Ever since Jeff Buckley was claimed by the Mississippi River in 1997, an entire cottage industry has cropped up to give us greater insight into his enigmatic talent, which left behind one perfect, timeless full-length album and much speculation about what could’ve been. But now that the vaults have been thoroughly scraped for every last improvised Smiths cover, a recent online initiative invites us to get to know Buckley at the most intimate level. Over at jeffbuckleycollection.com, you can virtually thumb through his personal vinyl archive as if you were hanging out on his living-room rug with a glass of lilac wine. However, in the jump from Philip Glass to Guided by Voices, a favorite band is missing, one that Buckley praised in the pages of Rolling Stone and eagerly pitched to the radio-station programmers he encountered on the Grace* *promo circuit. Perhaps the absence has to do with the fact the group in question rose up in the early ’90s, and Buckley only owned their music on CD. In any event, the oversight is all too appropriate—after all, the Grifters are used to being left out of canons.
The Grifters were the sort of group your record-store clerk would recommend if they saw you walking up to the register with a copy of Slanted and Enchanted or Bee Thousand—a band for braver souls willing to dig deeper into the dirt. They were, in many respects, a typical ’90s indie-rock act. Their sound was a Memphis-brewed melange of overlapping aesthetics: the fuzz-blasted melodicism of Guided by Voices, the crooked hooks of Pavement, the hoot ‘n’ holler hysterics of Jon Spencer, the dirty-needle boogie of Royal Trux. But at the center of that Venn diagram, the Grifters staked their own uncharted turf: a post-modernist, pulp-fictional universe populated by cool jerks, mambo kings, dragon ladies, and other mysteries. Even at their most ferocious, the Grifters carried themselves with an air of Rat Pack sophistication—their cryptic songs sounded like smart conversations you wished you could contribute to and inside jokes you wanted to be let it on. This is a band whose idea of an opening line is “Well, I swear, I never meant to leave you tied up to a train”—and their peculiar personality is perfectly encapsulated by that discomfiting mix of callousness and concern.
The Grifters weren’t exactly obscure in their day—beyond Buckley’s vocal endorsements, their records were reviewed in all the major music mags (leading to a two-album run on Sub Pop), and their association with Memphis’ Easley McCain Recording studio helped make it an Abbey Road-esque destination for A-list indie-rockers in the ’90s. But they never crossed over to the realm of Leno appearances, 120 Minutes rotation, and Calvin Klein ads like those aforementioned peers. As such, the Grifters don’t really have a legacy today, probably because their music is too scrambled and combustible to easily imitate. Their impact is felt most acutely close to home: In Memphis outsider-rock lore, the Grifters are the spiritual link between Big Star and Goner Records. Tellingly, their recent, sporadic spate of reunion dates was prompted by their participation in the 2013 documentary Meanwhile in Memphis: Sound of a Revolution. And, in keeping with that regional focus, some of the band’s pre-Sub Pop catalogue is now being brought back to market via Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records.
While 1993’s One Sock Missing thrust the Grifters to the topsoil of America’s lo-fi underground (complete with self-explanatory anthems like “She Blows Blasts of Static”), the band would carve out their own unique groove on 1994’s Crappin’ You Negative, where the battery of bassist Tripp Lamkins and drummer Stan Gallimore busted through the scuzzy surface with Zeppelin-esque might. Like Buckley, the Grifters had an unabashed affinity for the blues—a sound that had been all but vanquished from indie rock during the post-hardcore ’80s. Where Buckley channeled the blues’ eternal sadness, The Grifters adopted its slide-riff sleaziness and feral heat. But the Grifters were no blues-rock band—they were too compulsive to let their feet get stuck in that quicksand foundation.
Thanks to David Shouse and Scott Taylor’s good-cop/bad-cop dynamic, their songs had a consistently unsettled quality, marked by duelling melodies, out-of-sync harmonies and jarring aesthetic juxtapositions. Crappin’ standouts like “Maps of the Sun,” “Get Outta That Spaceship & Fight Like a Man,” and “Holmes” may come slathered in juke-joint grease, but Shouse’s arch, Bryan Ferry-esque vocals redirect them toward the cosmos. And while Taylor sings with a more typical Midwestern twang, his manic energy steers revved-up rockers like “Black Fuel Incinerator” into fiery, at times frightening chaos.
But Crappin’ You Negative’s explosive outbursts are tempered by serene lo-fi interstitials, and a pair of balladic set-pieces—the distortion-caked despair of “Felt-Tipped Over” and desolate desert twang of “Junkie Blood”—that preview the more refined songcraft Shouse would showcase in his post-Grifters band Those Bastard Souls. And as if to reward us for indulging their every whim, the Grifters’ send us off with the adrenalized, straight-ahead power-pop of “Cinnamon”, though, naturally, even this shot of sweetness is laced with poison: “fee-fee-fi-fi-fo-fum/I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
The Grifters would go on to write more structurally sound pop songs on 1996’s Sub Pop debut Ain’t My Lookout, but Crappin’ You Negative remains the best, most bracing showcase of what made the band so strange and special: the sudden pendulum swings between class and crass, between somber, tape-hissed meditations and outrageous lounge-act theatrics, between skronky Beefheartian disintegration and arena-ready rock-outs. As the early-’90s lo-fi revolution proved, any band of Tascam amateurs can make a racket. But in its violent vacillations between rock ‘n’ roll tradition and treason, Crappin’ You Negative is a reminder that one must first know the rules of rock ‘n’ roll before you can properly break them.
