Crazy thing is, um, well, that decade was the ’90s. Yep, it’s been a minute, as the young’uns might say these days. Matter of fact it’s been upwards of 16,819,200 minutes - flat out 32 years - since the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies put a dang record together. But lo and behold, brothers and sisters, come to find out these boys hands-down haven’t missed a beat. If anything, Fall Line full-on eclipses its own intrinsic brilliance as an incendiary showcase of their spectacular return to form, shining like a vibrant creative rebirth rather than some run-of-the-mill reunion. Like fiery-eyed cicadas that have at last returned to the earth’s surface and freshly shed their shells, the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies are screamin’ out their unmistakable call louder and livelier than ever before.

Now hang on a second though - if you’re maybe figuring some of the above sounds like the frickin’ 4-H club (hype, hyperbole, hoopla, and/or hogwash), well, that’s kinda what these so-called “band bios” often are, right? But you can bet your bottom dollar that in this case it’s the honest to goodness truth - and all you’ve gotta do at this point is just listen. Give this baby a whirl and you’ll find that the appropriate response to this magnificently intense revival is most definitely a jubilatory yee-haw, heavens to Betsy, hallelujah, and hell-freakin’-yeah! Fall Line is 100% proof - the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies are downright timeless.

So where in tarnation have they been all this time?

“Aw, y’know,” drawls Chickasaw co-conspirator Brant Slay with a sly li’l Mudd-chuckle, “we just went on a little beer run is all.”

Well alright then, reckon that pretty much sums up everything y’all really need to know, so we hope you have yourselves a helluva ragin’ hootenanny firin’ up Fall Line, folks! Woo-hoo!

But hey, if you do fancy a mite more particulars, let’s travel back a little ways to the beginning….

Ben Reynolds and Brant Slay started making a mad racket together after meeting up as art students at the University of Georgia in the late-‘80s, fueled by a mutual love of stripped-down blues, smokin’ Southern rock, and the sweetest elements of everything from old school country to folk to gospel to punk to funk to classic one-hit-wonder skatin’ rink junk. Hell, it’s pretty dang simple - these two whip-smart rural Georgia natives just straight-up loved good ol’ catchy and cathartic music that truly moved ’em, and they had a mighty strong hankerin’ to conjure up some of their own. So that’s what they damn well went and did.

They didn’t necessarily know what they were doing, mind you. They’ll both fess up to that right off the bat. But that’s part of what made - and still makes - the Mudd Puppies so beautifully unique, so refreshingly raw and down to earth. You’ve got brother Brant up there a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ like the dickens, flailin’ around a-rockin’ in his rocking chair whilst stompin’ his tattery-shoed feet up a storm, huffin’ and a-puffin’ out his heavenly hell-bent harp attack like there ain’t no freakin’ tomorrow, then how’s about ol’ Ben a-croonin’ and a-oozin’ the booze-drenched blues, howlin’ at the moonshine, wailin’ on his guitar in a finger-lickin’ good odd almighty every-whichaway electrifried fret-sizzlin’ frenzy, oh yeah! Hot damn! They honed the nitty gritties of all this somewhat primitive a-whatnottin’ through a time-honored Southern tradition in which anything goes - back porch pickin’ n’ singin’ parties where friends gather round, and any object can become an instrument if somebody can get it to make a sound.

Soon they mustered up the gumption to Pupp it up in a few local clubs, then they took the show on the road, might near totin’ the whole dadgum back porch right along with ’em. They decked out each venue to the hillbilly hilt, stokin’ up the vibes of a shindig at some super-cool swamp shack, featuring laundry-laden clotheslines, tangled vines, vintage quilts, rusty car parts, and other Southern comfort sundries, plus Brant’s rocking chair and homemade stomp-board contraption at the heartbeat center of it all. While some spoilsports speculated that the whole kit and caboodle might just be a gimmick, they couldn’t have been more wrong, bless their hearts, because not only did all the bells and whistles and thingamabobs make every gig feel a little more like home for the band, the souped-up down home ambiance also served to immerse and engage the entire audience in the glorious high voltage hoedown experience.

The duo’s dynamic output tended to be somewhat difficult to categorize, leading many confounded describers to whip out the hyphens, often linking some Southern or explosive-esque word to a music-related term with hybrid results like “swamp-rock,” “stomp-blues,” “nitro-folk,” etc. But the Pupps never gave two hoots as to how they got hyphenated - hell, you could plumb call ’em “K-pop” if the “K” is for kudzu and “pop” goes the ’lectric sizzle of the bug zapper out back. They were just doing what came naturally and having a blast, hoping maybe some folks out there might dig it.

