Paul Sanchez

Fred LeBlanc’s persuasiveness is the key to his art and the not-so-secret ingredient to Cowboy Mouth’s success. He will do anything to stimulate a crowd — climbing the scaffolding and diving into the audience are typical moves, although he’s given up the practice of throwing the drums into the audience at the end of the set.

“He’s like a cartoon character,” says Paul Sanchez, whose relationship with LeBlanc goes back more than 25 years. “If he has to, he’ll light himself on fire. It’s a trick he can only do once, like Daffy Duck does in the cartoon, but he’s willing to go there".

The band has never had an album that approached that stage intensity until now. After 16 years of struggles, close encounters with stardom, a string of managers and record labels and a bass player problem reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s difficulty keeping drummers, the band is working together more closely than ever, energized by new bassist Sonia Tetlow, and it recently released what is by far the best recording it has ever made, Voodoo Shoppe. The title track is a clever R&B-influenced song about the former apartment of Sanchez’s good friend singer John Boutté, who lived upstairs from a botanica. 

Sanchez gave the drummer his first job when he was just out of high school.

“He came to my garage,” Sanchez recalls. “The garage door’s open, this kid drives up and reaches into his trunk and pulls out this drum kit that looks like a toy. It’s really a small kit. He drags it up the driveway and I’m going, ‘Oh. no!’ So I say, ‘Okay, let’s try this’ and it was immediately obvious that he was a good drummer. I asked him to sing some harmony on ‘Sit Down I Think I Love You’ and it was obvious he had a great voice, too. So I said ‘Cool, you're in the band.’ He says ‘Let’s take a ride to the store.’ We go to the store, he buys a pint of Jack Daniels, asks me if I want a sip and I said ‘No, not really I've gotta go back and rehearse.’ He says ‘Okay!,’ downs the whole thing and says ‘Okay, let's go play!’ I thought it was going to be a rough ride. It was.”

Their stormy partnership was the flip side of the band’s charismatic impact as they fought like Martin and Lewis delighting an ever-growing audience. They played together for several years as the Backbeats during the early 1980s before breaking up. LeBlanc joined a rockabilly band, the Mistreaters, before signing on with Dash Rip Rock, where he made his first big splash. Meanwhile, Sanchez moved to New York to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter.

“I swore I’d never play in a band with Fred again,” says Sanchez. “Then I met with the guy who produced Neil Young’s Harvest, and he was interested in signing me, but he wanted to hook me up in a writing partnership with this drummer from New Orleans…”

Sanchez turned him down, but when LeBlanc called him two years later and asked him to join his band, Sanchez reunited with him. The two had known John Thomas Griffith’s work with the Red Rockers from the Backbeats days and asked him to join. The sound was magic, but the old tensions surfaced immediately. With only days to go before their first gig, they had a problem.

“We needed a name, and Cowboy Mouth was the only name we could all agree on,” says Sanchez. “It was the only name that didn’t spark an argument. I read the play, and the monologue about what rock ’n’ roll means is great and Fred sort of lives that, he’s a rock ’n’ roll savior with a dirty mouth.”

Griffith had a hard time coming to terms with the confrontational atmosphere in the group.

“When I joined the band, we went out on the road those first years and they would fight like cats and dogs,” he says. “I never understood it. I thought you were supposed to get along in bands, hang out, party together and have that camaraderie. There was always friction. It was horrible.”

Cowboy Mouth continued to be a popular touring band, but the group never really found itself in the studio, even after being signed for major label deals with MCA and Atlantic Records. “We used to write the songs quickly and go into the studio and bang them out in between tours,” says LeBlanc. “So our records sounded like a bunch of guys banging it out in the studio.” Voodoo Shoppe , on the other hand, emerged out of the chaos that followed a period when the band agrees it probably came closest to breaking up.

“It got to the point where we accepted where we were and didn’t bother to do too much about it,” says LeBlanc. 

As the ’90s came to close, the band seemed adrift. The respect that accompanies a cup of coffee on major labels had worn away, and it was surviving on the strength of the band’s collective energy. The individual members were growing apart creatively, though, and side projects seemed more important. Sanchez made six solo albums and his most significant writing partner was Boutte, while the last Cowboy Mouth studio project, Uh Oh, was essentially a LeBlanc solo record.

“We came close to the end many times, and each one of us individually came close to leaving,” says Sanchez. 

On previous albums, band members had all brought songs to the project. This time, they determined they would write all of the songs together.

“We decided to make a real Cowboy Mouth album for the first time,” says Sanchez.

The record was recorded in three locations with three different producers — Russ-T Cobb in Atlanta, Mark Bryan in South Carolina, and Mitch Allen and Mike Mayeux in New Orleans.

So there they were, in the studio late last August recording the final takes of an album that they felt would define Cowboy Mouth once and for all when the world came crashing down on them.

“We were all in shock,” says Sanchez. “The flood hits and Russ-T has got to finish the record with people who are literally sobbing, glued to the TV, glued to the Internet, watching our city being destroyed and then we would have to go on the road to do gigs and we came back and Rita was hitting. He was really calming. He kept it light, funny, kept it moving and made a record.”

The band’s newfound unity paid immediate dividends when new songs emerged in the aftermath of Katrina — “Home,” a defiant vow to rebuild the city and "The Avenue".

Playing live was difficult at first after the hurricane.

“I couldn’t imagine going through that hurricane with a band that wasn’t from New Orleans,” says Tetlow. “We didn’t have to explain how we felt to each other. I don’t know that I would have been able to play shows with any other band.”

At first, the band stopped playing one of its most popular songs, “Hurricane Party,” which Sanchez had written about deciding not to evacuate during Hurricane Andrew.

“It was almost impossible for us to play,” says Sanchez. “I just couldn’t do it. The kids like to throw tootsie rolls during that song and those tootsie rolls landing on the stage sounded like nails in my heart. I just couldn’t sing the song, but kids just kept holding up their New Orleans driver’s license and calling for it. Finally, we got home and we were doing the reopening of the House of Blues show and we put it back in. It was cathartic because it’s the nature of live performance, but they were the most difficult shows I’ve ever played in my life. The best thing about playing music is that you can disappear in the moment.”