"I thought you guys were a speed-metal band from Hobbs," I tell Daniel Pretends Eagle and Carol Morgan-Eagle of Bone Orchard, the Americana band from Taos.
They laugh and assure me that a bone orchard is a 19th century euphemism for a cemetery. Besides my confusion about their name, which has nothing to do with dope-smoking heshers, there's nothing typical about this Americana band. ***image2***
Bone Orchard began making music in the late '90s, released two independent albums and is now earning a reputation as one of the most exciting acts in New Mexico that, curiously enough, no one's really heard of yet. Its music is a sculpted blend of bluegrass and the clever side of David Allan Coe. Essentially, this means that it takes two very distinct sounds-one that exists in a rural environment typically filled with acoustic instrumentation and one that exists in an urban ethos with edgy punk angst-and splices them together. The groundwork for Bone Orchard's live shows and recordings is built on post-punk and Americana influences.
"The old-time influences were a little more up front with the first album; the new album has more of rock edge," Morgan-Eagle, the band's vocalist, says of Bone Orchard's latest release,
A Romance of Ghosts
. These influences are what she calls a "cinematic landscape" that is ambiguous, vast and brimming, without an absolute point of reference.
Eagle, the band's lyricist, guitarist and banjo player, adds, "The roots of the songs come from Americana tradition, and certainly what I sing about is straight out of Sam Shepard and Cormac McCarthy. It's very uniquely Americana in that way."
Literature by Shepard and McCarthy is largely based on the literal and figurative expanse of the rural landscapes filled with melancholic, restless
and often violent outsider characters. These are lyrical themes the band embraces.
"It's why we love living in Taos," Morgan-Eagle says. "The landscape is so vast and far reaching. We try to create our music almost as if you were hearing what the landscape looks like. McCarthy creates these beautiful melancholy landscapes and that's really what we try to create with our music."
So what began as a distant and romanticized view of the remote Southwest as described in books became reality in 1991, after what Morgan-Eagle calls a "moment of insanity on the freeway."
"We were coming home to Los Angeles from Yosemite on a hot August afternoon and we hit Los Angeles and literally sat on the freeway and said, 'We cannot do this anymore,'" she says. "So we sat there for an hour in traffic, trying to decide where we wanted to move and decided to go the opposite extreme."
They moved to Taos and, in 1998, formed Bone Orchard with guitarist Chipper Johnson, bassist Paul Reid and drummer Mark Bennett.
Previously, Morgan-Eagle had performed as a competitive dancer in Los Angeles before she met Eagle, who was playing with The Peckinpahs, a band named after Sam Peckinpah, the director of the classic Western film
The Wild Bunch
. It was during his time with The Peckinpahs in Los Angeles that Eagle began to connect the post-punk vision with the country-folk sound.
Ultimately, bands like Joy Division and X, which like Bone Orchard, wore their influences on their sleeves, simultaneously (and perhaps unknowingly) helped to shape and influence the face of modern rock. But there's still the question about the old-timey sound and its connection to punk aggression. The answer lies in an unlikely pairing of guitar/amplifier feedback and the atmosphere created by the acoustic instrumentation of Appalachian roots music-what Eagle calls the "drone."
"The drone of the feedback isn't that far of a reach from the drone on a banjo or the drone on a dulcimer. In my mind it all sort of makes sense," Eagle says. He describes the Peckinpahs' sound as having a "very Western insular drama thing, but at the same time they are a little bit hard core."
Of Bone Garden's sound, he says, "There is definitely an Appalachian influence. So many of these Appalachian songs are the working-class and labor songs and the murder ballads are a big part of that. There's a whole melancholy that seems to go with my other main interests…especially when I started playing music and listening to bands like Joy Division, X and Velvet Underground. These bands didn't have the grinding guitars or jump around and make a bunch of noise; it was more atmosphere and texture. It's more about what's going on inside than what's happening on the surface. To me that's still a very strong influence."
In a way, Bone Orchard symbolizes the romanticized spirit of the West, where ideology is thicker than water. Its very name evokes the mystery of the southwest, often misunderstood, and not unlike McCarthy's stories, based in a merciless desert landscape, the sensibility of Bone Orchard's songwriting and performance finds the hidden beauty among the sand and stones.
Bone Orchard and The Santa Fe All-Stars
9 pm Friday, Nov. 30. $5
The Mine Shaft Tavern
2846 Hwy. 14, Madrid, 473-0743
Santa Fe Reporter