Grant Lee Buffalo

When the members of Grant Lee Buffalo walked out of the studio after completing Copperopolis in 1996, they knew it was the final chapter of a trilogy. In the future, they concluded, GLB would visit musical places it had never been to in the four years since it emerged from the Los Angeles underground.

Fast forward to the spring of 1997. Guitarist/vocalist Grant Lee Phillips and drummer/percussionist Joey Peters are in Phillips’ living room wading through the most recent flood of material Phillips had written. Before them lies the task of drawing together a shopping list of various minimalism that marked their debut while forging ahead with a fresh sense of abandon. In contrast to the gorgeously veiled Copperopolis, the work at hand would play upon the starkness of seductive rhythms, jagged, howling guitars, and unforgettable melodies — all of this with the immediacy of a great pop song. The goal: To move the body as well as the mind, to give legs to the exhilarating collage of sounds that comprises Grant Lee Buffalo simultaneously psychedelic and antiquated, rootsy and overdriven. “We wanted to make it stomp,” says Phillips. “It had to feel good. It had to make you wanna get on the train,” adds Peters.

Jubilee stomps. As the name implies, GLB’s fourth release is a celebration that captures not only the joy of making visceral music but the creative revitalization put forth to make it happen.

Such a breakthrough came to full fruition as Phillips and Peters parted ways with bassist Paul Kimble, opening up their creative process to several talented outsiders. It was a brave step for a band that had produced its first three efforts almost entirely without the taint of the outside world. “We realized that we’d be screwing with the chemistry in a good way, depending on who we brought into the process,” Phillips says.

With Dan Rothschild (formerly of Tonic) on bass, and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Jon Brion juggling everything from tack piano to chamberlain, Phillips and Peters invited producer Paul Fox (XTC, 10,000 Maniacs, Robyn Hitchcock) into the fold, along with a supporting cast that others might only dream of. The Wallflowers’ Rami Jaffee contributed some B3 shades while alt-country session-king Greg Leisz added steel guitar parts. Other friends adding vocal or instrumental tracks during the band’s six weeks at A&M Studios in Hollywood included Michael Stipe, E from The Eels, The Figaro Brothers’ Phil Parlapiano, Andrew Williams and Robyn Hitchcock, who contributed the nastiest harmonica riff this side of the Mississippi Delta. “I didn’t know if they were necessarily going to sing or play on the record,” says Phillips of the guest performers, many of whom were put to work just because they happened on by the studio. “I just liked having them all in the room because personalities tend to tilt the boat one way or the other. We invited that.” Peters agrees. “It was very liberating,” he says. “It felt good to throw away all those old rules about the way Grant Lee Buffalo had to be.”

Several songs on Jubilee bash with a diverse arsenal of overdriven guitars, crashing rhythms and dizzying choruses (“APB,” “Fine How’d Ya Do,” “My, My, My”), others simmer like classic Motown soul (“Testimony,” “The Shallow End”), and others still are colored by the sepia-tones of Americana (“Come To Mama, She Say,” “Everybody Needs A Little Sanctuary”). On one hand it’s typical GLB, in that it still demonstrates the band’s knack for making their own wide range of styles their own; it showcases Phillips’ stunning, falsetto-tinged vocal work and his cinematic, deeply affecting lyrics. Plus, the band has by no means abandoned its obsession with the archaic. Antiquated instruments abound and the title track, for one, bubbles over like a drunken sing-along at a turn-of-the-century saloon. (It’s a foppish folly, if you will, born out of the band’s recent contribution to Velvet Goldmine, filmmaker Todd Haynes’ exploration of the glam rock scene.) But this time, such sounds ring through the speakers like the sunlight bursting through the clouds for the first time in weeks. Driven by Fox’s crisp, shimmering production work and the band’s desire to let go like it never had before, Grant Lee Buffalo has made their perfect post-modern pop statement with the effervescent Jubilee.

“I grew up with a lot of church music,” says Phillips. “In these little country churches, the idea was that the music was part of the release, part of the physical experience. I always thought of the jubilee as an event that was musical and magical and liberating and exotic and all things possible — a tent revival and a vaudeville show, all these other forms that are entertaining as well as liberating. That’s the idea behind Jubilee.”