Fat Possum Blues
Renegade Mississippi label keeps on truckin’
Since its inception, Mississippi-based Fat Possum Records has offered a snarling antidote to, according to founder Matthew Johnson, the sanitized face of mainstream blues and the fossilized genre conventions fiercely guarded by purists. The label’s flagship performers, R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford, make guttural, primitive music, unrefined and unblinking in its exploration of hardscrabble lives in the Mississippi hill country. (Both men are convicted killers and way-past-retirement-age veterans of the Delta’s juke-joint circuit.)
That undercurrent of visceral expression runs deep in the Fat Possum roster. From the moaning slide guitar of Kenny Brown to the jagged rock of the Black Keys, all of the label’s acts contribute to what The New Yorker called Johnson’s “evolution of the authentic anarchic howl.”
Which is an appropriate characterization for Johnson himself, who emerges in conversation as restlessness personified. Sounding at turns defeated, stubborn, tired (he schedules this interview for 9:30 a.m.), resentful and (cautiously) optimistic, he seems steeped in the exultant misery, the self-aggrandizing bluster, that characterizes the strain of Mississippi blues he’s helped make famous.
To be sure, Johnson has ample reason to feel all of these things. For starters, he’s still weathering the dissolution of Fat Possum’s distribution deal with the punk label Epitaph.
“It’s been hard,” he says. “The whole industry’s off 36 percent for the past two or three years, so funding for blues and smaller stuff gets put on hold. What’s the best way to say it? It’s maybe run its course. [Epitaph] were the best and only people that could have helped us [in the beginning], you know?”
Although the label has rebounded, inking a distribution deal with Rykodisc, Fat Possum has a storied past of financial volatility. Its fiscal situation has improved in recent years, but, as an independent, the label is particularly vulnerable to the effects of the industry’s dwindling fortunes.
“Sometimes it’s real comfortable and everything’s great, and sometimes it’s not,” Johnson says. “We’re not hand-to-mouth like we used to be, though it doesn’t take long for a record company to run out of money.”
Especially a record company known primarily for mining a particularly time-sensitive niche. Whereas he was once known to scour the Mississippi countryside in search of authentic and overlooked bluesmen, Johnson says that there’s little future left in that field:
“It’s so hard to make a dime doing it. Best-case scenario: You maybe break even, then they die or something. We had a record coming out. The guy was just a motherfucker of a guitar player, Charles Caldwell. He had the charisma. He was like R.L., when I met him. [Then he] gets pancreatic cancer right as we’re finishing the record.”
If recent signings like the Black Keys and Grandpaboy (a.k.a. Paul Westerberg) signal a bit of a retreat from Fat Possum’s original mission of trying to save the blues from purists, Johnson’s not bothered.
“I don’t think of it,” he says. “It’s a normal evolution. The Black Keys can do [Fat Possum artist] Junior [Kimbrough] better than anybody living. They just smoke. It’s real easy to out-hip yourself. I try to go with something that strikes a chord with me. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, they’re going in this direction,’ but we’re just trying to survive.”
For now, survival entails — or requires — another installment of the Fat Possum Caravan Tour, which packages label acts together to solidify the brand with club audiences. Asked what he’ll do when mainstays like Burnside and Ford, who are both well past 70 and must perform seated, can no longer tour, Johnson indulges in a bit of gallows humor appropriate to the subject:
“Then I’m going to take the guys in their caskets on tour, and put ‘em on view.”
That undercurrent of visceral expression runs deep in the Fat Possum roster. From the moaning slide guitar of Kenny Brown to the jagged rock of the Black Keys, all of the label’s acts contribute to what The New Yorker called Johnson’s “evolution of the authentic anarchic howl.”
Which is an appropriate characterization for Johnson himself, who emerges in conversation as restlessness personified. Sounding at turns defeated, stubborn, tired (he schedules this interview for 9:30 a.m.), resentful and (cautiously) optimistic, he seems steeped in the exultant misery, the self-aggrandizing bluster, that characterizes the strain of Mississippi blues he’s helped make famous.
To be sure, Johnson has ample reason to feel all of these things. For starters, he’s still weathering the dissolution of Fat Possum’s distribution deal with the punk label Epitaph.
“It’s been hard,” he says. “The whole industry’s off 36 percent for the past two or three years, so funding for blues and smaller stuff gets put on hold. What’s the best way to say it? It’s maybe run its course. [Epitaph] were the best and only people that could have helped us [in the beginning], you know?”
Although the label has rebounded, inking a distribution deal with Rykodisc, Fat Possum has a storied past of financial volatility. Its fiscal situation has improved in recent years, but, as an independent, the label is particularly vulnerable to the effects of the industry’s dwindling fortunes.
“Sometimes it’s real comfortable and everything’s great, and sometimes it’s not,” Johnson says. “We’re not hand-to-mouth like we used to be, though it doesn’t take long for a record company to run out of money.”
Especially a record company known primarily for mining a particularly time-sensitive niche. Whereas he was once known to scour the Mississippi countryside in search of authentic and overlooked bluesmen, Johnson says that there’s little future left in that field:
“It’s so hard to make a dime doing it. Best-case scenario: You maybe break even, then they die or something. We had a record coming out. The guy was just a motherfucker of a guitar player, Charles Caldwell. He had the charisma. He was like R.L., when I met him. [Then he] gets pancreatic cancer right as we’re finishing the record.”
If recent signings like the Black Keys and Grandpaboy (a.k.a. Paul Westerberg) signal a bit of a retreat from Fat Possum’s original mission of trying to save the blues from purists, Johnson’s not bothered.
“I don’t think of it,” he says. “It’s a normal evolution. The Black Keys can do [Fat Possum artist] Junior [Kimbrough] better than anybody living. They just smoke. It’s real easy to out-hip yourself. I try to go with something that strikes a chord with me. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, they’re going in this direction,’ but we’re just trying to survive.”
For now, survival entails — or requires — another installment of the Fat Possum Caravan Tour, which packages label acts together to solidify the brand with club audiences. Asked what he’ll do when mainstays like Burnside and Ford, who are both well past 70 and must perform seated, can no longer tour, Johnson indulges in a bit of gallows humor appropriate to the subject:
“Then I’m going to take the guys in their caskets on tour, and put ‘em on view.”