded in 1995. The other two songs, “Ain’t No More Cane” and “Tulsa County,” were recorded in 1997 with Son Volt on all the instruments.
Speaking of the old Son Volt lineup, were you blindsided when the original band members backed out of recording Okemeh?
It was devastating at first. Getting back together for the Alejandro Escoveda tribute record was a good experience all around, so I felt like we could continue to do more. But when it came time to make that happen, it just didn’t. So I regrouped with some other guys I played with in the past.
It sounds like you guys have been playing together forever.
That’s good to hear. Because it was kind of trial by fire. We didn’t rehearse at all. I gave them copies of the songs in demo form and we used the method of just rehearsing the song and recording it the same day. Averaging about one song a day. We didn’t know what was gonna happen, but fortunately, we were able to coalesce.
A lot of the songs are pretty political. The first time I heard “Jet Pilot” I burst out laughing at some of those lines. It really nails W.
That particular song is inspired by one person, but I honestly would like to see it applied to other leaders down the line. Looking at it from a historical perspective, it’s not gonna go away.
You paint a pretty bleak picture of the world in general and America in particular. And yet there seems to be hope bubbling up throughout. Where does that hope come from?
I don’t know. [laughs] I think it reflects my outlook these days, which is more positive. I have two children, and that’s a big part of it.
You know what I love about “Six String Belief?” That despite the consolidation, and the saturation, and the corruption, you still believe “a grassroots insurrection will bring them down.”
That was written during a period when I had my own record label, so the song is being written more for a music business context. Even though I guess it could be applied to a larger realm in a political sense. But, yeah, at that time, I was fired up.
I thought it was interesting that you guys did a very rootsy, live recording, almost nailing it on the first take, and on the other hand you did a lot of very high tech stuff with the packaging. You’ve got this Dual Disc with a CD side and a DVD side.
The approach to recording was to do as much of it live as we could. There’s some stuff that’s overdubbed where I felt that it added to the overall result, but yeah. The guys at Legacy I thought did a good job with the packaging. People have been commenting on it a lot. Those guys have a lot of experience with putting out catalogues and retrospectives and boxed sets.
On the DVD, you say you spent a lot of time on the sequencing, and it really shows. The segues are really dynamic. But that’s kind of an old-fashioned approach to making an album in the age of the iPod. Do you think the single will eventually eclipse the album?
I hope that there’s always gonna be a need for albums. That’s certainly the way I like to listen to music. I’ve had an iPod for three months, and I haven’t put anything on it yet. [laughs] There’s my entrance into the world of technology.
