Squirrel Nut Zippers: Lost Songs Of Doc Souchon

[Southern Broadcasting; Sep. 25]

“It’s a band that couldn’t have started anywhere else,” Jimbo Mathus says. 

He’s talking about the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Chapel Hill—specifically the rich alt-nineties ferment that produced nationally charting acts such as Ryan Adams, Ben Folds, and the Zippers, as well as local legends such as  Flat Duo Jets, Chicken Wire Gang, Zen Frisbee, and presiding folk eminences the Red Clay Ramblers, all “doing this take on deep roots,” Mathus says.

Mathus is from Mississippi and lives there today. He’s 53. Nearly 30 years ago, he was working as a deckhand in New Orleans but “looking for someplace to start what I wanted to do,” he recalls. “I met some people at Mardi Gras who lived in Chapel Hill, and I thought, next time I get off the barge I’m gonna drive up there and check it out. I was up there two hours and called the barge company and said I quit. I got a job washing dishes at Pyewacket within hours of arriving in town.”

Meanwhile, he spent his time learning about American music, theater, visual arts, and puppetry in Chapel Hill’s libraries, bookstores, and record shops. “There was an abundance of information,” Mathus says, and “it was encouraged to try new things.”

After his first new thing, the indie rock band Metal Flake Mother, came and went, Mathus started organizing backyard hootenannies like the ones he’d grown up with in Mississippi: “social music,” he calls it, serious about song but informal in energy, complete with fish fries and watermelon. 

Out of this “exuberance, joy, explosiveness—the manic craziness” came the Zippers, some of whose “original cast,” as Mathus says—he still calls the act “a theatrical troupe” and has even written a vaudevillian play for it to perform someday—“had never even done music.” 

It did not take long for the music to be done. The Zippers went platinum in 1996 and were kaput by millennium’s end. Death, divorce, dollars, drugs. 

“Watch twenty-four straight hours of Behind the Music, and you’ll hit every single thing that took us down,” original Zipper Tom Maxwell said in 2006.

Ten years after that, and 20 after the Zippers scored big with Hot and “Hell” (a more perfect union of album and single titles there has never been), Mathus was approached about an anniversary tour. It was fitting that by then he was working largely in New Orleans, the world’s most necrophiliac city. After all, the iconic “Hell” video was an old cartoon of skeletons frolicking in a graveyard. Death was always about. (Of course, Mathus spoke to the INDY while on his way to play music at a funeral in Muscle Shoals.)

Mathus called the 2016 Zippers not a “reunion” but a “revival,” brought back to life with “cats I knew that I sort of earmarked if I ever put the Zippers back together,” says Mathus, the only remaining original member. The revival tour led to the Zippers’ first album of new material since 2000, the bon-temps-rouler LP Beasts of Burgundy (2018).

Freshly enshrined in the 2020 class of the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, with The Lost Songs of Doc Souchon, coming out September 25, the Zippers are very much alive again. This version, Mathus says, has “a new level of skill and artistry and showmanship,” although, as musical director and co-producer Dr. Sick says, “I try to keep it sounding just shitty enough.” 

Mathus recruited most of the core group from the Little Big Horns, a polished brass outfit. The Zippers have been unzipped from the old body bag as “a New Orleans band with a New Orleans cosmology,” Mathus says. 

The Lost Songs of Doc Souchon sounds like a titular conceit à la Sgt. Pepper, but Doc Souchon was a real New Orleans musician, folklorist, and preservationist. Mathus discovered his only album in a secondhand shop. A couple of its tunes also appear on Lost Songs, which is mostly a covers album: a take on deep roots. It’s the sign of a well-steeped band that the three Mathus-penned tunes aren’t obvious ringers, even though they appear in sequence on the album. 

“I wanted to interweave them so you couldn’t tell which was which,” he says.

In order: “She’s Ballin’” is old-fashioned swing; “Train on Fire” is a doomy, Tom Waits-like dirge (“We had to do something that was really creepy or it wouldn’t be a Zippers record,” Mathus says) that features the return of early Zippers’ violinist Andrew Bird, who is now a music and screen star in his own right; “Mr. Wonderful” is a lounge lizard’s jealous croon to the titular character, whose razzmatazz stole the singer’s girl away. The self-referential wink is that “Mr. Wonderful” is the nickname Mathus gave the Zippers’ sax player, Hank West, who also delivers the song’s vocal, and takes the solo along with the girl.

The seven covers range from chestnuts like “Can’t Take My Eyes off of You,” in a slightly sinister arrangement by Dr. Sick, to obscurities like “Purim Nigrum,” a klezmer tune of uncertain Eastern European-Jewish origin. Dr. Sick learned it in another band (called Mazel Tov Cocktail, naturally), and heard in it an affinity between traditional Yiddish “Bulgar” rhythm and Afro-Haitian-New Orleanian Bamboula.

Such a mashup befits the spirit of the Zippers, who have kept the old backyard Chapel Hill spirit. According to Dr. Sick, “Jimbo will ask the band, ‘What do you want to do? What are you already doing that we would sound good on?’”

“Gut instinct,” Mathus says. “And I’ve been fearless about taking advantage of the opportunities that have been presented to me. I was aware enough to see one in Chapel Hill. It was urban enough; it was funky, eccentric; but it was still Southern, and I couldn’t see myself not being in the South. Chapel Hill spoke a language I understand.” 

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