photo by Joel Salcido
It was two decades ago that the BoDeans hit the stage for a memorable concert at the legendary Palomino Club in North Hollywood, Calif.
A former biker bar and certifiable dive, the Palomino was a fixture on the Los Angeles country rock scene dating back to the ’60s, known for concerts by the likes of Buck Owens, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Johnny Cash. By 1986, the club had become ground zero for what was being called the cow-punk movement, with young bands like The Blasters and the Long Riders infusing pure American country and rock with the brash attitude of new wave and punk.
On this night, a coming-out party of sorts was being staged for a hot new band from the exotic-sounding town of Waukesha, in the not-so-exotic state of Wisconsin. The BoDeans were set to explode. Their first album, Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams, produced by T Bone Burnett for the resoundingly hip Slash Records, was causing a buzz. A fawning tribute by the estimable Jay Cocks in Time magazine, who called the album “the most galvanic major-label debut of the year,” had fed the groundswell. All that remained was a show before an industry audience to justify all the hype.
I was there that evening and can attest: The BoDeans delivered. Guitarists and vocalists Kurt Neumann and Sammy Llanas, together with bassist Bob Griffin and drummer Guy Hoffman – the four original BoDeans – tore up a club whose ceiling was sometimes known to drip sweat, a sign perhaps that the rock ’n’ roll gods were appeased. The BoDeans were young, impossibly self-possessed, and by their own admission not yet skilled at their craft, but the embodiment of a bright new band destined for big things. With a battered RV with Wisconsin plates outside in the parking lot, prepared to haul them back and forth across the country for a grueling nine-month tour, the BoDeans were on their way.
“We were on top of the world,” Llanas would recall years later, adding with a soft, melodramatic smile: “We didn’t know what was lurking in the darkness yet.”
In the years since then, the band’s key leaders, Llanas and Neumann, have drifted apart for long stretches as albums and tours became more infrequent. For the past five years, they have spent more time together in courtrooms than in recording studios or on concert stages, as a pair of lawsuits threatened the BoDeans with financial ruin. The hard knocks of real life gradually caught up with the melancholy that was always lurking in many of their song lyrics.
But today, the BoDeans have a new album, Still. They have gone back to the venerated Burnett as producer and are currently touring the country hard to promote the album and reconnect with fans lost along the way. They are 20 years older than when they hit it big, but still yearn to recapture that glory, if not the special feeling of that time. Still could be the band’s last, best hope of keeping the dream alive.
* * *
“People talk about the music scene in New York in the ’50s, with Charlie Parker and Birdland and all that, and that’s how the East Side of Milwaukee felt to me,” Neumann says, remembering the club circuit of the 1980s, which included Century Hall, The Landing, Hooligans and Teddy’s (now Shank Hall). “When we were playing those tiny bars that were packed with people and everybody was dancing and having a great time, it felt like the most beautiful way to live.”
Paul Cebar, who was a fixture on the scene back then with the R&B Cadets, remembers the BoDeans making their presence known in the waning days of the 18-year-old drinking age, which fueled the thriving live music community. He quickly became their champion.
“I really liked their sound,” he recalls. “There was a real simplicity to what they were doing, but intensity. It was something to be reckoned with.
“We tried to have the BoDeans open for us whenever they wanted. I’ve always felt that if you like someone, open the door and let them get at your fans; let them decide what they think.” (Cebar and fellow Cadets Robin Pluer and John Sieger are thanked for their generosity in the liner notes of the BoDeans’ first album.)
It was this sense of community that the BoDeans left behind when their big break came. For Neumann, it sounds like a classic case of ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
“After we got the record contract and we were in the middle of America in our RV, going from city to city where we really weren’t well known, I remember shaking my head, looking at Sam, and saying, ‘What have we done?’ ”
What they had done in 1985 was sign with Slash Records, which had partnered with a deep-pocketed Warner Brothers to make a better offer than Capitol, which had come to Milwaukee to scout another band, but instead fell in love with the BoDeans. It was a surprise to many, which Neumann believes led to simmering animosity among Milwaukee’s other bands, some of whom were more skilled or schooled musically and had been chasing a record contract for much longer. It may be why, to this day, stories persist about the prickly behavior of Llanas and Neumann. “I’ve always felt that there are still people who would be happy for the band to fail,” says Neumann, now 46.
But all seemed golden for the BoDeans with the success of Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams. They recorded and performed with The Band’s Robbie Robertson, traveled with U2 on its breakthrough Joshua Tree tour, and the readers of Rolling Stone voted them Best New American Band. (In a glimpse of the changing marketplace the band would soon face, the next year’s winner was Guns N’ Roses.) But starting with their second album, the disappointing Outside Looking In (1987), the band hit a wall of sorts. Albums sold decently, but never impressively. Tours were successful, but in fewer markets and smaller venues over time.
