Riverboat Gamblers Ante Up
Words by Callie Enlow
photos by Gary Copeland
The Riverboat Gamblers are going to Oz. Not the place to find brains, or a heart, or courage, but the continent down under known for kangaroos, the outback, and most recently, raging wildfires. To celebrate, the punk rock band asked their management to speed up the Australia release of their scorching latest album, Underneath the Owl, two and a half weeks before its March 10 U.S. drop date.
In between preparing for the Oz trip, co-founding member and guitarist Fadi El-Assad explained the genesis of the trip for he, drummer Eric Green, guitarist Ian MacDougall, bassist Rob Marchant and co-founder and vocalist Mike Wiebe.
“It was a little out of the blue,” El-Assad said about the Soundwaves Festival, which requested the Austin, Texas-based quintet play their five-venue tour, “I don’t know if they pulled a name out of a hat or what, but they invited us to play this festival, and of course we couldn’t say no.”
El-Assad seems astonished by the recognition, but the bigger surprise is that the Riverboat Gamblers are going to Australia for the first time. After 12 years together and praise for their electric live performances, the Gamblers should have been there by now. They should have been everywhere by now.
With Underneath the Owl, they just might make it. After a decade of striving, numerous line-up changes, concert-caused injuries, and hundreds of shows, the Gamblers finally appear secure enough to take their crazy show to a whole new world of people.
The Riverboat Gamblers, who grew out of a house party outfit in the funky college town of Denton, Texas, always have been known more for their manic live performances than their albums, like a punk rock Phish, minus the spacey followers and gentle vibe. On Underneath the Owl, the band achieves something almost more elusive than fame: the balance between their show’s raw energy and radio-worthy pop sensibility. Where, before, the Gamblers blasted songs onto their records, the new album is less garage but far from the sellout stuff that makes old punk fans roll our eyes and mutter, “There goes another one.”
Working again with Mudrock (nee Andrew Murdock, whose other credits include Godsmack and Avenged Sevenfold), the L.A. producer who also oversaw 2006’s To The Confusion of Our Enemies, the Gamblers for the first time had the benefit of both experience and a solid band.
“The biggest difference is having a set line-up,” said El-Assad, who added that the group went through seven drummers in less than two years. “We didn’t have to make anything fit into this preconceived notion of how the record should sound like. It wasn’t like, ‘Will the drummer get it?’ We were just sort of writing whatever, not worried about if it sounded too pop music, too heavy. The whole feeling was much more focused. We knew what we wanted to do, we knew how we wanted to sound.”
El-Assad knows that how the band wants to sound now might be markedly different from how die-hard fans want the band to sound. Break-neck speed on the Gamblers’ 2003 full-length Something to Crow About and shouty pub punk from To The Confusion of our Enemies has ceded album time to melody and actual singing; there’s even “The Tearjerker,” a pseudo-country ballad, complete with pedal steel.
Many of those flourishes can be traced to Mudrock, who suggested that Wiebe visit a vocal coach and recommended the pedal steel in “The Tearjerker”. Jokingly referring to himself as “The Famous Hollywood Producer,” Mudrock describes the pre-Underneath the Owl Gamblers as “a rock band who thought they were a punk band,” and is clearly pleased that the band decided to leave some of the three-chord strums and screams behind. On To The Confusion of Our Enemies, “there was a real push-pull about where to go,” Mudrock said. “The [Gamblers] really felt they had something to prove on their last record, and on this record, they just made music they liked.”
“We practiced everything profusely before we got in there, everything was rehearsed and calculated,” El-Assad said. “I think it comes through; it’s a lot more cohesive of a record. There’s always going to be some weird sort of backlash when you evolve or change your sound a little bit. People sort of always want the same.”
At press time, Underneath the Owl still was locked up tight in the U.S., but to whet fans’ appetites, the Gamblers’ label, Volcom Entertainment, released two tracks for free and easy downloading: the album single “A Choppy, Yet Sincere Apology” and b-side “Don’t Jinx.”
Reviews in the blogosphere mostly were positive, noting the catchy chorus to contrast Wiebe’s angsty lyrics, “When you see me / uncomfortably / chain smoking / trying to force up a smile / that means I’m slipping again”. The single is the most unabashedly pop, but strains of crafty production are weaved throughout the rest, nowhere more so than the cheeky vibraphone and made-for-a-soundtrack guitar hooks on “Robots May Break Your Heart”.
Songs such as those will bait the diehards out there who proclaim, “Just like any band, there older stuff is better,” as one commenter wrote on punknews.org, but El-Assad bristles at the idea that the band is letting down their most devoted fans by growing up.
“The truth is,” El-Assad said, “our song writing was much more confined and contrived before. A lot of times on Something To Crow About and even still on To the Confusion of Our Enemies, we were trying to make a record that sounded like this or like that, and now we sort of threw that playbook out the window.”
One thing about the Gamblers that has not changed is their signature live performances. Photographs abound of Wiebe in mid-kangaroo leap, hanging from club rafters, and diving into masses of fans. At a recent Austin show outdoors at the Mohawk, Wiebe climbed the amps onstage and jumped to the balcony, swinging from the railing and balancing on a 6-inch-wide ledge while screaming lyrics into delighted fans’ faces.
