Back In The Saddle
In the 90s, Galactic Cowboys were destined for great things, backed by a big label and endorsed by the likes of Dream Theater. But it wasn’t meant to be. Seventeen years on from their last release, the Cowboys have returned for another ride…
There’s timing, there’s bad timing and then there’s truly lousy timing. And Galactic Cowboys can tell you all about that. Back in 1991, the Houston, Texas four-piece were holding a strong hand. They had a so-crazy-it-shouldn’t-work sound that was one part Beatles, one part Metallica and one part prog, a larger-than-life image that was just the right side of ‘wacky’, and, in the shape of Geffen Records, one of the world’s most successful labels behind them.
“We were being touted as the next big thing,” says guitarist Dane Sonnier. “People were telling us we were going to be the biggest band in the world, all this kind of stuff. We were thinking, ‘Wow, this is gonna be an exciting ride.’”
But Galactic Cowboys clearly didn’t become the biggest band in the world. They didn’t even become the biggest band in Houston. Just three weeks after their debut album came out, Geffen released Nevermind, the second record by a little-known band from Seattle named Nirvana. Suddenly, the eyes of the world were unexpectedly diverted towards the Pacific North West. Lousy timing, right?
“Oh, totally,” says Mike Portnoy, whose then-band, Dream Theater, invited the Cowboys to open for them on their Images And Words tour. “Galactic Cowboys were one of the great bands of the time. It’s a crime that they never got the success they deserved.”
Today, the members of Galactic Cowboys largely look back at those days of high expectations and thwarted dreams with a mix of bafflement and wry amusement. This is partly because of the distance that comes with time, and partly because they have other matters to focus on – namely Long Way Back To The Moon, their first album in 17 years.
“Does the world need a new Galactic Cowboys album?” says singer Ben Huggins. “They didn’t need the first six or seven!”
He’s being disingenuous. Galactic Cowboys’ small-scale success was dwarfed by that of their more illustrious labelmates, but a small yet dedicated band of fans – Portnoy among them – recognise them for the maverick visionaries they are.
With hindsight, though, they were never really superstar material from the start. Like fellow Houstonites King’s X (a band with whom they shared a manager and producer, Sam Taylor), they sweetened their heavier moments with big multi-part harmonies. But the Cowboys’ sound was even broader, a fullspectrum, genre-hopping approach that took in thrash metal, classic 60s pop and the envelope-pushing intricacy of such prog icons as Rush, King Crimson and Kansas.
“I was into the whole thrash movement,” says bassist Monty Colvin. “At the same time, we all grew up on The Beatles and Elton John. And I was a huge Kansas fan: Kerry Livgren was my hero. I wanted to fuse all those things together and have a lot of harmony vocals and this extreme metal thing. So we put it in a blender to see what came out.”
What came out was striking enough to attract the attention of Geffen, who had money to burn thanks to the blockbusting success of Guns N’ Roses. Galactic Cowboys were signed by Gary Gersh, the hotshot A&R man who also brought Nirvana to the label around the same time. Gersh made it clear his priorities were with Galactic Cowboys.
“Nirvana?” he told the Texans. “Those guys are just paving the way for you.”
Their self-titled debut album was released in August 1991. It was a technicolour clash of steel-plated riffs, oddball time signatures and sly humour. Its schizoid diversity set it apart from everything else going on at the time, and the reviews were positive.
But there was trouble brewing. The Galactic Cowboys’ album had barely cooled on the shelves when Nirvana’s Nevermind was released. Over the subsequent weeks and months, the musical landscape was drastically reshaped. For a bunch of long-hairs in waistcoats and comedy glasses, things suddenly looked a lot less rosy.
“I honestly think none of those guys at the label knew it was gonna blow up,” Huggins says. “They thought, ‘We’re just gonna get in with the grunge thing.’ The label were pumped for us. There were constant conversations. When Nirvana took off, it was like [makes shutting down sound]. Nothing. We had to fight for everything we needed after that.”
It didn’t help that Geffen didn’t really know what to do with Galactic Cowboys. They were too heavy for melodic rock fans, they weren’t heavy enough for the thrash metal crowd, and prog was in a commercial lull. The label opted to put them on the road with New York speed metal band Overkill. It was a memorable experience, not always for the right reasons. Crowds either loved or – more frequently – loathed them. “You get hit by a nickel coming at you at 120 miles an hour, that’s pretty discouraging,” says Sonnier.
More successful was a tour with Dream Theater on the Images And Words tour. The bands became fast friends. “By the third or fourth gig, we were onstage with them every night singing back-up on a couple of songs,” says the guitarist. “I look back at videos of the tour and we were so tight as a band.”
But Galactic Cowboys were out at sea commercially. Their debut album had been swept away by the grunge tide, and the band had gone from potential Next Big Things to Also-Rans. It wasn’t like they were doing
“Galactic Cowboys were one of the great bands of the time. It’s a crime that they never got the success they deserved.”
Mike Portnoy
anything wrong. It’s just that the rest of the world’s attention was focused elsewhere.
