Lee Stabert
July 17, 2008
When the Old 97's are on—when rambunctious frontman Rhett Miller is cooing and
crooning over a ragged honky-tonk snarl and dropping lines so snarky and
devastating that they can make you forget how darn pretty he is—there are few
bands better. But none of it would work without stalwart sidekick and bassist
Murry Hammond and his flawless vintage sensibility. On the handful of songs he
sings on each release, Hammond reminds the listener that this band's magic is
most potent at its most dissonant—when pop rubs up against punkabilly and when
Miller's rakish charm is mitigated by Hammond's unpretentious skill.
Despite Miller's ongoing flirtation with a solo career,
and the fact that band members are scattered coast-to-coast, Old 97's recently
returned to their old stomping grounds in Dallas to record their seventh studio
album, Blame It on Gravity. A breezy, thoroughly listenable collection
of tunes, the record finds the band as crisp and unified as ever. The
Scene recently caught up with Hammond by phone as he worked on some
recording of his own in San Diego.
Scene:
So you guys decided to record the new record back in Dallas.
MH: We recorded in Dallas and we recorded with
somebody—producer Salim Nourallah—that we've known, basically, since the '80s.
He's known us our band's whole life—he knows our catalog and the arc of our
sound and where we've been. In a way, we're still real garage-band about
everything. It's all super-homemade and not a lot of it can be planned ahead. We
trust the process.
Scene: You guys live all
over the country now—are there any upsides to that?
MH: I guess the upside is that you're always glad to see
each other. But there was a true upside to living in the same town, and we still
miss that: getting together on Sunday to play washers, barbecue and drink some
beer. There is a glue that happens. The downside to living separately is that
you grow separately. We're a unit, but there are also parallel paths that
happen, and the parallel paths don't cross. It works because of our
personalities and the fact that we're friends. We actually haven't lived in the
same state since the band was three years old, and now it's 15. We don't feel
like we're any less of a band because of it.
Scene: Since Rhett's
first solo record, every album you release as a band surprises people. Everyone
assumes that this is the way bands work: They're together, then the lead singer
gets something else going and they break up.
MH: Had Rhett's ego run amok during that time, it might have
been harder to come back together—if he had had a little more success or even
the promise of success. I mean Rhett really, really wanted his solo career to
work. I love the Old 97's. I think the Old 97's is the thing. I've
always been a band guy rather than a solo guy. Fortunately for us the solo thing
kind of—the albums came and went. But, you know, Rhett is a solo artist in
addition to the band, especially in his mind.
Scene: Do you have any
plans to release any solo material?
MH: I actually have a solo record that has an August street
date, but I printed it up in May and I've been selling it at Old 97's shows to
raise money for a nonprofit called Project Mercy. Basically it's like Habitat
for Humanity—they build very basic houses for extremely poor people in Tijuana,
Mexico. To build one house it only takes 234 CDs sold. I didn't get all the way
there on the last tour, but I got close, and I was able to make up the rest. Now
I'm on to house No. 2.
To listen to Murry Hammond's solo work, visit
myspace.com/murryhammond.
Nashville Scene