NEWS: Gram Rabbit and the Cultivation of Cosmic American Music

MUSIC: Gram Rabbit and the Cultivation of Cosmic American Music

I awaken in the morning to find that my savagely dehydrated body is covered with the scrawling text of a Sharpie marker. The whisky-infused sweat I’ve been secreting all night long has mingled with the ink, ruining the pale dress I slept in. The directions to last night’s party are on my left calf. They read something like, “Lt Yucca Mesaamarg. Rt Inezztibbar.” A song is stuck in my head, and the lyrics keep repeating, over and over again:

“Oh lord, it’s so hard, it’s so hard when you’re living in the devil’s playground…”

I’ve spent the last two nights celebrating the release of Gram Rabbit’s second album, the aptly titled Cultivation. This is the aftermath. I’m in their adopted home: Yucca Valley, just outside of Joshua Tree, in a dingy motel called The Sands. The wrappers from three Jack-in-the-Box tacos lie crumpled on the bedside table, and half of a warm, watered down Coke beckons. I take a sip. Perfection.

Whisky is my drink in the sense that I can consume more of it than any other liquor without becoming violently ill; that doesn’t mean I don’t get into brawls with ceiling fans or wind up naked in the ocean. Lucky for me, there were no ceiling fans or oceans anywhere near last night’s desert locale—just a Sharpie.

I toss my dress into the garbage and examine the rest of my body in the dirty mirror. Aside from a happy face on my back signed by Todd Rutherford—one of Gram Rabbit’s two founders—the rest of the writing on my body is totally illegible. There are no messages on my flesh from Jesika von Rabbit, the band's mysterious lead singer and other founder.

I haven’t scaled her fierce energetic wall.


***

I first heard Gram Rabbit about two years ago, when they performed ”Cowboys & Aliens” live on KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic." It was November 2004, and I remember having an epiphanic experience—the first time in a long time that someone else seemed to be speaking my language. There I was, trapped in the endless gridlock on Santa Monica Boulevard—just me and my perverted, pre-apocalyptic American dream—when all of a sudden, with the simple flick of a dial, Jesika von Rabbit was coming in live over the radio waves.

“Cowboys and aliens travel through time—the wild, wild, west magic saucer ride,” she sang in a spaced-out, disaffected near-monotone.

I felt a door to my subconscious open slightly. A sliver of light stabbed through the narrow aperture. I turned the volume up.

“Round-up, lasso, beam or probe, the eyeless leader is wearing a robe...”

This didn’t sound like the thin-skinned neo-folk or over-produced zombie-pop I was accustomed to hearing on the radio. It sounded like party music at an intergalactic haunted house. The door squeaked opened a bit further.

“Home on the range or outer space everyone’s breeding for the master race. Lick-it-y banana splits giddy-up, prehistoric land of the UFO, Sergeant Martian pepper machine, miracle on 34 galaxies…"

The cars around me began to disappear like soap bubbles, luxury SUVs that never leave the city, Escalades and Hummers—pop, pop, gone. The stretch of hot asphalt that leads from Hollywood to the Pacific Ocean melted and morphed into a black-lit sky studded with neon stars. I found myself standing in a deep, dark doorway that led to a universe of fringe fairy tales, Wild West hallucinations, and exploding myths.

"…It’s time for the dirty horse to take a bath; I’m making some wine from the grapes of wrath.”

Then, just as I was about to cross the threshold, "Morning Becomes Eclectic" host Nic Harcourt busted into my reverie with his tidy British accent. The Escalades and Hummers popped back into reality with asphalt beneath them. I learned that “Cowboys and Aliens” had its home on Gram Rabbit’s debut album, Music to Start a Cult to.

