JJ Grey & Mofro
From the days of playing greasy local juke joints
to headlining major festivals, JJ Grey remains an unfettered, blissful
performer, singing with a blue-collared spirit over the bone-deep grooves of
his compositions. His presence before an audience is something startling and
immediate, at times a funk rave-up, other times a sort of mass-absolution for
the mortal weaknesses that make him and his audience human. When you see JJ
Grey and his band Mofro live-and you truly, absolutely must-the man is
fearless.
Onstage, Grey delivers his songs with compassion
and a relentless honesty, but perhaps not until Ol' Glory has a studio record captured the fierceness and intimacy
that defines a Grey live performance. "I wanted that crucial lived-in feel,"
Grey says of Ol' Glory, and here he
hits his mark. On the new album, Grey and his current Mofro lineup offer grace
and groove in equal measure, with an easygoing quality to the production that
makes those beautiful muscular drum-breaks sound as though the band has set up in
your living room.
Despite a redoubtable stage presence, Grey does get
performance anxiety-specifically, when he's suspended 50 feet above the soil of
his pecan grove, clearing moss from the upper trees.
"The tops of the trees are even worse," he laughs,
"say closer to 70, maybe even 80 feet. I'm not phobic about heights, but I
don't think anyone's crazy about getting up in a bucket and swinging all
around. I wanted to fertilize this year but didn't get a chance. This February
I will, about two tons-to feed the trees."
When he isn't touring, Grey exerts his prodigious
energies on the family land, a former chicken-farm that was run by his maternal
grandmother and grandfather. The farm boasts a recording studio, a warehouse
that doubles as Grey's gym, an open-air barn, and of course those 50-odd pecan
trees that occasionally require Grey to go airborne with his sprayer.
For devoted listeners, there is something fitting,
even affirmative in Grey's commitment to the land of his north Florida home.
The farms and eddying swamps of his youth are as much a part of Grey's music as
the Louisiana swamp-blues tradition, or the singer's collection of old Stax
records.
As a boy, Grey was drawn to country-rockers,
including Jerry Reed, and to Otis Redding and the other luminaries of Memphis
soul; Run-D.M.C., meanwhile, played on repeat in the parking lot of his high
school (note the hip-hop inflections on "A Night to Remember"). Merging these
traditions, and working with a blue-collar ethic that brooked no bullshit, Grey
began touring as Mofro in the late '90s, with backbeats that crossed Steve
Cropper with
George Clinton and a lyrical directness that made
his debut LP Blackwater (2001) a
calling-card among roots-rock aficionados. Soon, he was expanding his tours
beyond America and the U.K., playing ever-larger clubs and eventually massive
festivals, as his fan base grew from a modest group of loyal initiates into
something resembling a national coalition.
Grey takes no shortcuts on the homestead, and he
certainly takes no shortcuts in his music. While he has metaphorically speaking
"drawn blood" making all his albums, his latest effort, Ol' Glory, found him spending more time than ever working over the
new material. A hip-shooting, off-the-cuff performer (often his first vocal
takes end up pleasing him best), Grey was able to stretch his legs a bit while
constructing the lyrics and vocal lines to Ol'
Glory.
"I would visit it much more often in my
mind, visit it more often on the guitar in my house," Grey says. "I like an album to have a balance,
like a novel or like a film. A triumph,
a dark brooding moment, or a
moment of peace-that's the only thing
I consistently try to achieve with a record."
Grey has been living this balance throughout his
career, and Ol' Glory is a
beautifully paced little film. On "The Island," Grey sounds like Coleridge on a
happy day: "All beneath the canopy / of ageless oaks whose secrets keep /
Forever in her beauty / This island is my home." "A Night to Remember" finds
the singer in first-rate swagger: "I flipped up my collar ah man / I went ahead
and put on my best James Dean / and you'd a thought I was Clark Gable squinting
through that smoke." And "Turn Loose"
has Grey in fast-rhyme mode in keeping with the song's title: "You work a
stride / curbside thumbing a ride / on Lane Avenue
/ While your kids be on their knees / praying Jesus please." From the profane
to the sacred, the sly to the sublime, Grey feels out his range as a
songwriter with ever-greater assurance.
The mood and drive of Ol' Glory are testament to this achievement. The album ranks with
Grey's very best work; among other things, the secret spirituality of his music
is perhaps more accessible here than ever before. On "Everything Is a Song," he
sings of "the joy with no opposite," a sacred state that Grey describes to me:
"It can happen to anybody: you sit still and you
feel things tingling around you, everything's alive around you, and in that a
smile comes on your face involuntarily, and in
that I felt no opposite. It has no part of the play of good and bad or of comedy or tragedy. I know it's just a play on words but it feels like more than just being happy
because you got what you wanted - this is a joy. A joy that doesn't get
involved one way or the next; it just is."
Grey's most treasured albums include Otis Redding's
In Person at the Whisky a Go Go and
Jerry Reed's greatest hits, and the singer once told me that he grew up
"wanting to be Jerry Reed but with less of a country, more of a soul thing."
With Ol' Glory, Grey does his idols
proud. It's a country record where the stories are all part of one great
mystery; it's a blues record with one foot in the church; it's a Memphis soul
record that takes place in the country.
In short, Ol'
Glory is that most singular thing, a record by JJ Grey-the north Florida
sage and soul- bent swamp rocker.
- Website:
- http://www.jjgrey.com/