"Driving a rock-country train"
Boston Globe 2-25-01 David Wildman

The music of Jabe comes on like a train, not a shiny, modern, high-speed model, but more like the locomotive with the long, lonely whistle that Johnny Cash might have heard around the bend outside of Folsom Prison.

"I like the energy of the train beat," said Jabe Beyer, the blue-haired singer/songwriter who leads the high-velocity rock/bluegrass group that bears his first name. "It's a roots/punk country sound, the kind of thing that really gets people going when we play live."

Beyer is a transplant from upstate New York, where, he says, musicians either were playing in the garage or on MTV. A rock singer/songwriter in a place with no music scene to speak of, he came to Boston to hone his live performing skills. He played around the solo folk scene for a while, but he soon found that he wanted something grittier. "Folkies are great, although I don't want to be one of them," Beyer said. "I like to play in bars, where people are drinking, not in restaurant clubs, where people are eating hummus."

Beyer seems to have found the proper atmosphere for his sometimes bluegrass, sometimes rock music in smaller Irish bars like Toad in Porter Square, Cambridge, and the Tir Na Nog in Union Square, Somerville, where a new appreciation for more rustic sounds seems to be taking hold.

Beyer himself is not a lifelong country fan, and he did not start out to play the kind of music he is now doing. "If I had heard myself doing this kind of music five years ago I would have punched myself out," he said. "Actually what I listen to is a lot of Tom Waits and Dylan. Locally I like Kris Delmhorst, but also hard-edged stuff like The Mother Brothers and Quintaine Americana. I like good music; I'm not so much concerned with style."

His crowd-pleasing raveup songs and raucous-but-relaxed onstage demeanor (accented by his punkish blue-dyed hair, the result of a late-night dare) grew out of playing shows where he and his band would have to keep an audience's attention for an entire night of music. "When I first started out I'd have these horrible gigs where I would just stand there and not say a word," he said. "The hardest part is the in-between songs stuff. The people who can do it the best are the ones who becomes successful. By playing gigs where I'd have to be on stage all night long, I began to find it must easier to talk to people."

The band has transferred all that live energy to a new CD titled Outback Country Vampire, which features Beyer's crack backup band of Sean Staples on mandolin, Jay Aucella on bass and Dave Westner on drums, as well as known session players such as Casey Driesson (who has played with Steve Earle), Bow Thayer on banjo (of Elbow and Seven League boots), and rocking fiddle from K. Ishibashi.