‘THE LONE RANGER OF LOVE’
Jack ‘Oblivian’ Yarber returns with new album.
Good things come to those who wait, or so the saying goes. In the case of local roots-garage rocker Jack “Oblivian” Yarber, the wait for his seventh solo album, “The Lone Ranger of Love,” was longer than expected.
The record, which comes five years after his last effort, “Rat City,” was beset by myriad delays and detours — at one point a different version of the record was actually set to be pressed, only to be scratched at the last minute; Yarber would instead release a stopgap live album and demos collection, before returning to the studio to rework and recut tracks.
Fortunately, the labyrinthine story reaches a happy conclusion this week with the official launch of “The Lone Ranger of Love,” out on Yarber’s own Mony label. He will play a release show at Bar DKDC on Wednesday with local garage band the Sheiks.
Back in the fall of 2014, Yarber had ostensibly completed the first version of “The Lone Ranger of Love.” Heading out for a long European tour with the Sheiks, he actually had the album plated and shipped to a plant in Croatia to be manufactured, with the idea he could pick up finished copies of the album there to sell on the road. Then, a funny thing happened: the factory lost the plate. After several weeks, they eventually found it, but by then were so backed up that they couldn’t get the records done in time for the tour. Yarber decided to scrap the whole Euro pressing plan. He took the failure as a sign that he should recut most of the tracks.
The original album had mostly been cut at Easley Studios with various combinations of Memphis
musicians (including Dustin Cropps, Jake Vest and Geoff Smith of Star and Micey), prior to the start of his collaboration with the Sheiks. “A lot of these songs I was trying to do as a solo record with different people playing,” says Yarber. “But once I was on the road with the Sheiks I realized I should just do all these songs with them, ’cause it felt more like a unit. The feel of the whole thing was different and it just felt more like a band, and that’s how I wanted the record to sound.” (The only song on “Lone Ranger” not featuring the Sheiks is the title track, actually a holdover from the “Rat City” sessions.)
The Sheiks — guitarist Frank McLallen, drummer Graham Winchester, and bassist Keith Cooper — began backing Yarber in 2014. It’s a collaboration that’s paid off, giving Yarber a consistent lineup behind him and an energetic young combo to mold into his ideal support group. “I love the guys I’ve played with and who I made the (first version of ) the record with, but when you have a real consistent band behind you it makes a difference. It does for me, anyway.”
After setting aside the original “Lone Ranger,” Yarber and the band went into Sheiks member Cooper’s studio, Burgundy Sound, and recut most of the record in fits and starts in late 2014 and into 2015. In the interim, Yarber decided to release a live record. Cut at the Sheiks’ rehearsal studio in front of an invited audience and released early last year, “Live!” proved an interesting diversion. A kind of “greatest hits” set, the 13-song, 35 -minute “Live!” spanned Yarber’s solo career, from his 1997 debut “American Slang” through “Rat City,” while also highlighting songs from his bands the Oblivians and Tearjerkers. Yarber’s catalog dive continued last fall with “Dream Killer,” a cassette-only release collecting various demos and outtakes from two decades.
Having cleared the decks in 2015, Yarber pulled everything together in time for the revised “Lone Ranger” to come out this year — though he admits he almost delayed the record again. A self-professed studio tinkerer, Yarber says he was trying to write more new songs for the album even as they were finishing the mix: “Keith (Cooper) finally had to tell me, ‘Jack, I think we have to stop — just save those songs for the next record.’”
Despite a tendency to revise his work, nothing about “The Lone Ranger of Love” feels labored. The Sheiks’ vibrant backing and Yarber’s songs — pitched somewhere between Memphis trash, NYC punk boogie and all-over-the-map Americana — are a perfect match.
The album cover — by local artist Emil Orth — combines the imagery of photographer Robert Frank and comic artist Robert Crumb, and the album itself is a loose-knit concept record that nods in the direction of John Schlesinger’s groundbreaking 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy.” Yarber reinterprets the journey of a couple of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo types in a selection of songs such as “Fast Friends” “Hey Killer” and “Downtown.” “That kinda came from the Sheiks — they’d never seen ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ so I showed it to them, and we all got a little obsessed with the movie,” says Yarber. “We were all about Joe Buck and Ratso for a while, so we went back and tried to sequence the album in a way that told a little bit of a story like that.”
Though he also continues to play sporadic shows with his garage band the Oblivians (the group may hit a few more festivals in 2016), Yarber will devote himself to promoting “The Lone Ranger of Love” on the road. He will head to Europe with the Sheiks in April for a five-week run — and this time he will have that new album in hand.
“We’re finally coming with ‘Lone Ranger’ done,” he says, laughing. “The way it turned out, I’m just glad the plant in Croatia lost it and it didn’t get pressed up a couple years back. It all worked out the way it was supposed to in the end.”