Broken Gold: “Sometimes, playing in E-standard isn't great….”

Riverboat Gamblers guitarist Ian MacDougall’s post-punk band releases Wild Eyes, the follow-up to their 2011 debut album, Recovery Journal.

The sleeve art for Broken Gold’s forthcoming album-length cover of The Who Sing My Generation, snapped by Dave Creaney.

“I've got two Discharge parody shirts,” grins Broken Gold singer/guitarist/chief-cook-and-bottle-washer Ian MacDougall as you take a seat in the neighborhood Mexican eatery. The one he’s wearing spoofs the Bruce Willis film Die Hard, rendering the logo in the same script font as British hudjabudja outfit Discharge’s logo. He notes that his other shirt applies the same treatment to Gin Blossoms.

“I forget what else it has on it,” he chuckles. “It's pretty cool. It's got the face, you know, like the old Discharge face, the logo with the face on it?”

MacDougall’s choice of attire says a lot about Broken Gold, the band he does when he’s not playing with The Riverboat Gamblers. He piled into the veteran Austin-by-way-of-Denton Stoogerock destructionists’ tour van at age 18, weeks after graduating high school in 2003, and has never looked back. With the Gamblers, he’s played stages ranging from punk rock house parties to the Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza festivals. 

But like those faux-Discharge shirts, there might be more to Ian MacDougall than meets the eye. Some of it might be hilarious. But it’ll always be musically intriguing.

15 years after MacDougall formed Broken Gold with ex-Gamblers bassist Pat Lillard, who wanted to continue playing music but not tour, they released their second album this past April 26th, Wild Eyes, via Austin’s respectable Chicken Ranch Records. 

Okay, so we lied about the album-length Who remake….

Why has it taken so long between Broken Gold LPs? There’s a lot MacDougall does when he’s not Riverboat Gambling. He teaches at Austin’s School Of Rock campus. He enjoyed five years with Band Of Horses, and has toured in other punk and/or crust bands. He also spent several years working for Foo Fighters’ touring organization. It’s not like he’s lacking in extracurricular activities during Gamblers hiatuses. 

“In 2014, I got that Foo Fighters gig,” he explains. “So I was doing that full time. It was a good thing and a bad thing in a way. It was not really a bad thing, but my time was kind of taken up because I was always out on tours. So whenever I'd come home, I would pay for everything that Broken Gold did with money I made with the Foos. It funded the Turning Blue record. It funded us going on tour and doing these short runs out to California and out to New York. But I never really had time to sit and work on 15 songs and whittle them down to 10. Same thing with Gamblers.”

The Riverboat Gamblers’ solution was to release some throat-clearing singles, mostly covers. Last year brought what’s likely the best single they’ve ever released,  “Two Little Hearts” b/w “Denton,” the most sky-punching, anthemic set of songs to be graced by their name since Something To Crow About.

“One of those songs, ‘Two Little Hearts’ was super old,” he explains. It was like 10 years old. I had a demo of that, recorded in my garage. I've had that for years. We finally were like, ‘Hey, we need to put something new out.’ And so Mike [Wiebe, the Gamblers’ singer] and I had written ‘Denton,’ and ‘Two Little Hearts’ was just ready to go. Mike changed a couple of lines in the song, but it's pretty much verbatim how the demo was. We just recorded it with the full band.

“I think post-COVID really lit a fire under us. It’s like, ‘We need to get some more shit done.’ We weren't doing anything before, and then we couldn't do anything. So I think that once everybody was able to be around each other again, it's like, ‘Why haven't we done this?’ There's a bit more of a focus on getting shit done. Time is fleeting.” 

MacDougall applied the same logic to Broken Gold, coming up with 10 songs for Wild Eyes stemming from his newfound sobriety as much as anything else. Then you have the recent single “Spiraling,” about the despair that inevitably sets in from coming off the road in a rampaging punk rock band, living in a sort of existential glory in a clapped-out Econoline, only to come home and flip burgers at Casino El Camino to pay the overdue rent.

“It was one of the first songs I had written for Broken Gold in a long time,” he says. “I was just thinking about all the different things that I've done to make money over the years. It's been anything. I've worked at bars, like anybody else here. I've also been a mover. I've worked in kitchens. I've taken some jobs that I didn’t want to take, and just production work, and just every single weird thing. It will kind of make you crazy after a while. Now I work with kids, which can make you crazy, too.”  

