"Broke, Not Broken" was just recommended in the Village Voice top 12 picks!!
by Chuck Eddy
May 5th, 2006 12:13 PM
The Austin Chronicle
HOME: APRIL 28, 2006: MUSIC: TCB
TCB Music news
By Christopher GrayPedals to the Metal: The Mother Truckers
MOTHER'S DAY
Barely a year after relocating here from San Francisco, the Mother Truckers are practically the South Congress house band. With a twang-infused sound that connects the dots between Billy Joe Shaver, Brooks & Dunn, and the originals on their latest CD Broke Not Broken, the Truckers took over Thursday happy hours at the Continental Club in February and this month have pulled double duty in the late-night slot at Ego's. "There's always five or 10 people at the Continental that follow us to Ego's," says Josh Zee, who shares vocal duties with Teal Collins, whom he met several years ago at an open-mic blues night. Despairing that "original music is pretty low on people's priority list" in the Bay area, Zee and Collins moved to Austin because it was cheaper than New York and because they'd met Ray Benson when the Truckers opened a couple of Asleep at the Wheel's California shows. "Ray took a shine to us and said, 'Hey, if you're ever out in Austin, I can introduce you to a few people,'" relates Zee. Benson set up their first show at Threadgill's World Headquarters, let the Truckers record Broke Not Broken at his Bismeaux studios on spec, and engineered spots on the bill at his pre-SXSW birthday party at La Zona Rosa and Willie Nelson's upcoming Fourth of July picnic in Fort Worth. "He's been really good to us," Zee says. The Truckers skip tonight's (Thursday) happy hour, but play Ego's late and Jovita's Saturday.
Austin Music Magazine
by Dante Dominick May '06 issue)
THE MOTHER TRUCKERS
Broke, Not Broken
(self released)The Mother Truckers are so much the perfect Austin alt-country rock band that it’s almost hard to acknowledge the two founders moved here from San Francisco only a couple years ago. Principal songwriters and co-lead vocalists Josh Zee and Teal Collins exude effortless chemistry that goes beyond their wonderful harmonies. So often, when a band has two distinct songwriters, their fans fall into camps that favor one or the other. Not with the Mother Truckers. Not only is the whole band on the same page, they finish each other’s sentences.
Kim Deschamps fills with just the right pedal steel and dobro licks to please the authentic country purists. The rhythm section and lead guitar balance with just as much Southern rock as Bakersfield sound. Lyrically, the Truckers eschew formulaic writing at every turn; even when broaching familiar subjects like unfaithful women and heartbreak their stanza structure throws standards out the window. They also demonstrate clever sense of humor without falling prey to being silly.
Perhaps the Trucker’s greatest success is they transcend beyond a certain type of band that squeezes in elements from other styles. Broke, Not Broken is that rarity that feeds on certain distinct elements but is unmistakingly unique and, more importantly, entirely complete.
Happily truckin' along in Austin
By Paul Liberatore
Eleven months ago, Josh Zee and Teal Collins, a young married couple who grew up in Marin County and perform together in a country/rock band called the Mother Truckers, packed up their guitars and their hopes and moved to Austin, Texas.
Their career had stalled in the Bay Area, and they felt it would be more likely to kick start in a city that, since 1991, has billed itself as the " Live Music Capital of the World."Now, less than a year after they relocated to this musician-friendly university town in the Texas hill country, they have hard evidence that they made the right decision.
They've just released their first CD in the Lone Star State, "Broke, Not Broken," recorded in the Austin studio of Ray Benson, leader of Asleep at the Wheel.
Through Rancho Nicasio owner Bob Brown, Zee and Collins met Benson when he was playing at Brown's West Marin roadhouse. He was so impressed with their quirky brand of country that he encouraged them to leave the Bay Area and move to Austin, following the same career path he did 33 years ago.
"I don't know of any other city that does as much for musicians as Austin does," Benson says. "I knew they'd have more opportunities for their kind of music here. There're dozens of places to play, and it's a welcoming community."
True to his word to help them get started in Austin, he not only lent his studio for their new CD, he was instrumental in getting the Mother Truckers on the bill of Willie Nelson's 33rd annual Fourth of July Picnic in Fort Worth, Texas, with country music legends Billy Joe Shaver, Ray Price and David Allen Coe.
"It's a pretty prestigious gig," Zee says from their new Texas home, their puppy Ajax barking in the background.
