Where the Buffalo Don't Roam

The Walkabouts find a home away from home for their twisted take on American music

by Peter Blackstock

Though the mythical brass ring of success in the music business is million-selling records, universal fame and adoration, and a jetset, big-spender lifestyle, in reality most musicians would settle for one thing: giving up their day job. To be able to make records, tour the country, and come home without having to go back to the office, restaurant, bookstore or whatever workplace may have paid the bills for many years of double-time toil is enough of a dream gig.

It’s just that you don’t expect your dream gig will end up being on the other side of the Atlantic.

That’s life these days for the Walkabouts, but then, they’ve never quite fit in on their home turf. In the mid-late 1980s, the Walkabouts were the anomaly in grunge-incubating Seattle, playing an aggressive brand of folk-pop that was a far cry from Mudhoney and Soundgarden, yet was just twisted enough to attract the interest of Sub Pop. Though their relationship with the label deteriorated in the early ’90s, a lasting bond was formed with Sub Pop Europe/Glitterhouse Records, which continued releasing Walkabouts albums overseas until Virgin signed them to a European deal in 1995 and released the band’s major-label debut, Devil’s Road.

Nighttown, the band’s second release on Virgin, came out in Europe this summer and continues the sonic mood established on Devil’s Road. String arrangements bring a rich depth to the darkness that has always permeated the band’s songs; Chris Eckman’s foreboding lyrics and Carla Torgerson’s eerily beautiful vocals have never before sounded so elegantly framed. "Lift Your Burdens Up" (from the new record) and "The Light Will Stay On" (from Devil’s Road) may be the two best tracks they’ve ever recorded, partly because of the songs themselves but also because of the ornate majesty of sound that surrounds them.

But these last two records are only one aspect of the Walkabouts’ musical identity. Eckman and Torgerson, who are partners in marriage as well as in music, have released an astounding 10 records in the past five years – seven with the Walkabouts and three under the name Chris & Carla. The latter records are, as one would expect, a bit more stripped-down and acoustic, while the Walkabouts records range from the lush orchestration of the Virgin discs to the rawer rock ’n’ roll edge of 1994’s Setting The Woods On Fire to 1993’s countrified covers project Satisfied Mind.

At its heart, this is all American music – all the more ironic, then, that they’ve had to go to Europe to find a market for it. Not that the crowds were huge from the beginning. "Our first show in Cologne, Germany, had 50 people there," Torgerson recalls.

"But it was like 50 people who knew every song," Eckman continues. "It was a little bit weird. And we had just done this horrible tour in America; we went out with Uncle Tupelo for a bit of it, and I think we did like two interviews in four weeks. And then in Europe, I was doing, like, three interviews a day, on this initial tour."

All this was happening in the wake of the band’s 1991 release Scavenger, one of its better albums but the beginning of the end of its relationship with Sub Pop in America. Original plans for a $40,000 recording budget, made possible because Sub Pop had a deal in the works with Columbia, were scrapped before the sessions were completed after the Columbia deal fell through, leaving both the band and the label with "this giant behemoth that nobody knew what to do with," as Eckman put it.

Without the anticipated major-label backing, Sub Pop was on the brink of going out of business (and might have, without Mudhoney’s self-titled 1991 LP), but the company finally got back on its feet financially – and then some – when Nirvana broke in late 1991. By that time, however, Scavenger had already been released, and the label decided "they didn’t wanna drop one more dollar into the project," Torgerson recalls. Eckman adds: "Which I think was probably smart on their part. I mean, frankly, it was a relationship that never worked from the beginning."

The turning point that led the Walkabouts down the path to a European career came in the summer of 1992 at a backyard barbecue at the Beverungen, Germany, home of Reinhard Holstein, owner of Glitterhouse Records and a partner with Sub Pop honchos Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman in Sub Pop’s European operations. "Jonathan was there, and we had this little meeting, and we didn’t get along at all; everyone was literally yelling at each other," Eckman recalls.

"Finally everything chills out, and we’re sitting at this picnic table later, and Reinhard just like, pulls me aside and says, ‘How much do you need to make an album?’ I just threw out this figure, $18,000, and he goes, ‘I’ll send it to you next week. You guys make it for me.’ And that’s where it started: We thought, okay, we’ll do this one album for them, and then we’ll shop it back to someone in the States. And we’ve just never really gotten back here; it kept taking off over there, and we kept going there."

It was an unusual business arrangement, to be certain – the Walkabouts’ records coming out on Sub Pop Europe, but not on the label’s American home base – but it worked. From 1993’s New West Motel and Satisfied Mind to 1994’s Setting The Woods On Fire, the Walkabouts continued to increase their following overseas, even though no labels back home were biting. Part of that was the simple business reality of spending half the year on tour in Europe, with no one back home available to follow up on potential interest from U.S. labels. Part of it, however, is probably attributable to a difference in the musical tastes of Europeans and Americans.

"I don’t think our music would have done nearly as well here as it’s done over there," Eckman says. " If you just look at the antecedents for the kind of stuff that we’re into at this point, I think it’s really a difficult sell in America. We could sell some records here, but not actually make the charts like we do in Europe. You think about people like Nick Cave and the Tindersticks, and they don’t sell anything in America. And that’s more kind of where we are, musically.

