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They say Roger Clyne could have been a superstar.
He had the makings—that jangly country-pop guitar, vivid imagery of banditos lurking behind the saguaros, sipping warm cans of Tecate. And that voice, relaxed and smooth with an ever-so-slight bite on the finish, like a good reposado.
But Clyne, his fans will tell you, didn't want to be a superstar. Disenchanted with how the label handled the rollout of the second record from his band, the Refreshments, he broke up the group, and relaunched a few years later with a new name and mission. No more would he be part of the label game—it'd just be Clyne and the band, playing 120 dates a year, bringing a Sonoran fiesta to St. Louis and Seattle.
"The size of the thing was less important than the feel," he says from Scottsdale, Ariz., where he's driving a buddy to find a Taco Bell. "We wanted the human touch."
He found that touch with the Peacemakers, who come through town this week to play 15 years' worth of their own material along with the entirety of the Refreshments' 1996 breakthrough, Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy.
You remember the record—or at least the video of Clyne rolling around the desert in an old Jeep, wearing a straw cowboy hat and ski goggles, singing "everybody knows the world is full of stupid people." Twenty years later, Clyne is proud of that album, but alienated from the process that made it.
"We were plugged into a system that really made the music a product," he says. "It wasn't good for us, and it wasn't good for our product. I liked the music we made, but the interface with the machine was really uncomfortable."
As far as anniversary shows go, you really can't do much better. Clyne takes good care of himself—he hasn't eaten Taco Bell in 20 years, he notes—and still hits all the high notes. The band is practiced. And the record has both verve and pacing.
I'm perhaps biased, having seen the original Fizzy Fuzzy tour, where the band was sandwiched between Tonic and Dishwalla, and having covered Clyne during my time in Phoenix, his hometown and the font of his border-hopping mythology.
But listen again and you'll hear it's pretty stacked—"Down Together," "Girly" and "Mexico" could've joined "Banditos" in an alternate future where the band landed a Sublime-scale following of soused partymoms and dudebros.
Those folks are coming out. Clyne has a cultish following across the country, with fans who trade stories on message boards before finally meeting up at Circus Mexicus, Clyne's annual party in Puerto Peñasco, the little beach town on the northern tip of the Sea of Cortez. That party draws thousands who spend the long weekend playing beer pong and eating street tacos between marathon Peacemakers sets, plus sets from fellow post-grunge road warriors like Cracker. It's basically a Corona commercial filmed at Burning Man, except everyone in Sonora drinks Tecate.
"Art can lead to commerce," Clyne says. "That's the decision we made to build community. We didn't know how big it would be. Over the last 20 years, we've been bigger and we've been smaller. And we might be bigger and smaller again."
Here, Clyne sounds very much like a leader as much as a rock singer—a man who'll happily shake some hands if he's spotted at Por Que No before the show at Hawthorne Theatre.
"Music, it's an ancient communication form," he says. "The tribe attracts the tribe. The vibe is the same everywhere."
SEE IT: Roger Clyne and the Pacemakers play Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE Cesar E. Chavez Blvd., with Rootjack, on Friday, April 15. 8 pm. $20 advance, $25 day of show. 21+.
Willamette Week