Bad Livers

During the 1990s the club circuit in Austin, Texas, nurtured ensembles drawing on wide-ranging styles, yet the Bad Livers stood apart as the most resistant to classification. Across their recordings the trio traversed traditional folk and bluegrass, blues, early rock & roll, punk rock, and eventually trance. At the peak of their extensive road schedule a single set might juxtapose pieces by the Carter Family, Iggy Pop, Monk, Mississippi John Hurt, the Misfits, and Slayer. Their mongrel approach attracted listeners open to such hybrids, though the later phase of their career demonstrated how limiting a designation like “Americana” could prove; increasingly experimental directions met only sporadic enthusiasm from devotees of conventional forms. Within the pop and rock sphere their instrumental lineup proved distinctive: Danny Barnes handled lead vocals along with banjo, guitar, and resonator guitar, Mark Rubin played bass and tuba, and Bob Grant joined the pair in late 1996 on mandolin, guitar, and tenor banjo, succeeding Ralph White, whose contributions had encompassed fiddle plus Cajun and Mexican accordion.

Rubin and Barnes both arrived with bluegrass roots, a label that fit the Bad Livers as well as any other. Raised in rural Oklahoma, Rubin took up tuba in childhood and continued through high school, where he also began on bass; exposure to klezmer during those years left an audible imprint on the group’s sound. The band coalesced in 1990 shortly after Rubin attended the New Music Seminar in New York and decided to assemble his own project, emerging from the informal Danny Barnes Trio that Barnes assembled on any given night from whichever musicians answered the phone.

Widespread notice among Austin audiences arrived in 1991, followed by the trio becoming the sensation of the SXSW music conference the next year. They signed with Chicago’s Touch & Go imprint, which issued Delusions of Banjer (1992) and Horses in the Mines (1994). Dust on the Bible, first sold on cassette at concerts and later released on CD by the label’s Quarterstick subsidiary, collected bluegrass-gospel standards and illustrated the group’s ability to perform traditionally when inclined. A move to North Carolina’s Sugar Hill label produced Hogs on the Highway (1997) and Industry and Thrift (1998), the latter produced by longtime Texas music gadfly Lloyd Maines. Successive releases steadily expanded the trio’s range, culminating in Blood and Mood, which surfaced in early 2000 as an unclassifiable blend of bluegrass, punk, various sampling techniques, and other electronic elements. The album drew simultaneous praise as a masterpiece and criticism as the culmination of a prolonged departure from traditional bluegrass; the group’s website observed that it was “to date the worst selling title in the catalog.” By then both Barnes and Rubin had turned toward solo endeavors—Rubin serving as music supervisor for Richard Linklater’s film The Newton Boys, and Barnes, after relocating to Washington state, composing for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Although the Bad Livers never formally disbanded after Blood and Mood, individual projects took priority. Barnes issued several left-of-center banjo albums that echoed the band’s early work, while Rubin remained a steady presence in Austin’s live-music and recording community.