Before Son Volt, before Wilco, before Calexico, before The Bottle Rockets, Whiskeytown and the Drive-By Truckers, there were the Scud Mountain Boys. At the forefront of an emerging alternative country scene, The Scuds fell roughly into the early 1990s orbit of acts like Buffalo Tom, The Blood Oranges and the seminal Uncle Tupelo (all spun out from studios like North Brookfield’s Longview Farm and Paul Kolderie’s Fort Apache), and influenced subsequent local artists including Lo Fine, The Drunk Stuntmen and The Ware River Club.
With a band full of brains and dark, emotive creativity, The Scuds’ career was a medium-length one, spanning about six years from 1991-1997, though it produced only three albums. Two early recordings were released on Northampton’s Chunk Records imprint (Pine Box and Dance the Night Away) before the band signed to Seattle’s Sub Pop label for its masterstroke, Massachusetts. Touring, job-juggling and personnel shifts took their tolls on band members, and in the end the group may have been an unstable element, made up of such fascinating and volatile constituents that it could only exist for a short, magical period.
Originally on a trajectory that was more roots rock than alternative country, the band (at first called just “The Scuds”) was as surprised as its audiences by its swerve into a world of relative croon and twang. Its divergence was, according to legend, precipitated by late nights huddled around guitarist/pedal steel player Bruce Tull’s kitchen table in the quaint cottage he maintained in Northampton, immersed in a gritty world of smoke and whiskey more properly found in a Tucson saloon than a New England home.
There the band countrified versions of ’70s songs like Olivia Newton John’s “Please, Mr. Please” and Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” and the flavor of the environment began to bleed into songwriting between the pickings of singer/guitarist Joe Pernice and the nimble stride of bassist Stephen Desaulniers’ fingers. Tull added glorious, textured arpeggios on electric guitar or revved up the steel like a half-speed beginning to a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and all were fairly proficient at vocal harmonizing—drummer Tom Shea even began to double on mandolin during the quieter numbers.
The mood created at Tull’s Woodmont Road hideaway was so prodigious that the resulting songs found their way onto four-track recordings that would evolve into the release, originally on cassette only, of Pine Box. The table became such a good friend that the Scud Mountain Boys dragged it out to their first show under the new moniker, and many others afterward, to the joy of audiences and critics alike. According to Chunk Records impresario J.M. Dobies (aka Mal Thursday), the creative vibe had been enhanced by an ongoing cultural influx of tabaccy-chewin’ movies.
“The Scuds’ living room had sort of an ongoing, in-house film festival. I remember watching a Charles Portis double feature of True Grit and the 1970 Glenn Campbell movie Norwood with the guys, who were known for playing several of Glenn’s big hits in their act,” says Dobies. “Another big movie for the band was Midnight Cowboy. John Barry’s instrumental theme from the film was a highlight of their live sets, and Joe Pernice was often heard to quote Jon Voight’s classic line, ‘Up your income, lady!’ That was some good times.”
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Any band—and maybe especially one fond of hard-knuckled Westerns—can create some bad blood along the happy trail of success, and the Scud Mountain Boys were no exception. Desaulniers, who left the band not long after the Sub Pop deal and was replaced as bassist on tour by Frank Padellaro (Behemoth, King Radio) before the Scuds’ eventual implosion, was perhaps the hardest to talk into a recently conceived 2012 reunion mini-tour. Ultimately it was Pernice, whose side project The Pernice Brothers went on to some success on the Sub Pop label and eventually established its own (Ashmont Records), who had to offer the olive branch.
“I left the band, so I had to make the extension,” the singer told Hollywood Reporter music editor Shirley Halperin (who is now, coincidentally, married to one-time SMB producer/engineer Thom Monahan). Deciding to invite his former bandmates to sit in on a solo show he’d booked at Cambridge’s Lizard Lounge, Pernice sent out some humility-laced emails and hoped for the best.
“I grabbed my nuts and gave them a call … all the bullshit kind of disappeared.” he said. He told Desaulniers, “‘I’m gonna set up a bass rig. If you want to show up and play, I’d love it. If not, I understand.'”
As with most grudges that can seem so exaggerated in hindsight, it seems enough years have gone by that everyone’s testosterone levels have settled to a comfortable place, and the egos of every band member who might have harbored some naive sense of self-importance have melted down to dwell inside the middle-aged lumps of clay we all inevitably become. Desaulniers, with some coaxing by Shea, showed up at the notorious basement bar on Mass. Ave., and to fine effect—so much so that the mini-tour plan was up and running.
“Amazingly,” Desaulniers says of the band’s first performance together in a decade and a half, “after 15 years of dust, it sounded really good, if I do say so. And no offense to Bob Pernice, who did a truly great job, but having Bruce back in the mix for the coming shows will be rather key. I always thought that he was a big— if not the biggest—part of our sound.”
Tull, perhaps the most mature and least prone to gratuitous drama, will no doubt provide a welcome glue for the group’s reunion mini-tour, which will once again cram the Boys back into close quarters in at least five or six cities up and down the east coast of the U.S. and Canada.
Ashmont Records is re-releasing The Early Year, which Sub Pop had released years ago as a re-issued packaging of the first two Chunk records. The rights to these early recordings recently reverted to the band as per their original contract with Sub Pop, and perhaps this event was also a catalyst for the digging up of old memories.
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Dobies looks back on the Scuds’ heyday with a combination of fondness and a slightly bitter taste, recalling the moment when they told him they were signing to a bigger label:
“When the band sat me down to break the news of their deal with Sub Pop, and the absence of any buyout money for Chunk, Joe demonstrated great balls by paraphrasing Abe Vigoda as Sally Tessio in The Godfather: ‘It’s not personal, Mal. It’s just business.'”
Still, Dobies continues to credit Pernice with a rare genius as a songwriter, and believes that, regardless of any personality conflicts or bad business dealings, the band was beyond a doubt a gem that was magical enough to poke its head up, however briefly, through a vast sea of musical mediocrity.
“The Scuds were okay, but the Scud Mountain Boys were great, and had indie cred,” says Dobies. “They were a band’s band, a critic’s wet dream. They had great material, a cool stage gimmick [performing seated around the table], and a unique sound: confessional country rock on heavy downers. They put the depression back into ‘No Depression.'”
Desaulniers expresses a similarly deep if slightly reluctant affection when asked about the upcoming tour, as well as optimism about future possibilities. “There has been talk of recording another albumr if all goes well,” he relays. “Personally, I’m looking forward to it all, not backward to it all.”
Old school Valley fans and newbies alike can catch the Scud Mountain Boys’ local show, preceded by opening sets courtesy of John Cunningham and Ray Mason.
Jan. 15, 8 p.m., $15/advance, $18/door, Pearl Street Nightclub, 10 Pearl St., Northampton, (413) 586-8686, www.iheg.com.