Looking back, a big part of the problem is that the BoDeans have never been as engaging on record, where the songs are often stripped of the ebullience of their concerts. In 1988, a rapturous New York Times review of a BoDeans concert summed up the problem perfectly: The band’s first two records, the reviewer wrote, “brought out the worst, most melancholy aspect of the group. Obviously sentimental and without the redeeming grace of excess, the records sound as if they were made by ordinary people who occasionally took themselves too seriously.” This from a guy who had a great time at their show.
“We’re always better live. If somebody sees us live, I think they get a better picture of what the band’s really about,” says Llanas, now 47. “It’s hard to make a good record. People always want that live feeling and it’s almost impossible because it’s a completely different situation.”
As witnessed in recent local shows, the BoDeans still deliver in concert, with songs from more recent albums like Go Slow Down (1993) and Resolution (2004) meshing perfectly with the classics. The band’s Homebrewed: Live From the Pabst (2005) displays the band’s continued onstage potency.
But off stage? The sterility and forced focus of a studio recording has drained the spirit of many bands, but the problem goes deeper for the BoDeans. The band’s two decades of lyrics reveal a trait that can definitely hurt your mass appeal. As the Times reviewer noted, the BoDeans can often be a drag.
Llanas is by far the more melancholy of the two leaders, his distinctively pinched voice given to melodramatic quavering when he sinks deep into dark tunes about loss, broken dreams and loneliness. (This quality was put to stunning use on A Good Day to Die,his 1998 album with new band Absinthe that was inspired by his troubled older brother’s suicide in 1976.) Neumann, blessed with a clean, honeyed voice, plays a feisty hot-rod guitar and is more likely to deliver up-tempo pop tunes and hard-driving rave-ups, like the concert staple “Good Work.” But he, too, tends to mope in his writing. Even a pleasing rocker like Resolution’s “(We Can) Live,” all swagger and power chords, gives way to moans of “They say good things come to those who wait … but they don’t!”
As if the frustrations of their career cannot help but infect their lyrics, too many songs drip with a glum yearning for clarity or comfort or forgiveness or … you name it, one of the two songwriters seems to be yearning for it. Even songs that resolve optimistically usually get there with an air of regret or compromise. While unfulfilled longing can be endearing in a young man, in their middle-age, you can’t help wanting Neumann and Llanas to figure this stuff out, or just get over it. There are other things for grown men to sing about.
Just maybe not lawyers and courtrooms and friendships turned toxic.
* * *
Mark McCraw was a high school friend of Neumann and Llanas who became their manager and invested his own money in the band to keep it afloat in the early days. But in 2003, the BoDeans sued McCraw. The suit sprung from an agreement signed in 1996 in the wake of their fluke Top 40 single, “Closer to Free,” plucked from obscurity as the theme song of the hit Fox series “Party of Five.” With decent money finally flowing in, McCraw – whose previous management contract had lapsed – wanted to protect his job, but also secure post-termination compensation in the event that he was ever fired. Just when “Closer to Free” was pumping new life into their career, the band claims McCraw effectively went on strike until they signed the new agreement.
“It was just the worst possible time for it to happen,” Neumann recalls bitterly. “We worked all those years and finally get a hit, and then this person tries to stop it by throwing a wrench in the gears. I’ll never really be able to come to terms with it. I have so much anger about it.”
The band reluctantly signed the agreement, but a sustained boost from “Closer to Free” never came. Staff upheaval at the record label and lackluster sales of Blend (1996) prompted Slash to drop the band, and when McCraw failed to find the BoDeans a new label (among other claims of alleged mismanagement), they fired him. This set off a fight over the terms of the 1996 agreement and the circumstances under which it was signed. Also at issue was whether McCraw had partial ownership of the BoDeans’ music, made hazy by the terms of their original agreement, signed in 1985.
After an acrimonious and costly court fight (Neumann put the band’s legal bills at almost $300,000 in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story), the case was settled in the summer of 2005, the details undisclosed. (McCraw declined to be interviewed for this article. Both Cebar and Bill Camplin, another musician on the local music scene in the early ’80s, offered fond recollections of McCraw’s role in BoDeans history, and expressed regret over the bitter turn of events.)
A second suit against the band’s entertainment lawyer for her role in the 1996 agreement was settled last year. The band took satisfaction in the outcome, but the twin lawsuits have left them in a dire financial hole, which they are now trying to rock their way out of.
After a disappointing experience with Rounder Records on 2004’s Resolution, the band was again without a label when they were finally ready to release Still, only their eighth album of new material in more than 20 years. Assessing a grave musical landscape in which even hit-generating bands are being dropped by major companies, the band was resigned to release the album in March through its own label, He & He Records. The hope is that goodwill and some old-fashioned Midwestern work ethic will beat the odds against an independent release. But Neumann can’t help being apprehensive.
“I don’t know that we can do anything that is going to strike the industry as new and interesting and big,” he says. “We’re an old act that has been here so long that when someone hears the BoDeans name, they already have an image in their mind.
“I don’t even know how interesting we are to our hardcore fans,” Neumann adds. “If we do something different, people are going to say, ‘Why’d you do that? It sucks.’ But if we don’t change our sound, they’ll say, ‘You’ve done this already a million times, there’s nothing interesting about this.’ You kind of can’t win.”
