Rob Savoy hits Rewind for a look back at 1990’s The Bluerunners, which took the band from the bars of Lafayette to the pages of Rolling Stone.
“We were playing the Maple Leaf. Tripp Friedler started coming to see us, and said, ‘I can get you a deal with Island Records.’ We said, ‘sure, like that’s true.’
One night Tripp brings this producer from New York, Rob Fraboni. He had produced the Rolling Stones, Clapton, The Band, some incredible records.
He said, ‘we’re gonna make some demos and try to get you guys a deal.’ We didn’t really know what ‘demo’ meant other than little recordings we had made in our house on a four-track recorder.
We started going to Southlake Studios out near Causeway. It was the first time we were in a ‘real studio.’ By today’s standards, it wasn’t elaborate, but at the time it had multi-track, isolation booths, it was all new to us.
We started making these demos, not really understanding what happens, what’s next, not knowing what the role of a producer is because we’d never had one.
We pretty much did everything live. We had a couple of vocal and guitar overdubs, maybe accordion solos.
This went on for what seemed like a year. We’d go in for three or four days between tours, never knowing what was going to happen. We just kept trying to make a living.
At some point Tripp came to us and said, ‘We got the deal.’ We still didn’t know what that meant, but he said we had a deal with Island Records and it was going to come out and we said, ‘well, how do we make the record?’ and Trip said, ‘we already did.’ So that series of demos became what the record was along with some mixing and mastering. Pretty much we heard the tracks we did in Metairie and then all of sudden it was ‘this is the record.’
We kind of started getting the idea, ‘oh… wait a minute… we could actually make something of this’ and one of the songs was called, “Viens Avec Moi.” It’s a waltz song, so we thought, ‘why don’t we get Michael Doucet to play on it?’ BeauSoleil is one of the reasons we play music at all because they were the Lafayette example of guys who had a rock background and took traditional Cajun music, put their own twist on it and had a brilliant career. Michael did this brilliant, soaring, whirling fiddle thing that just took it to a whole other level.
It was one of the first times I recorded upright bass. I had this creaky old bass, but Rob Fraboni and the engineer, Steve Himelfarb, were very patient with me in working with this funky instrument and my very rudimentary ability at the time to get a good sound and make it sound like an old record.
Fraboni insisted we do at least one cover from outside our wheelhouse, so he brought us this Teeny Hodges song, ‘I Sho’ Do.’ Teeny had written ‘Take Me To The River’ and some other great songs. If I remember, Mark wanted nothing to do with it, so I agreed to sing it. It was a style I never sang before, but again, they were very patient and coached me through it, line by line.
It ended up being a cool twist on what we were doing and somebody else’s vision.
It was a joyous time, we thought, ‘this is it, it’s gonna happen, we’re gonna be the next Black Crowes!’”
