Few performers in this world could describe their sound as “lemonade loungin'” with a straight face and expect people to buy it. But that description becomes entirely believable when it rolls off the tongue of Garrett “G. Love” Dutton, the silky smooth front man of G. Love ‘ Special Sauce.
Though he’s a Philadelphia native, G. Love returns to Boston, the birthplace of the full band, tonight for a performance at Axis, bringing along his impeccably cool onstage aura with a soulful guitar, harmonica and the Harry-Connick-Jr.-meets-the-Beastie-Boys vocals to match.
Along with him is the top-notch rhythm section of Jim “Jimi Jazz” Prescott on the upright bass and Jeff “Houseman” Clemens on the drums, stirring up the ice-cold glass of blues and hip-hop infused rock that has defined the band for the last decade.
Throughout their history, which began in Boston bars in early 1993, the band has played virtually every conceivable venue: tiny bars, hockey rinks and mammoth multi-day festivals.
But G. Love said small club shows are the best way to experience G. Love ‘ Special Sauce’s “lemonade loungin'” sound.
“It’ll be a good chance to see us in a small, real heated atmosphere where we can play a lot of our new stuff that people don’t know yet and a lot of our old stuff that people do know,” he said in a phone interview last week.
The new stuff the band is testing out will come together in The Hustle, its 11th album in the past 10 years.
“I think 10 years later I’m about to drop my best record,” he said. “I like my last record, Electric Mile, but musically we had kind of a wish-washy vision, and this record I had a much stronger vision and everyone musically is on.”
G. Love said they have an album tentatively scheduled for a September release on Brushfire Records, Jack Johnson’s new label. Johnson, the pro surfer turned folk-rock superstar, produces and guests on two tracks while the rest of The Hustle is produced by Mario C., the mastermind behind a slew of Beastie Boys full-length albums and EPs.
G. Love’s decision to join Brushfire is a sign that his enduring friendship with Johnson has come full circle.
Johnson made his major-label debut on G. Love ‘ Special Sauce’s 1999 release Philadelphonic. He guest-starred on the album’s “Rodeo Clowns,” which Johnson wrote.
“We both helped each other when we were in the position to help the other person every time,” G. Love said. “It’s a family, and it’s pretty unique what he’s doing right now, and it’s cool because we’re putting together a camp.”
Though Johnson’s recent success has trumped G. Love’s, G. Love is confident that with the recent explosion of rock and hip-hop hybrid acts, his time has finally come.
“It’s almost like people’s tastes have caught up with us,” he said. “We’re not the best band in the world, and we might be the sloppiest, but it’s definitely something – a vibe that we put out that’s really unique, I guess.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