I bought it, doused myself in it, and struck a metaphorical match.
***

A lot has already been said about Jesika von Rabbit, Todd Rutherford, and the beginnings of Gram Rabbit. A number of sources will tell you that Jesika grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and started playing piano at age six. Likewise, it's easy enough to learn that Todd was raised in the farming and ranching town of Porterville, California, where he learned to play piano and guitar. Both had musical parents—Jesika's mother was a singer in a hotel lounge band, and Todd's father supported his family as a professional jazz pianist. Eventually, Todd moved to San Francisco and Jesika to L.A., both in pursuit of musical dreams.

Google Gram Rabbit and you'll easily discover that Jesika and Todd met when a mutual friend invited them to Joshua Tree to start a band. Jesika was sick of L.A. and Todd needed a break from San Francisco, so they both accepted and journeyed to the desert. The band never quite clicked though, leaving them both frustrated. As respite from that disappointment, the two began a private collaboration and decided to perform together at Gram Fest. It wasn't long before they discovered their unique creative chemistry.

Biographies and timelines are fine and good, but what seems more interesting is the strange mix of qualities that makes Gram Rabbit—both as individuals and as a band—so distinctive. There's the underlying sincerity, even in their most absurd songs; their striking mix of earthiness and spaciness, and the depth to lyrics that rhyme.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a house filled with music ranging from Ladysmith Black Mambazo to George and Ira Gershwin, Mongo Santamaria to Randy Newman. I know that truly inspired, original music is hard to come by, but I also know that it exists. Early on, I discovered my parents’ Beatles collection on vinyl. The Beatles are a gateway drug, and before long I was listening to Simon and Garfunkel, The Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, The Doors, The Velvet Underground—the list goes on. That all led me right smack into Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, where I ended up hanging out for a while. Depending on the day, I would indulge my adolescent angst and mourn the awful fate of humankind with "Comfortably Numb" or "Ramble On" as the soundtrack to my lamentation. Eventually I exited (not abandoned—just exited), my Classic Rock and Folk Kingdom for college where, aside from a semester of hippie-fever, I indulged in a healthy diet of Indie and Alt-Music.

I was open, I was ready. I learned the merits of Brit Pop, the passion of Punk, even the possibilities of Ska, but what I really learned was to appreciate uniqueness in music, whether it was an individual with an acoustic guitar, a bunch of guys with pedals and amps, or a sultry lady with a strange voice, a bass guitar and keyboard, and a pair of bunny ears.


***

Two nights before my hangover in Joshua Tree (and two years after I first heard them on the radio), I meet with Gram Rabbit at The Echo in Los Angeles. They’re finishing up their sound check when I arrive, and I walk in on a track called "Angel Song." I’ve seen Gram Rabbit play live before, but they’ve never sounded like this. It’s like they’re channeling eons of past and future genius—and this is just the sound check. Lush music engulfs the venue. Todd Rutherford and his brother Eric Jonasson sing hypnotic harmonies, and my heart throbs as though I’m a lovesick adolescent listening to The Byrds' covers of Bob Dylan’s "My Back Pages" or Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!" It’s no accident that "Angel Song" reminds me of The Byrds. Gram Rabbit was assembled and named in part for Gram Parsons, who was briefly a member of the short-lived but enduring Byrds. It’s easy to hear the relationship between Parsons' "One Hundred Years From Now" and Gram Rabbit’s "Angel Song," which is at least as gorgeous, sweetly sentimental, and melodically all encompassing.

“Just past a new beginning, when everything was lost, I heard an angel singing, to those who paid the cost. She sang, the last tomorrow was surely meant to be, just past a new beginning, when everyone was free…”

Their first album, 2004’s Music to Start a Cult To, was a musical reckoning between Jesus and the devil—a pop-rock, Wild West shootout on a postmillennial frontier. Music to Start a Cult To is the album that made me love Gram Rabbit, with songs like the proverbially relevant “Dirty Horse,” the eerily beautiful and irreverently sardonic “Kill A Man,” the earnestly acoustic “Devil’s Playground,” and of course the ultimate intergalactic haunted house anthem, “Cowboys and Aliens.” It’s been nearly two years, and I’m desperate to hear Cultivation, but first I have to sit down with the band and fire at them from my arsenal of questions.

