There was a crazy swinging sound blowing in from the West Coast back
in the ’40s. Artists such as Hank Penny, Bob Wills, and Spade Cooley
were collectively destroying the boundaries between musical genres. The music they made had a
hillbilly heart, to be sure, but you couldn’t call it
country: The boys in the band might get insulted, pack up
their axes, and call it a night. It was jazz. It was jump blues.
It was good-timing dance-hall swing. And with its
obsessive lyrical focus on nightlife, heartache,
troublesome women, and wide-open spaces, it was honky-tonk to
the core. Anaheim’s retro-rockers Big Sandy and the
Fly-Rite Boys continue the popular West Coast practice of
making eclectic, genre-bending hillbilly music that
manages to be traditional in spite of itself. Big Sandy’s mix
includes not only western swing but also elements
of rockabilly, surf, R&B, doo-wop, Cajun music,
and crooner-era pop. But unlike so many of the
tongue-in-cheek hat bands that cropped up in the ’90s,
hell-bent on mocking traditional country form, the Fly-Rite
boys are respectful of their elders, every number an
homage to artists such as Ray Charles, Marty Robbins, and
Bob Wills, artists who knew the value of giving an
audience everything. You almost had to drag them off the stage.
“I guess some people don’t understand,” says
Robert “Big Sandy” Williams of the way some fans and
writers have interpreted his band’s antique look and
old-school sound. “Or they focus on the wrong thing. It’s not
about being retro or whatever. It’s about being timeless.”
Still, when the Fly-Rite Boys’ steel player Jimmy Roy lays
down a lick on his vintage Sho-Bud (serial number 2), a
piece of equipment once owned and played by Faron
Young sideman Ben Keith, it’s hard to deny that this band is
a touchstone to the past.
“I’m a romantic,” Williams says. “I like those
romantic elements of the older styles that are missing
from today’s music: songs about love, hate, relationships, heartache, women.
Most of my songs are about women. That’s what moves me.”
For being so starry-eyed Williams is very much a realist about his measure of fame.
Having begun his career as a musician in the late
’80s, he’s seen several roots revivals spring up and die out
before they could ever evolve into a national craze.
“It comes and goes in waves,” Williams says of the
market for traditional music. “It will be really popular and
maybe somebody will say, ‘Man, I don’t know, I think something
is going to happen,’ and then it will all die down again. So
if business picks up, hurrah, but if not, we still get by and we’re
having a great time along the way. We’re going to play the Grand Ole
Opry, and then we are going to be in Memphis.”
Appearing on the Grand Ole Opry is something Williams is excited about for obvious
reasons. “Maybe the Opry isn’t what it used to be,” he says.
“But being brought up on stage by Porter Wagoner,
everything is in slow motion. It’s like some kind of hazy dream.”
Visiting Memphis is meaningful for another,
equally obvious reason. “As a kid, the first musician who ever moved me
was Elvis,” says Williams. “I have a lot
of wonderful musical memories of him. I remember I just thought, Wow,
he’s so cool. I was caught up in the image. But when I got older, I
wanted to know more about his influences. And that’s when I discovered all
this beautiful music. The country, the gospel, the wonderful R&B. Just
give me a drink and a George Jones record and I’m okay.”
One of the main characteristics the Fly-Rite Boys have stolen from
such heroes as Elvis, Faron Young, and Marty Robbins is the ability to make
everything they do look effortless.
“Well, I hope we don’t make it look too easy,” Williams says. “We’re
going to have to kick ourselves a little bit. You know, we’ve been trying to put a
little extra into it because maybe it’s not such a good idea to be laid-back all the
time.” No sooner has he said this than he admits that his famously charismatic
band is made up of geeks who are having too much fun to be bothered with an
abundance of seriousness.
“Before anything else, we are all
fans of the kind of music we play,” Williams says. “But sometimes we’ll be
up on stage playing and goofing off and I look around and know that any one
of us would rather be out looking for records in a thrift store.”
Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys
with Two Tons of Steel
Sunday, June 29th
The Hi-Tone CafÇ