David Lowery photo by Jason Thrasher
David Lowery Reflects On The Band’s Expansive Sound For Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective
The band Cracker released a very special collection in late November, titled Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective, via Cooking Vinyl. It spans their history, it spans their creative directions, and it even spans formats, from demos to live recordings at shows. It also coincides with their return to their tradition of winter touring which finds them currently on the road throughout December and January, and then again in March.
What fans have long known about Cracker is abundantly clear on this collection, that literally from their earliest writing sessions to every step on their nearly 35-year career, they’ve embraced and investigated roots music in various forms. I spoke with co-founder David Lowery about the ways in which Alternative History paints a picture of the band, how it relates to live shows for them, and about collaborating with other roots artists like Leftover Salmon on some of these tracks.
Americana Highways: It seems like you’ve been giving this some thought for a while and a lot of care and attention has gone into this selection of materials. Is it a good feeling to finally get Alternative History out there?
David Lowery: Yes, and people seem to be really impressed with the selection of stuff. I think only five or six of these were actually unreleased, but it was just rare things, or things that were out of print, or B-sides that never made the transition to the digital world. To me, I know all those things, but the fans don’t really know a lot of that stuff. It seems like people are “getting it” in the way that I hoped.
AH: I had little doubt of that. I think it’s a very interesting collection. When I look at Cracker’s history of releases, I see that you’ve never been that band that kept things behind the curtain. You’ve always let audiences in a little bit on earlier versions of tracks, or things that hadn’t been released formally. So it wasn’t a shock that you’d do this, but the grand scale was a nice surprise.
DL: There was a period around the late 90s and early 2000s when the internet was established, and we had a discussion group on our website that ran for a long time. It was still on AOL billboards and the like. It was pre-social media. So we would often just put an MP3 of a rough mix onto one of these platforms and let people hear it and see what we were up to. During Covid, I brought a little bit of that back, where I’d have a listening party, and play a bunch of stuff on Facebook live or something like that. I’d play them stuff that we were working on. That hardcore, engaged fanbase is important for us. They are our street team.
AH: As a sideline to all of this, you have a tour going on this winter. These same fans have been waiting for this opportunity and it’s an even for the fan community. Some bands hadn’t created these communities before, and during Covid they came to the realization that this is a specific group of people.
DL: Partly the tour for this record is coincident with the fact that we used to do these shows around the Christmas holidays up through Martin Luther King weekend. We stopped doing it after Covid, and so this is partly about bringing that back. And then we also made sure that our retrospective came out before that. So this is our traditional winter tour, essentially, with a retrospective on top of it.
AH: Does that mean you’ll be playing materials from this release?
DL: Yes. There are some songs that we will now be playing in a different style, for instance, “Merry Christmas Emily” is a song that we’ve been playing forever, but this is almost like a new song it’s such a different take. What we’re planning on playing live leans into this retrospective. We’ll learn “Father Winter” that might have been on a B-side somewhere. It was actually one of the first demos of stuff that became Cracker. We’ll probably do that song.
There’s a song called “River Euphrates” which was a B-side from the Kerosene Hat era. I don’t know if we can play that fast anymore! [Laughs] I mean, we’re still pretty good, but that song is so crazy-fast.
AH: I hadn’t thought of that, that playing some of these older songs live again, or for the first time might mean boot camp for you guys.
DL: Usually it’s back there, somewhere in the back of your brain, but there’s a certain amount of muscle memory that needs to be fixed.
AH: Some of these selections are taken from live shows, too.
DL: Those are songs that are part of our regular repertoire usually, but we tried to pick those based on the fact that some of the songs evolved a little differently live, away from the album version. Some of the arrangements are slightly different in the live show. Also, what you hear on a record, a lot of the time is maybe only the tenth or eleventh time we’ve played a song. Songs either get worse or better live! There’s a whole theory of that.
In the case of the song, “Gimme One More Chance”, I that live version from the Rockpalast show is superior to the album version, just because we had played it at that point hundreds of times.
AH: I was thinking of the song “Seven Days” and was really impressed by the quality of the recording. These were live, but they sound almost like they were recorded in the studio. Were you thinking that way and making live show recordings?
DL: No, it happens that they were either recorded in Germany or Spain. I don’t know what it is with the culture of the audio engineers in those two countries, but they are fantastic engineers, always, with the live sound. Those are just random live recordings. I think the Madrid ones were recorded in a seriously old opera house.
Spain is lousy with opera houses, so this one was kind of run down and would hold burlesque shows. The console that they had in there was something you could record on, so our live audio engineer in Spain just recorded those shows. We listened to those a couple of months later on a little drive and said, “Wow! Holy heck! This is really good recording.”
