The Autumn Defense: Sons of the Triangle

The Autumn Defense was in the zone. They had permanent smiles on their faces all night as they played on a chilly October evening at the Barns at Wolftrap, just outside Washington, D.C. It didn’t hurt that the venue’s PA, in the house and onstage, sounded terrific. However, what may have been more critical was the fact that, for Pat Sansone, John Stirratt, and their rhythm section, comprising Jim Haggerty on bass and Greg Wieczorek on drums and vocals, the band was playing music from their first new record in 11 years. Their joy was palpable, and the crowd soaked it up.Stirratt and Sansone may be best known for their contributions to Wilco. John Stirratt is the group’s founding bass player and the only musician in the lineup to stood alongside Jeff Tweedy throughout the band's entire history. Pat Sansone joined Wilco in 2004 as a multi-instrumentalist, but he’s most fun to watch and listen to when he straps on an electric guitar. Sansone strikes rock poses, swirling around the stage like a fencer, his guitar slicing through the air like a riposting foil as he solos. These moves aren’t an affect. Legendary music producer Bob Johnston once chuckled as he said of Bob Dylan: “He can’t help what he’s doing. He’s got the Holy Spirit about him; you can look at him and tell that!” That’s Sansone with a Telecaster slung over his shoulder.“I was affected by the proximity of cool guitars right in my house.” —John StirrattFew recall that Autumn Defense actually predates Sansone’s arrival in Wilco. They debuted this duet project in 2000 (Stirratt’s first name for the band was April Defense, but Sansone redirected). Their latest record, Here and Nowhere, is the band’s seventh.From the Byrds to the Beach Boys, Stirratt and Sansone have long drawn on Southern California pop as a reference point. At Wolftrap, they encored with Love’s “A House Is Not a Motel,” from their 1967 album, Forever Changes. It may be surprising, then, that these two men actually hail from deep inside what music journalist James L. Dickerson coined the Mojo Triangle: a swath of the Deep South that birthed nearly every form of American music, including blues, jazz, country, gospel, and rock ’n’ roll. These invisible boundaries —from Nashville to Memphis, down into Mississippi, over to New Orleans, then northeast up to Muscle Shoals, Alabama —form the cradle of the country’s entire musical heritage. Pat is from Meridian, Mississippi, and John was born and raised in New Orleans. As I learned when I hopped onto Zoom for a ninety-minute chat with them, they were both steeped in musical families.
Stirratt’s parents played music together around the Crescent City until they started raising children. Throughout Stirratt’s life, his father was a banjo player who gigged in Dixieland-style bands across New Orleans. “As a seven- or eight-year-old, I remember crawling around in my parents’ closet with my twin sister,” Stirratt recalls, “and they had amazing guitars in there, like an old Kay from the ’40s and a Gibson LG-0 from the late ’50s. I can still recall opening the cases and that musty smell drifting out of them. There was definitely a moment of discovery there that turned into an obsession for us. So, I was affected by the proximity of cool guitars right in my house.” Stirratt and his sister, he continues, “started playing in bands very early, in junior high school. My mom stopped playing out at some point, shortly after we were born, but our dad played his whole life, up until the week he died. Our whole lives, there was music everywhere. My dad had big fake books filled with Dixieland jazz tunes, and our mother was deep into country music. I recall a lot of Emmylou Harris playing in our house—mid-period, like Roses in the Snow. That was like a primer for me for country music. Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton were on that record, and Willie Nelson, too.”“As a teenager in the 1980s in Meridian, in my head, I was really living in London in 1967.” —Pat SansoneUp in Meridian, Mississippi, just west of the Alabama border and 200 miles from Stirratt, Sansone was raised in a Mojo Triangle family simmering in a cauldron of music. “Show business and performance were just central to my family's life,” he says. “Meridian is the home of Peavey Electronics and Jimmie Rodgers,” he remembers. “My mother had a great voice. When she was pregnant with me, she was doing some singing on demos for some of the studios in Muscle Shoals, and she also sang jazz. My grandmother had an incredible voice and a great ear; she could sit down and play anything after hearing it once. She was a regular on several radio shows doing Western swing and pop songs. And my dad was a concert promoter in town. One of our close family friends was Chris Etheridge, who played with the Flying Burrito Brothers and Willie Nelson.”He continues, “I suppose every city has music in it, but Meridian had a real musical spirit about it, and I grew up in a unique situation where music and performance were celebrated. I never really questioned it; it was a normal way of life. But to really see it, I had to leave and come back. Because as a teenager in the 1980s in Meridian, in my head, I was really living in London in 1967. That was my dream world.” Sansone laughs. “The irony of that is in my career as a professional musician, I’ve met some British rockers from the ’60s who were dreaming that they were from Mississippi.
