Going Live With My Morning Jacket

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 24, 2006

"Okonokos," the title of the new live double CD and a companion DVD from My Morning Jacket, is as mysterious as the setting for the concert both capture: a surreal fairy-tale forest likely to be as hospitable to trolls, demons and hobbits as to a Louisville quintet known for epic, expansive, guitar-powered explorations. Into those woods we'll gladly go, to get lost or to be found, and it hardly matters which comes first.

"Music has always been the only thing that I ever understood, the only thing that I really have cared about since I've been a conscious, thinking human being," says Jim James, MMJ's co-founder, guitarist and soulful singer. "For me and my friends, it's always been the one true passion, the one true state, the one true vortex where you can climb inside this thing with other people and really just let it all out."

For James, a good -- make that a meaningful -- performance is one "where you make everybody in the room forget whatever problems they might be having. . . . When you can forget about life and the world, that's the best time -- you're lost, your personality doesn't really exist anymore."

The elaborate forest set, the magical lighting (by Pink Floyd lighting designer Marc Brickman), the passionate and intricately structured songs -- all contribute to a mind-bending journey that is intentionally nonspecific about the where or when; neither CD nor DVD identifies the actual location of the concert, San Francisco's Fillmore West. According to James, "that was exactly the point I wanted to make: It was an experience that could have been any time, any place. I wanted to remove the feeling that this concert is happening in the '90s or the '50s or the 2000s." ("Okonokos" is airing on the music television Concert Network through Thursday.)

Directed by Sam Erickson, the "Okonokos" DVD takes its place in the pantheon of classic concert mementos. The same is true for the live album, which was mixed by Michael Brauer (Bob Dylan, Coldplay) and mastered by legendary engineer Bob Ludwig. As James sees it, there's a common thread.

"I've always liked live records because they transport you to a place and time," he explains. "An album is a different world -- the tone and the pace is different. I like to sit in my room and listen to 'Thin Lizzie Live and Dangerous' and imagine I'm sitting in one of the bleachers at the concert: You can just close your eyes and hear the crowd screaming -- it's just really cool.

"When I was [in] maybe eighth grade, I heard Neil Young's 'MTV Unplugged' on the radio. I think it was one of the first live things I'd heard, and it just really made me want to be out there, made me hunger to be at a concert like that."

MMJ fans have been clamoring for a live album pretty much since the band started touring in 1999, but it may be just as well that they've waited until now, given the transformations within the band, not only in personnel but in sonic approaches. MMJ used to rehearse and record in a grain silo on a family farm in rural Shelbyville, Ky., owned by the family of guitarist Johnny Quaid (James's cousin). The silo probably accounted for the echo and reverb on MMJ's first two albums, 1999's "Tennessee Fire" and 2001's "At Dawn," effects that became signature elements of the band's jam-heavy, delightfully unpredictable live sound as well.

Early on, the facile comparison was Neil Young in his wide-open-country phase; by the time MMJ made its major-label debut with 2003's "It Still Moves," it was Crazy Horse-meets-Lynyrd Skynyrd-at-Pink Floyd's-house. Sometimes, it's only the middle band that gets highlighted, folks positing MMJ as a postmodern Skynyrd. The group so dislikes the Southern rock label that last year it did a jokey cameo in writer-director Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown" -- as a wedding band performing an almost note-for-note rendition of Skynyrd's "Free Bird."

That MMJ's ambitions transcended genre tags became clear with "Z," one of 2005's most acclaimed albums, a collection of melancholy meditations and ecstatic epiphanies, harmonized guitar showcases, dub reggae giving way to surging metal, anthemic rock to sweet soul music and, always, the exploratory jams. (MMJ remains the only band invited to four straight Bonnaroo music festivals.) The album title? Apparently the result of James's having written all its songs when he was 26, Z being the 26th letter of the alphabet.

By "Z," the band's lineup had changed: Quaid and original keyboardist Danny Cash had quit amicably in 2004 (they hated touring as much as James loves it), replaced by guitarist Carl Broemel and keyboardist Bo Koster. Bassist Two-Tone Tommy and drummer Patrick Hallahan remained aboard.

"I feel it's a completely different band," James says. "I'm really happy we started in a very different capacity than where we are now. I look at all the records that we've made and I feel like right now I'm just waking up, just starting to get used to this world, to making records."

There were other significant changes: the addition of an outside producer, John Leckie, and the use of a professional studio, Allaire, in New York's Catskills. Leckie was an assistant producer at Abbey Road Studios in the late '60s and went on to produce Radiohead, the Verve and XTC.

"It's something that I just let go of with the last record," James says of his penchant for having "total control over everything that happens with the band. It has helped me to work with somebody like John, to start listening more to what other people have to say. It's hard for me to trust somebody unless I have built a long relationship with them. We'd never worked with a producer before because I never felt awe-struck by the people who'd approached us, but his résumé spoke for itself, the records he'd worked on, and that opened me up a little more to trust what he had to say."

Songs from "Z" make up the bulk of the "Okonokos" album and DVD, with many of its best moments -- the opening "Wordless Chorus," the propulsive "Run Thru" and "One Big Holiday," the searing "What a Wonderful Man" and melancholy "Dondante" -- benefiting from expanded arrangements.

"We wanted the live record to be really long, as long as it could," James enthuses (a limited-edition vinyl box-set version includes an extra side of music). And, he adds, "we always wanted to make a live record that will stand the test of time, because nobody lives forever. I'm so glad that lots of my favorite artists made live records that documented what they were all about at certain ages and points in their careers. Once people are gone, those things are so valuable."

For instance, there's the Band, who recorded one of the great live albums, "Rock of Ages," and inspired one of the great concert films, Martin Scorsese's "The Last Waltz."

Is the Band both a model and an inspiration?

"Absolutely," James says. MMJ recently went back to the Catskills to Band drummer Levon Helm's Woodstock studio to record "It Makes No Difference" for a star-studded Band tribute album that will be released in January.

"We're wary of covers, but we like to do them here and there," James says. "I don't ever want to have a hit single with a cover or be known for one cover. But recording in Levon Helm's studio was a thrill. The Band are one of the biggest influences on us. To every musician, they're a symbol of playing music for the right reasons."

In "Wordless Chorus," the song that opens "Z" and both versions of "Okonokos," James implores, "Tell me, spirit, what has not been done / I'll rush out and do it / or are we doing it now?" Another lyric bite -- "We are the innovators / they are the imitators" -- sounds as if it might be a mission statement, but James points out that "oftentimes when I write lyrics like those, it's not necessarily talking about me or us."

"I know that we're trying as hard as we can [to be innovative]," he says. "I feel I'm inspired more from the past than I am from the present, but there's also a lot of inspiring stuff happening now. Sometimes I question what is really true innovation, but I'm really proud of what we've done -- I feel like we're trying as much as we can," he adds with a laugh.

My Morning Jacket and the Slip Appearing Monday and Tuesday at the 9:30 club Sounds like: Tender one moment, roiling the next, with a majestic sweep that can transport a listener in much the same manner it does the musicians.