<< Back 10/9/02 Gourds rollicking live show rolls into Asheville By Jay Hardwig Pull on your dancing boots, sprinkle sawdust on the floor, and bring your best hoot, holler, and moan: the Gourds are back in town. Long known for high-octane live shows — frontman Kevin Russell describes one as a “cross between a revival and a house party and a pep rally and a pow-wow” — the Gourds are also gaining notice for their farflung tastes. Their set list is a tight eclection of country, rock, bluegrass, shimmy, slither, strum, and swamp; the reels hum, the ballads creak, and the covers run from Snoop Dogg to Merle Haggard to Leadbelly and back. The audience ... well, the audience roars. Last month’s show at Knoxville’s Blue Cats was an Old City barnburner, a three-hour love-and-longnecks hootenanny punctuated by regular roars from an appreciative crowd. Russell, Claude Bernard, and Max Johnston (of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco fame) swapped leads on banjo, mandolin, guitar, and accordion, passing ‘round the instruments in true front-porch fashion; bassist Jimmy Smith and drummer Keith Langford backed it up with no small measure of funk, swagger, and drive. “I think what sets us apart from all the other milquetoast alt-country acts is that we groove,” Russell wrote from the band’s home base in Austin, Texas, in a recent e-interview. “You can shake yer ass to our downhome shit. We are all very oriented to the rhythmic boom shaka-laka-laka. Melody is nice, but you gotta have that beat. That is what American music has always been about: rhythm and grooves.” Using that scorecard — rhythm and grooves — perhaps it is not surprising that the Gourds’ most famous tune is their syncopated hillbilly take on Snoop Dogg’s thug-life anthem “Gin and Juice.” That cover — often mistakenly attributed to Phish — became a hotly-traded commodity on the Internet during the glory days of file sharing and went a long way to spreading the Gourds’ gospel nationwide. Still, to love the Gourds for “Gin n’ Juice” is to miss the point. They deserve your love for other reasons; catch them live and you’ll know why. If you should miss the show — bum foot, in-laws in town, recently had your driver’s license revoked — you can get a taste of the Gourds’ medicine on their most recent release, the odd and lovely “Cow, Fish, Fowl, or Pig.” Melodic, rollicking, robust, “Cow, Fish, Fowl, or Pig” finds the Gourds exploring the American musical map in their usual twisted way, singing and strumming and deeply invested in those downhome rhythm and grooves. The Gourds play the Asheville Music Zone (81 Broadway Avenue) on Saturday, Oct. 12. Advance tickets are $10; showtime is 9 p.m. Call 255.8811 or visit www.ashevillemusiczone.com for more info.