July 2005

It is a gorgeous day on the California coast. PL is cursing Ruth Seymour and the KCRW cultural oligarchy again. We’re right there with him. KCRW has become a futuristic corpo-public radio monster. As if this community college station was not powerful enough in the Los Angeles basin, now, through Podcasting, KCRW is cornering the market of thought and opinion and shaping the parameters of taste across the globe. 24/7/365. Just take last weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Their adoration of Nic Harcourt and his championing of the little guy musician and composer. Elevating the Finnish teen with his hip-hop beats and ProTools set-up. A truly global event is happening. Community radio is being abandoned for good.

PL wants to clarify his rant against Ruth Seymour. She was interviewing the head of the U.S. set up and run radio network in Iraq. Our own Tokyo Rose to convert the innocent youth of Iraq to free market capitalism and titillating hip hop sexuality. Ruth was lobbing one softball after another to Mr. Big Brother, cooing and murmuring “fascinating,” as he described, deadpan, his project as having one of the largest “news staffs” in the Middle East. Ruth’s only challenge was to mention that Radio Hooray for American got triple the funding of PBS and NPR. PL personally hopes that NPR collapses entirely. The stations will survive, and will be forced to scramble for local talent to fill the newly vacant programming hours. No more Robert Siegal and his patronizing nasality, Lisa Mullins and her bullying of the occasional lefty spokesperson, Day To Day’s privileged snickering at the sufferings of the world.
We’ll miss you, NPR. We’ll miss you Shirley Jihad. That’s right, jihad.

They skip. They just skip all the time. More and more I find that other people experience this same flaw with their DVD players. And I do believe it is the player that is the problem and not scratches on the DVD itself. We must stop suffering alone in silence! Share your stories of DVD skipping and free yourself from the pain. VHS was better, is better, and will suffice until full downloading of digital entertainment content fully takes hold two years down the road.

We are in Santa Barbara. Yes, Santa Barbara. Land of Reagan. Land of clean ocean breezes. Land of sleepy Santa Barbara enthusiasm. A mixed Wednesday night crowd of elderly Republicans, Folkies, Hippies, beautiful Lesbians and young girls came to alight on our solitary limb. Perhaps there’s something here that makes people permanently satisfied with themselves, the climate, the state of national politics. But we are not such people. We play a regular gig on skid row in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. For two years we played every week on the worst street in the worst city in America. And you know what? It was the best and it still is. The best room, the best vibe, the best bartender/owner, the best sound, the best fans. We are lost in this affluent beach community. We are lost.

PM says, “Any time we’re doing better than breaking even, we’re doing good.” It’s night, and Santa Barbara is quiet. Peaceful? Perhaps. Yes, it’s likely. But quiet, certainly. We’ve just done a mellow set at Soho, a very pleasant club in a tasteful Spanish courtyard whitewashed building on State Street. Gina Villalobos and her fine band went on first, and their rowdiness was reined in, as would be ours. They sounded like a good indie record, the sound man had good things happening, and the crowd was with Gina all the way.

Our friend , the Irish folk singer Paddie McCorkle, is wandering this week, seeking a deeper insight into his ultimate destiny and avoiding gainful summer employment. He’s hanging with us at Soho, and we try and browbeat him into selling CDs for us, but Paddy’s no patsy. He’s impersonating our tour manager at first, drinking beer after beer and eating chicken fingers on the half-price band tab. After a while he starts telling people he’s the producer, not the tour manager. It sounds better, gives him more artistic authority, makes him appear less desparate. Our show was with electric instruments, but we played cautiously, perhaps stately. To rock seemed wrong. The Hawks sounded good, and the audience was enthusiastic in that restrained Santa Barbara way. The ProTools overall compression plug-in has been applied to the collective psyche of this isolated and fortunate community. No highs, no lows, but a solid and pleasant midrange. Nice chats with our SB friend and big supporter Jeff Levy and audience afterwards, and then we packed up.

