G. Love Is Down With Little Milton, The Muppets, And Bootlegs

06/17/1999 4:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(6/17/99, 1 a.m. PDT) - Philadelphia hip-hop bluesman G. Love, born Garrett Dutton, of G. Love & Special Sauce is busier than you might think. Besides building anticipation for the Aug. 3 release of his fourth proper full-length album for Okeh/ 550 Music, Philadelphonic, Dutton has been occupied adding footnotes to his swelling resumé.

Following the likes of Keb' Mo', Government Mule, Lucinda Williams, Peter Wolf, and Dave Alvin, G. Love & Special Sauce entered the studio in May to record with Little Milton for the blues great's forthcoming album.

He also found himself contributing to the soundtrack for the upcoming movie Muppets In Space. For the soundtrack, G. Love & Special Sauce covered the No. 1 R&B hit "Dazz," originally recorded by the Atlanta jazz-funk band Brick.

"It came off pretty fly," says the 26-year-old Dutton. "Didn't get to meet any Muppets, though."

In midst of it all, Dutton and his band are continuing a long-standing tradition of bootlegging themselves for specialty albums to sell at shows and on the Internet. While concurrently releasing major-label-associated albums, the band has put out a handful of G. Love & Special Sauce bootlegs with titles such as Oh Yeah (G. Love's first tape), 1996's G. Love & Special Sauce Live At The Haunt, and 1997's G. Love Has Gone Country and Watch Out. The band is currently working on two more--tentatively titled Front Porch Loungin' and Back In The Day--which should be available within the next few months. Back In The Day will be made up predominately of early material such as demos, outtakes, and rehearsal material the band wrote and recorded in 1993.

Dutton compares the bootlegs and proper releases to different kinds of clothes. "You wake up on Sunday and put on some clothes that you feel real comfortable in. You look in the mirror and it's like, 'Damn, I look really great today,' just wearing those beat-up clothes that you love. Those are the bootlegs," he says. "And then maybe on Friday night you're dressed up in the most mackin'-est clothes to go out to the club or something and you're like, 'Damn, I look good.' Those are the major releases. Back In The Day is like our Sunday clothes that we wear around the family or home and Philadelphonic is like getting suited up to go out on the town."

Features on Keb' Mo' and Lucinda Williams are available now on LAUNCH.com.

-- J.R. Griffin, Los Angeles

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