ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCT. 8, 2008
By Steve Newton
When you unfold the CD booklet for the latest Grady CD, A Cup of Cold Poison, it becomes a miniposter depicting the Austin-based band in an early ZZ Top moment: guitarist Gordie “Grady” Johnson and bassist Big Ben Richardson are riffing out back-to-back, while drummer Billy Maddox–since replaced by New Westminster native Nina Singh–slams the skins in a T-shirt emblazoned with a longhorn steer.
They’re all wearing cowboy hats and jeans, and two of them sport short beards similar to what ZZ’s Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill had before going all Rip Van Winkle.
On the line from a tour stop in Omaha, Nebraska, Johnson acknowledges his group’s physical resemblance to that little ol’ band from Texas, but stresses that–apart from being a power trio with a boogie bent–it’s musically much different.
Former Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra–whose label, Alternative Tentacles, just rereleased Grady’s 2004 debut album, Y.U. So Shady?–describes Johnson’s group as “the missing link between Junior Brown and Black Flag”.
You could also call it honky-tonk raunch, or maybe cowboy metal.
“There is an intensity about it,” notes Johnson, “but it’s not metal in the sense that it’s all doom and destruction. And I don’t sing like the Cookie Monster.”
Maybe not all the time, but there are definitely some devil-in-a-garburator stylings heard on A Cup of Cold Poison‘s second track, “Chili Cold Blood”.
“Well, I can do it,” Johnson admits with a chuckle. “Satan has made a couple of guest appearances on our records. There’s sort of a death-metal moment on our first record, too. I’m a big fan of that stuff, but my affinity for country music goes back a long way, too. So I listen to Mastodon and Buck Owens the same day–so what?”
When not focusing on Grady, the former Big Sugar leader earns his keep through his production and mixing work, which is in high demand. He spends a lot of time poring over the console at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Recording Studio in Spicewood, Texas, where he helmed the two Grady discs.
His knob-twiddling credits include Gov’t Mule, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Taj Mahal, the Trews, and Vancouver’s now-defunct John Ford, whose singer-guitarist, Rich Hope, cowrote the gritty Cold Poison track “West Coast Hobo in a Boxcar Blues (Stretched Out and Wild as the World’s Deepest Ocean)”.
Between rockin’, ranchin’, and recordin’, Johnson–whose band plays a coheadlining bill with Nashville Pussy at the Plaza Club tonight (October 9)–keeps busier than a dog with two dicks, but when he does wangle some free time, he relishes it like any laid-back Texan would.
“I’ve always got time to go stand out in the sunshine,” he relates, “stop at a roadside honky-tonk and listen to some good country music, or go swimmin’ with my kids. Just little things like that. It’s a way, way more chilled pace of life [than in Toronto], so I’m real happy about that.”