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The group, formed at UO in 1990, is releasing its first songbook, a project led by band member and UO graduate student Jack McGaughey, who saw the need to transcribe decades of previously not-written-down music.
In a tightly packed garage-turned-music studio at the end of a Friendly-neighborhood driveway, adorned with patterned tapestries, The Sugar Beets got to jamming.
The Sugar Beets are a Eugene-born Americana ensemble that came out of the University of Oregon dorms in 1990. The band, which has become a regular act at the Oregon Country Fair in the years since it formed, are known for its two women lead singers and array of instruments (including, in one song, a choice kazoo riff) that animate their playful, at times psychedelic, takes on life.
Saturday, they’ll be playing a nearly sold-out show at The Shedd Institute to celebrate the release of “The Sugar Beets Songbook — Vol. 1,” a new compilation of songs stretching back to their 1992 debut cassette tape, “Paraloocha Moon.”
The songbook itself — filled with archival pictures alongside sheet music for the previously never-written-down songs — is the culmination of one member’s archival effort as well as a celebration of how a band can manage to stick together for 36 years, from a college dorm beginning well into adulthood.
But at first, co-lead singer and founding member Megan Bassett had to accept that someone wanted to document that work in the first place.
“We’re like, ‘What?’” Bassett said of the pitch from band member Jack McGaughey to begin archiving the back catalog. “We couldn’t believe that he liked our music enough to want to do that. What a huge honor.”
Hear The Sugar Beets play “Make Ends Meet”
Archiving music that’s never been written down
While there were decades of cassette tapes, recollections of what note went where and more to sort through, the actual work of archiving fell to the youngest and newest member.
McGaughey, 27, was folded into the group via a connection to original keyboard player Scotty Perey, who was McGaughey’s music teacher at a summer camp when McGaughey was 10 years old. Both Perey and McGaughey play with the band, but McGaughey has been the primary keyboard player for a few years now.
McGaughey is a graduate student in music composition at the UO School of Music and Dance, who started on the songbook project after being selected for the yearlong Edmund A. Cykler Song Scholars program at UO, with his work advised by professor Stephen Rodgers. He said that archiving Sugar Beets tunes was directly inspired by the experience of jumping into a band and learning 30 years worth of songs.
The O.G. Sugar Beets, he said, knew the songs by heart. Not him, which became extra clear while preparing to join the band.
“It just dawned on me,” he said. “Oh geez, not a lot of this music is really written down, at all.”
Writing the music down meant finding what documentation did exist, from their few cassette tapes and albums to any concerts that someone had happened to record at the time. The notation was done by McGaughey, with help from Sugar Beets fiddler David Burham.
One challenge: McGaughey had no idea how many live shows people had actually recorded. But longtime friend of the band Eric Nusbaum, who has been to almost every single Sugar Beets concert, provided him with hundreds.
But the archival recordings — and the transcriptions that resulted from them — didn’t always jibe with the recollections of the musicians who had actually played at those shows. The actual Sugar Beets musicians sometimes had different recollections of how what went when. The trick was to find a balance between the strict confines of the recording and how the musicians would actually play the songs today.
“Some of those songs they haven’t played in over 30 years,” he said. “So when they come back to it, they’re like, ‘No, no, I think the second verse goes here,’ and then I pipe up, ‘Well, actually,’ it’s sort of like telling them how to play their own songs. I tried to avoid doing that, if I could help it.”
But that individual memory was also a boon: For the songs that have never been recorded, founding guitarist Marty Chilla would simply come over to McGaughey’s house to play the songs out loud for him to write down.
McGaughey’s work also included getting The Sugar Beets’ music on streaming services. The end goal, he said, is to digitize each live show recording on the Internet Archive, à la fans of The Grateful Dead who have crowdsourced an archive of digitized concerts on the platform.
“That’s going to be years in the making, I’m sure,” he said. “I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
Reflecting on music you wrote at 19
The original lead singers were Megan and Brianna Bassett, who are sisters; Brianna quit the band to go to nursing school, and Eugene-based jazz singer-songwriter Halie Loren stepped in starting in 2007. At the Wednesday rehearsal before the concert, the Bassett sisters reflected on their time in The Sugar Beets.
Megan Bassett said the music cracks the band up at times, especially the earlier songs written when the members were around 19 years old.
“This early music was so silly when we started playing,” she said, pointing to a song written by Chilla called “Man With a Plan From Under the Sea.”
When asked about how a band that is so large stays together for nearly 40 years, Megan Bassett talked about the need to love the music itself. Brianna Bassett laughed.
“It’s a democracy for the most part,” she said. “People have differences of opinions, especially if there are a lot of people that have strong opinions. I just laugh because being in the band for so long, like everybody else, you see the back and forth. It’s fun to see these guys now, and how far things have come in terms of getting the job done and having fun together.”
Megan Bassett said reflecting back on the early Sugar Beets songs included in the book made her think of a simpler, more innocent time, before anxiety-stoking events in American life such as the advent of mass shootings or 9/11.
“We were in this little sweet spot of, really, privilege and freedom in a way to just make art and enjoy life and really have fun together,” she said. “We got lucky that people wanted to hear it.”