He describes “Spiraling” as “a combination of two things. It could be the biggest drastic change, like playing music all the time, which I love. But then it's also dealing with children, which I wouldn't necessarily say I hate, but it's weird. It's strange, trying to show somebody whose brain hasn't fully developed how to do something that takes a little bit of coordination. 

“But that's what that song was about. I feel like all the Broken Gold stuff, it's a little on the sly about what things are about. It's almost borderline confessional. But that one's just about the job you took and the time you threw away. You take all those jobs and feel like you're just wasting your fucking time. You'd rather be doing something else.”

Initially, Broken Gold seemed like an outlet for ideas MacDougall had that may not have been as chaos-chorded and ‘77-meets-Detroit as the Gamblers. “I think there's a touch of old school punk in there, every once in a while,” he avers. “I don't know, it's kind of gone through iterations of what we wanted the band to sound like.”

Most of those iterations are post-punk fueled. He talks of alternate guitar techniques he began indulging in Band Of Horses. You hear names like Johnny Marr roll off his tongue as he unravels Broken Gold’s DNA, besides stuff you might expect (The Clash) or not (Bruce Springsteen).

“I like elements of Fugazi, with the simplicity of the drums and the bass, the repetitive kind of bass stuff,” he enthuses. “I wanted to do a band where I could lay into some of that, some of the ‘80s stuff that I've always liked. I always liked the idea of Joy Division and New Order, where they would have these really simple guitar hooks, or really simple bass lines, just the way that that works.

“So when we started, it was a lot like that, and it morphed over time. I was just playing a lot more, and getting better at guitar, trying different things, using capos, alternate tuning stuff. And it's kind of funny, because all of that experimenting with that really enabled me. When Band of Horses came around, I had been working on a lot of those concepts and methods, to get those big, shiny, jingly sounds. I had been working on that a lot on my own, and so it worked out pretty perfectly, joining a band that was kind of doing that already. 

“If that band would have come up years prior, I would have been, ‘Uh, fucking, here's some powerchords.’ But I had already been writing like that. Starting to use a capo was a real game changer for me, because I like playing open chords to get that big, jangly kind of sound. I love The Alarm. I always thought The Alarm was cool, because they had elements of The Clash. But then there was this, obviously a U2 thing too. I always liked the fact that they played acoustics with guitar pickups in them. They put those big humbuckers in there. I just thought it was a cool band. And I got really obsessed with them for a while.”

It’s a helluva tool kit to work with. But, as he shrugs, “Sometimes, playing in E-standard isn't great for everybody, you know what I mean?”

Those “big, shiny, jingly sounds” are all over Wild Eyes, recorded again with local mega-producer Stuart Sikes. The man’s produced A Giant Dog and Black Pumas, as well as some obscure bands you’ve never heard of, like The White Stripes, Modest Mouse and The Walkmen. Famed mastering engineer Howie Weinberg, who’s worked with other unknowns such as Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, buffed the final mixes up nicely. Negotiating those lush-but-driving sonics with MacDougall is a rogue’s gallery who’ve enriched the lives of folks like Fastball, Alejandro Escovedo, The Del Vipers, and Mountain Time, among others: Bassist Bobby Daniel, guitarist Ben Lance, and drummer Sam Rich. 

Escovedo’s unmistakable voice creeps into two tracks, the single “Bad Days” and the wide-screen Springsteen-esque ballad “Looking Up,” providing another texture against MacDougall’s clear tenor.

“I think it started with us just thinking that maybe he'd come by and maybe play guitar on something,” says MacDougall. “I think he's got a cool voice, and I always like hearing his duets. I like that ‘Down In The Bowery’ song that he does with Ian Hunter. So we got him on a song, on a ballad, but when he came to the studio we were listening back to ‘Bad Days,’ and he was like, ‘Is this the one that I'm on?’ And we were like, ‘No, but fuck it. Yeah, let's get you in there.’ And so we had him sing on the big rocker one. 

“I think he expected that we were going to put him on some fucking ballad. Which we did,” he laughs.

I don’t think Al minds one bit. He loves doing the unexpected. As does Broken Gold. It’s the one thing you should expect out of either artist. Broken Gold may not be about replicating The Riverboat Gamblers’ high-octane chaos, but they are born out of the same restless spirit. It's a chance for experimentation, weaving in unexpected influences, and maybe even bust out an odd chord or two. With Wild Eyes, Broken Gold proves that taking a chance and playing something other than A=440 can be a beautiful and rewarding thing, both for the artist and the listener. Who knows? Maybe they’ll record a Discharge cover next? Or a version of “Hey Jealousy?”

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