Journey men

The Grifters' indie craft

by Franklin Soults

The Grifters offer as fine a justification as you'll find of indie-rock journeywork. That might sound like a contradiction in terms. After all, the low-budget underground should be dedicated to fostering innovation. Journeymen, on the other hand, just hog all the seed money with their workaday craftsmanship, churning out the same product till their luck fails. In a way, they further the very thing indie rock was meant to counteract -- the fossilization of popular music.

It just goes to show how easily, especially in this country, the idea of democratic individualism can be seduced by corporate capitalism. Sure, there was a time when rock and roll was clogged up with the worst kind of complacent journeyworkers -- the band Journey had the principle inscribed in their dumb name, fer chrissakes. But these days, the major-label norm is sink-or-swim one-shot contracts. Bands hardly get a chance to develop journeyman skills.

So the carefully wrought guitar rock of the Grifters' latest, Full Blown Possession (Sub Pop), is riding a marginal counter-current. Its unclassifiable amalgam of hooky songcraft and noisy experimentation, of bluesy roots rock and Anglophilic pop, is just the kind of collective expression that bands usually achieve only after they've been at it for a good chunk of their lives. If the group hadn't had the chance to develop their admirable sound in the world of independent labels, that sound -- and others like it -- probably wouldn't exist at all.

Not that the Grifters always hoped to become an indie institution. They just happened to start out in the late '80s, a time when distrust of the entire industry was running rampant. As Grifters frontperson Dave Shouse explained in a CMJ interview: "It was a post-Slash/-Twin/Tone/-SST/-Homestead period, when bands like Nirvana were starting in Seattle and Pavement were starting in Stockton." In this climate, when the only worthwhile scenes were nascent and local, "we didn't think of ourselves as an alternative band or an indie band, we just thought, `We're going to make some music and put it out.' "

Since this DIY instinct is exactly what indie labels are for, the band quickly settled into the routine of churning out albums, singles, and EPs recorded on shoestring budgets for labels like Sonic Noise and Shangri-La. By the early '90s, major labels started trying to nab the band as part of the roots-rock and/or "lo-fi" rage, but having developed a hard-headed pessimism in their formative youth, the Grifters resisted the first wave of offers, jumping to the Time Warner-associated Sub Pop only in 1996, after much soul searching. Among other things, Sup Pop provided them with the cash to leave behind their four-track world at a time when they had grown well beyond both the lo-fi and roots-rock pigeonholes and were ready to make the most of major-studio gadgetry.

Full Blown Possession, then, is the natural outgrowth of four friends taking their musical ideas seven years, five albums, three weddings, and two kids farther down the road. If this is the first Grifters album you've bought after cocking your ear for years whenever they turned up on radio, the first couple of tracks will sound exactly the way you thought they would: driving, bent, and bluesy, yet with big clear hooks and other trad-pop touches throughout. But after taking a brief dip with a strained ballad and a hackneyed funk move, the album continues with eight solid compositions that will raise your expectations to a more complicated level. Working in the impressionist school of lyric writing, where a catch phrase or two is everything, the Grifters drop bloodthirsty love stories and wry putdowns into guitar raves that glance off a dozen influences at once. It's doubtful the songs will raise the cries of hallelujah elicited by their Sub Pop debut, Ain't My Lookout ("The best album of 1996, and it's only February!" etc.), but compared with the output of a pretty good Sub Pop roots band like the Scud Mountain Boys, this shows how much more idiosyncratic -- and at the same time, how much broader -- the concept of roots can be.

For the Grifters, that concept includes everything from their love of '70s Brit rock -- a little Stones and Marc Bolan, a lot of Roxy Music and David Bowie -- to the liberating influence of Sonic Youth's dictum to detune that chord. Yes, they've been hoeing this row for years, but now they've got the chance to cut the channel deeper and wider than ever before. The Sub Pop deal calls for five albums. I expect critics of the future will call it the Grifters' middle period.

The Grifters play for free at the Central Square World's Fair this Sunday, September 21. Call 868-FAIR.