At the very un-rock hour of 5:45 p.m., the long line to get into Sons of Hermann Hall was somewhat slowed by the consent waiver everyone had to sign. Untitled Old 97’s Documentary will chronicle the band’s history and current chapter, according to a producer. So far that has included trailing the beloved Dallas-bred Old 97’s as they record a new album, their 15th, and on Monday night, filming them at back-to-back sets of Too Far to Care, their 1997 classic of booze and broken hearts.
“A couple of ground rules,” said Robert Wilonsky, editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News, introducing the band at the packed early show as a camera crane swooped back and forth above the audience. “Do not take pictures. Do not record. Do not use your RadioShack recorder to bootleg. Do not hire a courtroom sketch artist. Just do what we did in 1995. Drink a beer, stand in the Sons of Hermann and enjoy your favorite band.”
The Old 97’s busted out in the early ’90s, playing a toe-tapping mix of rock and honky-tonk that was then called alt-country, now Americana. 1995 was when the band opened for Wilco at Sons of Hermann, but its first show at the venue was a year or so earlier, at least according to Wilonsky, who heard the band that night, sitting with Funland’s Peter Schmidt and Mark Rubin from the Bad Livers, the evening’s headliner. Over the next three decades, Old 97’s have torn it up at Sons more times than anyone cares to count, but this show would be different.
“It is gonna be weird, because as much as we would like it to be otherwise, the priority tonight is that we’re filming,” said frontman Rhett Miller, talking to the audience like old friends, and by this point, many of them are.
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Dallas audiences have grown up with the Old 97’s, raised their children to the Old 97’s (several of those now-grown kids appeared to be in attendance Monday) and stumbled into middle age with the Old 97’s. Too Far to Care is a brilliant time capsule of smoke-choked bars and such pre-internet lines of longing as, “I’m calling time and temperature just for some company.” You’re probably plucking out gray hairs if you recall the ritual of punching numbers on a landline phone so an automated voice could tell you it was 6:43 p.m. and 82 degrees, which might be the Dallas Gen X version of walking a mile in the snow.
“I remember being up in the garage apartment on Goliad, looking across the alley at the Blockbuster parking lot,” said Miller, launching into an explanation of that line before the crowd favorite “Big Brown Eyes,” the eighth track on Too Far to Care. “I was missing my girlfriend, and I would go over to the wall phone, which had a super long coily cable, and I literally called time and temperature, because I was lonely.”
Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller performing in 2014, which through some miracle of age-resistance, is basically how he looked performing on Monday at Sons of Hermann Hall.
Jim Tuttle / Staff Photographer
Untitled Old 97’s Project promises to be a stiff shot of nostalgia for anyone eager to re-enter the Deep Ellum haunts and East Dallas dives of the bustling ‘90s scene, but it will also track a band that’s done something extraordinary, which is to make great music for more than a quarter-century. The show kicked off with four new songs, all instantly lovable.
“It’s been an intense month of being filmed while also trying to make a new album,” said Miller via text. “It definitely made for quite a few emotional moments. We have never given in much to the temptation to wax nostalgic, but once we were forced to do so, it made for some sweet memories.”
The in-fighting and jealousies of the band’s middle years have faded into a brotherhood bound by melody, although that raises a question: Given the thrill of bust-up docs about famous bands (The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, I could go on), is it possible the Old 97’s like each other too much for a proper documentary?
“Delish fighting isn’t quite the same as delish friend banter,” admitted bassist Murry Hammond, when I posed this question over text. “If they ever catch us in a proper onstage donnybrook, it would just be us dissolving into a riot of verbal snark and sarcasm.”
Less backbiting and soapy drama, more laughter and music. I think I speak for the roaring audiences at Sons on Monday night when I say: We’ll take it.
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