The Bottle Rockets end their three-year hiatus on February 25th with the release of Songs of Sahm. The album contains no original material, but instead has the Festus, Missouri, roots rockers tackling thirteen songs by the late Texas singer-songwriter Doug Sahm. Just don't call it a tribute record.

"We don't think of it as a tribute record," says Bottle Rocket vocalist/guitarist Brain Henneman. It's just an album of us playing songs by our favorite guy in the world. We noticed the fact that Doug Sahm passed away without much fanfare, and we thought somebody ought to put an album together for him."

When the logistics of gathering other artists for a full-fledged tribute proved too daunting, the band decided to go it alone. Songs of Sahm went from idea to reality in ninety days in the fall of 2001 -- two months that included the band finding a new record deal with Bloodshot Records. The Bottle Rockets, who previously recorded for Atlantic and Doolittle Records, have appeared on two Bloodshot collections, but this marks their first full-length effort for the label.

Produced by Lou Whitney, Songs of Sahm is the sound of the Bottle Rockets getting back on the horse. "We'd taken a pretty long time off and were looking for any excuse just to get back in the studio, and at the time we only had half an album ready to go," says Henneman. In the time since releasing 1999's Brand New Year, Henneman dealt with the deaths of both parents in a six-month period, drummer Mark Ortmann worked as a drum-tech for Shelby Lynne, bassist Robert Kearns toured with Chris Duarte, and guitarist Tom Paar took up a day-job driving an old-age transportation van. "It's getting us back working again, and takes the pressure off of having to come up with a whole album of new stuff."

Sahm, who died in 1999, was something of a godfather in the cultish Texas music scene. One of the first musicians to incorporate the sounds of the border into rock music, Sahm's career spanned almost fifty years. On Songs of Sahm, the Bottle Rockets cover Sham's two greatest hits from his days with the Sir Douglas Quintet, "Mendocino" and "She's About a Mover," as well as later tracks from Sham's Austin Cosmic Cowboy heyday like "Stoned Faces Don't Lie" and "You Can't Hide a Redneck (Under That Hippy Hair)."

"I think John Fogerty is about as cool as you can get," says Henneman. "And somehow, Doug Sahm was just a level cooler than that. It was country and rock and blues, and it never sounded like he was crossing genres. It was just him. Sahm was a total hippie, but he didn't get into a hippie-style of music. I always wished I could be as cool as him, and I could never come close."

Void of the twang of earlier Bottle Rockets efforts, Songs of Sahm is a decidedly rock record that came together with relative ease. "We'd been covering 'She's About a Mover' and 'Mendocino' for years, but the funny thing was, when we made the album we'd all been listening to him for so long that we basically recorded the whole album by memory," Henneman says. "We didn't go listen to any of the records to record it. That's just how we remembered it."

The Bottle Rockets will begin a national tour in support of Songs of Sahm on February 27th in Madison, Wisconsin.

Songs of Sahm track listing:

Floataway
Mendocino
Be Real
At the Crossroads
She's About a Mover
Lawd, I'm Just a Country Boy in This Great Big Freaky City
Nitty Gritty
Song of Everything
Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day
Stoned Faces Don't Lie
You Can't Hide a Redneck (Under that Hippy Hair)
I Don't Want to Go Home
I'm Not That Kat Anymore

PAUL GOLDSMITH
(January 30, 2002)