For more than 30 years, Jerry Joseph has been strapping on a guitar and chasing down truth, understanding and soul with a tenacity and resonant skill that mark him as a hard charging kindred spirit to Joe Strummer, Warren Zevon and Patti Smith. While not a household name or critic’s darling, Joseph is the archetypal musician’s musician, something resoundingly clear on his sweeping new double album, Happy Book. Captured with muscle and blood by Joseph’s longtime trio the Jackmormons, this latest chapter in his long, strange journey flows like glowing quicksilver through the modern psyche, where war and disaster wrestle with hope and faith and sometimes the best option is to sashay down to the local disco to mambo with the chicks with dicks just to remind one’s self that you’re never too old or too dead to learn a couple new tricks.

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Happy Book (out March 20, 2012 on Response Records) presents the Jackmormons at their most diverse and confident, a record with a wide swing that dexterously moves from whisper closeness to Technicolor expansiveness. Many of the songs on Happy Book were written in Mexico right after Joseph’s father passed away but then left wide-open so the band could be part of the writing process, producing an emotional and sonic wallop fueled by the tightest, tastiest playing Joseph (guitar, lead vocals), JR Ruppel (bass, backing vocals) and Steve Drizos (drums, backing vocals) have ever captured in the studio.

Joseph first came to prominence in the mid-1980s with still-beloved cult band Little Women, a reggae-rock proto-jam band that dominated the Rocky Mountain club scene for nearly a decade, and notably helped break jam giants Widespread Panic, who looked up to Joseph and opened for his band before rising to prominence. To this day, many of Panic’s favorite concert staples were written by Jerry Joseph, including such blazing epics as “North,” “Chainsaw City” and “Climb to Safety.” Today, Joseph neatly describes Little Women as “a mash-up of Burning Spear and the Grateful Dead dressed up like the New York Dolls.”

The other two key ingredients to the Jackmormons, JR Ruppel and Steve Drizos, are also musical lifers working steadily for decades both as sparring partners to Jerry Joseph and elsewhere. Drizos was a member of acoustic Dexter Grove from 1995-2004, who performed over 1500 shows nationally. Drizos produced the live Jackmormons record Badlandia and co-produced Happy Book, as well as performing and recordings with such luminaries as Dave Mason and Jim Capaldi (of Traffic), Widespread Panic, The Decemberists, moe., Merle Saunders, Eric McFadden, as well as dozens of local Portland artists and bands. Ruppel has recorded and played live as a solo artist and with Fabuloso and Moheynow. As far as being part of the Jackmormons, Drizos says, “I love the intensity of this band, the songs and live performances. Playing drums for this band sometimes feels like driving a runaway train about to fall off the tracks at any moment but always manages to arrive at the station.”