![]() ![]() ![]() (Of course, Mathus spoke to the INDY while on his way to play music at a funeral in Muscle Shoals.) After all, the iconic “Hell” video was an old cartoon of skeletons frolicking in a graveyard. It was fitting that by then he was working largely in New Orleans, the world’s most necrophiliac city. Ten years after that, and 20 after the Zippers scored big with Hot and “Hell” (a more perfect union of album and single titles there has never been), Mathus was approached about an anniversary tour. “Watch twenty-four straight hours of Behind the Music, and you’ll hit every single thing that took us down,” original Zipper Tom Maxwell said in 2006. The Zippers went platinum in 1996 and were kaput by millennium’s end. It did not take long for the music to be done. Out of this “exuberance, joy, explosiveness-the manic craziness” came the Zippers, some of whose “original cast,” as Mathus says-he still calls the act “a theatrical troupe” and has even written a vaudevillian play for it to perform someday-“had never even done music.” “There was an abundance of information,” Mathus says, and “it was encouraged to try new things.”Īfter his first new thing, the indie rock band Metal Flake Mother, came and went, Mathus started organizing backyard hootenannies like the ones he’d grown up with in Mississippi: “social music,” he calls it, serious about song but informal in energy, complete with fish fries and watermelon. Meanwhile, he spent his time learning about American music, theater, visual arts, and puppetry in Chapel Hill’s libraries, bookstores, and record shops. I got a job washing dishes at Pyewacket within hours of arriving in town.” I was up there two hours and called the barge company and said I quit. “I met some people at Mardi Gras who lived in Chapel Hill, and I thought, next time I get off the barge I’m gonna drive up there and check it out. Nearly 30 years ago, he was working as a deckhand in New Orleans but “looking for someplace to start what I wanted to do,” he recalls. Mathus is from Mississippi and lives there today. He’s talking about the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Chapel Hill-specifically the rich alt-nineties ferment that produced nationally charting acts such as Ryan Adams, Ben Folds, and the Zippers, as well as local legends such as Flat Duo Jets, Chicken Wire Gang, Zen Frisbee, and presiding folk eminences the Red Clay Ramblers, all “doing this take on deep roots,” Mathus says. “It’s a band that couldn’t have started anywhere else,” Jimbo Mathus says. Squirrel Nut Zippers: Lost Songs Of Doc Souchon ![]()
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