Slobberbone: Two Brent Best Interviews From The Early Days

[While y'all were celebrating America over the weekend, editor Bill Glahn and contributing editor Rev. Keith A. Gordon were busy digging into the archives to celebrate one of Americana's greatest bands, We came up with, not one, but two, interviews with Brent Best conducted during the Barrel Chested tour. The first is from the pages of the March 1998 issue, the second from the good Reverend's Nashville-based blog. And as if that's not enough, we've added a Roll The Tapes review of a show from the tour.]

The Live! Music Review Interview

Bill Glahn: The first four lines of “Barrel Chested” are very much the voice of experience. That song sets the tone for the album.

Brent Best: The song sets the tone for the album in that it’s an expression of what was going on thematically on the last album (Crow Pot Pie). But it’s a progression from that. So for me, personally, it was a good way to start the new album and as it turned out, after we got into the recording part of the album, it clicked pretty quickly. As soon as we laid that one down, we knew it would set the tone.

BG: Was that one of the earliest songs recorded for the album?

BB: Yeah, I think so. It was one of the earliest written for the album. And it feels like a leadoff track. It has thay big chugga-chugga guitar.

BG: How does it fit in the live set?

BB: We play it pretty early on. It changes some nights. When we’re back home where everybody knows it, we play it earlier in the set just to get it out of the way and piss everybody off. It varies but we usually do it pretty early – it’s a good rocker.

BG: “Barrel Chested” has a sort of downtrodden feel to it. A lot of character development. Does that come from your own experience?

BB: Crow Pot Pie had a lot of that. Most of the songs were written when I had a kind of crappy physically-based day job and at night I just drank. So that’s where a lot of those songs came from. What I realized is that, as the band got going, all these things that I had hoped for… those things alone can’t pull you out of that mentality. You just can’t rely on something else to get you to a different place mentally or emotionally. The new songs are coming from that same place but it’s more about where you slap yourself in the face a couple of times an say, “OK, you’ve gotta do something,” You’re still there, but at least you’re looking forward to something else.

BG: One of the things I like about the new album is that the songs are more developed. “Billy Prichart” could have been a movie script. Do you feel you’re becoming a better songwriter?

BB: I don’t know, That was really written awhile back. I’ve really got a backlog of those story-type songs. I think those, as I bring those out more, people tend to think of me in terms of a songwriter instead of just a rock musician. A lot of my favorite songwriters… Peter Case – when I listen to an album I like to feel like I’ve been somewhere by the time I’m done. I’m not saying that you need a whole album of narratives. That would probably suck. But I like the idea of being grabbed by an album and being pulled through, whether it be from the story, or musically or whatever. I first got into him [Peter Case] on his first solo album somewhere around 1986.

BG: That was a great record, very similar in style to Steve Earle.

BB: Very Steve Earle. Kevn Kinny [Drivin N Cryin vocalist] has done some solo albums like that. I saw Peter when I was 16. That’s when I started writing. I’d been in bands but I knew I wasn’t that good of a guitar player. But I realized early on that’s the only reason I play guitar – to write songs. And he exemplified that. When I first heard him and that guitar and everything he played was a great song. It totally gave me goosebumps.

BG: I think that first album tour was the first time he ever played with just an acoustic guitar. I love that record.

BB: Yeah “Walk In The Woods” – that song floors me. The early ‘80s is when I started writing. I was into REM around their 2nd or 3rd album. Fables of the Reconstruction was a big album for me because it kind of opened my eyes to something different. At the same time it could rock, but it was real mysterious and there were lots of stories going on – lots of layered images.

BG: Are you hip at all to that L.A. Paisley Underground scene that was happening at the time. Green on Red? The Long Ryders?

BB: I was a huge Long Ryders fan around the same time that we’re talking about

BG: Sid Griffin is one of our contributing writers.

BB: Really! He’s my hero. I saw the Coal Porters a couple of years ago. Is he still in England?

