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The Jayhawks: The Jayhawks (The Bunkhouse Album)

Lost Highway

The Jayhawks were still a very young band in 1985 when they ventured into a recording studio in Minneapolis and laid down 13 tracks of pure, effervescent country rock that only a few thousand people would hear at the time. Released on the local indie label Bunkhouse, the largely forgotten album is only now getting its maiden release on CD. What The Bunkhouse Album, as it’s been nicknamed, shows is a band heavily in touch with the early ‘70s hippie cowboy sound of POCO, New Riders of the Purple Sage and, more than anything else, Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers. The set, mostly original material by guitarist Mark Olson, is rich in tight vocal harmonies (Olson and co-leader, guitarist Gary Louris ), twangy guitar and the type of storytelling one might expect from Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings—had they come up in the Midwest during punk rock’s halcyon years. It would take several more years and a refocus toward the more contemporary alt-country hybrid before The Jayhawks would seriously matter, but this peek into their earliest days is worth a listen on its own merits.