WHAT: Asylum Street Spankers
WHERE: High Noon Saloon, Madison
WHEN: 7 p.m. Nov. 25
INFO: high-noon.com, asylumstreetspankers.com

>>WIM: Christina Marrs
WOMEN IN MUSIC

Any woman can tell you about the trials and tribulations of being pregnant and what a relief maternity leave can be. Imagine a pregnant musician who has to go on the road to make a living. Christina Marrs, co-leader of the Austin-based Asylum Street Spankers, has been there, done that.

“It was horrible being on tour while pregnant. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” she said. “I toured into my ninth month with my second child, but finally had to leave in the middle of the tour to go home, only three weeks away from the due date. I just couldn’t take it any more. But we kinda had to make a living.”

The Spankers started as an acoustic jug band side project for a group of Austin musicians in April 1994. While she had sung all her life, Christina had no professional musical experience when she was asked to be a part of the start-up band. At the time she was the single mother of a 4-year-old.

“I was dangling out there, and really didn’t know what to do with my life,” she said. “I dropped out of college and didn’t have any clear-cut goals, kind of drifting from one crappy job to another, then this opportunity came along and turned into a career and a whole life change.”

A week after the band’s first rehearsal, a job rolled in. “It just snowballed,” Christina said. “We got a following in Austin right away. About a year into it we were doing three weekly residencies.”

It wasn’t long before the Spankers became the main musical focus for many of the members. “And for me it became a way to make a living without having to wait tables,” Christina said.

By the band’s third year, it had outgrown Austin.

“Eventually your hometown dries up on you, so we hit the road and started touring,” Christina said. “Once you hit the road, you find yourself in the situation where you have to go out longer and more often to keep the wheels rolling. Pretty soon we became a touring band and Austin became a place that we happened to play every once in a while.”

Her son was 7 when she became a national touring artist.

“That was a bit complicated,” Christina said. “Then I met my husband after we’d been touring for about a year. He was our first outside management. We got married and it took a lot of the stress out of having to go away on tour.”

The fifth year into the band’s existence, two original members dropped out.

“We were close to breaking up,” Christina said. “Of course, at the time, we couldn’t foresee how many people were going to come and go and how truly it isn’t that big a deal. No one is irreplaceable, but at that time it was devastating. It seemed like we weren’t going to be able to recoup. Then I found out I was pregnant.”

The band decided to press on, but with a refocus on the creative vision of Christina and her force-of-nature band mate known simply as Wammo. “It turned out to be a good thing for us. It allowed it to diversify and get a little more experimental about where we were gong musically,” Christina said. “Before there were way too many cooks. At one point there were 11 people in the band, so now it’s no longer a democracy of 11 people. Now it makes it easier in a lot of ways.”

The only thing not good about the new direction is that now there was more focus on Christina, who is touring while carrying her second child.

“I was huge,” she said. “I could barely sing because I couldn’t draw breath. There was nowhere in my lap to put an instrument. It was tough. My husband went on the road to help me out. I basically had my own personal assistant, but it was still too much. There were gigs that I missed just because I couldn’t get up and out of the RV and go into the show. I didn’t envision that it was going to be that hard.”

She finally left the tour in her ninth month, but two months after the birth of her second child, Christina and baby were on the road.

“So then I was out touring with an infant being breast fed,” she said. “I would get on stage and I’d have to run off for a song to go breast feed and run back. I was working until 2 or 3 in the morning and the baby would wake up at 7 and want to be fed. That was horrible. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. There are things you do when you’re young and struggling and trying to keep a family together and make a living, but looking back on it all, I knew that I could never, ever, ever do that again.”

That is why Christina will not be with the Spankers when they hit the High Noon Saloon in Madison on Nov. 25. She is on maternity leave for her third – and what she says is her final – child, who is due Jan. 18. She also intends to stay close to home for six months after that.

“The timing couldn’t have been worse,” she said. “We just hired a few new people, all of them young kids who had moved from out of state to be in the band. Some of them had one tour under the belt when we broke the news.”

When the current tour is done, the band is taking a touring hiatus, at least outside of Texas. That was decided after taking a cold, hard look at the economy.

“All the venues we play across the country are getting worried about attendance. We’re paying twice as much for gas as we were two years ago. It’s tough out there right now. We want to keep our musicians working. On the other hand, we were facing the prospect of possibly going into debt while touring, which isn’t an option. So we decided that rather than send them out without me, we’re going to take a little break, try to work as much as we can around Texas, work on some new projects, recording and otherwise, and keep an eye on the economic environment and see when it’s safe to get back in the water.”

The Asylum Street Spankers have a new live double-CD release on Yellow Dog Records, appropriately titled What? And Give Up Show Biz?