The Jayhawks

Tomorrow the Green Grass (American Recordings, 1995)

February 14, 1995 was a Tuesday. I know this because back in the day albums were released on Tuesdays. And on that particular day, my girlfriend and I walked from our campus north, went to Appletree, and I got my copy of Tomorrow the Green Grass. Then we walked on to Garcia’s, which used to be on North Main in Normal, because, you know, it was Valentine’s Day, and we were on a date, a date on which I made my girlfriend accompany me to get the new Jayhawks album the day it came out.

We broke up a couple weeks later.

I’m not sure why I knew that the album was coming out that day. I was excited about it though because the previous Jayhawks album Hollywood Town Hall had installed itself as one of my favorites, and not long after I’d started college, the idea of getting an album the day it came out lodged in my mind as a very smart thing to do, so, well, there you go.

This seems strange and quaint but my introduction to Hollywood Town Hall was actually the radio. “Waiting for the Sun” managed to sneak its way in to get played pretty much every morning on WXRX, which as of 1992 was a rock station where mornings and early afternoons tended to be mellower and evenings and late nights tended to be less so. WXRX was something which in retrospect was truly bizarre: a radio station where it was common that in the same day you could hear both Steely Dan and Pantera.

“Waiting for the Sun” was a rock song that vaguely leaned country in the same way that, say, Tom Petty made rock songs that nobody especially thought of as country songs, but certainly they leaned country at times. (Indeed when “Last Dance with Mary Jane” came out in 1993, people talked about how he lifted the hook from “Waiting for the Sun”… though a while later someone pointed out they’d both lifted the hook from Neil Young!)

In retrospect what I’d say is that 1992 was probably about the last time that a band like the Jayhawks could have broken through rock radio. They were a real rock band, but twangy and poppy in ways that at some point wouldn’t work unless smoothed out into utter blandness (think Hootie and the Blowfish) or maybe grunged up. This was about the point in time where alternative country first started to break, and the Jayhawks were considered an important player in that scene, but of course, there was no coherent commercial outlet for music like that then.

Tomorrow the Green Grass was sort of DOA then because in February 1995 it managed to not quite fit any format, except for something like Chicago’s WXRT which was very expansive about rock music so long as it wasn’t too heavy. But that format was uncommon in national radio and also worked against the band in terms of being able to fit into either MTV or VH1 rotations. It was 70s pop rock, but with exceptional modern production, like if Rick Rubin had gone back in time and forged a supergroup with Brian Wilson and Gram Parsons. (It’s funny to think back to then though and recognize that the likes of Garth Brooks were having success by taking mainstream country in a direction which was arguably more pop/rock and yet still somehow a world apart from what the alternative country scene was doing.)

The Jayhawks were sort of caught up in the emerging alternative country world - Uncle Tupelo were contemporaries, Wilco’s first tour was opening for the Jayhawks, and Gary Louris and Mark Perlman even had a side / supergroup Golden Smog which included Jeff Tweedy. I think that Wilco is actually a really good comp in this sense: while the country influence is obvious, Wilco has never really been a country band. But neither has Wilco ever really been a shimmering pop band. It was like the Jayhawks, when they released Tomorrow the Green Grass, had managed to be in step with all of these pop-rock traditions, and yet just out of step with any dominant musical direction

The very things that caused the album commercial grief were the things that made it musically amazing. The harmonies between Gary Louris and Marc Olson were stunning, like on the opener “Blue”. When Louris would hit the pedal and flash his guitar chops like on “Real Light” it fit incredibly well. Immediately it was clear to me that Tomorrow the Green Grass was a spectacular work of art.

The centerpiece of it all was the somgwriting collaboration between Louris and Olson. They and bassist Mark Perlman had been playing together for a decade by this point. Olson was more in a folk/country vein and Louris was more in a pop/rock vein and Tomorrow the Green Grass represents the ultimate culmination of this interplay. The final bit that seemed to make the difference was the addition of Karen Grotberg on keyboards. The final balance it all maintains - sonically and also emotionally - is truly remarkable.

If there are two centerpieces, they’re the opener “Blue” and the stunning cover of Grand Funk Railroad’s “Bad Time”. But the album is not just a couple of high points. Maybe the most indicative song is “I’d Run Away”, which in the hands of a lesser band I think would turn into something either plodding or overwrought. It is Gary Louris in particular who oozes a complicated combination of confidence, control, and vulnerability. Thirty years later you can’t help but think they really did set out to make the great American rock record… and pulled it off.

As it so happened Tomorrow the Green Grass wound up being the primary soundtrack for my first breakup, the most frequently played album in my freshman dorm room, even though I was at a point where I was otherwise listening to things that leaned louder or noisier. It was my year-end #1 album for 1995, and probably stands out as as good an example as any of how difficult it would have been to pigeonhole my emerging tastes.

