Howe Gelb, leader of the Tucson, Arizona group Giant Sand, started mixing country music, then still unacceptable in polite society, with punk, jazz, and noise thirty years ago. Today, Howe tours the world without troubling the charts, and is feted by collaborators and fans from PJ Harvey to the Spanish flamenco musicians with whom he recently snuck out the CD Alegrias. “Giant Sand were at least 12 minutes ahead of our time, I guess.” reflects the so-called ‘Godfather of Alternative Country’, a mantle he says “feels different on different days, from comfortably invisible to ridiculously notable. When they ask me at passport control what kind of music I play, I retort “I’m a cult figure”. But I don’t mind. It probably means I’ll never have to suffer a backlash from being too popular. That would suck. ”

To Howe, genre specifics are irrelevant. His career includes three solo piano instrumental collections, bucketfuls of grunge sludge, and two collaborations with a Gospel choir. 1994’s Glum, for example, included lead vocals by Howe’s four year old daughter Indiosa, and also by then septuagenarian crooner Pappy Allen. “I used to think if I just got the record done and out there, more informed powers then me would know what to label it,” he explains, “I mean, was Johnny Cash ever really country music? Never a lick of pedal steel there, but they had to sell him somehow. Neil Young is just Neil Young rock.? Is Thelonious Monk a jazz piano player? Why does he sound like he’s discovered his own planet then? If I have to make up my own category, I’d prefer the term ‘erosion rock’. I think it’s encoded in the band name anyway; Giant Sand.”

Howe’s compelling musical process sees chance strategies and slapdash instant composition collide with a thorough working knowledge of classic rock, an approach sometimes as likely to thrill as to spill. But it’s an addictive ride, its evolutionary arc encoded in Howe’s first three albums as Giant Sand, reissued last month by Fire records with a further twenty-four culled from his back catalogue to follow by next Summer. The garage rock of 1985’s Valley of Rain bleeds into the country-punk fusion that was 1987’s Storm. The one-take blowouts of 1989’s Long Stem Rant introduced improvisational freedom, and the key elements were all in place. Those early records make much more sense today, in the wake of White Stripes, Alt Country, and Western Society’s third or fourth Garage Rock Revival. “I am just happy it stands up at all,” Gelb confesses, now older and greyer than the youngster on the inner sleeve of Valley of Rain, “But those first two albums are regurgitations. I hear ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ in there. I hear all the stuff I loved when I was 14 and had my first stereo.”

So is Howe a product of a specific era, a Seventies rock childhood, followed by punk teens, and then the get-in-the-van American indie era? Could Giant Sand happen in today’s climate? “I existed in between things, like the space between molecule clusters. ‘72 to ‘77 was bleak for rock.” Howe opines, but makes notable exceptions for Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and Neil Young’s Zuma, the parentage of his own apparently orphaned mix of literary lyrics and guitar noise suddenly clear. And if Howe’s omnivorous music sounds like it was influenced by almost random browsing, then his teenage listening habits explain it. “I’d poke into the blues bins at the record store and gather what I could from Memphis Slim and Otis Span, and the cheap jazz bins , full of McCoy Tyner and, thankfully, Theloniuous Sphere Monk.” Like many musicians, after the punk party was over Howe felt stifled by the Eighties. “We just had to make up our own music cause we couldn’t find what we wanted to buy. We made the music we needed to hear.”

After grunge, the lo-fi movement of the mid-90s, placing ideas and energy over production values, should have been a perfect fit for Howe, now making Giant Sand and solo records in ad-hoc combinations of musicians on the fly. “Sure, folks finally had ears for immediacy and began to embrace the realm of sonic happenstance. But, I was hit with a series of troubling circumstances and was hampered from further momentum until the end of the decade.”

In 1997, Howe lost his long-term inspiration and sometime collaborator, the steel guitarist Rainer Ptacek, to a brain tumor; in 1999, he was dropped by Virgin, the first major label to invest in him; and gradually a fairly stable Giant Sand band left him to become Calexico, pushing a tasteful version of Howe’s core sound to larger audiences in a way Howe had never been willing or able to do. But eventually the freedom seemed to energise him. Howe started self-releasing records, and hit the road in the clothes he stood up in, with a contract asking for underwear and socks and the loan of a guitar, carrying just a utility belt of effects pedals. And thus he became the low-intensity cult figure of legend, sustainably farming a loyal audience worldwide.

Giant Sand’s latest album proper, Blurry Blue Mountain (Fire), has received the kind of career best reviews that come when critics finally realise there’s little they can say or do that will deter a determined artist from proceeding, so they may as well concede defeat. There’s the Monk-ish piano balladry of Time Flies and Love A Loser, the luminescent country chug of Monk’s Mountain and Better Man Than Me, and scorching re-writes of the back catalogue classics Thin Line Man and Swamp Thing, revisited and reinterpreted as if they were alternate universe standards. What, then, is the key to a successful performance? “I don’t know,” Howe says,”it’s like, what makes a line funny or fail. It’s the beat. Sometimes you are inside the beat and sometimes you are outside the beat. They both work, but not to someone who is listening to only one. And unlike jazz, our improvisation is not in the solo, it’s in everything. Just like erosion changes the landscape on a daily basis, I tend to allow the same for my work. It is what nature is. And if the desert is anything, it is magnificent erosion.”

Does Howe hope, at 54, that Fire’s reissues program will consolidate, belatedly, the Giant Sand brand? Howe is philosophical; “At this point if someone has never discovered Giant Sand, they most likely will be insulted that we didn’t reach them before. Die hard fans should be remiss we never validated their allure with their friends who chided them from choosing the likes of us. And our more successful peers should hate us for seeming so fiercely independent and unattached to the very things they have had so much success with. I guess we probably suck.”

Howe is surprisingly amenable when I suggest he might like to consider dying, as it often provides a sales boost to cult artists. “Last month, at a place called Gig harbor on the Puget Sound below Seattle, I found myself drowning in a capsized canoe,” he recalls, “cold weather, clothing saturated, and losing the struggle against the outgoing tidal surge. But the epitaph would have been tempting: Howe Gelb – drowned in sound at gig.”

Blurry Blue Mountian, Valley Of Rain, Thin Line Man and Storm are all out now on Fire Records.

Stewart Lee