gaffney

for those of you lucky enough to be in santa rosa tonight/or the bay area in general. if i were able, i’d be at all three of these shows

THE HEAR & NOW
The Hacienda Brothers ‘farewell’ tour pays tribute to the late Chris Gaffney
Derk Richardson, special to SF Gate

Thursday, August 7, 2008

The Hacienda Brothers had just finished recording their third studio album when the “Western soul” band’s lead singer, Chris Gaffney, was diagnosed with liver cancer. That was in February; on April 17, Gaffney — a roots-music polymath who rose from quintessential bar-band musician knocking around Southern California to multifaceted sideman for Dave Alvin and irreplaceable front man for the Hacienda Brothers — passed away at age 57 with family at his side.

Gaffney’s musical collaborator in the Hacienda Brothers, Dave Gonzalez, worked with executive producers Jeb Schoonover and Paul to see “Arizona Motel” through to its release at and the end of June, and this month, Gonzalez continues a kind of Hacienda Brothers farewell tour as a tribute to Gaffney. The revamped band, with “a very special guest,” performs Friday, Aug. 8, at Slim’s in San Francisco.

“It’s been pretty rough lately,” Gonzalez said in recent phone call from Tucson, Ariz., the Hacienda Brothers’ de facto home base. “I’m driving through Tucson with my girlfriend right now on our way to Jeb’s house, where Gaff and I always hung out and where we wrote all those songs. We’re driving down these streets, and we’re gonna be driving by the recording studio where we did most of our records, the Cavern, right here in just a couple miles. It’s beautiful here, and it also has kind of a lonesome feeling, you know? Just like the way that new record is — it’s a beautiful record, and we’re very proud of it.”

The fourth in the Hacienda Brothers’ discography (which includes the live “Music for Ranch & Town”), “Arizona Motel” is once again primarily a showcase for Gaffney’s stirring gruff and soulful singing, whether the song is his own (“Soul Mountain”), a collaboration with Gonzalez and Schoonover (“Uncle Sam’s Jail,” “I Still Believe”), the solo work of Gonzalez (“Big Town City,” “Long Way to Town”), a co-writing effort by Gonzalez and Schoonover (“A Lot of Days Are Gone,” “Ordinary Fool”) or Gonzalez and the legendary Dan Penn (“Used to the Pain,” “Break Free”) or a country classic, (Hank Williams’ “When You’re Tired of Breaking Other Hearts,” Connie Smith’s “I’ll Come Running,” Bill Deaton’s “Divorce or Destroy,” made famous by George Jones and Hank Williams, Jr.).

“He was just a great singer,” Gonzalez said of Gaffney. “If he got behind a song, he could absolutely hit it out of the park. He could sing jazz, he could sing show tunes, he could sing rock music. I was so proud to be there in the studio with him, to be there on the stage with him and just witness it every night and see him turn it on and lay it out there for everybody. I would stand there with chill bumps up and down my arms listening to him sing, being the happiest I could ever be, just hearing a song being sung by him. But now it’s bittersweet. It’s sad to think about it — you can’t hear Chris singing those songs anymore except for on the record.”

Gonzalez, raised in San Diego, was still in his longstanding rockabilly-blues trio, the Paladins, when he and Gaffney crossed paths. They first met at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood in the late 1980s, Gonzalez recalled. Gaffney was leading his band, the Cold Hard Facts. “At that time I was doing some producing myself, and I was looking for a cat that played accordion,” Gonzalez said. “He was tremendously talented as a singer, songwriter, rhythm guitar player and accordion player. So we exchanged numbers, and a little while after that I had him on a session and we hit it off real good. At the same time, I knew people that he knew, and one of them was our mutual friend right here in Tucson, Jeb Schoonover. He really believed in Chris and promoted him a lot. Every time I’d see Jeb, we’d be talking about Chris and saying, ‘One day we sure need to do something and get together.'”

Before that would happen, Gaffney recorded several fine albums under his own name and then hooked up with another Southern California roots-music hero, Dave Alvin, playing on Alvin’s recordings and touring with him as a member of the Guilty Men.

“I thought it was great that he started touring a lot with Dave,” Gonzalez said, “but he still wasn’t singing his own tunes and leading his own band, which is what he wanted to do. Here at the end — it’s hard to talk about it like this — but he got to do what he really, really liked to do, which was make records and sing in front of people and tour with his own band. He had a lot to say. Everybody that got to hear him fell in love with him.”

That included Dan Penn, the veteran producer and songwriter behind such hits (often co-written with Spooner Oldham) as “I’m Your Puppet,” “Sweet Inspiration,” “Cry Like a Baby,” “Do Right Woman” and “The Dark End of the Street.”

Gonzalez got to know Penn in the late 1990s, having met at a European festival around the time Penn and Oldham recorded their intimate “Moments from this Theatre.” “He had always been one of my heroes,” Gonzalez said of Penn, “and when Chris and I first got together, I just absolutely knew that Dan would love the way Chris sings. There was no doubt. Dan’s into singers and songs. And I felt like Chris and I had some real good songs, and at that point, when we first got together, even on the earliest demos, Chris was singing so great, so natural and raw.”

After Gonzalez and Gaffney cut their first demo, they sent it to Penn in Nashville. “He absolutely fell in love with it,” Gonzalez said, “And I know it was Chris’ voice and Chris’ talent that Dan recognized.” Penn agreed to produce the debut Hacienda Brothers CD and maintained the affiliation right through “Arizona Motel.”

“He liked the sound we were getting out here in Arizona,” Gonzalez noted, “and he told us, ‘You know, I could invite you boys out to Nashville, but I’d rather come out there and see how you got that sound. It’s not Nashville, and it’s not West Coast; it’s Western soul.’ And that’s how we got that name, Western soul.”

The name perfectly suited Gaffney’s singing. “Chris is a Western singer that also sang R&B and soul,” Gonzalez said. “I love that about him. At the same time you hear Waylon (Jennings) and Ray Price in him, you also hear Otis Redding and James Carr. And he had some Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra thrown in there on side, too, stuff that he heard so much when he was growing up.”

In his long tenure as the leader of the Paladins, Gonzalez was the front man and lead singer. He gladly stepped back from the lead mic in the Hacienda Brothers. “I was a utility singer,” he explained humbly. “I always wanted to have a bigger, more produced sound with steel guitar, piano, horns, extra singers. I always wanted to have a bigger band and work with a great singer.

“By the time I started working with Gaff and Jeb and Dan Penn, I felt like it was just about the songs. I really didn’t have any boundaries on what I could write because I wasn’t limited by what I could sing — I had a great singer here, and I could really open up and write more freely. And everything I do from now on, I’m gonna really be thinking about Chris in so many ways — in terms of being a good musician, a good songwriter and a better singer. I owe him a lot. I’m really sad he had to go.”

Dave Gonzalez and the Hacienda Brothers perform with a very special guest, Friday at Slim’s, 333 11th St., 9 p.m., $20. The Iguanas open. For more information, call (415) 255-0333 or click here. For the Hacienda Brothers tour dates, click here. Part of the proceeds from the tour and sales of the new record will go to assist Chris Gaffney’s family. For more information, go to HelpGaff.com.