I only managed to see the Jayhawks once, at Summerfest in Milwaukee, 7/5/95. (It was the third consecutive show I saw in Milwaukee - something I foreshadowed when writing about R.E.M. very recently!) The funny thing is that we didn’t actually intend to see the Jayhawks that night. We intended to see Urge Overkill, but the stage they were supposed to be on, it was Enuff Z’nuff instead, so… Jayhawks it was!

Marc Olson unexpectedly left the band later in the year. Surely there were a lot of reasons for this, but at the time one of the things which got talked about a lot is how the band was wildly in debt to their label. It seems that there are reasons why Tomorrow the Green Grass sounds so amazing - the recording process was super expensive, the label thinking they would have a huge hit on their hands, only for it to get blunted by the evolving state of media at the time.

A couple years later, sans Olson, the Jayhawks released their followup Sound of Lies. All I can say is, it didn’t work for me. And for as much as I loved what they had done before, the band managed to substantially fall off of my immediate radar. This was during the absolute peak of my music consumption - I think I was listening to at least 10 new albums a week at the time - and, well, they weren’t the only important band to me for which this happened. The next couple albums Smile and Rainy Day Music were better and I listened more but they never stuck for me either.

The band went on hiatus for a while, then came back with Marc Olson back in the lineup, but time and time again it seemed like there was some conflict and I managed to not see them again, and have been almost totally unfamiliar with any of their material from the last 20 years.

It was then incredibly serendipitous to learn that the Jayhawks would be playing Codfish Hollow Barnstormers on July 3. This venue is literally a barn, pretty much in the middle of nowhere - 10 minutes outside Maquoketa, Iowa - a place which is kind of not on the way to anywhere at all. Except… it is sort of on the way if you happen to be going from Chicago to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Which, as it so happened, was exactly what we were planning on doing.

And the wonderful thing here is that of the hundreds of records I own and all of the music I have subjected my wife to over some 20+ years, songs from Tomorrow the Green Grass are near the very top of things she might listen to on her own. “Blue” and “Bad Time” have made it onto Spotify playlists I myself didn’t make. There are very few bands she would have been totally on board with going to a barn in rural Iowa to see, and the Jayhawks happened to be one of them.

To get to Codfish Hollow you take a state highway to a country road, which turns into dirt, and you drive about four more miles to a big field where you park across from a restored prairie. Then you climb aboard a short bus which drives a half mile down into the holler, and walk the lane up to the barn.

The band today is Gary Louris, Mark Perlman, Karen Grotberg, and Tim O’Reagan - there have been a couple shifts across the years but this has been the core of the band since 1996. They’re so thoroughly in tune with what each other are doing that it all seemed effortless, in the best sense of the word.

They’ve been a band for 40 years and Gary Louris is now 71, but I swear, they sound like they could keep doing this for another couple of decades. The set - which someone was kind enough to post - was a scattering of material from across the catalog. They closed the main set with “Blue” and they closed the encore with “Bad Time” - probably what we would have drawn up if we’d been writing the setlist ourselves.

I should probably note here that the Jayhawks are a Minnesota band - and it’s hard to imagine them having come from anywhere but the Midwest. So seeing them in a barn in rural Iowa was perfectly logical. Who better to play such a place?

I feel silly for it having been over 30 years since I’d seen the band but I couldn’t have asked for a nicer time. (I’m not sure our 12 year old was as enraptured, but he managed to find a pulled pork sandwich down at the bottom side of the barn, and sometimes all you can ask for is that your pre-teen be sated.)

It occurred to me during the set, hearing some material from Smile and Rainy Day Music, that maybe it’s only now that I’d be more in tune with some of that material. There’s a pretty large collection of music out there which I’d say is somewhere in the singer-songwriter / mid-tempo rock vein - in broad terms, definitely a space occupied by the Jayhawks and Wilco and similar bands - which I suppose I like alright but which hasn’t really been in the sweet spot. Maybe I’m shifting a little bit in that direction. Or maybe in another month I’ll be telling you all about some kind of noisy post-hardcore record. Perhaps both?

I have to imagine though that if all this sounded at all of interest to you and you’re just not familiar with the record that Tomorrow the Green Grass is definitely something you should make a point of sitting down and listening to. I’ve got a whole lot more albums to write about here, but this one is going to be near the top of the list of broadest appeal. If this exact album had come out in 1975 I feel like it might have sold 10,000,000 copies, and a lot of you would still have your old worn out vinyl of it. If you want the physical item today, try Discogs. The band is on Bandcamp but TTGG isn’t available there.

However it might be that you get your hands on it, don’t worry, you’re not likely to have a breakup two weeks after you do. But hey, if it happens to go that way, better things will be in store anyway.