In Marin, he and Collins were two of the county's best-known and respected young musicians. In the '90s, he was the guitarist, singer and songwriter for Protein, a post-grunge trio that released two major label albums for Sony and toured with Limp Bizkit, Social Distortion, Blink 182 and Primus.
The ever-smiling Collins, daughter of the late Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins, a famous '50s disc jockey, toured with the funk band the Mo'fessionals and sang on records by Whitney Houston, Madonna and Third Eye Blind.
Five years ago, they formed the Mother Truckers and married two years after that, living in Mill Valley.
Talented, intelligent and gleefully sardonic, they specialize in what they call "irreverent, harmony-driven country music." (They're about to begin a California tour that brings them back to Marin for gigs June 8 at the Fourth Street Tavern in San Rafael and June 11 at the Fairfax Festival.)
Although they were playing all the time when they lived here, winning fans (me among them), writing songs and recording CDs, they were laboring largely in obscurity, unable to get any traction in the Bay Area. It was frustrating.
"With the press in San Francisco, you have to be their boyfriend or their girlfriend or their drug dealer to get them to write anything about you," Zee fumes. "We were doing well, but no one would have known about it."
In less than a year in Austin, they've gotten unsolicited write-ups in the local papers, had their record played on the radio and got themselves a weekly happy hour residency at the Continental Club, one of Austin's hipper watering holes.
"In the Bay Area, having a weekly gig in a club makes you into just another bar band," Zee says. "Back
in Marin, if you say you play every Thursday during happy hour, it immediately demotes you to some second-rate band. But here it's different. It has prestige. It's a badge of honor. It's a coveted thing."In Austin, Zee and Collins can afford to live in a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a big yard in a nice neighborhood for a fraction of what the same house would cost in Marin.
As working musicians, they are eligible for medical insurance through the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, a spin-off of the SIMS Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides low-cost mental health and support services for Austin-area musicians and their families.
The SIMS Foundation (Benson is president of its board of directors) is named after Sims Ellison, a popular young Austin musician who killed himself in 1995. Shortly after his death, his friends, fans and family established the foundation in his memory.
Claiming more live music venues per capita than Nashville, Memphis, Los Angeles, Las Vegas or New York, Austin seems more proud of its "Live Music Capital of the World" slogan than the fact that it's the actual capital of the state.
To quote the city Web site, "Music is a driver of the 'creative economy' that translates into millions of dollars annually for Austin."
To keep that revenue stream flowing, the municipal government sponsors free concerts every week on the city hall plaza, an Austin music channel, a "Band of the Week" feature on the city's Web site and, if you can believe it, live music at the Austin airport and before city council meetings.
Rather than some moldy general or politician, the statue beside the city's Town Lake commemorates the late blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Aside from Austin's official musical events, Zee also wanted the folks back home to know about the bands that play before women's roller derby matches in Austin and the musicians who relax over games of "Chicken S--- Bingo" every Sunday at a roadhouse called Ginny's Li'l Longhorn.
"I don't know if its evolved or devolved, but either way it's fun," he says.
Civic boosterism aside, he and his wife miss Marin. They're finding that once you live here, it's hard to live anywhere else.
"It surprised me, but I really miss the actual land itself - the mountains and the redwoods and the ocean," he says. "That's a bigger part of it than I thought it would be. At whatever point in my life that I think it's time to settle down, it'll be in California. I'll always be a Californian at heart."
If You Go:
What: The Mother Truckers
Where: Fourth Street Tavern, 711 Fourth St. in San Rafael
When: June 8
Information: 456-4828
Where: Fairfax Festival
When: 3 p.m. June 11
Buy: "Broke, Not Broken," distributed by Marin's City Hall Records, will be in stores at the end of the month or go to www.themothertruckers.com.
Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com.
It's a Mother Trucker: The Bay Area's best up-and-coming alt-country band opens the KPIG Humbug Hoedown Dec. 6.
Can't Stop the Rock
The Mother Truckers have country in their hearts and AC/DC in their blood--and they're bringing it all to the KPIG Humbug HoedownBy Mike Connor
When Josh Zee and Teal Collins set out to start a country band, they knew they'd never be able to stifle the ghosts of the rawk music they grew up with. Once bands like AC/DC, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin and Motorhead have gotten into your soul, they won't ever be silenced. But like any truly honest country band, the Mother Truckers just let it all bleed through.
"We like to keep that flavor in there for sure," explains Collins, who sings and plays guitar and ukulele for the band. "You just can't leave the rock behind."
Hell mothertruckin' yes, that's what I'm talking about!
