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Sid Griffin
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Sid Griffin has the kind of schedule that inspires massive memory overload. He shuffles through his itinerary to confirm, if only for his own peace of mind, the date he will return to the Cincinnati area and the venue where it will happen.
"I couldn't do anything without my piece of paper," he says from his London home on the eve of leaving for America with his brand new project, a rootsy collective known as Western Electric.
Although he had just offered the caveat that he's played so many gigs with his original band (The Long Ryders) and his subsequent projects (The Coal Porters, his solo gigs, and his new band) that he could never remember them all, as soon as the Bogart's name comes up in conversation, he shouts in the affirmative that the Corryville club was indeed the site of The Long Ryders' opening slot for The Alarm back in the mid '80s.
"They tried to fit all their Arena Rock lighting inside Bogart's," remembers Griffin. "They had all this scaffolding that they hung lasers and shit on, and they were trying to fit all this stuff in, and it was just so Spinal Tap. I was telling their crew, 'Man, you can't fit all that in there, you're going to have to scale it down.' They looked at me like I had two heads, and said, 'This is scaled down, it's half our stuff.' It was hot as hell, too, with those lights like 30 feet away."
Even with Griffin's demure claim of a weakened memory, The Alarm reminiscence seems more the rule than the exception as he recounts at least a partial retelling of his musical history. It is a timeline that requires a fairly good memory all the way around.
Griffin, a native of Louisville, Ky., formed the Country-tinged Long Ryders in the early '80s, and ultimately relocated the band to the Los Angeles area, where it became associated with the so-called Paisley Underground, which also included the Dream Syndicate and Green on Red. Griffin's unabashed and vocally validated love of Gram Parsons at the time was as quaint and charmingly obscure as Parsons himself, and went relatively unnoticed. Nearly 20 years later, every band with a pedal steel and an electric guitar invokes Parsons' name to hushed reverence and awe. Griffin has gotten used to being ahead of the curve.
"I defy anybody -- with a lot of time on their hands -- to go back into the files of Rock & Roll in the '80s and find out who was talking about Gram Parsons in interviews before The Long Ryders," Griffin remembers. "Now in Britain, you can't have a breath of Country in your act without you or the reviewers saying, 'Gram Parsons.' I feel that The Long Ryders, doing so well in Europe as they did, had something to do with that. Maybe that's vanity."
After a lengthy hiatus when Griffin floated in a limbo of re-evaluation and reflection, which involved relocating to London and taking on various straight journalistic writing assignments for Mojo and Q magazines and the BBC, Griffin finally got back into the swing of things with the solo Little Victories in 1997, and the formation of The Coal Porters shortly thereafter. It was an arduous process, but one that was ultimately rewarding.
"(The Long Ryders) had a few albums that didn't do anything, and it was kind of sad, because we loved the band," Griffin recalls. "I had a bad four or five years where I wasn't the critics' darling anymore. As the English would say, I'd lost the plotline. With the Little Victories album, I just sort of got it back. The reviews were really astonishing. I sold a bunch of them in the U.K., not bad on the continent, and then it came out in America and a month later the label went out of business. It came out in America, got great reviews, and no one could buy it. Perfect for me."
The Coal Porters inadvertently became Western Electric last year with their appearance at a Gram Parsons' tribute concert, which ultimately was released on disc. When the time came for the Porters to move into the studio for new recordings, something unexpected developed.
"We started cutting some sounds, and we cut like four or five songs," Griffin remembers. "One of them sounded like The Coal Porters, and the others sounded like this new band. It didn't sound like The Coal Porters' Springsteen-meets-the-Byrds schtick at all. It was a different thing, a different sound. We'd had one personnel change, in our pedal steel player, a Scotsman named Neil Robert Herd, and it just changed everything. This sounds very pretentious, but we got into this laconic, ambient atmosphere that sort of suggests things, not just the 4/4 Rock & Roll with the big dramatic beat behind it. We just got a completely different vibe."
With more and more sessions, Griffin was convinced he and the band were definitely onto something special and unique. At the same time, he was being counseled by friends in the business who had heard that what they were recording was not a Coal Porters album.
"People just loved it, but the guys in the band and other people in the industry thought that it had to come out under a different name," says Griffin. "If The Rolling Stones, to use a bad analogy, suddenly recorded an album of straight Country or Surf music, it would really throw their fans, whereas if it came out as a side project, people would get it. So we felt that we had to change the name."
By the time the sessions came to an end, it was clear to Griffin that the Western Electric songs were not just a bunch of great music, but almost a thematic work. With a little fine tuning, the finished Western Electric album works on nearly a concept level, with static-laden radio broadcasts stitching the songs together.
"We went in after we recorded the first few songs, and I said, 'What made Little Victories click was that it hung together as a record,'" Griffin says. "Maybe Little Victories isn't 12 great songs in a row, but it's all of a piece. It sounds like a record, like Rubber Soul sounds like a record, in the way that a Ramones record sounds like a bunch of guys making a cohesive record. In the way that the White Album doesn't sound like a record, with all the different stuff going on -- experimental stuff, balls out rockers, acoustic ballads, a Beach Boys pastiche -- it's a great album, but it doesn't fit together. I'd been making mini-White Albums all my life, and I needed to make a mini-Rubber Soul."
Even with that thought in mind up front, Griffin was still tempted to include a couple of pounding Rock tracks in the Western Electric project (one of which was co-written with former Dream Syndicate prime mover Steve Wynn). After playing the songs for industry friends, he was advised, and ultimately realized, that the more frenetic material was slightly out of character with the blissed-out psychedelic ambient Country he was making simultaneously. He wisely left those tracks off the finished Western Electric album.
With Griffin, growth is always in the fabric of every musical project. For instance, with the shift of the band to Western Electric mode, the Coal Porters have gone from being an extension of the Long Ryders and Griffin's solo work to a progressive Bluegrass experience.
"Pat McGarvey has learned the banjo, and I picked up the mandolin after I produced the Lindisfarne album -- they actually bought me one after the sessions because I was always fooling around with theirs -- and Neil (Robert Herd), our pedal steel player, has been taking flat picking lessons," Griffin recounts. "He's not Doc Watson, I'm not Bill Monroe, and Pat's not Earl Scruggs. But we're learning steadily."
At the moment, Griffin is in the center of a maelstrom of musical activity. In addition to the month of stateside Western Electric shows planned, Griffin is in the process of recording The Coal Porters' first Bluegrass album, a collection of Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons songs. He's also keen to resume work on his sophomore solo album, an acoustic piece that he describes as "up-tempo and peppy." He recently wrote the liner notes to the reissue of former Monkee Mike Nesmith's first two Country Rock albums, and he and the Porters contributed a track to the fabulous Gene Clark tribute album Full Circle (Griffin insists that both Nesmith and Clark have been given as short a shrift as Parsons in the Country Rock influence department). And there will most definitely be another Western Electric album, as Griffin has decided that all of his electric music will ultimately wind up under this banner.
As he has been from the start of his career, Sid Griffin is philosophical and realistic about his place in the musical food chain.
"I know and you know that I'm not George Michael or the Spice Girls or Michael Jackson," he says with a laugh. "Nonetheless, it's at least nice to have that critical acclaim back, and that critical wind blowing, to fill your sails and move your ship forward. I can't tell you how good that feels. I don't feel like I'm in the dark anymore."
WESTERN ELECTRIC perform Friday at the Southgate House with The Hangdogs and The Mic Harrison Band.