They finish their sound-check and descend from the stage.
***

My questions don't go over too well. This isn’t one of those articles where I purposefully self-deprecate and paint myself as lame to make the band look cool. Gram Rabbit is cool without my help, just like my questions are lame all on their own. The truth is, they’re hardly questions at all. I’ve made the mistake of overanalyzing their music and so, like a total novice, I do most of the talking.

I tell them that I see Gram Rabbit as the “most American” band currently producing material. I say things like, “The lyrical and musical symbolism in your songs seems deeply entrenched in the myth of the American West, an arguably archaic myth. Somehow, you marry the very powerful and vivid images and sounds of that myth to a decidedly modern experience. The result is an exploded myth that encourages listeners to re-imagine and reevaluate both our national and individual identities, and to look at things that we’ve potentially allowed to stagnate in the depths of our minds and in our cellular memories.”

I wait for the band to respond. They don’t—unless you consider bored and somewhat embarrassed expressions to be responses.

“Okay,” I say, shifting in my seat. “You guys have the rare ability to be ironic without coming off as judgmental, didactic or alienating. Is this intentional, and how much effort, if any, do you put into your tone?”

Jesika seems to think that I’m full of bull. She makes it clear that she isn’t comfortable with my word choice. She slouches on the couch in her dangerously low-rise trousers and pale blue, retro western shirt.

“What do you mean by ironic?” she asks pointedly.

I start to sweat. Todd scrambles to my defense.

“Like in ‘Kill A Man,'” he suggests.

“Yes,” I say, thankful for this small mercy. “’Kill A Man’ is a perfect example.”

Fingers poised over my laptop keyboard, I prepare to document their response.

“It just kind of happens naturally,” grumbles the band.

I am grasping at straws and decide to try a new tactic.

“Okay, um—is there anywhere else, geographically, that you would like to try living and working as artists?”

Jesika looks shocked and appalled. I've struck a major nerve. She sits up, leans toward me and looks me square in the eye. “No way,” she says, shaking her head slowly. “I’m ready to die in the desert.”

“Yes,” I think to myself, “and I am ready to die right here."

To my relief, however, the mention of the desert actually gets the band talking. It is a subject they feel comfortable with, something they are sure of. Todd tells me that when he first arrived in Joshua Tree from San Francisco, he felt his psychic awareness open immediately. Experiences that would have seemed crazy in the city became standard fare.

“We call them synchronicities,” Jesika explains. “Doubles.”

“The desert frees you from the grind of the city that keeps your senses dulled,” Todd adds.

I tell them that despite having lived most of my life in Southern California, I’ve never been to Joshua Tree. They insist that I come out and see it for myself, inviting me to the next night’s show—the real album release party—which is happening at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, just outside of Joshua Tree.

Todd gives me a copy of Cultivation and the band walks me to the street. The show won’t start for another couple of hours, so I’m headed home to listen to the new album and bide my time. I’m halfway down the block when Jesika calls my name.

"Thanks," she yells when I turn around. She waves and flashes a warm smile that momentarily softens her normally stony eyes.


***

Gram Parsons coined the phrase Cosmic American Music. It’s how he described the music he and artists like Emmylou Harris, Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds were making. He wasn't satisfied with the more common monikers assigned to their music: genres like Country Rock, Progressive Country, Continental Country, and later Alt Country. It’s funny, because more than any of the original Cosmic American Musicians, I feel that label best suits Gram Rabbit. Don’t get me wrong—they’re not a simple Alt Country band. I could list a bunch of other artists whose influences I hear in Gram Rabbit's work, but to make some feeble comparison—to say that Gram Rabbit is like a cross between Johnny Cash and Madonna—would be beside the point. The music Gram Rabbit makes is random, unique and peripheral. It's got incredible depth and yet is somehow intensely relatable. It doesn't fall into any one category, and so can almost fit anywhere.

