![]() ![]() ![]() Though Son Volt has contributed to other tribute albums - they recorded “Sometimes” for the Alejandro Escovedo fundraiser effort Por Vida in 2004 - Farrar says it’s not a category that occupies much of his time. “And now you can click on iTunes or Spotify or whatever and it’s all right there, the whole catalog. “In the old days, it was so hard to find his stuff on vinyl,” Farrar says. ![]() Yet even Farrar was surprised by the depth of the Texas singer’s catalog when he started combing through it for songs to cover. More recently, he often swaps record-store finds with DuPlantis and Son Volt drummer Mark Patterson. Louis as part of an ad-hoc country band whose repertoire included songs by Sahm. ![]() Back in the early ’90s, he and Brian Henneman from the Bottle Rockets played a few shows in St. He was animated inside, too, playing with such intensity that he inadvertently whacked a microphone with his guitar, producing an audible clunk that the band did its best to mask afterward.įarrar has long counted himself a fan of Sahm’s. Sahm made a memorable entrance, pulling up to the Austin, Texas, recording studio in a vintage Lincoln Continental. (Sahm died of a heart attack in 1999, at 58.)įarrar got to know Sahm when Uncle Tupelo covered his song “Give Back the Key to My Heart” on their 1993 album Anodyne and invited the self-styled Texas Tornado to sing on the track. “Doug came from that generation where that was his social media, just getting on the phone and calling people,” says Farrar, who unearthed the answering machine tapes from some shoeboxes full of old cassettes. Phone calls from Sahm weren’t unusual: Tony Margherita, who managed Farrar’s previous band Uncle Tupelo, says Sahm frequently rang him, too, to talk about baseball. Son Volt bookended Day of the Doug with scratchy snippets of messages that Sahm left on Farrar’s answering machine in the ’90s. Going from psychedelic rock to country and then a heavy blues thing, he kept jumping around the whole time.” “The guy was into so many styles of music it’s too much for most people. “Doug’s an example of why music is interesting, and it’s not about accumulating large amounts of money,” Chadbourne told Magnet magazine in 2002. Sahm has been the subject of three separate tribute albums over the years, starting with respective LPs by jazz/psych guitarist Eugene Chadbourne and roots-rock band the Bottle Rockets in 2002, and rounded out this year with Day of the Doug, a new collection from the alt-country band Son Volt. Maybe that’s what has prompted some of his acolytes to keep alive Sahm’s legacy, a distinctive blend of British Invasion-style pop, psychedelia, country and Tex-Mex. Yet he was always more of a niche taste for those in the know than a household name. Sahm also collaborated here and there in the ’70s with the likes of Bob Dylan, Dr. Sure, the hippie-cowboy singer, songwriter and guitarist landed a handful of songs on the pop charts at his height in the ’60s with the Sir Douglas Quintet, establishing a template that Willie Nelson later used to bring his outlaw country sound to a rock ’n’ roll audience. Doug Sahm is one of those musicians whose influence has resonated well beyond the scope of his success. ![]()
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