Johnny Irion’s U.S. Elevator

It’s a boiling 86 degrees in the Berkshires hamlet of Washington, Massachusetts, and Johnny Irion needs to hit the road. But first there’s this interview—and about half a football field of overgrown lawn that needs to be mowed. It’s the latter that’s consuming him when your music editor and photographer roll up. “Okay, I’m ready,” jokes the sweaty, shirtless singer-songwriter as he stomps over to meet us. “You guys wanted to get some shots of me looking like this, right?”

After changing into dry duds and grabbing an iced tea, Irion sits down in the shade and explains how he’s going a little nuts. He’s about to drive three days straight to Santa Barbara, California, where he and his wife and musical partner, singer Sarah Lee Guthrie, have a second home; their daughters Olivia, 13, and Sophia, 8, will be starting their first years of West Coast school and the house there needs to be prepared for the family. But first this one needs to be battened down for the winter. And then there’s the matter of the upcoming first tour by Irion’s new band, U.S. Elevator.

If he looks a bit like a Grapes of Wrath farm worker in his straw hat and three-day stubble, it certainly fits this day of toil. The analogy is related, so to speak, in another way: Irion is the great-nephew of John Steinbeck, as his aunt married the legendary novelist’s son, Thomas Steinbeck (also an author), in 1994. “I was aware that it was a big deal when they got married, but I hadn’t really read any John Steinbeck then,” says Irion, who grew up in Durham, North Carolina. “Now he’s one of my favorite writers. But in high school his books were part of the stuff that was forced upon us, so that had made me resistant to reading them. In 1984, Durham was a weird place to be if you were a snotty kid with a skateboard who listened to Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat.” Prior to his rebellious teen hardcore years, it was the Beach Boys and the Beatles that had initially transfixed him. “I remember looking at the poster in the White Album while I was listening to it at my aunt’s house, memorizing all [the Beatles’] names,” he says.

When he was 21, Irion’s dual loves of Brian Wilson- and Lennon/McCartney/Harrison-inspired melodies and aggressive punk came together in his first band, the pop-grunge group Queen Sarah Saturday. In the 1990s the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle attracted a lot of label love as an alt-rock hot zone, and it wasn’t long before the quartet was picked up by major indie Thirsty Ear. Despite the attention garnered when “Seems,” a song from Queen Sarah Saturday’s first album, Weave, was featured in the hit 1995 film Empire Records, the band was quickly dropped from their label and broke up not long after. Irion jumped to another local buzz band, Dillon Fence, for a European tour supporting the Black Crowes. Although that group as well would soon get dropped and split up, during the tour Irion befriended Crowes front man Chris Robinson, who encouraged him to move to Los Angeles. “That’s where Chris lived and he was producing this band from Monterey called the Freight Train,” says Irion. “They needed a guitar player and I wanted to move to L.A., so in 1997 I went out there.” Unfortunately, in yet another crash-and-burn story, the Freight Train went off the rails not long after Irion’s arrival. But the move would prove fruitful in a different way.

Through his fellow Southern singer Robinson, the North Carolinian met his future wife and collaborator, who is the Western Massachusetts-reared daughter of folk great Arlo Guthrie and the granddaughter of American musical icon Woody Guthrie. “We started hanging out and playing together, and listening to stuff like Graham Parsons, the Byrds, and David Crosby’s [1971 Atlantic Records album] If I Could Only Remember My Name,” recalls Irion. “The first song we sang together was [Parsons and Emmylou Harris’s version of the country classic] ‘Sleepless Nights,’ which sounded really good. It’s a hard song to sing, so I figured, ‘Wow, if we’ve got this one down already there’s definitely something here.'” Surprisingly, Guthrie credits Irion, and not her father, with motivating her to perform. “I was kind of a punk rock chick—I didn’t wanna follow in my dad’s footsteps, like I thought people expected me to,” says one of the heirs to America’s best-known folk dynasty. “But all of sudden Johnny and I were singing Flying Burrito Brothers songs, he taught me some chords on guitar, and the next thing I knew was singing Cisco Houston songs with my dad and my brother [Abe Guthrie]. It felt right. As a songwriter Johnny works really hard at crafting his songs. Sometimes he’ll be up at 3am, writing and making demos. I tend to be kind of lazy and picky about my writing, and he always pushes me to do more.”