We’re back at the hotel, and things have turned strange.Paul Marshall is having a very sensual discussion with Paddy, our boon and twisted companion on this brief journey into mellow uncertainty. Paddy wants us to drive backroads into the mystic Santa Barbara Highlands to gaze upon ponds with local beach dwelling nymphs, now sheltering in the upper mists. We Hawks are weary, and guarding our spirits from distraction, and are declining the invitation, but these Sirens are of an unstoppable will, and will not release us from their feminine energy. Paul Marshall is a rock, a cool and commanding iceberg calmly but resolutely cooling the scene, lowering the stakes, bowing out gracefully. Thank you, Paul.

Shawn is the healer. He’s our Jesus. At times, PM can be the bad guy but he’s also the compassionate father. Sleep comes after hours of trying to squeeze decent programming from the big screen TV.

Morning in Santa Barbara, and the pleasantness persists. A flawless breakfast at Cajun Kitchen (good to superior rating, Hawks Better Cuisine Council), a farewell to wanderer Jay, and we’re heading north on the 101. Will the mellow groove persist? It seems impossible, and yet . . .

I SEE HAWKS IN L.A. BRINGS ITS TWANGING SOUND AND POETIC LYRICS TO SOHO
By Josef Woodard
Santa Barbara News-Press
July 3rd, 2005

What’s in a band name? Plenty, in the case of the oddly monikered, critically acclaimed alt-country band I See Hawks in L.A. They will make their Santa Barbara debut Wednesday at SOhO, with former Santa Barbaran Gina Villalobos opening. If the name evokes a mystical, natural atmosphere mixed with the built-in cultural references associated with the abbreviation L.A., it has done its job.
Like a hawk over the metropolis, the band creates a unique twanging musical palette, part country and part rock. It’s a perfect local brew for a city where hawks and showbiz hacks coexist. Musically, the band operates in the long shadow of country-rock legends like the late Gram Parsons, and his early 1970s band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and is a focus of the current neocountry-rock sound out of Los Angeles.
Of the name, pedal steel guitarist Paul Lacques explains, “The band formed, at least conceptually, on a trek through East Mojave desert preserve, and we do write about the desert and other surrounding vistas with great regularity. We were talking about all the hawks we’d seen over the skies of L.A. recently, and decided that would be the band name.
“The hawk is our informal bearer of omens,” Lacques notes, “and they show up at key moments in our lives. When we were recording our first album, they popped up all the time, even in movies we were watching. One landed near my feet in San Francisco when we were mixing the record.”

When the band formed a few years ago, a country music leaning came naturally, but members weren’t sure how that instinct would manifest itself.

“We knew we were forming a country band,” singer-songwriterguitarist Rob Waller recalls. “In that sense there was a mandate. But, hopefully, our sound is always developing organically. It would take the fun and spontaneity out of it if it wasn’t.” Adds Lacques, “We knew we wanted to form a country band, and we weren’t fond of what was coming out of Nashville, but beyond that, it’s been blind instinct.”

The band’s musicians have played in a variety of groups and in a variety of musical directions. Country music was a common interest, though they don’t pretend to have come up from C&W soil. “My family didn’t listen to much country music,” says Lacques of his musical background, “but we had a Glenn Campbell record and a Roger Miller record that we wore out. I got into country via bluegrass guitar and The Grateful Dead.”

For his part, Waller was weaned on classic rock, beaming in on the only decent radio station in his hometown of Rochester, Minn. He grew up on a musical diet of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and “came to country and folk music later on when I got serious about songwriting, because that’s where the really good songs lived. I love Zeppelin. They rock. But the lyrics are pretty cartoonish. The country and folk guys — Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard — they’re really talking to you very intimately about their immediate experience and, ultimately, that’s what I’m most interested in doing as a songwriter.”
Coming west to L.A., Waller found himself naturally attracted to the older tradition of country-flavored rockers in the areas, especially Parsons and The Byrds.
“Gram just wrote so many good songs and The Byrds experimented with adding psychedelic sounds to country and folk,” he says. “The Byrds’ harmonies are also just so devastatingly good and that’s something we work very hard on in our band.”
Waller believes that there is a definite link between music and the environment out of which it grows. That idea is particularly relevant to the sound and imagery in I See Hawks in L.A.
“I believe that the ground has a sound,” he says. “We all know what New Orleans music sounds like. There’s a sound that creeps up through musicians’ feet when they stand on that soil. Why fight it? If I lived in New Orleans I’d make a different kind of music than I’d make in New York or Memphis or L.A.
“We’re all just plants after all. Certain kinds of sounds grow better in this Los Angeles soil, this Los Angeles climate. We’re just trying to grow native plants here, musically.”
I See Hawks in L.A. made an impressive splash with its debut, eponymous album from 2001, and has continued a gradual upward course with its fine second album, “Grapevine,” released a year ago.
From the beginning, the music press came courting.

