Intelligent Design
The evolution of Baboon into Dallas' best and loudest rock band took only 16 years, two tastes of major label stardom and a few horse heads.
13.October.2006

Andrew Huffstetler has just torn the shrink-wrap off of Baboon, the fourth full-length album by the Dallas band of the same name, having never seen the final CD before today. The six-foot-plus steel-faced lead singer/howler is hunched over a table at a North Dallas sushi restaurant, thumbing through the liner notes, and though he doesn’t look upset, he’s certainly a bit concerned when he asks an unexpected question: “Where’s the clown?”

            “We were on the road somewhere, driving home from a gig,” drummer Steven Barnett says about a mid-’90s Baboon tour. “We went by a church, a youth group something-or-other, and there was a sign outside. Said something about ‘the magic clown appearing tonight.’” The band laughs. “That turned into ‘Magic Clown Cannot Be Reasoned With,’ and that became our motto somehow.”

            The phrase found its way into most Baboon liner notes, and on previous albums, the nonsensical phrase made, well, a certain sense. On the band’s semi-greatest-hits live album, A Bum Note and a Bead of Sweat, barely-melodic hardcore assaults like “Step Away” and “California Dreamin’” are accompanied by a screaming, sweaty, whistle-blowing crowd (a Baboon audience staple that dates back to its beginnings), while the group’s progression into more melodic, straight-out rock fare on 2002’s Something Good Is Going To Happen To You still has its share of twisted cuts (the horn-infused freakout of “Pig Latin,” for starters).

            The group’s progression to a straightforward style is obvious to the cult of fans who have closely followed Baboon since its 1991 genesis, its 1996 debut album on Grass Records or even its earliest sign of maturity on the excellent (and now out of print) 1999 EP We Sing & Play. Even so, for most Dallas music fans, Baboon’s reputation is still abrasive, torrential, evil, earned after over a decade of pounding concerts: Huffstetler screaming and pretending to whack a baseball bat while on stage; Mike Rudnicki looking like a deranged troll as he pummels crowds with guitar shrieks on songs like “I’m Okay If You’re Okay;” Barnett smacking a strobe light and donning a horse’s head when the mood strikes him.

            So on Baboon, the band’s best record yet--a true contender for local album of the year, and a rock breakout that nails the difficult balance between intelligent composition and balls-out, mainstream-worthy lack of bullshit--the guys may still retain their long career’s edge and intensity, but the clown is gone.

 

 

When asked about the four years between albums, the band busts out a few jokes--“We wanted to milk every single from the last record,” says bassist Mark Hughes--as if the time span is a bad thing. But you can’t blame them for feeling that way at least subconsciously, having inched so closely to a major label break in 2003.

            Word had reached Baboon that the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, known for helping more than a few breakout bands in the past decade, would “listen to all submissions” when he took over as vice president of A&R at Elektra Records. Tipped off and encouraged by former Last Beat Records head Tami Thomsen, the band sent a copy of Something Good to Ocasek, as did a friend of local producer and pAper chAse lead singer John Congleton. They expected absolutely nothing, but weeks later, Ocasek’s assistant called Thomsen, expressing a huge level of interest.

            “We were like, he might come see us,” Rudnicki says. “We better try to recreate the record [live].” So the band enlisted two new members: First was a second drummer, Brutal Juice’s Ben Burt, for a few gigs, but the double-drummer setup didn’t last for long. The other addition, former Legendary Crystal Chandelier/Dooms UK guitarist James Henderson, seemed even less likely to stick around.

            When they asked him to join, “It was only a matter of months [since LCC had broken up],” Henderson says. “They called me, and I was prepared to kinda never play with anyone again. Yeah. I thought that was the end of that. I just didn’t...I didn’t see how I was gonna play. I couldn’t be bothered to start anything myself.”

            But Henderson was a longtime friend of Baboon, having played with Hughes in LCC for some time and with other members in the art-rock insanity of Dooms UK before that. Thus, he was “only too happy to accept.”

            And then... the band has a moment of deafening silence.

            “There was an awkward period where we waited around, waited around, hoping to hear from [Ocasek],” Barnett says. Huffstetler chimes in: “He had requested some more music, some videos, so we sent that stuff, and we never heard anything. Then he got fired.”

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