Sansone continues reflecting: “As a young kid, as soon as I could walk, I was in the Temple Theater with my dad while he was working. So it seeped inside of me from the very beginning. I have memories of standing in the wings as a child watching Ray Charles rehearse his band, and moments like Jerry Reed and Carl Perkins trading licks at a soundcheck. I do remember the first time I ever put a Stratocaster around my neck. I was onstage as Helen Reddy was getting ready to play, and her guitar player could see that I was eyeing his Fender. He was kind enough and patient enough to let me try it; I could play ‘Twist and Shout’ by that point. And when I heard and felt the power of a D chord come out of an amp, that’s a moment I’ll always remember.”
Their early days of acquiring gear were a very local affair. “My teen years were the glory days, when you could walk into a pawn shop and pick up a Marshall or a Peavey very cheaply,” Stirratt remembers. “There was no vintage market yet. My first amp was a Peavey Musician with the silver knobs; it was loud and powerful.”Sansone concurs, “My dad took me down to Peavey in Meridian and I picked out a Peavey guitar and a Peavey Renown amp straight from the factory floor. My dad knew Hartley Peavey. When dad first started promoting shows, he had purchased one of Peavey’s first PA systems out of Hartley’s garage. Here’s the funny thing: I was such a Who freak that I recall a photograph of Townshend when he was recording Rough Mix with Ronnie Lane, and it looks like Pete is playing through a Fender tweed Bassman, but it’s actually a Peavey amp. Supposedly, one of Townshend’s main studio amps at that time was a Peavey. When I discovered that, I just about shouted with joy. I couldn’t believe it.”“I have memories of standing in the wings as a child watching Ray Charles rehearse his band, and moments like Jerry Reed and Carl Perkins trading licks at a soundcheck.” —Pat SansoneThat passion carries over into the guitars they play. Sansone is quick to tell me that Autumn Defense doesn’t set out to make ’70s-sounding music. But they don’t shy away from it either, especially because it fits their voices and writing styles. That means old guitars, too. “We have an appreciation for the past musically and sonically,” Sansone says. “So using vintage guitars and mics has always been part of that process.”On the road, Stirratt travels with his trusty 1967 Gibson Hummingbird. “I bought it in 1995 at Gruhn’s in Nashville the week that Wilco’s first record, AM, came out,” he tells me. “I love the sound of a Gibson. It’s been my mainstay, and since I mostly only play acoustic in this band, it fits nicely into the mix. We can sculpt it so it doesn’t have too much bottom end like a J-200 might.” Sansone mainly uses a 20-year-old Breedlove for his acoustic work during Autumn Defense shows. “It’s based on a Martin OM that Breedlove built to my specs, and we kept it super simple. It’s a great all-purpose guitar; it just kind of does everything, perfect for fingerpicking, and it’s a great strummer. In Autumn Defense, we don’t have roadies or even a tour manager, so we have to travel light and keep our live situation pretty tight. So that’s the one [acoustic] guitar I take.”
For an electric, Sansone travels with a Bill Nash T-Style that he has owned for about 15 years, featuring a rosewood fingerboard and a sonic blue finish. “It’s based on a 1961 neck,” he says, “like a soft V shape. It feels nice and the pickups sound nice, it just does what I need it to do.”
The recording studio is where the vintage gear really matters. Stirratt didn’t want to bring any of his old guitars from his home in Maine to Tennessee, so he recorded with axes already in the Nashville studio where they laid down the tracks. “That’s the thing about Nashville,” quips Sansone, who lives in Music City. “They’re everywhere. My HVAC guy has great guitars!”Since Sansone is a local, he brought his 1956 Gibson Country Western and a vintage Martin D-18, both of which “record wonderfully.” There’s a lot of nylon-string guitar on Here and Nowhere, and it comes courtesy of “a $150 Takamine that I bought 15 years ago,” Sansone says. “I have some other, more expensive nylon-string guitars, but I keep coming back to that Takamine. It sounds incredible.”
The musicians draw a straight line between the kind of guitars they first discovered during their childhoods and the sonic vibe they strive to capture in Autumn Defense. “Our big influences came from sitting around playing songs from Love, America, Scott Walker, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and David Crosby’s first solo album,” Sansone says. “That kind of stuff is the sonic framework that we love. It’s specific, but it’s also very broad. We want to be authentically expressive in our songwriting and our record-making.”
Stirratt jumps in, “Those records all have a shared atmosphere. And listening to that stuff, that’s generally when I’m inspired, and want to pick up an old guitar and try to write a song. I may not be actively chasing what those records are doing, but it’s where I’m going to go—into a warm atmosphere of, perhaps, potential longing or something. That’s the zone I’m looking for whenever I pick up a guitar.”