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Bottle Rockets’ fire is back |
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Written by Knight Ridder
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Wednesday, 12 July 2006 |
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 The music is as inviting, homey and ultimately colorful as the lawn outside your house. Or your neighbor’s house. Or maybe the one growing like gangbusters by the duplex down the street.
Maybe that’s why Brian Henneman named the newest Bottle Rockets album “Zoysia.”
OK, then. What exactly is zoysia? Well, if you were a lifelong Midwesterner like Henneman, you would know. He grew up with it in Festus, Mo., the town 35 miles southwest of St. Louis that has long served as Bottle Rockets Central, U.S.A.
Or, more exactly, the zoysia grew up around him.
“In St. Louis, everybody knows what zoysia is,” Henneman said during a tour stop in Pittsburgh. “It’s lawn grass. Simple as that.”
Perhaps the album cover is a tip-off. It depicts an American flag not in shades of red, white and blue, but in agriculturally correct colors of green and hay-hewn gold. But it’s the album’s title song that makes sense out of such an unexpected social metaphor. Using a dark, somber guitar riff as an anchor, Henneman details small-town life that, despite its conservative leanings, respects diverse political slants. After all, come election time, where do all the campaign signs go? Why, on the lawn, of course.
“That’s life where we live, right there,” Henneman said. “We’re just telling it like it is.”
Arguably the best of the band’s eight studio albums, “Zoysia” also represents the first phase of what Henneman views as a “new band.”
But let’s review the old one first. The Bottle Rockets modestly stormed out of Festus in the early ’90s by religiously touring clubs across the country and capturing prestigious opening act slots for such artists as John Fogerty and Lucinda Williams. Then came albums like “The Brooklyn Side” and “24 Hours a Day” that were full of blue-collar tales such as “Welfare Music,” “1000 Dollar Car” and “Indianapolis” that mixed country attitude with a rockish roadhouse-style immediacy.
“Songs were just falling out of the sky when we made it,” Henneman said of “Zoysia.” “It’s like we were hitting free throws everywhere we went. I don’t know. It was this little magic occasion for us.”
“The group is healthy now, mentally and physically,” Henneman said. “We’re not this band of roving, drunk party guys anymore. In the past, I took every other end of what we did seriously except the music _ which, at the end of the day, isn’t terribly satisfying. I mean, the only reason you’re out there in the first place is for the music. So what we have now is a million times better than what we had.”
But “Zoysia” isn’t the work of a reformed band. It’s an album forged by a mature one. The title song is fascinating because its sounds so creepy before turning into a loving tale of community and then exploding into one the most frenzied guitar jams the band has ever put on record.
And that’s not all. “Better Than Broken” tells of a wary but redemptive romantic spirit, “Blind” suggests a world consumed by appearances and “Where I’m From” outlines the fragility of a hometown identity in the modern world.
“I don’t know if a teenager would really love this album very much,” Henneman said. “I know when I was a teenager, I didn’t understand ZZ Top. But when I got older, it made perfect sense.
“This album is just a way of looking at things from a fortysomething-year-old perspective. You get a little worldly when you get older. At least I did.”
“Zoysia” may be the work of a fortysomething rocker, but Henneman is eager for everyone to hear it.
MUSIC
Fans predicted stardom, especially when the band signed to Atlantic Records. But the audience size remained limited and loyal. Unrelenting road schedules then took their toll, along with the boozy excesses that come with being a traveling rock show.
So the band shifted its lineup and cleaned up its act. Henneman and drummer Mark Ortmann are the holdovers. Guitarist John Horton joined in 2003. Bassist Keith Voegele, who wrote a killer Everly Brothers-style bit of country reflection on “Zoysia” called “Feeling Down,” rounded out the current Bottle Rockets lineup last year.
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