As well as being one of our favourite album titles of last year, the full debut album from Pug Johnson and The Hounds, THROWED OFF AND GLAD, featured in our ‘Best of 2022’ at Lonesome Highway. The album’s sound is unadulterated Texas outlaw, exploring life’s darker side in places but also loaded with high spirits and wicked humour. Much of the material also mirrors Johnson’s real-life trials and tribulations as he finds his feet in an industry that is seldom easy to navigate. It’s still very much a ‘work in progress’ but heading in the right direction, as Johnson explained to us when we spoke with him recently.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your musical career to date.
Okay, I'm from Beaumont, Texas, which is in the southeast corner right next to the Gulf Coast and Louisiana. I started playing music when I was 13, trying to learn to play the guitar. I started off writing poems when I was a kid and eventually it kind of transitioned over into songwriting. When I was in high school, I started my first band. We took it pretty seriously and I wound up going to a school for music close to home. When I graduated, me and a few members of the band moved to Nashville.
How was that Nashville experience for you?
We were all music majors having just graduated and we all knew that we needed to get somewhere where there was a music scene going on: it was either go to Austin or go to Nashville. We all had some friends that had already gone to Nashville and we thought that Nashville was where we would have a better bet of actually catching work as sidemen. I went there also trying to sell some of my songs. We pretty much all just went our separate ways eventually in Nashville. I had just turned 21, so that wound up kind of like really being my college experience and so that was two years that I didn't really get a lot done. I wound up working at a Kroger grocery store and trying to go to writers’ nights. I also wound up selling weed for a while. The big lesson that I really learned is that I wasted quite a bit of time there. I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with two other guys that I went to college with. Three of us crammed into this one bedroom and that was when I first really started drinking heavily. But I got some great stories worth telling and writing about from that time.
Did you get to play many gigs there?
Me and a friend would do a set every Thursday night at the Nashville Palace, which is just by the Opryland. It’s one of the touristy areas and we had a six-hour set and there were no breaks. It was mainly covers but we could also do songs that we had written. I built up a pretty good repertoire of covers –when you're playing for six hours, doing it every week, that happens. I also started playing a lot of writers’ nights, though I felt that I wasn't good enough at first. You only get the chance to play two or three songs so I was getting far less playing time than I wanted and had to learn how to stand out really quickly. That's where I came up with a lot of songs for THROWED OFF AND GLAD.
It's a great title for an album: where did the idea for the title come from?
It's a classic cheesy story. I had just moved to Nashville. I'd probably been up there for two months or so, some friends and I were having a little get-together and I went to the patio to smoke a cigarette and wound up kind of stumbling out the door. And one of the guys there said: ‘throwed off and glad.’ Eventually, I wanted to write a song with that title because I thought it was a funny kind of notion, and it can go different ways. I pictured a stoned cowboy laying back in the corner of this smoky dive bar bobbing his head. It wound up being my theme song while I was in Nashville.
There are some powerful tracks on the album. Miss You All is particularly dark.
Yeah, I was kind of isolated at one point while I was in Nashville and getting into a dark place, which can happen when you start kind of spending too much time by yourself. You get to think of all kinds of nonsense. You think, maybe because people aren't reaching out to you that they don't care about you. It's pretty easy to make yourself feel down and isolated if you're on your own.
Angel is another track that is extremely soul-searching.
That was the first one I wrote after I moved to Nashville and it was about being homesick, missing a girl, and a little bit of guilt because I was pretty promiscuous by nature at that time.
Did you record the album in Texas?
Yes, in a studio here in Beaumont called Four Eyes. It was started by a guy that was one of my professors in college and I reached out to him, telling him that I'd got all these songs. He had sold the studio to a guy that was a fellow student in music college with me, I think he started a couple of years before me. He was one of those guys that I just knew even back then that he was on a whole other level than the rest of us. That's Ryan Johnson, and ever since he's been my producer, who I go to when I want to make a record.
You’re due to embark on a fairly extensive tour right now.
Yes. I still haven't even toured as I should have. My wife, Mindy and I have been in the process of changing our living situation so that I can do that better. We’re getting ready to move to Hill Country close to San Antonio. Mindy’s managing me, she quit her full-time job and right now she's taking care of the business end of things, and I'm the creative side of the partnership. We’ve sold our house and bought a motorhome, so now we're about to hit the road in a big way.
Will you play solo or with a band?
We're hoping to put together a touring band, it will probably be the group of guys who will be on the next record as well. I’ll tour solo at first, but we have room in the motorhome for a few guys to crash. But, the plan is to get a hotel room and let the guys take the room and Mindy and I will stay in the bus.
In a very crowded marketplace and without the backing of a major label, how difficult is it to get your music recognised?
We had some good fortune through my friends in the Teague Brothers Band. Through John Teague we were actually able to hook up with the Smith Music group. They've been a big help because before that we were just doing CD Baby, and with that we weren't really seeing a lot of growth. Through Smith Music, we were able to get on a couple of playlists and get into some rotations, and we're seeing a lot more growth that way. We’re also just spreading ourselves by word of mouth.
Slowly but surely there appears to be more recognition for roots music in recent times. Are you noticing this in Texas?
Yes. One of my professors back in college talked about the music business and music tastes as a pendulum that swings between the poppy commercial stuff and the grassroots. It's going to go back and forth. And I think right now people are leaning more towards something more roots’ based.
What’s on the Pug Johnson music playlist in recent times?
In the past couple days, it’s been The Stanley Brothers. I'm not going to lie; I've still been listening to THROWED OFF AND GLAD quite a bit. It’s like Tarantino when he talks about how he makes his films for himself. That's exactly how I feel about making records. I still also go back to the classics a lot, Waylon, Willie and Merle. I was recently doing a deep dive back in to Merle’s early stuff with The Strangers and there’s some really good deep cuts there that I need to go back and check them out again.
Is that similar to what you were listening to when you were younger?
Like most kids my age, my brother was into modern rock, but he would also play rap and hip hop. I was listening to Waylon and George Jones; I got it from my grandpa and my dad. They would love to listen to music and sing along. My dad would come home from work on a Friday and we'd be getting ready to go out to dinner and he would turn on these country tunes. There was a Johnny Bush record that he had that he would put on all the time and pour two fingers of whiskey into a glass for himself.
Interview by Declan Culliton