I listen to Cultivation on the drive home from the interview. The first track is called "Waiting in the Kountry," and it's a heavy, serious, bass-driven rock song. Gram Rabbit knows their way around traditional bass and guitar driven tracks. Music to Start a Cult To was built of them—tracks like "Dirty Horse," "Devil’s Playground, "Land of Jail," "Kill A Man," and "New Energy." Each is unique in its own way, but they all seem spawned from an extraordinary Western, desert energy. These songs sound as though they're composed of an almost effortless musical truth, and Cultivation offers a few more in the same vein, while obviously attempting to stretch even further.

There's "Charlie's Kids," a track that reminds me of They Might Be Giants (on peyote in the desert), and the darkly synth-tastic "Paper Heart" that could easily be used to score a Cirque du Soleil routine. "Jesus & I" is a romp of a song with an infectious beat, "Sorry" could be Gram Rabbit's anthem, and maybe I'm a total sap, but I love the simple and beautiful "Follow Your Heart." "Bloody Bunnies (Superficiality)" seems poised to be a crowd pleaser (maybe even radio-friendly), but "Angel Song" is my favorite. "Angel Song" is modern Cosmic American Music at it's best. It picks up the allegorical conversation about America where Music to Start a Cult to left off.

A couple of hours later I head back to The Echo. A good number of Eastside hipsters are in attendance, joined by an unexpectedly large showing of desert-dwellers. You can tell the desert dwellers from the Eastside hipsters in a number of ways. The desert-dwellers are genuinely odd, whereas the Eastside hipsters are putting it on. Once, in college, a friend of mine (plastered after hours in a free beer garden) ate about four fistfuls of hallucinogenic mushrooms to satiate his hunger. When he stopped tripping a day and a half later, he had changed. His hair seemed to be growing in a different direction, his eyes were wider and their color seemed to have altered ever-so-slightly. It was almost as if he buzzed. A number of Gram Rabbit's desert uber-fans remind me of him. Some of the desert-dwellers are strangely androgynous, like the middle-aged, heavyset, frizzy-haired, leather-clad blond(e?) who remarks on how beautiful Jesika is. While I can’t vouch for my interlocutor’s gender, I can vouch for Jesika’s hotness. All eyes are on her as she takes the stage with her waist-length auburn hair, huge platform shoes, outrageous bod and sexy-comic pout—not to mention the enormous bunny ears she’s sporting.

By the time Gram Rabbit begins to perform, the Echo is packed. They play an exceptional set featuring some of my favorite tracks, including "Kill A Man," to which the entire crowd sings along in cultish unity.

"I see, I kill...I see, I kill..."

After a few tracks two morbidly sexy women in black-and-white, skin-tight bunny suits take the stage, dancing alongside Jesika and throwing bunny ears into the audience. Jesika herself performs a couple of songs wearing an eerie white bunny mask.

On my way out at the end of the night I pass the androgenous desert-dweller who had remarked earlier on Jesika's hotness.

"See you in the desert?" my new friend asks.

"I'll be there," I say.


***

Music to Start a Cult To and Cultivation serve as the soundtrack to my two-hour journey into the desert the next morning. When I arrive, I quickly check into the Desert Sands and chuck my bag, then head out to Joshua Tree, where I find myself incredulous at the landscape. I've always known (with a sort of jaded presumption) that Joshua Tree would be breathtaking, but it's one of those places that's really impossible to imagine.

In writing about his extensive experience of another American high desert—Arches National Monument in Utah—Edward Abbey said, "I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us." He described the natural, human struggle that he saw symbolized by the desert as "paradox and bedrock." I find myself thinking about this as I take the Barker Dam Loop trail out through a paradise of rocks and Joshua trees to a reflective lake. I overhear a ranger tell a group of visitors that in the 1950s, a movie studio shooting a Western painted over the petroglyphs along the Barker Damn Loop trail to brighten them up. Paradox and bedrock.