While Wiebe’s rabid frontman energy and gimmicks naturally command attention, the entire band courts the same kind of interaction from the audience. At their Austin show, the four nondrummers stood perilously close to the edge of the stage. El-Assad, who recently rehabbed a knee ligament he tore while performing, acknowledges that the band does some light calisthenics before playing.
“We’ve sprained way too many things to not stretch, I’ve learned that the hard way,” El-Assad said.
Aside from some warm-ups and toe-touches, “we’ve had very little ritual or choreography,” El-Assad said. “I’d say absolutely no sort of ritual. We kind of play it loose.”
So the Wiebe stage dives, the El-Assad deep stance, and the MacDougall jumps are just as real in Australia as they were in millennial Denton.
But, even the let-it-come-natural approach is something of a conscious decision for the Gamblers, or at least for El-Assad.
“Here’s the thing, I was thinking of something Francis Ford Coppola said, some interview of his, there’s a fine line between being pretentious and being sincere,” El-Assad said in his rapid-fire, articulate patter. “As a musician, you’re sort of expected to be very sincere and have everything come across as very exciting and genuine, but with that comes the pitfall of seeming contrived. You want to be very genuine and honest without the pretension.”
According to El-Assad, that fine line resulted in axing several would-be Gamblers as the group tried to replace original members throughout their more-than-a-decade run. “It was rough,” El-Assad said, “but we got lucky.”
Mudrock says when he met the Gamblers during pre-production for Confusion, the band was in between drummers.
“They were in a strange place mentally,” said Mudrock, who saw some of the screening process for the position Green now fills. According to Mudrock, several capable drummers didn’t make the cut.
“There’s a reason people say ‘Gamblers forever, forever Gamblers’; it takes a special kind of person to be a Gambler,” said Mudrock, who describes the Gamblers as a combination of booze hounds, sweethearts, and gentlemen, on top of dedicated musicians.
The Gamblers honed their rough edges in Denton, a town three hours north of Austin, just on the other side of Dallas. During the years, the college town’s university arts program and cheap living cultivated bands such as Midlake, Centromatic and cult favorite Lift to Experience.
In 1997, when the Gamblers first formed, “It was awesome,” El-Assad said. “There was a circuit of house shows, always something going on.”
For years, the Gamblers – initially El-Assad, Wiebe, drummer Chris Adams and bassist Pat Lillard – played legendary parties in Denton, but in 2004, the group toured Europe and soon landed a record contract.
“There wasn’t one sort of catalyst that changed it,” El-Assad said about morphing into the dedicated international act they’ve become. “As the houses got shut down and there was less and less places to play in Denton, we just sort of started playing different clubs in Dallas. By doing that, we started getting in touch with people from California and other parts of the States and got offers to play some out of town gigs, so we figured, let’s make a tour of it.
“When we started, we were all in school at the time and we started finishing school and dropping out of school and whatnot, and we started thinking, ‘What do we want to do with ourselves?’ And music was the only thing that made sense. It was the only thing that we wanted to do that we really loved.”
The band members probably would have had an easier time going to law school or running audits. Despite repeated overtures such as being named a breakout SXSW band by both Spin and Rolling Stone magazines and touring with megastar punk act Against Me!, the Gamblers have yet to taste the comfortable lifestyle of a well-off band.
While trying not to complain, 30-year-old El-Assad breaks the musician reality down thusly: “I tell you what, it’s hard to be a midlevel band because, what you’re doing is you have the touring schedule of a gold- or platinum-selling band, but you don’t see the money coming in. You don’t have this luxury of touring a couple weeks out of the year, here and there. You have to keep pushing the record, you have to keep pushing and pushing.”
In the end, El-Assad says he’d be happy to make enough money from music to cover a mortgage.
Keeping their all-business drive separate from their nothing-but-rock attitudes is the linchpin that allows the Gamblers to work with a big-name producer and partner with a record label spawned of an apparel line and still keep their punk credibility.
“Sometime in the process,” said El-Assad toward the end of a lengthy phone conversation, “I will lose my mind being overexposed. You’re dealing with promoters and agents and management and producers and master guys and booking agents and clubs and money, and it gets to where you’re like, ‘Am I an accountant, or am I a musician?’ I realized that to make a living doing this, you accept both but keep them very separate. You can’t let one affect the other. The money has to be in place as far as logistics; you have to get in your van, and you have to drive to the show on time and load it. But when you get on stage and play, you can’t be thinking, ‘Did we pick up the deposit on the last show?’ It can’t be about that, or else you really are going to lose yourself to the machine of the industry, which is going to lead to nothing but ruin. When you get onstage, leave it; just forget about it. I’ve had my fair share of complaining about stuff, but it has to be dealt with in order to try to make a living at it, which is what I want to do, simply because this is all I want to do; I don’t have aspirations to sell insurance or clean carpets.”
Right now, what El-Assad has aspirations to do is to fly down to Oz with his band, sell their new record, and introduce a whole new world to the music that the Gamblers are creating with Underneath the Owl.
Mudrock, for one, thinks the band will see more success this time around.