"But I still think what we’re doing is American music," he continues. "It’s all written on piano and guitar, and we still strip it down to the heart of the songs. A great example is the song from Devil’s Road that Townes covered," he suggests, referring to a version of the Walkabouts song "Stopping Off Place" that was one of the last things ever recorded by Townes Van Zandt. It hasn’t been released; Eckman received a tape of it in the mail from a friend who has worked with both Townes and the Walkabouts, just a few weeks before Van Zandt’s death in January. The Walkabouts recently returned the favor by recording "Sanitorium Blues," one of the last songs Van Zandt wrote, with Seattle singer-songwriter Gary Heffern for a bonus track to a CD-single of "Lift Your Burdens Up" from the new album.

While Eckman still considers the Walkabouts’ music to be based in American traditions, he also observes that "really pure, straight-up Americana music has never done very well in Europe. I mean, country acts do horrible. The Europeans always want it with a little bit of twist. Let’s put it this way: You’re gonna have an audience for 16 Horsepower, but you won’t for Don Walser.…They want it to be fucked up. We saw 16 Horsepower in Berlin recently, and the crowd was just totally into it. So it’s not just the fact that you play steel guitar, it’s also what you do with it. You’ve gotta fuck it up a little.

"They also want it to be a critique of America, too," he continues. "They don’t want to just celebrate America’s virtues, because as much as they’re fascinated about America, they want to hate it, too. So bands like us, who have, like, certainly not always the nicest things to say about the myth of the land of opportunity here – they’re gonna love that."

Indeed, for the Walkabouts, Europe has instead been the land of opportunity, with the Virgin deal affording them the ability to fulfill artistic dreams such as the string sections that have graced the past two albums. (Devil’s Road featured the backing of the Warsaw Philharmonic on several tracks; on Nighttown, the group employed musicians from the Seattle area.) Which isn’t to say major-labeldom has left the band rolling in dough; in fact, their modest sales of about 75,000 have simply meant that Virgin "allowed us to go in debt to do these things," Eckman says. "Which is what I swore I would never do. I was always like, ‘If we get on a major label, we’re gonna pay our way. But of course we’re not paying our way, at all. It’s interesting; we met the other day with Danny Barnes [leader of the Bad Livers and a recent transplant to the Seattle area], and what he was saying about the music business was just so refreshing to hear, after being kind of immersed in this major-label world for the last two years. Because he was like, ‘Well, why would you put out a record that didn’t make money?’ And it totally make sense. But now we’re two records into a deal where our records essentially don’t really make money."

"They broke even," Torgerson clarifies. "It’s a drop in the bucket for Virgin. But I think our real reason for going with the strings was that we could afford to do it, to fulfill another dream. But now that we’ve done it, maybe we’ll pull back, and go more stripped down, or explore new instruments."

In the meantime, they no longer seem in any hurry to make things happen in the States. "This is probably the first record [Nighttown] where I don’t think we’ve made an enormous orchestrated effort to try to get people over here to pick it up," Eckman says. "We’re so busy just trying to keep up with the European thing, that it’s really just difficult." In actuality, some of the European releases have finally found their way back to these shores recently, via a licensing deal with Creative Man/Cargo, which over the past two years has issued three Walkabouts discs that had previously been available only on Sub Pop Europe (New West Motel, Satisfied Mind and Setting The Woods On Fire).

Ironically, the one American offer that did look like a serious prospect came from the band’s old hometown haunt, Sub Pop, shortly after the label signed a deal about three years ago with Warner Bros. Part of the agreement was that Warner would take over European rights to Sub Pop’s catalog, which meant a severing of the longstanding Sub Pop Europe/Glitterhouse connection. "Sub Pop America offered us a worldwide deal, America and Europe, but we basically said no to it," Eckman recounts, pointing out that, by then, other major labels already had expressed interest in the Walkabouts’ European rights (including Virgin, which eventually signed the band).

"The business decision that really governed it was that we didn’t think this new Warner relationship would work for us in Europe. And in the end it was probably the best decision we ever made," he says. "They don’t have separate offices for Warner [in Europe] like they do here; they don’t have Reprise and Sire, and all the little sub-labels. If you’re at Warner in Europe, it’s 70 releases a month, and the same promo people that are hawking 70 releases. I mean, with the press that Wilco got in Germany, they should have really sold records, and they only sold eight or nine thousand. And that’s okay for sort of an extra added territory, but they were getting, like, album of the month in four or five publications over there; they really had the critical support."

"And we would have loved to have said yes to Warner America, because it’s a great company here, and we could’ve worked in America again," Torgerson adds. "But we couldn’t lose six years of work."

"We have this toehold that we don’t want to give up," Eckman agrees, "which I still think, as frustrating as it is, on a strictly business level has always been the best decision. Because it’s stupid to just give up what what you have for the promise of a maybe."

No Depression co-editor Peter Blackstock spent a week in Germany with the Walkabouts in March 1996 just to make sure they weren’t making up this whole schpiel about being "big in Europe."