Artist: Bad Livers
Genre(s):
Other
Discography:
Dust on the Bible
Year: 1994
Tracks: 11
The clubs of Austin, TX, proved to be fat ground in the 1990s for bands with eclecticist musical influences, only the Bad Livers whitethorn possess been the least-categorizable ensemble of all. The trio's recorded songs ran the gamut from traditional folk music and blue grass to blues, early rock & revolve, punk rock rock-and-roll, and finally even trance music. At the altitude of their long touring career it was possible to hear music by the Carter Family, Iggy Pop, Monk, Mississippi John Hurt, the Misfits, and Slayer, all in the course of one concert congeal. They tapped into a base of music fans wHO could apprise a mongrelized euphony, only the by and by stages of their career showed that "Americana" could be a musical category as constraining as whatever other; the band's increasingly experimental mind-set resonated only intermittently with the preferences of fans of traditional music. The Bad Livers' instrumentation was unique inside the pop/rock realm: lead isaac Merrit Singer Danny Barnes played banjo, guitar, and resonator guitar; Mark Rubin played bass voice and bass horn; and in later 1996 the two were linked by Bob Grant on mandolin, guitar, and tenor banjo. Grant replaced Ralph White, wHO played fiddle and Cajun and Mexican accordion with the triplet.
Both Rubin and Barnes grew up with bluegrass music, and that genre label was as liable for the Bad Livers as was any other. Rubin, elevated in rural Oklahoma, began performing sousaphone as a child and continued his studies into senior high school day, when he likewise began playing sea bass. Rubin as well heard klezmer music in his juvenility, and the soundprint of the klezmer banding would turn audible in the music of the Bad Livers. The mathematical group was formed in 1990, correct after Rubin had attended the New Music Seminar in New York and was divine to put together his possess banding; it consolidated with an ad hoc Danny Barnes Trio, which actually consisted of Barnes plus whatever other musicians he was able-bodied to raise on the sound on whatsoever given evening.
The Bad Livers gained widespread attention from Austin clubgoers in 1991 and became the star of the SXSW euphony conference the following year. They signed with the Chicago-based Touch & Go tag, cathartic Delusions of Banjer (1992) and Horses in the Mines (1994). Another recording, Dust on the Bible, was originally sold on cassette at the trio's live shows and was later issued on CD by Touch & Go under its Quarterstick depression; it was a collection of bluegrass-gospel standards that showed that the group could spiel it straight when they so desired. The Bad Livers touched to the North Carolina-based Sugar Hill tag for Hogs on the Highway (1997) and 1998's Diligence and Thrift, the latter album produced by longtime Texas euphony gadfly Lloyd Maines. Each subsequent expiration broadened the trio's musical range, and Blood and Mood, which appeared in early 2000, was an unclassifiable mixed bag of bluegrass, punk, sampling of various kinds, and other electronic techniques. The record album was alternately hailed as a masterpiece and denounced as the last step in a long perfidy of traditional bluegrass; the group's web site drily noted that it was "to date the worst merchandising title in the catalogue." By that time Barnes and Rubin had both become involved with solo projects of their possess; Rubin was the euphony supervisor for Richard Linklater's film The Newton Boys, and Barnes, wHO had stirred to Washington state, had composed music for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. After Blood and Mood, though the Bad Livers ne'er formally dissolved, the private members' solo projects took precedency. Barnes released several left-of-center banjo albums passably redolent of the Bad Livers' early real, while Rubin remained a secureness of the Austin live-music and recording scene.
