Less Talk, More Rock

Three tracks into the North Mississippi Allstars’ fifth studio album, Hernando, there’s a sludgy, swinging song called “Soldier” that reveals a lot about how the trio operates. Most noticeable are the track’s extended instrumental jams, the last of which veers from a primal groove into double-time Latin percussion. It’s a rare in-studio demonstration of how brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson (guitarist-vocalist and drummer-keyboardist, respectively) and bassist-vocalist Chris Chew stretch out in unpredictable directions onstage.

“It’s always been hard for us to capture the kind of chaotic energy that we conjure up live,” says Luther. “I think we’ve really gotten close this time. We’ve always been comfortable in the studio. But this time we were just more aggressive.

“Like, say, ‘Soldier,’ for example—that was the first song we recorded,” he continues. “The jam outro, we had talked about it at a soundcheck right before the session, but we’d never really done it. In the studio, we played it once and then we kicked the outro and just went right into it. I thought that was a great kickoff to the record, just to have a totally spontaneous jam. Some reviews dissed us for the long instrumental sections, but oh well.”

“Soldier” is a rare political song for the Allstars, with lyrics that contrast George W. Bush’s neglect of Katrina victims with his Christian faith. Still, the lyrics aren’t all righteous anger and no humor. There’s playful irreverence in the rhetorical question, “Do ya think he’d make a soldier in the army of the Lord?” Plus—like most Allstars songs—it’s not the weight of the words that makes the song appealing—it’s the groove (or in this case, the energy channeled into muscular riffs and a rolling rumble of tom-toms and bass).

“Soldier” also exemplifies the group’s easygoing malleability. “It was a flood song and I’d been working on the song way before Katrina, but after Katrina it kind of changed directions,” Luther says. That’s not unlike the Dickinsons welcoming a new element (the gospel-trained Chew) into their brotherly dynamic years back and rolling with the change.

“When we started the band, we were trying to do [as] traditional hill-country blues as possible, and [Chris] brought in that gospel harmony and feel,” says Luther. “When he brought that, I was like, ‘This is really opening up. We can take these songs and use them as foundations for improvisation, just like we grew up doing with rock ’n’ roll music.’ The combination of the blues, the gospel and the psychedelic Southern rock, I think that’s kind of our unique little recipe.”

The Allstars’ last studio album—2005’s Electric Blue Watermelon—had a sense of nostalgia not present on Hernando. “Watermelon was kind of a sad record looking back at all the great guys that I grew up around that have passed away [influential Mississippi bluesmen such as R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and Otha Turner] and addressing the generational shifts, just kind of looking back on the good old days,” Luther says.

But there’s still one strong generational bridge. The Allstars recorded four of their five studio albums at the Dickinson family’s Zebra Ranch studio in Mississippi and made three of those, including Watermelon and Hernando, with the Dickinsons’ father—Southern producer, pianist and occasional solo performer Jim Dickinson.

“With Hernando, we demoed up 22 songs and then [dad] helped us pick,” says Luther. “So he really was in the driver’s seat as far as the direction of the record. I knew I wanted to make a rock record, then I wrote a bunch of different types of tunes, but he kept me on track.”

Unlike the band’s earlier albums, this one’s plugged in from start to finish, and the guitar sounds are mostly heavy and raw. This addition to their body of work hints at a progression from more rural African American blues pioneers to rock bands of the ’60s and ’70s who infused their riffs with bluesy verve. “I didn’t even use an acoustic guitar,” Luther says. “It was all electric. I was really listening to a lot of early ZZ Top and early Sabbath and AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.”

It’s a raucous affair, albeit a highly symmetrical one, sort of like a two-sided vinyl LP. Four tracks of fuzzy blues-rock give way to a three-song breather. (These slow-burning, pop and rockabilly numbers are well-placed but aren’t such strong stand-alone tracks.) Then the rock resumes.

“We just wanted it to be a party record that you put on during a party and just let it rip,” he says. “So you can listen to it with no footnotes.

Three tracks into the North Mississippi Allstars’ fifth studio album, Hernando, there’s a sludgy, swinging song called “Soldier” that reveals a lot about how the trio operates. Most noticeable are the track’s extended instrumental jams, the last of which veers from a primal groove into double-time Latin percussion. It’s a rare in-studio demonstration of how brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson (guitarist-vocalist and drummer-keyboardist, respectively) and bassist-vocalist Chris Chew stretch out in unpredictable directions onstage.