The Jayhawks Turn 40, and Gary Louris Refuses the Tribute-Band Gig

The Jayhawks mark 40 years this month with a concert at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, and their 12th album, Sanctuary Park, landed in August. Gary Louris, 71, frontman and guitarist, showed up to a wood-paneled room at the Minneapolis Club in a faded blue Western shirt, a two-button Henley and tinted aviators. He also showed up mildly ornery. Anniversaries be damned, he has little interest in the past.

"I want to show the world that we're not done yet," Louris says. "I still feel like I have something to prove; I feel like people don't quite get us yet — I want to reach new people."

How did a band without a hit last 40 years?

The quick lore: the 1986 debut was a bluegrass-on-speed outlier. The band found its sound in the vocal pairing of Louris and Mark Olson, across 1989's Blue Earth and 1992's Hollywood Town Hall — two brothers of the road singing about rain settling on Midwestern towns like Sioux City and Wichita. After touring 1995's Tomorrow the Green Grass, their biggest record, Olson left. Louris regrouped and made three more acclaimed albums: Sound of Lies (1997), Smile (2000) and Rainy Day Music (2003). Olson returned for 2011's Mockingbird Time, then left again in 2012 after an unhappy reunion tour. The rest kept playing.

Louris won't discuss any of it. Asked twice about Olson, he said: "I'm not going to talk about him." The harmonies now belong to keyboardist Karen Grotberg and drummer Tim O'Reagan — the latter, Louris says, technically a better singer than he is, with "a kind of a Levon Helm thing." Original bassist Marc Perlman still holds the low end.

What does Sanctuary Park sound like?

Ten days, one room, four people. Producer Bob Ezrin — the man behind Pink Floyd's The Wall — told Louris, "We're not going to make Smile 2.0." No string sections, no months split between Minneapolis and L.A. "The world is starved for some real music — music made by real people together in a room," Louris says. Ezrin's fee quote was simpler still: "I'll work for food."

Ezrin and Louris had stayed friends since 1999's Smile, the splashy pop record The New York Times greeted with the headline "What If You Made a Classic, and No One Cared?" Louris's reaction at the time: "All right, we're in The New York Times! And it was a disaster." Ezrin's counsel then — "You owe your audience nothing" — apparently still holds.

More than half the new songs are about Stephanie Louris, née Stevenson, Louris's wife of six years, whom he met at Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern in 2019. He got his first tattoo for her: a self-designed horseshoe, done in Chicago. The album is dedicated to her mother, Lorraine Stevenson — the "Kingston Girl" of the second track — who died last February at 86. The title track draws on Stephanie's adolescence in Regina, bush parties and Teenage Head, "the Canadian Ramones." "It would be easier to list the songs that aren't about her," Louris says. He compares them, without blinking, to John and Yoko.

Can you do your best work past 70?

"I'd like to prove to people that you can still do your best work even over 70," Louris says. "I can't think of any in the rock world — maybe jazz or blues. Leonard Cohen made some really cool records as he got older; Dylan has made some cool records."

The State Theatre set will still serve "Waiting for the Sun," "Blue" and "All the Right Reasons." But tribute-band status holds no appeal: "If there isn't new material coming in, I think maybe it would be time to close the door."

A few biographical gaps get filled in. Louris grew up in Toledo, Ohio, on The Kinks, The Who and the Stones — not Hank Williams, not Neil Young. He arrived in Minneapolis in 1973, studied architecture at the University of Minnesota, worked as an architect and didn't join a band until 26. He replaced original Jayhawks guitarist Steve Retzler two weeks after the band started, in January 1985. He has been off painkillers since 2012, still drinks wine, golfs, plays tennis and rides Peloton. His son Henry, a painter and singer-songwriter, painted the cover of his father's 2021 solo album, Jump for Joy.

The verdict, 40 years on: "There were times when I felt like we were going to conquer the world, and instead we found our place in the world. But writing music keeps me young; it gives me purpose." A band with a chip on its shoulder, in other words, and a new record to prove it.