It’s 9pm on 3/11, the second night of the Old 97’s two-night engagement at The Sinclair. The crowd—not sold-out, as it was the night before, but still sizable and enthusiastic—is massing expectantly at the front, the roadies have finished prepping the stage, and the headliners, the legendary Old 97’s, who celebrate their 20th birthday this year, are about to step out and start playing.
The show, so far, has been been a decidedly countryish affair: the openers, Dallas-born guitar-and-banjo duo the O’s, have already offered up a rollicking hour of classic guitar-and-banjo music, accompanying themselves Mumford-style with foot-pedal percussion (one working a bass drum and the other a bass-drum-hammer coupled to a tambourine), singing and yawping in tight harmony, bantering Grand Old Opry-style between numbers, and wearing the most countryish of black snap-down shirts. And once they bid the crowd goodnight and clear the stage, the songs that start booming over the loudspeakers are similarly all country-inflected—twangy, fingerpicky, whole nine yards. I hear the Crazy Heart theme-song twice—not in a row, but pretty close.
And why shouldn’t it be? A countryish affair, that is. The Old 97’s have, after all, spent most of their two-decade career saddled like a bucking bronco with the ill-fitting but doggedly adhesive label of “alt-country.” During their heyday in the mid-90s, they were summarily lumped with Wilco, Son Volt, Whiskeytown, and other bands that hipsters allowed themselves to like despite the shuffle-beat and twangy guitar and occasional flare-up of banjo or pedal-steel. Never mind that, over the course of their voluminous and varied output, the “alt-country” label has ranged from misleading to reductive to downright wrong to basically meaningless. People like easy categorizations—after twenty years, why shouldn’t the Old 97’s just give the people what they want and embrace theirs?
And moreover, hasn’t the world, over the past 12 years or so, become safe for country? Don’t we live in a post-Allison Krauss, post-“Wagon Wheel” world, a world in which even the biggest band in the world has a banjo-picker on their full-time payroll? If there has ever been a day to just lie back and let people peg you as “alt-country,” isn’t today that day?
So there I am, sipping my Schlitz and waiting for the Old 97’s to appear, expecting things to proceed more or less as countryishly as before.
Boy am I wrong. Because just as I’m thinking those thoughts, the stage-lights go red, and what should come over the loudspeakers but the Pixies’ “Cecilia Ann,” an epic rager that evokes everything from Ennio Morricone to Dick Dale to Iron Maiden but is resolutely not country. Then the Old 97’s stride onstage, and I am left wondering, of all the songs they could have chosen as their theme music, why “Cecilia Ann”?
As soon as they start to play, all questions of generic classification fly, naturally, out the window. They blaze through a big chunk their hits, from the rockabilly shuffle of their early albums through the sparkling power-pop of 2001’s Satellite Rides, their finest and most beloved album, to the driving rock of their later period, and everyone around me in the front seems to know all the words. Rhett Miller, still boyishly handsome at 42, struts his rock-star moves—the hair-shake; the Elvis hip-swivel; the abbreviated (because from the elbow instead of the shoulder) Pete Townshend windmill-strum—with the tongue-in-cheek yet earnest nonchalance of a man who is old and seasoned enough not to give a shit, if he ever did, that he never quite became the first-tier rock star he probably deserved to become. All in all, it’s a total blast, and the crowd gobbles it down like candy.
Once it’s over, though, the question—why “Cecilia Ann”?—resurfaces, compounded by the fact that, while the lead guitarist was talking between songs about the Old 97’s first show in Boston (in 1994, at a club called the Shithole, they went on at 1:30am and the sound guy pulled the plug after four songs), Rhett cut in and said he kept imagining that Frank Black would walk in while they were playing. So clearly Rhett Miller, supposedly the poster-boy of “alt-country,” is a huge Pixies fan and wants everyone to know it. Furthermore, when the house lights come up and the crowd starts meandering toward the door, the song that blasts out of the loudspeaker is the Clash’s “Death or Glory,” which is certainly no one’s idea of country music. So now I am very curious about Rhett Miller’s taste in music—so curious, in fact, that I resolve to go against my natural shyness and ask him what the deal is.
His explanation could not be simpler. “Cecilia Ann” is just “such a rockin’, powerful song,” he says, “It says to the audience, ‘Shit’s about to go down, man!'” He confirms that he and the rest of the band are indeed huge Pixies fans, and that, in fact, he spent most of his youth emphatically down on country. “Growing up in Texas,” he says, “it was hard to like country without being, you know, a redneck.” He grew up listening to Bowie, along with the Kinks and Robyn Hitchcock and early Dylan, and didn’t warm up to country until later, when Old 97’s bassist and co-founder Murray Hammond introduced him to Hank Williams and Willie Nelson, and he began to realize how much artists like them had influenced the rock ‘n’ roll that he’d grown up with. Ultimately, says Rhett, Old 97’s are just a rock band. “You could point to different influences,” he says, “but none of them define us—the Clash are equal to Johnny Cash.” That’s what they were going for, he says, when they first started—”Johnny Cash meets the Clash”—and I assure him that they’ve pulled it off quite nicely.