And as it turned out, the right people sure enough had their ears open. Next thing you know, they’d snagged themselves a major label record deal, scored fellow Athens, Georgia resident and fabled R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe as a producer for their 1990 EP White Dirt, and landed blues legend Willie Dixon as a producer along with Stipe for 1991’s 8 Track Stomp. Whoa! Seemed like the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies were indeed hittin’ the big time, whether people knew what to make of ’em or not.

“I remember one of the hosts on MTV saying something like we were ‘the strangest band to ever make it to a major label,’” laughs Brant. “And they were so right, man. It was such a whirlwind for us to all of a sudden just be thrown into the big music scene. But we rode the wave and had terrible fun. And then the damn wave just crashed.”

Yep, dagnabbit, right around the time they were brewin’ up new demos for what was set to be their next record in 1992, everything went haywire, cattywampus, and kaput. No need to harp on the ending, since this here story’s about a new beginning, but let’s just say the band and the record label weren’t ’zactly seeing eye to eye, and the pressure cooker situation took a terrible toll on the duo.

“We were at such a crossroads,” explains Brant. “With all the touring we did, and all the angst, and all the record company bullshit, Ben and I weren't even happy in our friendship. We were kinda like an old married couple who’d gotten sick of each other. There was just no way it could continue.”

So they called in the dogs, poured water on the fire, and went their separate ways. Ben commenced to working on a hog farm, then teaching photography and whatnot back at UGA, while Brant cozied into a position at the Georgia Nature Conservancy. And as far as the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies went, that coulda easily been all she wrote - the finish line.

But two decades later something of a miracle occurred, when a crafty character from the Louisiana bayou appeared out of the blue to remind these boys what they’d been missin’. He was a straight-shootin’ heavy hitter with a unique set of skills, specializing in solving other people’s problems. Sometimes it takes the intervention of a highly-trained professional to repair a tattered relationship, and that’s exactly what brought Brant and Ben back together. Like something right out of a movie, the man who stepped in to fix things was known as “The Mechanic.”

Truth be told, this fella was a violent sociopathic loner with a shitload of guns and a nasty habit of killin’ folks, and he was indeed right out of a movie - the 2011 Jason Statham hitman flick “The Mechanic.” Turns out the makers of the indie action assassin feature wanted to use the Mudd Puppies’ song “Ponky Knot” from White Dirt on the film’s soundtrack.

Now at this juncture they could’ve easily just said “Yep!” to the killer request, then rolled right on along with their lives. But lucky for all of us - and partly to avoid risking any renewed kerfuffle or red tape rigmarole with their old record label - they hatched a far more audacious plan.

“Me and Ben got together,” says Brant, “and we were like, ‘Well, hell, why worry about the damn record company?’ We just said, ‘Fuck it, man, we made the music! Let's go back to the studio!”

First order of business was ringin’ up a Florida man by the name of Alan “Lumpy Weed” Cowart, esteemed former drummer for the defunct Jacksonville, Florida outfit the Beggar Weeds, with whom the Mudd Pupps had many a time toured. On the road back in the day Lumpy’d all but beg to be a part of the Puppies by always eagerly offering up his drumming services, and after he’d hopped up on stage with ’em here and there for a song or two, then a song or two more, he’d indeed grown right into the band like a weed, becoming essential. And oh hell yes, he was in!

They’d recorded “Ponky Knot” over 20 years earlier in Athens at the studios of producer and engineer John Keane, who co-produced White Dirt - so that’s where the three headed lickety-split.

“We went back and rerecorded it exactly the same and renamed it ‘Chicken Bone,’” explains Brant. “And hell, we had such a good time! Like, ‘This is fun, man!’ And nobody was driving our ship! It just kind of spurred a spark! We were like, ‘You know what? Let's start playing again, start writing music again! Send me some guitar licks and I'll start recording lyrics!’”

And that’s what they did, starting work on what would eventually become Fall Line. Come to think of it, “work” ain’t the right word for it. They were just enjoying themselves, rediscovering their love of musical collaboration, and doing whatever suited ’em - including playing shows now and again. So they took their sweet time with the whole process.