See, because countrified covers of rock songs like AC/DC's "TNT" and Judas Priest's "Electric Eye" are loads of fun for fans of both country and rock, but they serve another purpose as well. It's like a Sistine Chapel finger-to-finger transmission of all the wild, destructive energy of cock-rock straight into the deepest, darkest depths of country. So when they play one of their chugging country burners like "Save My Soul" with enough intensity to singe your lashes and soak your bedsheets, you know they're not fucking around.
Their song about getting high--aptly titled "We Were Getting High"--is a singalong that rings with enough truth to inspire nostalgia about speed and heroin binges (not that we condone that sort of thing): "Last Saturday night about four a.m., we were getting high/ Sitting around waiting for the day to begin, we were getting high/ Doing it again: methamphetamine, so I could say bye bye."
But if cryin' in yer beer is your deal, the Mother Truckers have still got a seat with your name on it. Saddle up to the bar and lament with "My Only Friend," on which Zee slows it down with the pedal steel and sings: "Ain't got no faith, ain't got no hope, ain't got no god at all/ But at least I got a friend in alcohol."
But wait--it gets darker. On "If I Die," Collins muses good-naturedly about suicide: "Would they send my body south/ If I crammed this knife here into an open toaster mouth?/ And would I feel much pain/ If I jumped off an overpass onto an oncoming lane?" Then, the happy-happy-fun-fun verses are followed by the victorious chorus: "If I died today/ I wouldn't have to see you with her/And If I died today/ I wouldn't have to go to work."
"It's funny," says Collins; "to us, they're serious lyrics. People say they're really bizarre, but stuff like "If I Died"--I was actually thinking that death, in a way, is comforting. When you're done and get to the end of it all, all the stuff you're worrying about is really not gonna matter. So that's kind of my morbid fascination with death coming through."
But if she's a twisted freak, at least she's not the only one in the band.
"Growing up, I loved horror movies and gory dreams, and Josh and I share that in common, so when we got together to start a band, we knew it definitely wasn't going to be clichéd lyrics," he says. "That's just kind of how we are: fascinated with weird and macabre."
For Those Who Used to Rock
It's clear from his playing that Zee is also fascinated by guitar-driven rock. For those of us weaned on the wailing guitar solos of Angus Young and Jimmy Page, the idea that the guitar solo went "out" back in the late '90s doesn't sit none too well. Some of us have just blamed it all on Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and cut our losses. Others, like Zee the Budding Bay Area Guitar God, hung on until the bitter end. His guitar-heavy rock band Protein scored a deal with Sony and a slot on the '97 Warped tour with Limp Bizkit and Social Distortion, but eventually the well ran dry.So how did a bunch of ex-rockers figure out how to write great country songs? Plenty of booze, plenty of drugs and plenty of disappointment.
"I think maybe at this point," says Collins, "Josh and I have been doing the music thing for so long, suffering through band after band, that you're familiar with disappointment. When you're 17, you're like, 'This band I'm in now is gonna be it, I'm gonna be a rock star!' Now we're familiar with the devastations year in and year out--and I think that's why Josh and I can hopefully write a good country song."
From the December 3 - 10, 2003 issue of Metro Santa Cruz.
Copyright © Metro Publishing Inc. Maintained by Boulevards New Media.
Click on the photo to read the article
And Then There Were None
In a shocking display of treachery and boldfaced lies at the KPIG Swine Soiree this past Sunday, local (cow) punk-ass trio The Devil Makes Three declined exhortations for a second encore, claiming that they didn't have any more songs to play. Preposterous! Unless the band I've seen at previous shows was a group of evil imposters, I know for a fact that they've got plenty more excellent originals, plus a slew of Steve Earle covers to boot. Well, turns out that the young 'uns just didn't want to play anything that was less than completely polished, which is pretty durn cute. But it did lead to a rather long set break, given that Todd Snider showed up a good half hour after he was scheduled to start. In another shocking display (this time of warmhearted generosity and forgiveness), the audience graciously (yet figuratively) embraced Snider at the first chord of an aptly chosen first song, "Tension." He rambled through a nice long set of quirky, poignant ballads, showing off Another Side of Todd Snider and making a fan out of me in the process. So did the Mother Truckers, who only needed to play their Southern-fried version of AC/DC's "TNT" to win me over, but they sealed the deal with rumbling country-rock burners, epic steel slide-heavy anthems ("If I Die") and the tongue-in-cheek ballad "We Were Getting High," all of which showcased the magnificent vocal harmonies of Josh Zee and Teal Collins, who can belt out the twang with the best of 'em.Mike Connor
From the June 25-July 2, 2003 issue of Metro Santa Cruz.
