out and watched them play it, and it was so, so exciting.” Vedder sang the song with MMJ almost every night thereafter.

For such a taut band, only James and Blankenship are charter members. James formed the group in 1998, after he—then a 19-year-old college student who’d fronted but failed to cause a stir with several homegrown bands, including Month of Sundays—landed a deal with West Coast–based indie label Darla Records. James was your typical son of Louisville, a blue-collar kid weaned on Muppets music, metal, and indie rock. The songs he remembers first being transfixed by were “When You Wish Upon a Star” and, curiously, folkie Dan Fogelberg’s quasi spiritual “Leader of the Band.” But a record-store slipup at age 14 convulsed his musical life. James and his mother had watched Neil Young perform “Harvest Moon” on Saturday Night Live, and struck by the retiring, ethereal quality of late-period Neil, he asked her to buy him the Harvest Moon album. Mistakenly, she brought home Harvest, Young’s seminal, jagged take on American roots music.

“I was in my bedroom,” James remembers, “and I put it on and thought, ‘Holy shit, what is this?’”

My Morning Jacket’s first two albums—1999’s The Tennessee Fire and 2001’s At Dawn—echoed loudly with the Young influence but were flecked with other colors, too: space twang, R&B, a straight shot of Skynyrd. It was the kind of neo-roots rock that got them mentioned in the same breath with Drive-By Truckers and Kings of Leon, but didn’t reveal the full range of James’ imagination. Personnel shuffles (James’ childhood friend Hallahan signed on in 2002) and endless touring sharpened MMJ into a protean live act. The shows grew woozy and long,

Tom Blankenship

and so did the itinerary: a crushing 143 dates in ’02, 110 in ’03. The warped road life yielded the protracted jams on their critically lauded 2003 major-label debut, It Still Moves. (“We look back on that album with good feelings,” says Hallahan. “But we listen to those songs now and are like, ‘Do we really need to play that for 18 minutes straight?’”) It also nearly destroyed the band.

“Early on, when you’re given opportunities, you’ve got to take them,” James explains at Bourbons Bistro, about the decision to say yes to gig after gig. “A lot of bands feel that, because there’s the fear that if you don’t, you’ll fall off the face of the earth.”

“You’re going and going and going,” Blankenship adds, “and finally it’s like, ‘ What the fuck am I doing?’”

“I got so sick at one point,” says James, “I thought I was losing my mind.”

Only three months after the release of It Still Moves, the brutal realities of the road had left two casualties, keyboardist Danny Cash and James’ cousin, guitarist Johnny Quaid, whose family farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky, was where the band had recorded their atmospheric epics. (Famously, James’ ghostly vocals were

“WE HAD ALL THIS RECORDING EQUIPMENT SET UP, AND
WITH THE HIGH ELEVATION AND THE LIGHTNING, WE
THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO GE T FRIED.” —CARL BROEMEL

Bo Koster

MY MORNING PLAYLIST

Before auditioning for My Morning Jacket, keyboardist Bo Koster
crammed for three days. A week or so later, he got a call. “Jim pulled
one of those ‘Man, we really liked you, thought you were a good player
and all, buuuut…we’d like you to come on tour with us.’ And nothing has
changed since,” Koster says, laughing. “Jim is still fucking with me.”
Here are Koster’s 12 essential (pre–Evil Urges) MMJ tracks.

FROM 1999’S
THE
TENNESSEE
FIRE
“The Bear”
“I Will Be There
When You Die”
“I Think I’m Going
to Hell”

FROM 2001’S AT DAWN “At Dawn” “Bermuda Highway”

“Strangulation!”

FROM 2003’S
IT STILL
MOVES
“Golden”
“One Big Holiday”
“Steam Engine”

FROM 2005’S Z “Wordless Chorus” “Gideon” “Dondante”

Patrick Hallahan