Day of the Doug

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Now, for the 28th anniversary of Trace, Son Volt will play the album in its entirety on an extensive tour this July, August and September (see full list of dates below). Also included in the set, the band will perform an homage to Doug Sahm and a celebration of 28 years of Son Volt with songs from their celebrated catalogue. Paste: And if you look at his history, he was associated with the late Freddy Fender long before they hooked up in The Texas Tornados. And the same for Flaco Jimenez. Farrar: Yeah, you know, Chris had to tend to some things, and John is a friend and an acquaintance, and he actually played on the Son Volt record [2005’s] Okemah and the Melody of Riot. He played some slide guitar, and he played some bass guitar on a solo record I did before that. So we have a long history together, so John is kind of the common thread between these two records, that’s for sure. Paste: And in terms of penning new material, I once asked the late Guy Clark how difficult it was, every year that goes by, full of new songs set in copy write stone, to somehow come up with an original one. And he said, “It’s the hardest job in the world.”

Paste: Gram Parsons has a whole Joshua Tree mythology surrounding his death. But Doug Sahm’s death in a hotel just seems so random.

Doug Sahm is one of those musicians whose influence has resonated well beyond the scope of his success. Paste: So instead of penning an entire dark pandemic album that you’d then have to go out and sing every night, you chose to dig into the past. Why Doug Sahm?

Leave it to animated Family Guy father Peter Griffin to always find the perfect cutaway-gag solution to whatever trouble he bumbles into. As in one of the show’s most surreal skits“Yikes! Looks like I need a distraction!,” he yelps in the first of several similar recurring gags relied on over the seasons. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Conway Twitty!” And yes, the show brazenly cuts to grainy old live footage of the country legend crooning an entire mournful tune, with the Griffin clan, afterwards, sitting calmly at their dinner table, all problems from three minutes earlier somehow resolved. There’s just kind of a different momentum and excitement level that goes along with doing a tribute,” Farrar says. “We were all aware that we wanted to just roll the tape and have a good time. Essentially, we knew that playing Doug’s music meant exactly that. One way or another, a good time would be had.” Trace, but the pandemic did not allow that to happen. So people had been asking about a Trace tour a lot, but the pandemic kind of put it in perspective, like, “I don’t know if we can wait on this. Let’s just get out there and do it.” Farrar: I do, yep. And it’s pretty low profile, but it’s great. It’s essentially just a stamp that goes on the record. There’s no me sitting in an office, fielding phone calls, or doing all those old-school record company things. But it affords me the freedom to do whatever, whatever I feel is creatively necessary. So in that respect, it’s great.Paste: Your cover of “Beautiful Texas Sunshine” kind of summarizes Texas as just a completely different animal. Paste: It’s so weird to look at all these pictures of him in the ’50s, sporting shades and known as Little Doug. The record starts with “Sometimes You’ve Got to Stop Chasing Rainbows,” an addictively catchy song with enough twang to be country and plenty of hooks to almost count as pop. Surprisingly, Son Volt chose to skip over some of Sahm’s best known hits like “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino” for deeper cuts and much of his earlier works. The result is a remarkably fun album reminding you just how compelling a songwriter Sahm was. Songs like the driving “Float Away” and “Dynamite Woman” are destined to become staples of Son Volt’s own live sets for years to come. They also do justice to “Poison Love” and “It’s Gona Be Easy,” two songs Sahm never wrote but recorded in the early 1970s. Paste: While you were out on tour, did you go, “Hey! Let’s go visit that place nearby that Doug frequented!” Did you do research on him that way?