San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate
Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit's Country music crackles with energy
“We’re an unapologetically country band,” says Chris Doud, singer, songwriter and guitarist from the Oakdale (Stanislaus County) band the Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit.
“Not alt country, roots or Americana,” he says. “Just country. Oakdale calls itself 'the Cowboy Capital of the World,’ but it’s not a cowboy town or a music hub. We’re pretty secluded from the scenes in the Bay Area and Sacramento, so there’s no pressure to conform to anyone’s conception of what we should sound like. We were free to create good, honest music that got people up and dancing.”
The Thrift Store Outfit’s sound harks back to the hard-core country of the late ’50s and early ’60s, with a touch of Texas swing, honky-tonk rock and bluegrass complementing their strong melodies and incisive lyrics.
“The band grew out of the 52 Week Club,” Doud says. “Willy Tea (Taylor, the band’s second singer, songwriter and guitarist) got together a group of songwriters, including myself, with the goal of writing a song a week for 52 weeks. Some of the tunes were so good, we began to rehearse together with the idea of becoming a band.”
After a few personnel shifts, the band coalesced around the songs Taylor and Doud had written. “We went through the songs to pick the best ones we’d written and realized we had an album’s worth of material. We decided to make a record.”
The new band also included Matt Cordano on pedal steel, banjo and electric guitar; Taylor Webster on bass and vocals; drummer Aaron Burtch; and Chandler Pratt on electric guitar and mandolin. After honing their sound with regular weekend gigs at Oakdale’s Cow Track Lounge, the band cut their debut, 2005’s “The Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit,” following it up with 2009’s “The Ghost of Good Manners” and their latest offering, 2012’s “Old Excuses.”
They’re all solid efforts, crackling with energy and displaying the band’s prodigious musical chops and expert songwriting, and are well worth tracking down. “You can buy the albums at our shows and online, but we haven’t concentrated on getting them into stores,” Doud says. “We’ve been more focused on our musicianship and writing the best songs we can.”
These days, the band hits the stage in their work clothes, but when they started, they had a look that was a throwback to the country acts of the ’50s. “We dressed up in fancy suits and tried to look slick,” Doud says. “We didn’t have the money to buy real costumes, so we scoured the thrift stores and we said whoever had the best suit had the best luck. Willie came up with Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit, which we liked because of the double entendre on the last word.”
From: Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit's Country music crackles with energy
By J. Poet
January 7, 2015
https://www.sfgate.com/music/article/Good-Luck-Thrift-Store-Outfit-s-Country-music-5999932.php
