The gospel according to Big Sandy

Twenty years this year since Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys—originally the Fly-Rite trio—first took off and they’ve always respected the strictest rock & roll rules. Every release they’ve ever done has been available on vinyl, and so complete at one point were their period kits that a little boy who saw them step off their vintage tour bus warily asked, “Are you from the past?”

But just as Deke Dickerson put his first sample (authentic vinyl crackle) on his last album, so now is Big Sandy ready to let the orthodoxy dissolve a little. He wouldn’t mind if a sample found its way into one of his analog albums—if it fit. It wouldn’t take much for him to record a rock-steady song, he says. And one day he’d like to make his own gospel album—inspirational but honest, he says. Not agnostic, but just honest. With his last album (Turntable Matinee on Yep Roc) two years behind him and the next at least six months away, he’s thinking now of the way he used to listen to music as a little kid, and of the special tipsy fan or two at the bar who works up enough guts to tell him how much one line of lyrics really means. (Maybe: “Seventeen/a broken beauty/wounded in the line of duty?”)

“When I was first in the rockabilly scene, maybe it was more about the scene itself,” he says. “Maybe I forgot for a little while that it’s the heart of the music that moves me—not any outside things that people attach. I feel a lot more free these days to purely enjoy the music for what it is.”

Of course he isn’t walking away—the writer of “Power of the 45” sometimes drives home from a show with George Jones or Buck Owens or Merle Haggard on the stereo and just sits in the driveway, letting the night settle and the album finish. “That touches my soul at times,” he says. “But then Ken Boothe or Desmond Dekker or Alton Ellis—there’s so much that I’m wild for!”

Sometimes someone will recognize him somewhere unexpected—like a Squeeze show—and say, “What are you doing here?” “Same as you,” he says. In fact, he’s even readying a track for a Squeeze tribute song, and he’s thinking about doing his first full real solo album sometime, and he’s thinking about cracking open his live set a little and putting in the songs that roll something more into that rockabilly beat. He’s still reverently dizzy about Porter Wagoner walking him onto the Grand Ole Opry stage, but he speaks with some of the same spirit about a recent set at “a hippie sort of thing” in the Carolinas, where he pulled out songs he seldom plays and found a warmer response than he’d figured he’d warrant.

“I’m used to playing feeling like I have to keep everybody dancing—keep the rhythm going,” he says. “But these people were paying attention—I got to work some songs in I might shy away from. ‘Wishing Him Away’—it’s sort of about spousal abuse, and why a person would stay in that situation. Not your typical rockabilly fodder. And I thought ‘Wow, I need to put more songs like this in the set!’ I’m really thirsty for the kind of response I got that night—that’s what I wanna hear from people.”

BIG SANDY WITH FLIGHT ROCK, CROWN CITY BOMBERS AND BOBBY AND THE BLACKOUTS THE BLUE CAFÉ | 201 PROMENADE | LONG BEACH 90802 | SAT 9PM | $10 | 21+ | THEBLUECAFE.COM

Tags: big sandy, blue cafe, Long Beach, Music, rockabilly, rocksteady