Reviews of Still have been positive, at least in the Wisconsin outlets that still give ink to local artists. The album brought back the talents of their first producer and most influential mentor, T Bone Burnett, after a chance meeting between Neumann and Burnett in a Texas airport. Since 1985, Burnett has become a roots rock godhead, winning a Grammy for his soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? and producing acclaimed albums for Elvis Costello, the Wallflowers, Los Lobos, and the recent Alison Krauss/Robert Plant collaboration.
His stripped-down sound still serves the BoDeans well, but one wishes the famously prickly musician had asserted himself more over the choice of songs, some of which date back to the darkest days of the band’s legal troubles. Llanas and Neumann each get one mood piece – “Pretty Ghost” and “Breathe,” the latter a grim buzz-killer about an injured child – and there are a sufficient number of earnest, slow- to mid-tempo janglers that have come to define the band. The trademark meshing of Llanas and Neumann’s voices remains a splendid thing to hear, but at a time when the band’s best hope might be to reconnect with the baby boomers who had a lighthearted blast at a BoDeans concert during the Reagan administration, Still is not much fun. In concert, the band continues to be loose and at times even silly; this album is not that. The stage-versus-studio disconnect continues.
The trick now will be mixing the fresh material into the live act in order to move the new merchandise while pleasing the “Play the old stuff!” fans who couldn’t care less about hearing new songs (ask the Stones). A full slate of concerts has been scheduled throughout the spring and summer, sticking primarily to the midsection of the country and the musical festivals and smaller venues that are the bread and butter of veteran, midlevel bands. Touring will allow Neumann and Llanas to spend some concentrated time together, which, oddly enough, has become something of a rarity for the duo.
* * *
Kurt Neumann lives just outside Austin, Texas. It’s true: Half of “Milwaukee’s own BoDeans” hasn’t lived here since 1994, when a foundering first marriage prompted a change of scenery. Neumann gets back to Wisconsin regularly, to visit family, to perform, and – until recently – to rack up lawyer bills.
Neumann and Llanas have always developed their BoDeans songs individually, refining them together once they meet in the studio, but geography and personality differences have caused them to grow apart as friends. Ask yourself if you still regularly see anyone you knew as a teenager – let alone have your professional and artistic existence inextricably tied to them – and you can appreciate how the Neumann/Llanas partnership has settled into a respectful functionality.
“Sam and I have always maintained distance, even when I lived in Milwaukee,” says Neumann, a family man to Llanas’ committed bachelor. “We worked so much together that when we weren’t working, we’d give each other space. We’re very different people. We live very different lives.”
Adds Llanas, “We’ve always had the kind of relationship where we knew what the other was thinking. We don’t have to do a lot of talking about it, which is why the partnership has lasted this long. There’s a chemistry there you don’t find very often, and what we’ve learned along the way is that we should really, really value that. We’re better together than apart.”
The band is exploring every opportunity to keep the amps on. Following the current trend that finds even major acts like Tom Petty and Aerosmith renting themselves out for high fees to play in front of private audiences, the band welcomes interest from corporate entities or monied baby boomers willing to pay for their own exclusive BoDeans concert. (They performed for the Chicago Dental Society last year.) While the band once toed the “artistic integrity” line on the subject of licensing songs to advertising, Neumann chuckles now when asked about the Violent Femmes song that recently turned up in a Wendy’s commercial. As the BoDeans learned with their lone hit single, one lucky break on television can subsidize a band for years.
Whatever it takes, to not fade away.
“We need to get back on track. We need a record that radio is going to want to play,” says Llanas, when asked if Still represents a make-or-break situation for the band. “We are certainly in a financial spot that we’d rather not be in. Our losses have been very expensive, and they seem to go on and on and on.”
While he was scrambling to put the finishing touches on the new record, I told Neumann about something I saw at a Pick ’n Save in Brookfield over the holidays. The grocery store had recently gone upscale, and now offered live acoustic music on weekends. One Saturday morning, a duo of performers departed from an all-holiday set list to play the venerable BoDeans track “She’s a Runaway.” It was a cheesy moment perhaps, yet oddly quaint when I saw the lips of some customers silently singing along as they walked the aisles shopping for their Christmas dinner. At least in Brookfield, neighbor to Waukesha, the BoDeans were still hit-makers.
I shared this anecdote delicately, fearing Neumann might bristle at the notion of his life’s work reduced to tacky background music for suburban grocery shoppers. Instead, his voice broke out of the dispirited monotone which marked most of a 90-minute conversation. It was the same heartfelt enthusiasm heard as he longed for those days back at Century Hall, back when Milwaukee seemed such a hot rock ’n’ roll town, and it was all just about being with friends and playing your music.
“I was a blue-collar kid,” Neumann mused. “To have somebody singing your songs in the grocery store is about as human as you can get. That’s the most basic thing that you could want for your music. It’s why we do what we do.”
Tom Matthews, author of Like We Care, is a Wauwatosa-based freelancer. Write him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
