|
by John Wooley
Sitting right
in the middle of the country, with music from the rest of the USA swirling
through it from all sides, Oklahoma has understandably been the source of
several influential pop-music movements. Invariably, those styles can be
traced not just to a city, but to a specific place within that city – as
well as to an act that sums up what it’s all about.
You can begin
in the 1920s with the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, who’d become a huge force
in the creation of Kansas City jazz, coming out of the downtown OKC area
known as Deep Deuce. Not long afterwards, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys
popularized the music now known as western swing from the Cain’s Ballroom in
Tulsa; several decades later that same town’s Leon Russell turned a church
into a studio, introducing the Tulsa Sound to the whole doggone rock ‘n’
roll world.
Like the
others, Red Dirt music grew up in a specific place in a specific town. The
town is Stillwater, home of Oklahoma State University. The place was a
two-story, five-bedroom, funky old place called the Farm -- for two decades
the epicenter of what would come to be called the Red Dirt scene.
The act that
represents Red Dirt? You couldn’t do any better than the Red Dirt Rangers,
who’ve been carrying the banner for Red Dirt music since the late 1980s. And
years before the band existed, Ben Han, John Cooper, and Brad Piccolo became
an integral part of the Farm’s musical brotherhood, trading songs and licks
with the likes of Jimmy LaFave, Tom Skinner, and Bob Childers – and, later,
with such now white-hot acts as Cross Canadian Ragweed, Jason Boland and the
Stragglers and Stoney LaRue.
“We would keep
on coming in, every weekend, and whoever was playing music at the time, we’d
just chime in,” recalls Ranger lead guitarist-vocalist Ben Han, whose
journey to the Farm began in far-away Borneo. “Living-room jams became jams
for beers, and then it was, `Hey, we’ve got something going on.’ We just
proceeded with what we already had, called a couple of friends, and the next
thing you know, we’re pickin’ and grinning.”
That
casual approach to becoming a band is the very antithesis of the
ambition-driven grab for the stars that makes shows like American Idol
possible. But the Rangers’ laid-back road-less-traveled style splendidly
evokes the musicians who honed their chops in the living room, front porch,
garage (aka “The Gypsy Café”) and campfire-dotted acreage of the Farm, where
the sheer joy of creating music with friends transcended everything else. As
Rangers mandolinist-vocalist John Cooper has noted, “ The Farm was as much
an attitude as a physical structure. It allowed a setting where freedom rang
and all things were possible. Out of this setting came the music.”
The physical
structure burned down in 2003. But the attitude prevails in not only every
Red Dirt Rangers show and song, but also in the acclaimed new disc Ranger
Motel – produced by Red Dirt godfather Steve Ripley at Tulsa’s legendary
Church Studio -- which finds the band consistently conjuring up the spirit
of the Farm and Stillwater. Opening and closing with two direct evocations
of their old hometown, LaFave’s “Red Dirt Roads” and Piccolo’s longingly
wistful “Stillwater,” Ranger Motel is chock-full of connections to
those golden days at the Farm, In addition to songs penned by such Red Dirt
compadres as Childers, Skinner, Mike McClure, Greg Jacobs and Ranger bassist
Don Morris, it includes a spirited remake of “Lavena,” a tune from the
band’s very first album, the cassette-only Cimarron Soul (1991).
Along with
longtime musical pals Randy Crouch on fiddle and Tulsa Sound legend Jim
Karstein on drums, Ranger Motel features appearances by another Tulsa
great, harmonica player Jimmy Markham, and Texas-based keyboardist Augie
Meyers, whose genre-twisting work with the Sir Douglas Quintet and Texas
Tornados had a major influence on the Rangers’ music.
Another
influence on the disc is far less joyful. In the summer of 2004, the three
Rangers all went down in a near-fatal helicopter crash. Guitarist-vocalist
Piccolo believes that whole experience helped return them to their
Stillwater roots.
“A lot of
times, you’re just kind of rambling along, and it takes an epiphany like
that, a defining moment, to let you know what your purpose is,” he explains.
“Now, I just want to make good music and send a good feeling out there to
people.”
That’s exactly
what the Red Dirt Rangers do with Ranger Motel, channeling the deep
and wondrous vibe of the Farm, and playing it forward to a new generation.
|
