Boogie Nights

Bradford Hoopes got to Lawrence the hard way. The Yards‘ frontman and organist was driving across the country from Seattle, returning home to his East Coast roots, when his truck bit the dust in Ellsworth, Kansas. Repairs cost Hoopes nearly all his savings, but at least he got back on the road. Broke and exhausted, the musician made a brief pit stop in Lawrence to check out a recording studio that some friends were in the process of opening. He never left.

“I hobbled into Lawrence with $21 to my name,” Hoopes recalls with a laugh. “I started working at the office at Z’gwon,th [the studio], and I picked up work very quickly — session work, studio work, live work. We played a jazz gig up at Templin Hall. I made $100. I was like, whoa, Lawrence rules.”

Local musicians returned the affection and Hoopes soon found himself enmeshed in the area scene, playing six degrees of sonic separation with acts that included the E-Z Pieces, the Secondhands and Brent Berry & the Roots Crew. In November 2000, a ragtag assortment of these players gathered at Z’gwon,th (now part of Neighborhood Studios) under the Yards moniker for an off-the-cuff jam session dedicated to old-school funk. The eleven-hour excursion, recorded live without overdubs, spawned eleven tracks, each played in a different key.

“We just missed B,” Hoopes explains. “We did the white notes during the day and the black notes at night. We were going to get back and do B, but it never quite happened.”

The Yards’ superfunky debut launches with the groove-’til-ya-drop stutter of “Sweet Potato Soup,” followed by the equally funkalicious “Here Comes the Yard Man,” stirring New Orleans funk and Chicago soul into its musical melting pot. The tempo-meter set to dance, the group then gallops through nine more sharp instrumentals without pause.

“We only had one day to record, so there were time restrictions,” explains Tom Johnson, who produced the session and manned the bass for the “white note” tunes. “But around that time, also, I was really fed up with all the records I was doing, because they just sounded sterile to me. Everything was overdubs.”

Johnson’s hands-off strategy gave the Yards ample breathing room, leaving plenty of open space for Hoopes to work his Hammond M2 magic. Equal parts Jimmy Smith and Booker T, Hoopes is an imaginative organ-grinder with the smarts to keep things from collapsing into exhibitionist, chops-a-plenty showmanship. His melodic touch and simple approach are far more effective than the bulk of his spider-fingered contemporaries.

“I think the organ is really coming back around,” Hoopes says. “I hear it everywhere now. But I don’t hear it as a featured instrument enough.”

The Yards’ primal instrumentation and staunch avoidance of digital databanks and push-button processors didn’t hurt either.

“The way recording technology is now, you can fix almost anything,” Johnson says. “Perfection is this Pandora’s box. People get Pro Tools, and it’s like, ‘Oh, I can edit these takes, or play it over and over again until I get the solo. I can tune every note on the vocals.’ So it’s just a constant mishmash. They lose that energy of a bunch of people playing together at once. It’s metronomically perfect, but it has no feel.”

Copies of the Yards’ debut made the local rounds, with Hoopes and company handing the disc out to friends, fellow musicians and anyone else in sight. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and the disc soon found its way into the hands of a booking agent willing to take a chance on the untested act. Last March the Yards scored a pair of prestigious out-of-town gigs, warming up for jazz guitarist John Scofield in St. Louis and Boulder, Colorado. In October, the group opened for Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe at Abe & Jake’s Landing, recording the show for posterity and releasing it and one of the Scofield outings as live discs. Though these efforts proved closer in spirit to Meters than to Widespread Panic, the Yards’ boogie-down productions caught on with the jam-band contingent, leading to an astonishing 65,000 plus Yards downloads from mp3.com, as listeners from Afghanistan to Antarctica tuned in. The Yards continue to receive between 300 and 1,000 plays a day, a remarkable achievement for a group with only about a dozen live outings under its belt.

“It’s definitely the most downloads for any record I’ve ever worked on,” Johnson says, quickly adding that thousands of mouse clicks don’t always result in national success. “The hippie crowd, the jam-band crowd, they don’t show up unless it’s something they heard about one way or another. So it’s kind of a weird cycle to have to break into. It was kind of the same thing with the Roots Crew — where if we could just open up for Widespread Panic, like, four times, it’d be right there. But it’s hard to get onto those shows.”

“The Yards play instrumental music, so it sort of slips through the cracks of what’s deemed to be acceptable and appropriate,” Hoopes adds.

Maybe, but 65,000 downloads are nothing to sneeze at. The increased attention prompted Hoopes and Johnson to remaster the Yards’ impromptu debut, reissuing it on Hoopes’ self-owned label, Bugaboo, in November.

“Music is highly disposable in this country,” Johnson says. “It’s all background — almost like television, where it’s on all the time but you don’t really watch it. The Yards’ record works both ways: You can focus and listen to it all, and there’s good performances, but you can also clean your house to it. It’s like any good record. You don’t have to dedicate a day to sitting at home with the stereo, dropping acid and listening to the record. But if you wanted to, we wouldn’t hold it against you.”