BG: Yeah. He’s doing some writing for magazines like Mojo and I think a book now and then. I think his musical career has become a struggle. Touring [in the States] can be difficult. He’s a guy I consider to be one of the great songwriters of our time who struggles to get 50 people into a club here.

BB: That’s the way it was at SXSW last year.

BG: Were you there? I went to see that show!

BB: The one in the beer garden (Maggie Mae’s West)?

BG: Yeah, and there was some heavy metal band playing next door and the noise was bleeding over.

BB: Yeah, I was there. He rules. Man, he’s great. All those Long Ryders albums were just… I saw them first in Dallas with The Alarm. That’s when I got really turned on to them. And then they came back through and I got to see them again and I was floored. I was heavily into Dream Syndicate for awhile, but not near as heavily.

BG: Are you aware of the Danny & Dusty record? It was a collaberation between Dan Stuart of Green on Red and Steve Wynn with members of the Long Ryders.

BB: Really? We actually did a show with Steve Wynn. I like his new record. You didn’t hear a lot about that music where I was from in Texas. When I found out and started listening I was like “WOW!”

BG: During that period I think big labels weren’t so much trying to develop artist themselves, I think there may be a return to that now. [editor’s note: in reality the majors were letting small labels develop acts, giving “seed” money to some,  and if the small labels were successful, the majors would buy the smaller labels up. Slobberbone finished their recording career on New West Records, a large Nashville label with an impressive roster of talent.]  Have you guys had any major label interest?

BB: Yeah. After signing with Doolittle Records, we did SXSW a couple years ago and it got pretty crazy. It was pretty ridiculous, actually. That was right on the cusp cusp of the big country-rock explosion and the alternative country bullshit. I just never felt comfortable talking with any of those people. Not to say we went in predisposed to feeling uncomfortable. Universal [made an offer.] Mercury was pretty arrogant about it because both of Doolittle’s previous acts had gone to Mercury. After awhile Mercury started feeling that Doolittle was a farming ground for them.

BG: You weren’t in awe of tham as a major label?

BB: Yeah, that’s almost like they expect you to be.

BG: There’s a lot of powerful egos out there.

BB: Yeah, but you can’t talk to them about making an album. You can only talk to them about making money.

BG: What artist has Mercury broken since Rod Stewart? And he had already established himself in the Jeff Beck Group.

BB: I know! I can think of a lot of people they’ve screwed but I can’t think of any they’ve…

BG: How’s Doolittle as a label/

BB: Great. They’re a small indie label with a lot more muscle… investors with money who are really into music and liked the idea of doing it just for the sake of doing it.

Jeff Cole produced Barrel Chested didn’t he?

Yeah he produced it with us. With this one, there were some things I heard for the album and things I knew I could get and Jeff had an electrical engineering degree out of UT (Austin) and Berkeley (Boston). I knew on this album we could get the sounds I was hearing in my head.

BG: Has Slobberbone always had the same band members?

BB: No. There’s been a lot of change. We’re from Denton (college town north of Dallas) where there wasn’t much of a club scene but lots of parties. For the first three and a half years, I just viewed it as something to do for fun. Members came and went for various reasons. Not everybody has the same intentions. But when (bass player) Brian Lane joined, it became obvious to lots of people that had been coming and seeing us for awhile, things were really on. That kind of coincided with a big burst of songwriting from me and it just went from there. (Guitarist) Mike Hill left after the first album because we’d been touring for almost a year constantly and it didn’t agree with him. He came in to do some of the guitar parts on Barrel Chested but I did most of the basic parts and most of the overdubs myself. Jess Barr joined right after Barrel Chested was made. He’s been coming to our shows since he was 16, so it’s cool having him on the tour now.

BG: I was surprised to learn that “Haze of Drink” was left over from the first album. It’s such a great song.

