Lucero stayed horn-y to funk up Women and Work’s Memphis-soul vibe

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MARCH 28, 2013

By Steve Newton

As a kid growing up in the musical mecca of Memphis, Lucero bassist John C. Stubblefield could take mucho inspiration from the history of his hometown. The city was home to Sun Records, after all, which gave us the likes of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins.

And a few blocks away from that landmark was Stax Records, the southern-soul label famous for Otis Redding and the finest house band in the land, Booker T. & the MGs.

But Stubblefield’s proximity to the birthplace of rock ’n’ soul doesn’t mean that his own musical life revolved around the coolest of sounds.

“I was actually an orchestra nerd,” says the bassist, on the line from a tour stop in Washington, D.C. “I started out playing the upright bass in the orchestra, so it was everything from Bach to Beethoven to Rachmaninoff, but then I was also goin’ to matinee punk-rock shows as early as the age of 12.

“I met Brian [Venable] the guitar player and Roy [Berry], our drummer, at a punk-rock club in midtown Memphis called the Antenna, and we’ve all been around this kind of music and influenced by some of the same bands and shows—whether we knew it or not.”

Last year, Lucero released its eighth album, Women and Work, its first on ATO Records, which is also home to its long-time pals the Drive-By Truckers. The disc takes off with the rootsy, stepping-out stomper “On My Way Downtown”, blends in elements of punk-edged alt-country and heartland rock along the way, then winds down with the closing-time gospel tinge of “Go Easy”.

As singer-guitarist Ben Nichols states in the group’s bio: “ ‘Downtown’ is Friday night, ‘Go Easy’ is Sunday morning. The rest of the record is the party in between.”

“Exactly,” concurs Stubblefield, whose band plays the Biltmore next Thursday (April 4). “There’s definitely an arc to the album. Sequencing is kind of a lost art, you know, but the songs just fell into place, and it became really obvious what order they all needed to go in. It kinda tells a story and has a really nice album feel.”

The core membership of Stubblefield, Venable, Berry, and Nichols has been in place since Lucero played its first gig in early 1998, and has spent upward of 200 days a year on the road. The lineup was bolstered in 2005 by keyboardist Rick Steff, and then two years later Todd Beene was recruited to add pedal-steel guitar—or “hillbilly string section”, as Stubblefield calls it.

For its 2009 album, 1372 Overton Park, horns were brought in, and they stayed to help give Women and Work a similarly funky, Memphis-soul vibe.

“We were doin’ some demos on 1372,” recalls Stubblefield, “and I thought somethin’ was happening where we should maybe hear some horns in there. So I called up my buddy Jim Spake and he brought in his tenor sax and his baritone sax and we double-tracked those on a couple of songs.

“Halfway through the first one, people were jumpin’ up and down on the couches and goin’ crazy,” he adds, “so it’s been a part of the band ever since.”

To hear the full audio of my 2013 interview with Lucero’s John C. Stubblefield subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 700 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with musicians since 1982.