AH: I think that’s absolutely understandable. I had also wondered if they were recorded in older venues with good acoustics, and that seems to be the case. Going back to “Father Winter” for a second, I just have to say that I love that song. Hearing it makes me think, “I want that album.” I want a whole album in that direction. To you, does it seem like a forerunner of the band’s sound?
DL: Yes, that was basically what we were doing that led us to create Cracker. We got together and said, “Let’s see if we can write some songs. What have you got?” I bought this little 8-track recorder. It’s both of us playing all the instruments, so that’s odd. I’m playing the bass and the drums. It’s very, very simple, which sort of makes it better, in a way. That’s the proto-Cracker recording, the UR-recording. That sound is all through the Cracker catalog in a lot of ways. There are tracks similar to that on the first, second, and fourth album. It goes all the way through, so it was very important.
I think the first three things that we recorded that became Cracker demos were “St. Cajetan,” “Father Winter,” and the song “Satisfy You” from the first Cracker album. And I think that kind of covers it right there, you know? [Laughs]
AH: That’s so interesting how that often happens, capturing future directions right at the beginning. For me, “Father Winter” captures what we would now call and Americana accent that is striking. I was surprised by how strong it was, and that helps me understand so much about your whole arc of music. You have, at times, faced people saying to Cracker later, “Oh, you went so country,” or “Oh, you went so bluegrass.” But I can see it here, right at the beginning.
DL: Oh yes. There’s a story I’ve told a few times over the years about delivering this first record to our A&R person at the record company, who was the person guiding the creative part of our career. Mark Williams was a legendary A&R person, and what he said wasn’t negative, but he said, “I really like this record, it’s a great recording, but you’re releasing what’s essentially a country rock album, when grunge is the biggest thing on the planet. alternative rock and grunge is something where you were on that path with Camper Van Beethoven, and here you take a right turn, back towards roots music. So, we can put this out…but you know you’re not going to sell that many copies.”
He meant that it was sort of out of step with what’s going on. That turned out, fortunately, to not necessarily be true because there was enough room in the alternative rock, or modern rock format at the time to play something like “Teen Angst,” which was very upbeat and rocking, and of course, “Low,” on the next record, fit into the alternative rock format. But things changed pretty quickly as that format became harder and harder and went towards new metal and rap rock. There were really only three or four years where we could fit into that format, but we were always that country rock, American rock, Southern rock sort of band. Now, that would be called Americana, but that’s what we were, right from the beginning.
AH: I don’t know if you intended it this way, but the selection of tracks in this collection does highlight the different avenues of that which you have explored. Some of these tracks even seemed like blues rock to me, and I was interested by this “museum tour” approach where you cover the bases.
DL: And two of the re-releases, including “Sick of Goodbyes,” are done in an Americana style. “Merry Christmas Emily” is kind of like a Roy Orbison song. Again, that is also different from the original recordings. That one features the pedal steel heavily, so a lot of what we are selecting is the Americana version of these songs.
AH: I really loved what the pedal steel did for the feeling of “Sick of Goodbyes.” Then we’ve got the bluegrass aspect of things with “Mr Wrong.” It’s amazing how that song transforms and fits right in to the ethos of bluegrass music.
DL: Those three tracks that we do with Leftover Salmon on this record were really fun. They completely transform those songs. “Eurotrash Girl” as a bluegrass waltz is amazing. That was not our idea! That was the banjo-player’s idea. It was maybe the second or third take, and none of us had ever played it that way. It was hilarious.
AH: How does sound usually develop on songs for you? As a writer, and then as a band, do you get inklings which sound-direction you’ll be heading before you’re in a studio?
DL: Generally, it’s a more spontaneous development. We get in there and see what’s developing when you get musicians in a studio. With the exception of that Berkeley to Bakersfield album where one album where one disc was designed to lean more towards our punk or alternative rock roots, and one disc was designed to lean more towards our country roots. That had a high concept, but we don’t normally do that. This album, being a retrospective, it got shaped by what was available that was rare and not as heard as other tracks. Normally, there isn’t a concept going in!
AH: That allows a lot more freedom for development on songs, doesn’t it?
DL: Yes. But I think that something that people don’t always understand is that the collection of people you have in the studio affects things, including the engineer, and stuff like that. Some tracks are perfectly good tracks but don’t match the lineup and creative team and therefore don’t work. Then, maybe five years later, you try the same track with a different ensemble and a different creative team in the studio, and they work! The sound of the studio itself also has certain qualities.
Thanks so much for chatting with us David Lowery! You can find more information here on his website: https://www.crackersoul.com/
Enjoy our review of the album here: REVIEW: Cracker “Alternative History”
