Squirrel Nut Zippers

Written by Grayson Haver Currin

Around 1991, when Jimbo Mathus was still relatively new to North Carolina but already drumming in a band called Metal Flake Mother, he would hitchhike to visit his grandfather down in Mississippi. Born in the States to Italian immigrants, Tony Malvezzi was a World War II veteran who had subsequently settled in Clarksdale, promoting jazz and soul shows across the Delta and running a little bootleg booze. He was already in the throes of dementia when Mathus stopped by, but he would open up about this world of bygone intrigue to his grandkid.

On one trip down, Mathus arrived with a hot jazz tune called “Good Enough for Granddad,” about how the wild times of the old sport could serve as a guiding light for Mathus himself. Malvezzi lit up at the song, even though he reasoned that trying to make a living off sounds from a half century ago seemed difficult.

For the last 33 years, minus a gap around the middle where Mathus made a half-dozen other records, Mathus has done exactly that in the Squirrel Nut Zippers—revivifying and recontextualizing old sounds to remind us that the basic human condition, with all its fault lines and glories, hasn’t changed much at all. Swing and Dixieland, the blues and early jazz, a little bit of R&B and country: The Zippers have continued to find fresh fire by recombining these old forms. Though they are three decades removed from the 1996 breakthrough Hot, they remain an avid touring band and a beacon for young acts who also see the past as a playground for the ever-renewing present.

The Zippers may have never been so devoted to a patchwork past, where multiple decades overlap into a single quilt, than on …Starring in “Fat City,” a sprawling concept album about the indignities and arousals of a life in the entertainment industry and their first record in six years. In 1997, Mathus and the Zippers were in Metairie, Louisiana, finishing overdubs on what became their Perennial Favorites. He thought a lot about how the place had tried to brand a section of itself “Fat City,” a bargain-bin alternative to nearby New Orleans’ French Quartet.

It made him think about his granddad and the long odds people suffer for a chance to make it as entertainers. Over the next three decades, he began to stockpile bits of music dating as far back as his Metal Flake Mother days, all with the ambition of eventually building a kind of folk-jazz opera about the assorted sordid characters of Fat City. “All the years I worked arranging jazz, I actually know how to arrange jazz now,” Mathus says, laughing. “I had the cast, the crew, everybody there. I was finally able to make the record I always wanted to make for us.”

…Starring in Fat City is the biggest album the Zippers have ever made, from its 28 tracks to its swirl of styles to its grand story. But it is, in the end, a perpetuation of the thing that has forever made the Zippers so fascinating: Pulling sounds from our past into right now not just as a way to entertain us but to remind us of our fundamental links to then, now, and forever, too.

The Squirrel Nut Zippers were formed in 1993 in Chapel Hill, NC.