A Beautiful Struggle

Louris was born into a Greek–Irish Catholic family in Toledo. He learned the liturgies at St. John’s Jesuit High School during the day and worshiped the gods of AM radio at night.

An excellent student but a social loner, he learned guitar at his mother’s suggestion as a way to make friends. She put a classical guitar in his hands when he was fourteen, and he loved how it felt from the start. “Playing guitar just came easy to me,” says Louris.

He never thought he’d make a living playing it, though. That wasn’t the plan. Notre Dame, job, wife, kids. That was the plan.

Then his sister, who lived in Minneapolis, invited him to visit. He buzzed on what he found here, especially the music, and it was so long Fighting Irish. “I wanted to try living in a big city,” recalls Louris. “I was also interested in architecture, and the University of Minnesota had a top-five program.”

He enrolled, got his degree, and landed a job with a small design firm. He found some satisfaction in the work, but he didn’t excel at it. “I just wasn’t that gifted,” he says. “I was good at drawing, I was good at math. But I was destined for a life of being the office guy instead of a great architect.”

When he started pursuing music in earnest, Louris hit the clubs and eventually worked up the nerve to talk to people about playing together. He joined the groups Schnauzer and Safety Last and had a ton of fun, but he wanted more.

One evening in 1985, he ambled into the Uptown and found it. An acquaintance, Mark Olson, had invited Louris to come by and check out his new band, a twangy roots outfit called the Jayhawks. The group sang rustic Americana as if they meant it. After the show, Louris chatted with Olson, who asked him if he knew of any available guitar players. Louris said he knew of one.

Louris, Olson, bassist Marc Perlman, and drummer Norm Rogers, who would eventually be replaced by Thad Spencer, coalesced quickly. They were good, but nothing special. Then their eureka moment came.

“We were running over some of the songs at Spencer’s house,” remembers Olson, talking from his home in Joshua Park, California. “Gary and I started to sing the songs together and I was like, ‘Wow, that sounds really, really good. And it sounds different.’ ”

Louris felt it too. “It was just very natural.”

Olson’s voice, direct and scratchy and slightly nasal, and Louris’s sweeter, higher tone, blended into something gorgeous. They wrote and recorded a batch of songs, and started playing gigs wherever they could, keeping their day jobs. It was thrilling, but exhausting. Louris, ever the architect, started to wonder, Were they building something?

His patience was tested even further when he spun through an intersection in October 1988. “I got knocked over a concrete bus bench into a brick wall,” says Louris matter-of-factly. He lost his spleen, punctured a lung, broke some ribs, bruised his heart, crushed his pelvis. More pain.

Louris knew he had a long recovery in front of him and, if he rejoined the band, a future filled with fast food and nights spent on friends’ floors. So he quit. “I just thought we weren’t going anywhere,” he recalls. He was gone six months.

Then things started happening. Local label Twin Tone took an interest in their music and asked for some tracks, and the band members asked him to return. Louris couldn’t resist. “We worked on some demos, and I came crawling back,” he says.

In 1989, they released Blue Earth. Critics flipped. “It was one of those records that was clearly important,” says Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, cohost of Chicago Public Radio’s Sound Opinions. “It was just beautiful. The harmonies, the songwriting, the sensibility, you just had the feeling that people would be able to put it on twenty years later and it wouldn’t sound dated.”