Copyright © Metro Publishing Inc. Maintained by Boulevards New Media.
Click HERE to read an article about KPIG's Swine Soiree by Dave Brooks of the Register-Pajaronian
Sunday, April 27th
The Mother Truckers live performance on KPIG Radio!
LISTEN HERE!
(In "Type of Program", choose "Please Stand By (live music show)")
The Mother Truckers from DigitalCity.com, January 2003
If you pine for the twang long abandoned by media darlings Wilco and Ryan Adams or dig the beefy white-trash content popularized by Kid Rock’s Twisted Brown Trucker band, discover a bounty of both in San Francisco’s band the Mother Truckers. With tongue planted firmly in their cheekiness, the Mother Truckers unapologetically romanticize about multiple suicides, murders and overdoses in songs such as ‘If I Died (I Wouldn’t Have To Go To Work Today)’ and ‘Getting High.’ The anti-heroes of their songs seek sweet relief, sustenance and absolution from a range of low-brow vices -- heroin, Jesus, Denny’s, adultery, boozing, graveyard lovin’ and prodding electrical appliances with metal utensils. Despite being an irreverent band, which bonded over a mutual love for Hank Williams, Sr., slasher flicks and Heinz 57 mutts, the Truckers are comprised of seriously talented players with chops and pedigrees from Primus and Protein. Vocalist/ukulele player Teal Collins, an accomplished studio gun-for-hire with multi-platinum credits, transitions from sweetly crooning harmonies to powerhouse belting of those oft-referenced death wishes. Paired with singer/guitarist Josh Zee, the duo can easily execute an authentic tribute to patron saints George Jones and Tammy Wynette if the spirit beckons. The Mother Truckers believe that we should have fun all the way to the grave, because there’s always a chance to get reborn. Amen.
--Leigh Anne Lewis
Music: Country, Rock
Music to move by
Soutnern-flavored tunes and short films from around the worldby James Sullivan
Mother Truckers has more than a hint of irreverence. But the song craft and the musicanship makes it clear: For these Bay Area veterans, country music is no laughing matter.
The band is the creative product of Josh Zee, formerly of Protein, and Teal Collins, a session singer once with the Mo'Fessionals (and daughter of the late DJ Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins, with whom she met the greats of jazz from an early age.)
The band celebrates the recent release of its self-produced album "Something Worth Dying for" with a set Saturday at Slim's. It's an all-mudflaps kind of show: The headlining band is Georgia's Drive-By Truckers, authors of the ambitious double-disc saga "Southern Rock Opera."
Drive-By Truckers, Mother Truckers, 9 p.m. Saturday at Slim's, 333 11th St., San Francisco. $12-14. (415)255-0333 or www.slims-sf.com.
Marin Independent Journal - Lifestyles Section - Thursday, May 16, 2002
(Click photo to read article)
Repeat And Fade Magazine 2001
"This outfit does a professional level type of country music. Slick sounding and tight is the order of business for this group. But underneath all the musicianship and perfect harmonies, lurks the wit and sarcasm that save the group from "Music Row" blandness. Imagine hearing on country radio, a song lamenting the absence of the writers death, a song that contemplates the numerous ways to hasten the end in lieu of going to work. Maybe you would have heard that in the old days, in some clever whitewashed fashion from Bocefus and the like, but not any longer (Dixie Chics be damned!). This is the closest I can come to exemplifying the "saving grace" of The Mother Truckers."
-Billy Morgan
From SF Weekly's Listen Up Column:
The Mother Truckers
Hell's Half Acre
Josh Zee (formerly of local band Protein) and Teal Collins take turns writing the brilliant songs on this album and sing beautifully together throughout. A little bit country, a little bit rock - the Truckers mix it up to create a unique and amazing combination that's likely to restore your faith in songwriting.-SL
Listen for The Mother Truckers on these Radio Stations:
KFJC Foothill College, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills, CA 94022, 89.7 FM 250 W
KUSF University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton St, San Francisco, CA 94117, 90.,3FM 3kW
KCSC California State University Chico, BMU 208, Chico, CA 95926, 95.5CaFM 916-898-6228
Radio ATL FM 105.9 P.O. Box 42 B-2960 Bree Belgium (32)89-473365 - playlist
KWMR 90.5 FM Point reyes (415)663-8068