BB: Yeah. So was “I’ll Be Damned.” We knew “Haze of Drink” was a balls out rock song and it just wasn’t coming across that way. And it was because we were just trying to do too much. This time I just went in and cut it.

BG: “Haze of Drink” sounds like something made for the stage. Have you played it all along?

BB: Yeah, we’ve been playing it a long time.

BG: Set closer?

BB: Yeah, exactly. We’ll probably close with it tonight. It’s just a big three chord rock song.

BG: So how often do you get lost in the haze?

BB: (laughing) A lot less than I used to. But I have found that drinking and alcohol in and of itself is a great metaphor for a lot of different things. For anything compulsive. On that first Peter Case album that we were talking about before, I remember the liner notes said something like “all these songs are either about sin or redemption.” Every great story is about that and it kind of falls in line.


Bonus round

[Keith A. Gordon, a frequent Live! Music Review contributor and editor, was Nashville-based at the time and caught up with the band on the same tour. Here is an interview he did with Brent Best for his blog that often featured area musicians, but also touring musicians travelling through.]

BRENT BEST INTERVIEW
By the Rev. Keith A. Gordon

Roaring out of the Texas badlands like the horsemen of some sort of musical apocalypse, Slobberbone have begun to carve a bloody path through the fringe of alternative rock & roll. In an age where the airwaves are filled with sensitive, angst-ridden losers wailing about the injustices of life, Slobberbone's Brent Best straps on a guitar, calls up the ghosts of Hank and Elvis and tears into some real shit-kicking songs. The best punk band south of the Mason-Dixon line since Jason & The Scorchers first began blazing across the rock & roll horizon like Sherman marching to Atlanta, Slobberbone kick out the motherfuckin' jams, country-styled, with enough twang to appeal to the redneck rocker and enough white light and white heat to pacify even the most hard-core punk aficionado.

With the release of Barrel Chested, their second album for the Austin-based Doolittle Records, Slobberbone are one of the more high-profile indie bands plying their trade in the music world today. Continuing where their debut, Crow Pot Pie, left off, Barrel Chested is an electric collection of loud and rowdy rock & roll, raucous songs with a churlish attitude and plenty of reckless country soul. Pounding out razor-sharp riffs with careless abandon, guitarist and songwriter Brent Best sings with a distinct Texas drawl, writing working-class poetry that stands tall alongside Lone Star scribes like Steve Earle and Guy Clark in terms of passion, lyrical depth and brilliant imagery.

Best began writing songs while in high school, playing in various bands. “The stuff that I was writing at home pretty much had nothing to do with the bands I was playing in,” says Best, “they were all coming out kind of countryish.” The country influence on his material came natural. “It was always kind of there. I grew up hearing Willie Nelson, those kind of guys. If you grew up in Texas in the seventies, you heard that stuff. It always seemed a real natural thing.” Playing, at the time, in a couple of “loud-ass guitar bands –  which is what I was into,” Best eventually inherited the remnants of one of the bands. “I decided that it could be the same band, playing the music that I like to play,” says Best. “I had all these songs that I'd been sitting on, these country songs, and I decided to take those songs that I'd been playing in the bedroom, amp up and show them to the band. They'd either like them or tell me to go to hell.” Thus was Slobberbone born.

The original incarnation of the band got together in 1992 in the unlikely musical hotspot of Denton, Texas. “At the time there were a lot of bands,” says Best of Denton, a college town north of Dallas, “but there weren't a whole lot of places to play, clubs and stuff, so you had a lot of bands playing at restaurants and parties, that kind of thing. So we played gigs for beer, basically, for two or three years before we played a paying gig.” Playing steadily throughout the area, the band won a legion of fans on the strength of their enormous live performances, which tend to be equally part Ramones and part George Jones.

