Oct. 26, 2011 - Issue #836: Winter Guide 2011
On the Record
Pass the Sugar
Big Sugar records new album—a decade after its last one
Big Sugar released its last full-length record a decade ago, with bandleader Gordie Johnson folding the group and moving south to Texas to escape the pleasure-destroying pressures that the music industry brought to bear on him and his musical compatriots at the time. After three albums of metal-heavy Texas blues with Grady, in 2010 Johnson put his old band back together for some festival dates before releasing the full-on reggae rock of Revolution Per Minute this past summer. Johnson recently spoke with Vue Weekly about the creation of the new album.
VUE WEEKLY: What made now the time that you wanted to put Big Sugar back together?
GORDIE JOHNSON: Because I feel like everybody spiritually and musically is realigned. There were a lot of conflicting tensions in the group before. It just seemed like all the forces of nature were pitted against us and we were just trying to make our music and live our lives, and it just felt like everything had to have a meeting and be put to a vote and committee to decide on it. It just got to be a drag, and it was making the music not fun to play. I can never just walk out there and go through the motions because it's making somebody money, including me. I don't do this for money: I do this because it's what I do. You can't buy my allegiance to a thing I don't believe in.
We're happy to just let ourselves be weird, and if we feel like playing a bunch of reggae jams one night, well, that's tough. If you don't dig it, you're at the wrong show, man. If we want to get all tripped out or we want to play some old blues, we're going to do what we're going to do. Come on in, anybody's welcome, but we didn't promise we were gonna please everybody. We're just there making our music. It just seems like now at this point in history it's a really good time to do that.
Even making Revolution Per Minute was, I don't think instantaneous, because it does take a lot of planning and effort, but it certainly was a trouble-free and everything-moving-in-a-positive-direction experience in the studio. All I did was record it. There were no technical interventions necessary.
Even when it came down to mixing that was all obvious, too, because I took the audio back down to Texas with me and I was watching reggae movies on the screen in the studio and dancing around. I didn't even use a chair. I was like, "This is mixing?" This is a technical thing you do and yet I'm dancing around like I'm in a reggae dance hall the whole time I'm mixing a record. This is a really good sign, man.
VW: How long did it take to make Revolution Per Minute once the band got back together?
GJ: We had done a bunch of shows last year, just festival shows, you know, and of course we played a bunch of the old songs—that's what we have, you know—and we started infusing those with new attitudes and approaches and some new jams put in between to tie the songs together, and it was just this huge wellspring of new ideas that we were putting into the old songs, and I was like, "Oh, oh, oh. Everybody hold that thought." I had a bunch of songs that I'd been gathering up for years that had no home because I had no Big Sugar. Let's go into a jam space for a couple of hours and just see what these songs would sound like.
Literally, one evening we went in a jam space and we played through the songs and we were like, "Let's go into the studio tomorrow." The next day we went to the studio, we spent a week, week and a half recording; I only took a couple of days to mix it. Once we said, "Yes, we're doing this," it all came together pretty quick.
VW: In the liner notes, you thank [the Black Crowes'] Chris Robinson for the initial inspiration for "A Revolution Per Minute."
GJ: He's a brethren that I've known for years and years and we really bond over our common love of reggae music and Jamaican culture and Rastafarianism and all these different levels, and he's always been a guy where it's not a professional relationship: we don't work together, we play together.
I went into the studio on my own one day with my engineer and I played some drums and some bass and some guitar and I just made a bunch of old-school reggae rhythm tracks and I was like, "I'm gonna send these to CR and just blow his mind." And he was like, "Man, you should do something with that. You should put Big Sugar back together and make it all sound like that." Yeah, I could do that.
Thu, Nov 3 (8 pm)
Big Sugar
With Wide Mouth Mason
Edmonton Event Centre, $35
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