The Joshua trees remind me of Jesika—they are weirdly beautiful, both enchanting and eerie. The perfect blue sky is punctuated by amorphous white clouds, and I feel a childlike giddiness come over me as I begin to run around, climb on rocks, and sneak up on lizards who disappear into dark crevices and thorny bushes. My whole body feels different, my eyes feel bigger—they widen with awe. Nerve endings that have been hibernating for years seem to awaken suddenly; my lungs stretch as if in an instinctive attempt to breathe in the endless space around me. I lie on my back on a flat rock and stare up at the sky, then close my eyes and appreciate the feeling of the sun on my face.

After a while a strange, low droning sound becomes audible above me. I open my eyes and sit up, searching the sky for the source of this unidentifiable, humming noise. Other park visitors cast their faces upwards, searching as I do. The noise grows in volume and intensity.

"What is it?" someone asks.

"UFO," someone else says, only half-kidding, and everyone smiles with an odd mix of skepticism and acceptance.


***

Later, I head to Pioneertown, a formerly living movie set that was built to resemble an 1870s frontier town. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry shot there, and it still retains many of its original structures. It is also home to Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, a saloon, restaurant and nightclub where Gram Rabbit enjoys regular status as musical guest.

The place is packed with cowboy hats and Hell's Angels leather. Locals play pool in the billiards room, and the dinner clientele is deep into their
Biker Chili Burgers and Baby Back Ribs. A country band strums guitars and pics fiddles onstage. It's a far cry from Los Angeles, and I settle in for a meal. After dinner I stroll down main street—an abrupt stretch of dust bordered by Wild West-style post offices, banks, and bath houses.

When I arrive back at Pappy and Harriet's Gram Rabbit is there. Todd Rutherford immediately offers a warm welcome. I notice that the crowd has changed. Cowboy hats and motorcycle chaps have been replaced by bunny ears. Fans and fanatics are beginning to crowd around the stage, and I join them.

Before long, Gram Rabbit begins to play, and it's as if their music is an invitation to happily lose one's mind. People start to go crazy, dancing, screaming, singing along. I get the sense that there really is something to this Gram Rabbit "cult," even if it's just an excuse to rail against the stifling homogeny of our world. I chase my inhibitions with whisky, and my whisky with beer. It isn't long before the set is over and my sobriety is shot. I stumble outside, where the night sky slaps me across the face, hard. If you're reading this from an urban setting, you can commiserate with me. The night sky in Los Angeles is shallow and dull. It offers nothing—just a sense that you're penned in and restrained. Devoid of artificial light and smog, the high desert sky is deeper and more saturated with heavenly bodies than anything I've ever seen. I feel like I could stare into it forever and never be done looking, but shit—there's a party to attend.
***

The rest of the night is a bit of a blur. I decide, for some inexplicable reason, that I should take down directions to the Rabbit Ranch on my body, but then realize that driving is probably not in my best interest. I hitch a ride to the party, though the roadmap on my legs proves to be unreadable and unnecessary. I double-fist Tecates, pour beer on my shoe, rave to strangers, and offer Todd Rutherford unsolicited relationship advice. I watch Jesika dancing to 80s pop surrounded by a close circle of friends. Gram Rabbit's producer, Ethan Allan (Kristin Hersh, 50 Foot Wave, Luscious Jackson) patiently suffers my philosophizing.

I awaken in the morning to find that my savagely dehydrated body is covered with the scrawling text of a Sharpie marker. A song is stuck in my head, and the lyrics keep repeating, over and over again:

“Oh lord, it’s so hard, it’s so hard when you’re living in the devil’s playground…”
***

On the drive back to Los Angeles, I think about how Jesika said she was ready to die in the desert. I think what she meant is that the desert is her absolute life force—that in the desert, she can stop looking for a connection to or meaning of life, because she’s surrounded by it. It sounds odd, I know, because the desert isn’t generally thought of as a vibrant, bustling environment, but that’s the power of it—it’s life force is subtle and subliminal, but undeniable. Much as Todd mused that "the desert frees you from the grind of the city that keeps your senses dulled," Edward Abbey wrote that "the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparitive sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock." Jesika feels awake in the desert, which is liberating—almost like death. By saying she is ready to die there, what she really means is that she’s begun to live.