The band received further recognition after the 1994 self-release of their Crow Pot Pie CD.  “We got a really good response, critically, from different papers. That's when things started taking off and we started playing a lot more outside of Denton,” says Best. An inspired mix of traditional country, roots rock and punk energy, Crow Pot Pie brought Slobberbone to the attention of Doolittle Records. “It was an extension of the press we got from that first Crow Pot Pie,” says Best. The album was receiving local Texas airplay and creating a buzz throughout the state. Doolittle became interested in the band. “At the time we didn't have any notions about signing with anybody,” says Best, “we just wanted to play some shows and make a little money. I had several friends who were in bands around Dallas who had been signed, even to major labels, and they all had a bad taste in their mouth.” After a brief courtship, though, Doolittle signed the band to a deal and released a new version of Crow Pot Pie that the band had been working on before beginning their relationship with the label.

If that first album was “done by the seat of their pants,” the band had more time to think about the making of Barrel Chested. Almost two years of playing live and touring across the Southeast served to age Best and the band a bit. “Going into this record,” says Best, “I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Most of the material is new. There's a couple of songs from the original Crow Pot Pie that we had recorded a couple of times, but this record, I let it come together on its own. Thematically, a lot of the new stuff that I had been writing all had a similar theme. It's kind of a variation from the first record.” The band was stripped down to a three-piece line-up from its previous incarnations with a variable number of members and instruments, “so there weren't any crutches for us to lean on,” says Best.

The band has received their share of interest from the major labels, but they're not too interested in that avenue of career development. “It goes back to how we felt when we were talking to [producer and label head] Jeff Cole,” says Best. “It's just not something that I'm comfortable thinking about right now. It's weird enough being on a small label. At least Doolittle I can call up and talk to the President, the guy who makes the decisions.” The experience of other musicians affects Best's opinions, as well. “It goes back to watching friends being signed to labels and, from day one, realizing that they're not going to do everything that they say they're going to do. It's not something I rule out, but right now we're more concerned about making really good records. I'm sure that it's easier to do that where we are now, at this label, then it would be at a major label.
 
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Back pages, Live! Music Review Roll The Tapes column, February 1998 issue

Review by Keith A. Gordon
Artist: Slobberbone
Venue: JR’s Ballroom, Fayetteville , AR 10/24/97 opening set for Buick MacKane
Source: 30 minute DAT recording, good sound with some echo
Tracklist: Sober Song/ No Man Among Men/ Barrel Chested/ Engine Joe/ Your Love Is Waning/ Whiskey Glass Eye/ I’ll Be Damned/ Your Excuse/ Haze of Drink

Relative newcomers on the alt-country scene, Slobberbone hail from Denton, Texas and perform a high-octane musical hybrid of country and rock – sort of like the bastard stepchildren of George Jones and the Ramones. Guitarist/songwriter, Brent Best crafts deceptively mature songs that showcase more passion and anger, death and destruction than a half-dozen flannel clad grunge monkeys or died-black Goth-rock poseurs.

Raised on Willie Nelson and weened on Jason & the Scorchers, Slobberbone kick out the proverbial jams with this brief opening act performance. Showcasing songs from their second indie release, Barrel Chested, the band rips up the rules and rocks the admittedly small crowd with songs like “Whiskey Glass Eye,” “Haze of Drink,” and “Your Excuse.”

A tantalizing short set, Slobberbone nonetheless bring the same sort of chainsaw style, boundless energy and rough-edged abandon to their live performances that the Scorchers did in the ‘80s. Unlike the Scorchers, maybe we won’t have to wait 15 years to get a live CD from Slobberbone. [editor’s note: unfortunately, a wish unfulfilled. Brent Best has, however, given www.archive.org permission to host live recordings by his post-Slobberbone band, The Drams in their live music archive.]

A search of YouTube yielded this full performance from later in the Barrel Chested Tour. Minneapolis was always a strong supporter of Slobberbone.

We'll leave you with a live tune from the Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today tour, a very special performance. Neil Young songs are best left in the capable hands of Slobberbone.