The liner notes to the Jayhawks' career-making 1992 album, Hollywood Town Hall, were written by friend-of-the-band Joe Henry, then a struggling musician himself (and now one of the most prolific producers around). In just a few short paragraphs, Henry evokes not so much the music made by the Minneapolis band, but presumably what the music was about: wayward drifters with sad histories who disappeared, hitting the road in search of better times. The Jayhawks were never so down on their luck as their characters, but they were drifters just the same, ostensibly headquartered in the Twin Cities but always traveling to the next show and the next show after that. In the late 1980s and early 90s, they stayed on the road almost constantly, paying their dues and gradually playing to larger and larger audiences. They were alt-country merely by coincidence, gestating in isolation and predating the movement by several years. The band incorporated a wide range of styles and influences into their stately Americana, not just country and certainly not punk, but classic rock, folk, power pop, and lots of feedback from Gary Louris fuzzbox-filtered guitar-- all seemingly absorbed with every mile of road traveled and every city played.
What the Jayhawks never drifted toward was success-- at least not the kind that they and their fans felt the music warranted. Even so, a full 25 years after forming, the Jayhawks don't come across as also-rans, which is itself a minor miracle. Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass still live and breathe, and these two new, long-awaited reissues sound like the logical conclusions of a legacy-shaping campaign that began with 2009's career retrospective, Music From the North Country. Neither of these albums was a hit, exactly, but they have endured to become something more impressive. They show the Jayhawks unmoored from any one particular trend or style, devising new ways to combine roots and rock without skimping on either.
Hollywood Town Hall is, appropriately, a good road-trip album, moving from pre-dawn departure ("Waiting for the Sun") to a hard-won destination ("Martin's Song", with its chorus, "I've been working all night, I go long into day"). Louris' guitar cuts elegant swathes through these songs, and the new remaster brings out the rich tones in the instruments themselves, especially Benmont Tench's organ on "Crowded in the Wings". The songs have a greater live feel, but Hollywood Town Hall remains primarily a vocal album, with the harmonies of Louris and Olson at the center. Their approach is based on old-time country sibling acts like the Louvin and Stanley Brothers, yet those tightly intertwined vocals are reset in a dusty, electrified setting, marking perhaps the Jayhawks' greatest innovation.
The five bonus tracks neither distract from nor add to the original, but they do reveal the tracklist as a model of economic editing and sequencing. Every song sounds ideally and carefully concise, adding to the effect of the whole. Because it is so economic, Hollywood Town Hall becomes the Jayhawks' greatest statement. By contrast, Tomorrow the Green Grass sprawls to 13 tracks, representing a looser, more experimental tack. The band tinkers with some new sounds and ideas-- some of which are revelatory, others not so much. Opener "Blue" is the hit that should have been, a rambling lament that soars on the band's most majestic chorus, and "I'd Run Away" opens and closes with a string section that revs the song to a fleet gait that underscores, not undermines, the lyrics' loneliness.
As Tomorrow proceeds, the Jayhawks pursue those experiments too doggedly, or they simply don't anchor them to especially compelling songs. "Miss Williams' Guitar", a mash note to Olson's future wife, Victoria Williams, is sweet but shrill, and the bar-rock riffing of "Real Light" doesn't sound especially believable in this setting. The album's final half sounds particularly scattershot: The abrasive "Red's Song" and the sappy "Ann Jane" would have sounded better as B-sides at the time and bonus tracks in the future. Tomorrow is one or two tracks too long, a generous gesture that nevertheless lessens its impact, making it an uneven follow-up to Hollywood Town Hall.
Similarly, this Tomorrow reissue sprawls with a second disc of bonus tracks, comprised of what have become known among fans as the Mystery Demos. A collection of acoustic run-throughs whose origins were until recently unknown, they feature Louris and Olson tackling a career's worth of songs on acoustic guitar, with Mike "Razz" Russell on fiddle and mandolin. Some, like an especially sadsack version of "Blue", are well-known Jayhawks songs; others, like the power-pop "Won't Be Coming Home", would show up later as Golden Smog songs. Some were revived for Olson and Louris' reunion album, Ready for the Flood, and still others have never been heard before. While the reissue includes barely half of the entire Mystery Demos collection (which deserves its own release), these eighteen tracks comprise their own Jayhawks retrospective, an alt-universe greatest hits that sums up the group's appeal as persuasively as any of their proper albums. Stripping the band down to its essentials-- just two voices singing ruminatively and forlornly-- these bonus tracks show just how unnecessary everything else was and just how much direction there was in the band's constant drifting.