“It was definitely years in the making,” admits Ben. “And this time, because I did it in my basement, I got to do whatever the hell I wanted to. For me, because my skills are limited, it took a long time to teach myself how to play what I was hearing in my head. It took forever. I hear these sounds in my head and I've always wanted to get them out. I'm so happy with this, because I had enough time to get all of this shit outta my head and onto a track, even if it didn't make it to the record. And without any worries of burnin’ up studio time.”

“We were slow as hell,” agrees Brant. “Ben would send me a piece and I'd make a lyric and - I gotta say this: the coolest thing about Ben Reynolds and the reason we just jive, our music connection together is just magical - it's because he's so eclectic and weird on the guitar. And sometimes that's a little hard to translate into cookin’ a melody, so getting back into music, I was having a hard time pulling it all together. It was a slow cook. We just kind of slow-boiled the whole thing.”

The duo, now officially a trio, worked remotely, then assembled in Ben’s basement “bunker” from time to time to bang it all out in style. They pulled in a couple songs from the past that had never seen the light of day, and glory be, it all came together. They took the 13 tracks to John Keane, who polished ’em up a li’l bit, and hooty-hoot, they had ’em a new album.

Not to drift off on a tangent here, but this is a big thing: There’s a deep groove in the earth that connects the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, a geologic demarcation called the fall line. Take a gander at a map and you’ll find that the fall line running across Georgia pretty much cuts the state damn near right in two, a 20-mile-wide seam snaking from the west down around Columbus northeast up through Augusta. It’s where two distinct environments collide, the northern Piedmont meets the southern Upper Coastal Plain, red clay switches to sand, cotton turns into peanuts, chipmunks and foxes give way to alligators and salamanders, plus the rivers get wider and slow down, becoming more navigable south of the many resulting waterfalls that give the boundary its name.

The natural divide shaped virtually every aspect of the state’s commerce and culture, creating a vibrant corridor for the meetings of minds of all kinds, therefore of course spawning a whole lot of Southern strangeness, hijinks, and horrors along the way. The towns along the fall line have always served as the breeding grounds for the Mudd Puppies’ stories and sounds, even though the two had no clue back in the day that they were growing up on what was once the dang prehistoric shoreline of the old school Atlantic Ocean.

“Hell, I lived on it all my life!” marvels Brant. “And so did Ben! I only learned about it by my working for the Nature Conservancy, because all my work is on this western fall line - and hell, 60 million years ago it was oceanfront property! Isn’t that cool? Ben’s on the eastern fall line over with Augusta and Midville and Swainsboro. I'm over here in the Chattahoochee Valley with Phenix City and Junction City and Omaha. So we're on the opposite ends of the state right on the fall line!”

They managed to tie drummer Lumpy to this alliance as well.

“The way we could connect him,” laughs Brant, “which is a maybe stretch, but it's true: he lived in Jacksonville and surfed on Jax Beach. And fuckin’ Jax Beach 60 million years ago was right there in Junction City, Georgia! And his stories are the same weirdness as ours. God, Florida's all this, y’know - his history and all that went into the music from his side of things is just so David Lynch, it's just as fuckin’ weird as ours. So everything on the record came from the same place!”

Fall Line lives and breathes and speaks and bleeds the sounds, the sights, and the spirits of the South, it’s a rockin’ cavalcade of eccentric and electric characters rising straight outta swampton, the hollering pleas of auctioneers, carnival barkers, seers, and preachers all selling their salvations and swaying people’s faiths, folks speakin’ in tongues, handlin’ snakes, gettin’ wasted, workin’ miracles, packin’ guns, runnin’ from the law, gazin’ down a deep dark well, it’s joyful, it’s mournful, cautionary tales creepin’ up the twisting dirt roads from way down by the railroad tracks up to the tent revival over to the juke joint and roundabout to jail, eventually maybe heaven, but oh lord not hell, you can almost feel the humidity, hear the chickens and the crickets, smell the sticky candy apples on the magic midway of the county fair, and - if this sounds like a ramblin’ damn scattershot diatribe, well, y’know, the beauty and the power of it all is truly hard to describe, and to unravel it with too many spoilers would be a downright sin.