There was still hope. The band cameoed as heavy metal band Sons Of Thunder in the 1994 Adam Sandler and Steve Buscemi movie Airheads, one of the heavy metal movies that appeared after Bill & Ted and Wayne’s World. “Adam Sandler hung out in our trailer playing these songs that would end up on Saturday Night Live,” says Sonnier. “These songs were not safe for work. I honestly do not know that I’ve ever laughed as hard as I did that day.”
Despite their flirtation with the big screen, they were living on borrowed time, at least as far as their relationship with Geffen went. “We were out there in Nowhereland,” says Colvin, “which is when the label lost interest in us: ‘Yeah, you’re gonna have to leave now.’”
Dane Sonnier left soon afterwards, frustrated with the band’s situation (he was replaced by guitarist Wally Farkas). Ironically, just a few months later, the band signed with US indie label Metal Blade.
“They were real cool,” says Colvin. “They told us we could make whatever album we wanted to make, they weren’t going to tell us what to do, there was no expectation.”
The Cowboys carried on releasing records through the 90s via Metal Blade. Diehard fans still carried the torch, but the rest of the world had long forgotten them, if they even knew who they were in the first place.
By the end of the decade, the glue that held the band together began to disintegrate. Tour offers dried up, money became scarce, original drummer Alan Doss left for personal reasons and the band were eventually sued by his replacement. It was death by a thousand cuts.
“We were all kind of discouraged,” says Colvin. “We felt we’d taken it as far as we could. It wasn’t a bad thing, but I’d moved to Kansas City and I was just kind of wanting to move in a different direction.”
Galactic Cowboys’ 10-year space race was over. The members poured their energy into various new projects. Some of them dealt with the band’s split better than others.
“I gotta tell you, I missed Galactic Cowboys for a long time,” says Ben Huggins. “I was the last one holding on back then, I didn’t want the band to end. It was difficult for me.”
Towards the end of the 00s, the band reunited for a handful of local reunion shows. They repeated it a few years later. Each time it was purely for fun, and the fans, rather than any desire to take another shot at the big time. Which is just as well, as the big time had packed its bags and left town a long time ago.
“Every time we got back together, we were like, ‘Hey, this is fun, we ought to do something,’” says Colvin. “And then we go back home and forget about it. But Ben and I did start writing some tunes. I guess we were thinking about it even then.”
That may have been the case, but they weren’t thinking about it too hard, largely because most record labels had zero interest in a band who had barely reached ‘cult’ status while they were active. But they did have one unlikely champion in the shape of Bill Evans.
Evans is a friendly American multihyphenate producer/musician/manager/audio whizz whose connections to the prog scene run deep. He’s worked with Kansas’ Kerry Livgren and currently manages Flying Colors. He was also a huge Galactic Cowboys fan.
“They’re one of my absolute favourite bands,” says Evans, who also played drums in Monty Colvin’s post-Galactic Cowboys outfit Crunchy. “Along with King’s X, they invented a whole genre of music that combined progressive metal and those Beatles-esque harmonies. I always felt that band never really got its fair chance. One of the things on my bucket list was somehow to right that wrong.”
The success of Flying Colors impressed that band’s label, Mascot. When they asked Evans if he wanted to do another project, his response was instant: he wanted to get Galactic Cowboys back together.
“I called Monty and said, ‘What would it take to reunite the band?’” he recalls. “He just said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ It was that easy.”
It wasn’t difficult to persuade the original Cowboys line-up to get back in the saddle. They all admit to having missed the band.
“We’ve all grown up,” says Colvin. “We’ve matured a little since we started out. It was just fun to get back together with the guys.”
The new album, Long Way Back To The Moon, picks up where the band left off at the turn of the millennium. It’s still a sonic jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces that shouldn’t really fit together but somehow do, even if they’ve tempered down some of the obtuse musical angles of old. “We’re just as heavy as we’ve always been, and just as pop-orientated as we’ve always been,” says Sonnier. “But it’s more streamlined. There’s not as many crazy jumps from one section to another.”
Those “crazy jumps” may well have been one of the things that counted against Galactic Cowboys first time around. But tastes change over time, and what once existed on the fringes slowly drifts towards the centre.
“We were this oddball band at the wrong time,” says Colvin. “If we were starting out now, people would have really gotten it.”
Almost 30 years on, there’s little in the way of lamenting what might have been. As Monty Colvin points out, it pays to be careful what you wish for: just look at how Nirvana’s story ended. “You don’t know what success will do to you,” he says. “I would have loved to have had a taste of the big time. But it might have destroyed us as people.”
Dane Sonnier is equally philosophical. The ride might have been wild at times, but at least they’ve made it this far. “We’ve been through the good and the bad together,” he says. “The good was always great, the bad was never as bad as it seemed at the time.”
Long Way Back To The Moon is out now via Music Theories Recordings/Mascot. See www.galacticcowboys.com for more information.
“I was really into the whole thrash movement. At the same time, we all grew up on The Beatles and Elton John. And I was a huge Kansas fan: Kerry Livgren was my hero.”
Monty Colvin