How Jeffrey Steele Put Together the Sleeper Country Album of the Year
Hit songwriter assembles honky-tonk supergroup for 'Sons of the Palomino'
The first time Jeffrey Steele heard country music in person was at
the Palomino Club in North Hollywood. His father would take Steele, then
about 9 years old, to the weekly Palomino Talent Show, where he saw
legends like Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Buck Owens play to crowds
of a few hundred people. Years later, Steele, who today is a Nashville
Songwriting Hall of Famer, got his start playing country music in the
Palomino's house band.
"I was playing the Roxy and the Viper Room in these rock bands, and I
started moonlighting as a country guy because I could make $50 a night
playing bass in a country band," says Steele. In spite of his father's
influence, he'd been weaned mostly on rock & roll by his older
siblings. "When I first started hearing those songs, I was so
overwhelmed by the lyrics and simplicity, the twist of the phrase.
Country's got a certain form that really separated it from the rest."
Steele,
following in the footsteps of Dwight Yoakam and Lucinda Williams, would
go on to be one of the leading lights of early Nineties West Coast
country as the front man of Boy Howdy, and find even greater success as a
songwriter when he moved to Nashville. Tim McGraw, Rascal Flatts and
Steve Holy all took his songs to the top of the charts, while he enjoyed
a few minor hits himself as a solo artist. But, now 56, Steele finds
himself channeling those early days with his latest project, the
honky-tonk throwback super group Sons of the Palomino.
"Your
publisher's coming to you like, 'God, I love this song, man. It's too
country for country radio, but I love this song.' You laugh about it and
look at each other and go, 'We should go re-record these,'" says
Steele, who decided he needed to pursue the concept when he had four or
five good songs that fit the mold. "It just morphed into this thing that
was built around my upbringing. I was a lot more of a West Coast guy; I
grew up with Bakersfield music, Gram Parsons and that whole side of
country music."
The first seeds of what would become Sons of the
Palomino would be sewn over a decade ago when Steele wrote the song
"Independent Trucker" with Chris Stapleton, which was recorded by Brooks
and Dunn in 2004. "We were looking at each other back then, saying,
'Can we write a song like this?' And I remember Chris saying, 'We'd be
stupid if we didn't,'" he says. The key for Steele was that these songs
were shuffles. "Back in the day, my mom and dad would come out and see
me play and just two-step all night around the dance floor," he
remembers. "Everything's mechanical now, everything's beats. There are
no shuffles anymore."
Excited by the initial recordings, Steele
assembled a group of veteran ringers to re-create the sounds of Eighties
Los Angeles, including Paul Franklin on steel guitar, Glenn Worf on
bass, and Gordon Mote on keys. "For the most part, the band are guys
I've worked with for at least 25 years. All the guys in the band have
played on a lot of those records, so they get the gag of it. They get
what it's all about," Steele says. Others soon followed, including
Emmylou Harris, who contributes a particularly beautiful vocal on "Out
of This Town." "I played one for Vince Gill and he flipped. He wanted to
sing on it. Then I played that one for Jamey Johnson and he went, 'Man,
do you got one I can sing on?'" Steele recalls with a laugh.
All three of those singers, along with John Anderson and Gretchen Wilson, make appearances on Sons of the Palomino,
the band's debut LP, which was released in June. Some collaborators,
like Adam Hood, who wrote album opener "Runnin' Round," needed more
convincing. "He had that title and wanted to write a drum loop thing for
it. I just listened to the title and was like, 'That title is from
1965. It's gonna be a Sons of the Palomino song,'" says Steele, who
immediately heard it as a shuffle. "I ended up recording it, but I think
he thought I'd lost my mind."
When it came to naming the band,
Steele thought of his old friend, Billy Block, who'd played with him in
the Palomino's house band alongside Jim Lauderdale, Buddy Miller and
Dale Watson. "He always wanted to do a recreation of that house band and
call it Sons of the Palomino," Steele says. "He kept trying to put it
together, but everybody's schedule was busy. We just couldn't do it."
Sadly, Block, who'd moved to Nashville and established his own weekly
staple, Western Beat, died of melanoma in 2015. With the blessing of
Block's wife, Steele took on the Sons of the Palomino moniker.
"That's
where I was from. It summed up how I got to here. It was kind of my
college education," Steele says of the Palomino, which closed its doors
in 1995. More than just nostalgia, Sons of the Palomino has given him
the opportunity to do something completely different than what he's used
to artistically. "A lot of people who know me, have seen my show or my
band, they've never seen that side of me before. I'm like a crooner. I'm
doing Charlie Rich songs, lots of really cool covers like Dave Dudley,"
he says.
Bringing those old songs and sounds back to life is
something that Steele hopes will turn younger country fans onto artists
like Rich and Dudley, whom they may have never heard before. "There's no
history anymore, nobody knows those guys. Everybody knows the icons, of
course, but there was a lot of great music back then that people have
forgotten about," he says. "Maybe this opens the door for people who've
never heard the stuff."
No comments:
Post a Comment