Once again, the best thing you could do here is just listen, as the proof’s all right there in the puddin’. From the first frenetic sparks of “9 Volt” you’ll be electrified. Somehow while nobody was lookin’, the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies stirred all this up and seasoned it and basted it and marinated it and smoked it and scattered and smothered and covered and this-and-thatted it all into a blazin’ Southern Gothic classic with universal appeal, a rockabluesy tour de force brimmin’ with a razor sharp sense of humor, a heap of personal history, and a whole lotta rock and roll hell-raisin’.

At the end of the day this record casts the spell of a grand, yet inadvertent concept album, something of a Sgt. Puppers if you will, or perhaps more aptly, all in all, it’s just another crick in the Fall Line. Opposing sides collide, exposing the deep divisions, dichotomies, and contradictions of the Southern condition - dark vs. light, good vs. evil, sin vs. salvation, nature vs. mankind. All with a buggy full of them hyphens to go where their many musical influences collide, plus to get a bit literary, a little Hank Williams meets Tennessee Williams, Tom Waits meets Tom Sawyer, Willie Dixon meets Willy Faulkner, and so on.

William Faulkner once said that the primary reason for writing is “simply to leave a scratch on the earth that showed that you were here for a little while,” and the Mudd Puppies’ sonic scratch on the earth as they were excavating this ancient scratch on the earth also celebrates the rekindling and the longevity of their friendship and musical kinship. As much as it highlights the divides, Fall Line is where the sides meet up and come alive.

“The coolest thing out of all of this,” enthuses Brant, “is that me and Ben are better friends now than we were back then! And we’re at a place where we handle communication better.”

“There's something about the way we work together that's just so gratifying,” agrees Ben. “I think about the ups and downs of our friendship and our musical partnership, and I'm so much happier with the way we collaborate now. We’ve both grown so much and learned to appreciate each other's strengths.”

And Lumpy loved playing his part, while watching it all come together.

“Honestly, this is an amazing story to me,” raves the drummer. “I can still view the whole thing as sort of an outsider looking in, because those guys were always the core, they were a two piece for so long, and they still play like that - they play off each other just like it's 1988! I still have the luxury of kind of being on the outside looking in and just enjoying the shit out of it all. I can see them first of all as a fan and second of all as a musician, playing what I know they need as a drummer, and it's just so cool. I honestly can't believe how it all came about, this whole second wave.”

“I just want to play music,” notes Ben. “And I'm still getting to do it and I feel incredibly lucky. I'm really grateful we have the opportunity, and Strolling Bones having faith in us to put this out. That's the way I went into making this record. I got exactly what I wanted, and it wasn't all the shit that came with the music business. No disrespect and nothing but gratitude to the people we worked with before - I learned so much from it all - but this is the first time I've ever thought our opinion as a band matters the absolute most.”

“We probably should’ve just gone with a little indie label back then,” surmises Brant. “But, like they say, hindsight is 20/20.”

In this case hindsight is straight up 2023, and it doesn’t really matter how these guys leapfrogged from their twenties to the ’20s, because now that Fall Line has arrived, it’s almost like the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies never even went away.

“How cool is that?!” says Lumpy. “Something lays dormant for so long, and now it’s back and better than ever! It's just beautiful! And I’d say this is the beginning, we're just getting started. And the reason it’s so good is because the chemistry is great - when you have chemistry like this, great things come out of it.”

“This is as close as we've gotten for sure,” figures Ben, when asked if Fall Line might represent the ultimate Mudd Puppies experience. “I love it. And I think it’s all just gonna get better.”

They’ve continued to amp it up lately, adding Athens bassist Kevin Sweeney from the band Hayride to their live shows.

“It's like a hot rod now and I love it!” declares Brant. “It's pretty freakin’ hardcore rock and roll. It was back then too, but there's four people now live. It’s loud and it's low and it rumbles, so it's a little different than the original clang and bang of the tin cans. But it's kind of where we left off, we were headed that way.

“It’s all a ball, man,” he sums up. “We’re just doin’ what we do, making it from the heart, having fun together as a group - and there ain't no other feeling like that. When we first started playing – back in probably ’86, ’87 - Ben couldn't really play guitar, and I didn't know shit from Shinola. We just loved playing together. We just connected. It was good for me and Ben to take a hiatus. And now we're out here doing it again! When we get together, there's a super magic there that ain't like playing with anybody else. That's the way it started and that's the way it is now.”

He lets loose a little cackle.

“And y’know, like I say - we just went out for a beer!”

Reckon that calls for a toast. So here’s to the return of the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies - long may they thrive on the Fall Line!

-Mark Blackwell