It’s early evening, barely dark, and Dave Gonzalez has just pulled
into Santa Fe, N.M. He’s been on the road all day driving in from
Austin, and only minutes earlier, he was driving into a Southwestern
sunset.
“It was so beautiful, man, and it’s wonderful weather now—they
say it might snow here tonight, which is a real relief, because it was
such a brutal summer in Texas. And I know you had it bad in Tucson this
year, too.”
A roots-rock guitar hero and bandleader, Gonzalez is a journeyman
musician with longtime ties to Tucson and the Southwest. A former
member of the roots-rockabilly group The Paladins and the Western-soul
band the Hacienda Brothers, he has crossed the desert more times than
he cares to remember during a career of more than 25 years. But he
never tires of doing it—as long as he can bring his music to the
listening public.
These days, Gonzalez has a brand new bag: the Stone River Boys, a
terrific combo that plays equal amounts of honky-tonk, roots rock and
R&B, creating one of the freshest sounds to arise lately from the
genre known loosely as Americana.
The Stone River Boys will make their first appearance in the Old
Pueblo during the Tucson Weekly‘s 2009 Fall Club Crawl®.
Gonzalez and company will play at 10:30 p.m. on the outdoor Bud Select
Music Stage.
The Stone River Boys came together last year in the wake of the
death from liver cancer of accordionist and singer Chris Gaffney, who
was Gonzalez’s partner in the Hacienda Brothers.
Gonzalez’s voice still cracks a little when remembering Gaffney, who
passed away in April 2008.
“I was trying to get a band together to play some benefit shows when
Gaff got sick, to help raise some money for his treatment, but we’d
barely got started, and he died unexpectedly. So we still formed the
band and toured, and we were able to send some money back to his
widow.”
That all-star Austin-based band grew into the Stone River Boys,
which prominently features the singing and songwriting of Mike
Barfield, a friend of Gaffney’s and a longtime Austin musician.
Barfield led his own band, The Hollisters, for many years and has been
working a unique brand of country-soul as a solo act, for which he’s
earned the nickname the “Tyrant of Texas Funk.”
Gonzalez provides a little background: “Even before Chris got sick,
Mike had expressed some interest in doing something (with me), and then
he had these songs ready to go, and we started hitting venues as the
Stone River Boys. We went into the studio, writing more material, and
now we have 15 solid songs in the can. We’re just looking for the right
label to release the album.”
The Stone River Boys are a true hybrid, developing serious soulful
grooves while staying true to hard-core country. It’s Stax soul meets
the Bakersfield sound, imbued with touches of Duane Eddy and
spaghetti-Western soundtracks, thanks to Gonzalez’s signature baritone
guitar sound.
“We’re like right there in my (musical) home, between Don Rich and
Steve Cropper,” he says.
Barfield and Gonzalez have employed several musicians as Stone River
Boys in the last year, some of them former members of the Hacienda
Brothers. They’ve spent months woodshedding and honing their
live act. When in Austin, the group holds down a weekly happy-hour gig
at the famous Continental Club.
“But now we’re touring and gonna be on the road for a while,”
Gonzalez says. “We’ll be back at the Continental as soon as we return
to town.”
On the current tour, the Stone River Boys include drummer Justin
Jones (formerly of Billy Bacon and the Forbidden Pigs), Hacienda
Brothers bassist Dave Berzansky and steel-guitarist extraordinaire Dave
Biller.
Although the Stone River Boys are Gonzalez’s main focus, he’s been
busy in his spare time, writing and recording at his Austin-based
studio with legendary blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite. The
results of this collaboration will be featured on Musselwhite’s next
album.
“That’s been a real pleasure and truly an honor. He’s one of the
great original harp players, and a deep soulful brother, let me tell
you,” he says.
“When Gaff passed away, Charlie wrote me the most beautiful e-mail
and said, ‘If you need a job, you’ve got one.’ I’ve played with him a
few times, but I said, ‘I’m very flattered, but I need to play
country; I can’t play blues all the time.’ So this project was the
perfect compromise.”
Whether playing blues, country, rootsy rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, swing
or rockabilly, Gonzalez always has leaned toward music that is, for
lack of a better word, old-fashioned. You won’t likely be hearing a new
Neptunes remix of a Stone River Boys single.
“I think what’s missing in today’s musical trends is the feel and
sound and production of the classic records. That’s what I want to
capture in whatever music I happen to be playing. Newer is not always
better in my book,” Gonzalez says.
“I’m talking about the feel you get when you hear a classic like ‘Do
Right Woman,’ ‘I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,’ ‘Good-Hearted
Woman’—the list goes on and on for me. I can feel it in Muscle
Shoals and Motown, Johnny Paycheck and Waylon records, and the stuff by
George Jones, everything from The Beatles to Count Basie, you
know?”
Gonzalez acknowledges that some artists have made a lot of great
recordings in recent years, but he stays true to the classics.
“I just never really veered around from those old sounds and values.
There’s still so much there; it’s like a gold mine that is still
producing,” he says.
Dave Gonzalez and the Stone River Boys perform at 10:30 p.m. on
the Bud Select Music Stage.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.