Published in the July / August issue of
Rhythms magazine
POSSUM MAGIC
Founded in 1991, FAT
POSSUM RECORDS this year celebrates its 25th anniversary. For a
quarter century though, it’s been anything but normal, writes SAMUEL J. FELL
I
don’t know when I first heard T-Model Ford. I remember how it made me feel though.
Like I wanted – nay, needed – to
fight, fuck and forget all at once. Guttural and shit-stained, all piss and
bile, the music barely hung together by the skin of its teeth as it rumbled
along all fractured and fucked up, so close to slipping off the rails but
managing to cling on until the song ended with a rattle of a laugh, a guitar
twang, the out-of-time thump of a snare drum.
I
loved it.
 |
| T-Model Ford |
I
loved RL Burnside too, whether he was by himself or immersed within the punk
blues the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion trafficked in, their 1996 collaboration, A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey, an eye-opening revelation for me. A few
years ago, I was introduced to the music of Junior Kimbrough and I loved him
too. Their music was hypnotic and droning, trance-like, thumping and riding off
a primal beat, a far cry from the acoustic folk blues players, even the
electric guys. This was something else entirely. Ragged and raw. No one seemed
to give a goddamn. It was beautiful in a way.
All
those guys are dead now. They were outlaws – drinkers, murderers, miscreants – and it’s amazing some of them lived as long as
they did. Burnside died from a heart attack in 2005. Ford died of respiratory
failure in 2013. Kimbrough also died from a heart attack, allegedly leaving
behind 38 children. They were outlaws and it came through in their music.
It
was this music that also captured, firstly the ear, but then the heart of a
young man named Matthew Johnson. In 1991, in his early 20s, Johnson and fellow Living Blues writer Peter Redvers-Lee founded
Fat Possum Records, the now legendary indie label which championed these outlaw
bluesmen, which brought them the fame and, ultimately, money, that they
deserved. Or at least coveted.
This
year marks 25 years since Johnson and Lee founded the label, a quarter century
of highs and lows, of bringing this blues to the people in a variety of forms
and stylistic mash-ups. It’s been anything but normal, anything but boring.
“It
was recording RL Burnside, that’s all it was,” recounts Johnson on why the pair
started Fat Possum. “I did not think it was gonna work, you know what I mean? I
would have called [the label] something better, I wouldn’t have called it the
stupid name that it got.”
He
laughs when he says this, then adds, “We wanted it to be like, rock records.
All that [old blues] stuff, people were very precious and that’s not what we
were about at all, obviously. You know, we were like, screw this. We wanted it
to be more of a rock ‘n’ roll thing.”
Which
is exactly what it was. Records like Burnside’s A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey, which was licenced to Matador, was pure
rock ‘n’ roll. A slew of the label’s other releases were hard and electric,
droning and dirty, nothing like any of the other blues stuff going around.. This
hard-driving, hard-drinking, foot-to-the-floor style of the music was all these
bluesmen knew, and so Johnson and the label tried to harness that.
“There
was something that was missing,” Johnson explains. “There were all these
folklorists… big fat guys with a vest on, with cameras and shit, right?
Everything was like, ‘Oh, this is a legend’. I was like, these guys aren’t
gettin’ it – these [artists] are so much rowdier and more insane… fuck that, so
that’s when we started putting [these guys] with Jon Spencer, or Iggy Pop, or
The Beastie Boys or shit like that.”
“It
got a lot wackier, I’m kinda proud of all that. I’ve been taken to task about
the [purity of blues] which I thought was funny, I don’t care,” he goes on, his
enthusiasm taking hold. “You know, no one will play acoustic if there’s an
electric guitar there, for the most part, you know? The fact all those guys
were being made to play acoustic because that was tradition and shit, that’s
kinda bullshit, that’s not right. I was like, why should the kids have the
Marshall stacks, and they don’t? So that’s the first thing we got, with RL.”
This
is what set Fat Possum apart from the get-go. They quickly made for themselves
a reputation for not conforming in any way, shape or form, which is why they’re
so highly regarded today. The blues they were working with was different to
begin with, but they took it further - there were hip hop hybrids, punk
hybrids, rock ‘n’ roll hybrids. These artists began to cross over, picking up
fans in the unlikeliest of places. The label’s reputation grew.
Despite
this, they’ve never really made any money over the years (they were funded by
Epitaph in the mid ‘90s, saving them from certain death), but they’ve always
managed to keep afloat. There’ve been a few events which have also helped –
signing The Black Keys early on in their career; securing the rights to Al
Green’s back catalogue. For the most part though, it’s not been easy.
“I’m
not really sure, to be honest,” Johnson laughs when I ask why he never called
it quits, why the label is still here after 25 years. “Epitaph and The Black
Keys [saved us] as we were teetering on the edge… I hope we still have
relevance today, I mean, we’ve had to change our game. I do miss those guys a
lot. We still have some guys, like Fat White Family, to carry the torch of RL
Burnside.”
According
to Johnson, there’s nothing happening in rural Mississippi these days. Not like
back then, no one of the ilk of Burnside, Kimbrough, Ford, Fred McDowell,
Jessie Mae Hemphill, Johnny Farmer. “RL’s gone, Junior’s gone, all the stuff I
liked is gone,” he concurs. “The people who learned it and had those crappy
jobs, the real-deal guys, they’re all gone. [Today’s kids] don’t care, they’re
doing the hip hop thing, and I get it. They think it’s a white person’s thing.”
He
pauses after he says this. I get the impression that despite the hardships he
would have endured dealing with these artists, (“It was basically like chaos
theory,” he laughs at one point), he misses the fucked up unpredictability of
it all, not to mention the raw power of the music itself, now only existing,
gathering dust, in the label’s vaults. It’s sad in a way. Sad that these
renegades have died out and there’s no one to replace them.
The
label itself of course, has managed to survive, essentially by expanding their
sonic horizons. Their signing of The Black Keys is well documented, as is their
work with Iggy Pop, Solomon Bourke and Dinosaur Jr. It’s fair to say they’re
still known as a blues label, but these days Fat Possum has many different
fingers, in many different pies.
“A
lot of it was necessity,” Johnson explains on this sonic expansion over the
past decade and a half. “[And] it has to be bands that I like, that’s the only
criteria. There’s something about all of these bands, The Districts are one of
my favourites, and I love Seratones. We just had to evolve, or it would just
get kinda old, you know?”
Now
home to the likes of the lo-fi rock of Sunflower Bean; the roots/rock hybrid
that is Seratones; the unhinged punk roots of Fat White Family; the country of
The Felice Brothers; Jon Spencer’s disjointed side-project Heavy Trash, Fat
Possum has indeed changed its focus. What hasn’t changed though, is the quality
of the acts that call the label home – sure, it’s different music, it’s not as
hectic and chaotic as it would have been in the early ‘90s, but Fat Possum is
still very much alive, still very much focused on what they see as good music.
“I
hope so,” Johnson says after some thought, on whether the label has another 25
years in it. “I mean, hopefully we’re not gonna undo what we’ve managed to
accomplish so far.” He laughs again here, and then lapses into silence before
adding, “It’s gotten so damn hard… for a while things were flying off the
shelves, not hugely, but you know…”
The
label’s motto is ‘We’re Trying Our Best’, which says it all really. That’s what
they’ve been doing since 1991, and even as the record industry continues to
slip and slide, they’ll keep on trying their best. It’s why they’ve survived as
long as they have – an unflinching belief in the music they’re working with,
regardless of any outside influence. Just like the lurching, jangling, fucked
up outlaw bluesmen they originally championed.
