“The archive is not a repository of cultural memory, but of dreams, a bank of dream material. The work of history is not memory-work, but dream-work.“

~ Steve Reinke

Thanks to superfans at the FuckYeahBenNichols and DearBenNichols fan-sites, us lazier musicologists now have access to the man’s earliest known bands. So, let’s go backwards a few decades before working our way up the imminent new Lucero album.

In Little Rock, in the early early 90’s, Ben played bass in high-school band The Harbingers, and shortly after, with the same personnel, in Victory Garden. Guitarist Brad Sims wrote most of the lyrics and sings lead, but Ben sings lead on the songs he wrote and back-up on most of the others. Like many upstart bands of the time, they wore a significant R.E.M. influence, but added accents of Hüsker Dü and early Joy Division. They sound like the south’s response to Miracle Legion, which itself had been the north’s response to R.E.M. For such a young band, they had that southern college rock sound down–they could float it out on new waves and surf vibes, tie it together with ribbony guitar and anchor it with concave drum. Ben’s bass stands out every now and then, (like in the mostly instrumental “Truth is Rude”) but in these recordings at least, the Harbingers and Victory Garden were guitar-focused bands.

In the mid-90’s, Ben’s tastes punkified and he started his own Jawbreaker-influenced band, Red Forty. This is where the story becomes more well-known. Red Forty incinerates Little Rock for a few years before Ben moves to Memphis. There, he starts a new band in the same vein called Lucky Old Sun, which only leaves behind a few shows and a demo tape featuring the song “Crystal Blue,” later played occasionally by Lucero. Ben’s punk period stands on it’s own as a great few years of songs; Red Forty and Lucky Old Sun deliver the emotional weight of any Lucero song, but quirked and revved to supercharged pace.

After Lucky Old Sun, Ben plays a stint on bass in the Memphis band/institution Pezz. He would leave Pezz to concentrate on a new cowboy band he was forming with another former Pezz bassist, Brian Venable. The rest, as they say, is … on the Attic Tapes.

Almost fifteen years later, Lucero has proved almost as variable as the rest of Ben Nichols’ career, which is the main thing to take away from how a dude’s high-school bands sound. Fashions change and artists sometimes outgrow them; if an artist started his/her work as a teenager, then that has to be for the best. To the message-board posters who say they could never listen to Lucero because the singer’s voice seems so put-on, I mean, he didn’t sing that way when he was twenty-something in Red Forty, the revelation of an earlier phase in Ben Nichols’ evolution will probably only add fodder to that argument. To the Lucero diehards who say they can’t appreciate the new records as much because they’re just don’t sound like same band, it’s not Country to use trumpets, the Harbingers and Victory Garden might not mean anything because they don’t sound like “All Sewn Up.” However, I think each of those positions are as absurd as saying I don’t buy into Picaso’s Cubist Period, I mean, a few years before he was painting normal-looking people.

We’re talking about an entire lifetime in art, spontaneous in some phases, but composed in others. Red Forty, the first four Lucero albums (S/T, TMFW, TN, ND, RRSB), and the Cormac McCarthy album are Nichols’ compositions, but Lucero’s latest material seems to be Ben’s most instinctive since Victory Garden–it is an actual evolution, unlike Obama’s “evolution” on equal rights for same-sex couples, which is just a choice. Ya burnt!

If you haven’t been following the links in the post, you can follow them now to download the bands discussed above for free: The Harbingers, Victory Garden, Lucky Old Sun, Red Forty.

Thank you again to the aforementioned fan-sites, their readers and sources. Good work.

The Harbingers – Standing On The Shadows Of Angels

Victory Garden – Gallowglass

Red 40 – Cry At The Table