INDIE INK: Sugar Jones's Meter-Made Funk Onstage
magazine, September 2001
Thevenot knew his revamped outfit required the kind of hard rock bottom only a seasoned funk pro could provide. “I wanted someone in the order of a George Porter Jr., the bassist from the Meters,” Thevenot recalls. Sure — where are you going to find a guy like that? Easy: ask the man himself. “I went online, located George's Web site, and just e-mailed him,” Thevenot says. “When I saw the reply in my in-box, I freaked out.” After negotiating the terms, Porter flew in from New Orleans, P-bass in hand. “He walked into the studio, and within five minutes he was digging in so hard you could hear the strings grinding against the wood.” Hiring a funk legend turned out to be a major coup, even if it took Thevenot some time to realize it. “People started saying things like, ‘Wow, that's great. He'll really help you sell the record.’ I wish I could say that I had such market savvy, but the truth is that it never even occurred to me. But all the musicians who'd contacted me about working with the band and all the press I've gotten was because of George and the music we did in the studio.” The world was all flannel and grunge in the early '90s when Thevenot first heard the call of the wild. “I'd just gotten heavily into Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and Sly and the Family Stone,” Thevenot says. “One night I was helping a friend videotape a dance performance at this club, when Sly's ‘Sing a Simple Song’ came blasting through this incredibly loud P.A. It just blew me away. I remember thinking that if I could tap into just half of the dynamic Sly got on that tune, I'd have the makings of a great band.” Taking a page from Stone's funk-rock handbook, Thevenot rounded up a crew of like-minded players, and Sugar Jones (pronounced shu-ga) was born. The band's 1994 debut CD, The Push, gave Thevenot and company their first shot of recognition. It wasn't long, however, before the leader learned that keeping a six-member lineup intact was considerably more than he'd bargained for. “We were always losing players, having to hire new ones, and then needing to rehearse and bring them up to speed,” Thevenot says. Generating income with a large band in a tight market was no easy task, either. It got to be a bit much. So in 1996, Thevenot decided to take an extended musical hiatus and relocated to Washington, D.C., where he eventually found work as a full-time drug-policy reformer. “I really thought that was the end of the music thing,” Thevenot says. “Incredibly, it was my parents who sat me down and said, ‘Look, we really think you should give the music another try.’ I was trying to talk them out of it! But I eventually took their advice.” Not that it's been a total picnic: just weeks before the release of the band's second helping, Bring Your Own Insanity, Thevenot discovered that another Sugar Jones, a Canadian pop act in the Destiny's Child vein, was already flooding the market with hype (he is exploring legal options). Still, he says it's not all about the business. “When I'm not out there performing or using the creative energy in some way, I literally start going nuts,” Thevenot says. “So when people ask, ‘How can you afford to spend so much money making a record and assembling a band like this?’ I just tell them, ‘It's still a lot cheaper than therapy.’” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David Simons is a New England-based music journalist. ESSENTIAL
FACTS Sugar Jones Recordings: The Push (Sovereign Music, 1994), Bring Your Own Insanity (Sovereign Music, 2001) |
Press
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Porter flew in from New Orleans, P-bass in hand. “He walked into the studio, and within five minutes he was digging in so hard you could hear the strings grinding against the wood.” |