I’ve spent a significant portion of my life considering ditching the mainstream for the fringe. I’ve flirted with it chemically, spiritually, and artistically, and I’ve come to the desert—and to Gram Rabbit, in a way—looking for a small dose of that fringe; looking for escape from the lonely claustrophobia and empty demands of urban, Western society. I quickly learn, though, that Gram Rabbit isn’t in the desert, and the desert isn’t in Gram Rabbit: They are one and the same. Gram Rabbit is the music I’d been looking for, even though I didn’t realize I was looking.

Edward Abbey wrote: "Love flowers best in openness and freedom." Gram Rabbit are proof that the same is true for music.
***

Helen_Jupiter is the Managing Editor of the SuicideGirls Blog. She is currently at work on an allegorical novel about America. This is her first feature.

I really wish Gram Rabbit would come to Colorado!

(ps: i think i love you, Helen )

Lovely feature. you have a way with words that brings the senses to life...and makes a girl crave a shot of whisky!

this story is all tongues and tumbleweeds...

xo,
e

Yay Helen! Posh is right! You spill yourself into your writing in a very honest and endearing way without clouding the story with ego... bravo...


...but i love the night sky in LA... its tight and comfortable to me... controlled. Un-daunting...

...stop writing on yourself.

Gonzo-esoteric. This is a good thing.

holy shit. i unfortunately do not have the time to read all of this right now, but - i am dying to come back when i can.

Gram Rabbit have been a favorite of mine now for a couple years, and still no one seems to know who they are. cosmic American music, indeed.

I really wish they would play live more often than the handful of west coast dates they seem to do every once in a while. Although it seems the best place to see them would be in their high-desert habitat.

Thank you for the article's existence - I'm sure I will have more to say when I get the chance to savor its contents.

I went to a show in the desert a couple of months ago, Camper Van Beethoven, and Grim Rabbit opened up for them. Fucking awesome. I cannot say how much I liked Grim's show.

And a great article.

SO good! Very nicely done. Love it. Will have to investigate said band 0x

Bravo, Helen!

You sucked me in with the lede. How can anyone turn away from a story that begins with a beautiful woman whose body has been written on?

Then, you weaved your story with that of the band seemlessly. It's difficult to write in first person on a feature like this but you do so without any self-consciousness or attempts at being the next Hunter S.

I particularly love how you skipped over the bios and timelines and went straight for the meat, the essence of the players and how they work together.

And hell, I even learned something -- not just about Grim Rabbit but "Cosmic American Music." Never heard the term before. Very cool.

Overall, this feature made me want to learn more about a band I had never heard of before and after I hit submit, I'll be checking out their tracks.

Thank you for this.

Bravo, Miss Helen.

Great piece, Helen! Will you get drunk in the desert with me and puke on stuff?

Look at all the editors kissing your ass!!

With good reason...great article.

a very enjoyable read, helen--much better than the usual self-absorbed, ranting drivel on some popular music review sites that shall not be named.

i had heard of gram rabbit, but not heard their music before today, not to mention that i think every band sucks, but you sold me. i'll definitely give them a listen.

i feel the fucking energy

niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice

+1

(on the third try)

Congrats on a great feature.

I recently caught GR for the first time at the Troubadour in Los Angeles after misssing their LA shows repeatedly. I had a feeling it would be moving, and sure enough it was. they're one of those bands I always mention in hopes to find other fans, but seem to remain alone in my admiration I've definately been inspired by their work and can't wait to get my hands on their new record!!