The couple’s romance blossomed alongside the folky, acoustic-based music they began making together and as individuals on tour and on disc. Their solo debuts appeared on two different labels —Irion’s Unity Lodge on Yep Roc in 2001; Guthrie’s eponymous set on Rising Son in 2002—and an acclaimed children’s album featuring unearthed Woody Guthrie lyrics, Go Waggaloo, came out on Smithsonian Folkways in 2009. Most of the husband and wife’s output, though, has been on their own Rte. 8 imprint, home to 2011’s country rock breakthrough, Bright Examples, which features Jayhawks Gary Louris and Mark Olson and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic and Otto Hauser, and 2013’s Wassaic Way, which was coproduced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Pat Sansone, both of whom also perform on the album.

While new in Los Angeles, Irion also gave acting a shot, doing bit parts in the short-lived Dennis Leary cop series “The Job” and Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 comedy Ghost World, starring in the latter as the bass player in—yes!—Blueshammer, the bar band in one particularly funny scene starring Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch. Irion seems happily taken aback when told of the mythic status Blueshammer has acquired among rock scribes; the fictitious foursome has become a shorthand stand-in for archetypally clueless, heavy-handed, blues rock bands around the world. “People ask me about that and I just kinda shrug and laugh,” says the musician. “What I remember most [about shooting the film] was how fun it was in the green room, hanging out with Scarlett Johanssen and Steve Buscemi.”

But despite the faux-rock detour with Blueshammer and the touches of heartfelt rock that color his last two albums with Guthrie, in recent years Irion had found himself longing to reconnect more strongly with his own rock side. “My friend Zeke Hutchins, who was the drummer in Queen Sarah Saturday and now works in artist management, pointed out that Sarah Lee and I will always be more strongly identified as a folk act because of her family name, so we should just embrace that, and that maybe I should put my rock stuff somewhere else,” Irion explains. “That was hard to hear at first, because I thought Sarah Lee and I had really found our sweet spot with Wassaic Way. But the more I started to think about it, the more I saw that Zeke was right.” Although U.S. Elevator is new to the world, the concept had actually been lodged in the front man’s head for quite some time before it became manifest. “Oh, God, the U.S. Elevator band name was something Johnny had been talking about almost since I met him,” says Guthrie. “For at least 15 years.”

And by fall 2014 it was time for the project to enter the real world. “I had just done a paid writing session with a well-known artist in L.A., and the whole thing was done on computers,” Irion remembers, grimacing. “It got me thinking about how Zuma [Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1975 album on Reprise Records] is one of my favorite records. Listening to that album, which sounds like it was done mostly live in the studio, it’s, like, ‘Hey, they made a mistake and the drummer’s a little off—but so what? They’re having fun.’ And that’s the kind of record I wanted to make with this band.” So after some casual rehearsals, the fun began the following February when Irion and a gang that included ex-Freight Train bassist Nate Modisette and guitarist and producer Tim Bluhm (the Mother Hips, Nicki Bluhm & the Gramblers) borrowed a 24-track tape machine that had once belonged to Jackson Browne and set it up to record in Modisette’s home. The sessions yielded the 11 tracks that make up U.S. Elevator (Rte. 8 Records), which will be officially released this November. On the album, the stoned ghost of Neil Young is definitely in the house via the lazy, Laurel Canyon shuffle of “Can I Make It Up to You?” and the wrenching, substance-and-the-damage-done heartbreak of “Cry for Help.” And add to this a bit of humor: “Community Service” chronicles the predicament of a band member who can’t go on tour until he’s served out his civic sentence.

“Johnny’s a brilliant songwriter, I think,” says Stone Temple Pilots bassist Robert Deleo, whose band U.S. Elevator will support on tour following their inaugural show at Club Helsinki this month. “His songs bring me back to the first music I really got into as a kid: Cat Stevens, Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jim Croce, that whole era of music.” Deleo, who also divides his time between the Berkshires and the West Coast, recently collaborated with U.S. Elevator on music slated for a follow-up release.

Perhaps most importantly, though, what do Irion’s daughters think of this whole music thing? “They love it,” he offers. “In fact, Olivia just got a turntable. That’s what she wanted for her 13th birthday.”

For the present, however, the family DJ session will have to wait. It’s time for Daddy to roll.

U.S. Elevator’s debut performance will take place at Club Helsinki in Hudson on September 12 at 9pm. Darren Jessee (Hotel Lights, Ben Folds Five) will open. Helsinkihudson.com. U.S. Elevator is out November 3 on Rte. 8 Records. Uselevator.net.

This article appears in September 2015.