Richard Gehr wrote in the Village Voice that “their music, driven by the fine steel guitarist Paul Lacques, is sinewy yet poetic — more nihilistic than decadent, with an urban-desert poetry all its own.”
In the L.A. Weekly, Johnny Whiteside stated plainly that “the driving-force duo of singer Rob Waller and guitarist Paul Lacques have cooked up one of the most audacious sounds the Golden State has ever produced.”
What’s the fuss about? It has to do with the unusual sonic-poetic chemistry between the songs and the sound. Sweet down-home vocal harmonies, fiddle and other country touches are part of the story. Also, the searing, surreal texture of the pedal steel in the band adds greatly to the overall band sound.
What is about the pedal steel that so magically colors whatever music it touches?
“The fact that it’s never actually in tune,” Waller deadpans.
Lacques says half-jokingly, “You have to be obsessive-compulsive to even attempt pedal steel, so the insanity of the player is the most important element.”

Alt-country is a thriving, if semiunderground, subculture within music. I See Hawks in L.A. is one example of a band which may have little hope of having an impact on the standard, Nashville-governed country scene, but it’s not that they intentionally cling to life in the margins. “We certainly seek a wider audience,” Lacques says, “and we’re not trying to be deliberately obscure or ‘alternative’ in our music or lyrics. If we could write a Nashville hit, we just might do it, but I think our DNA is missing a few strands for that.” In the modern parlance, they may be “off-the-radar,” in terms of any mainstream attention or airplay. But Waller clarifies that, in the current multifaceted musical cosmos: “There are a lot of radars these days. We’re very present on some, completely absent on others. “I suppose we’d like to make more money and feel we deserve it, but I imagine most people probably feel about their careers. There’s something very satisfying and enduring about the grass-roots development of a band — or any artistic, political or religious movement. The convictions that drive true believers are the most powerful of all. “People come to hear us because they’ve heard our songs and connected with them. Sometimes very deeply. That’s plenty satisfying for me.”

It’s Friday the first of July, 2005 but you already know that. PL, PM, and RW work diligently at the bucolic foothill retreat and studio of PM at the edge of Los Angeles. The sun is getting warmer, the sky smoggier. It is summer here in Los Angeles. Real, interminable, Los Angeles summer is dawning.

We are at work comping the tracks for our third full LP. Barrier Reef is comped. Byrd From West Virginia is next. We’re going through the songs alphabetically. We’re organized, damn it. As if we were launching a rocket into space for NASA, we’re utilizing the most severe tools of organization. Yes, we’re using computers. Apples, IBMs, PCs. We’re using all the computers. All of them. Is Paul Laques, in fact, in support of the space program, you ask? No, of course he’s not. He’s exhausted by it just like you, and just like the entire shuttle launch platform. Will Discovery survive its mission later this month? And why is Discovery always used immediately after a Shuttle disaster? It was the first Shuttle launched after Challenger disintegrated on take off, the first launched after Colombia disintigrated on landing. Is it the most reliable Shuttle? Is Atlantis as unreliable as the fools who wander the earth believing in the mythical ocean city from which it gleans its name?

There are still many questions left to answer, my friends. Many questions. Am I talking about the Kennedy assasination? You bet I am. The Magic Bullet Theory, the mysterious circumstances surrounding Officer Tippitt’s death later that afternoon, the witnesses pointing to the train trestle immediately after the shots were fired, the change in the parade route, the improbability of a single gunman operating alone, the drastic differences in conclusions between the Dallas surgeons and those of the government autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the CIA-Mafia-Cuban Connection and the fallout from Bay of Pigs, Alpha 66, Sturgis and Hunt: Tramps or CIA Assets?, Life Magazine flips the sequence of frames in printing the Zapruder film, Jesus, the bullet changes direction! And where was George Bush Sr. on Nov. 22, 1963 (he claims not to remember). By God, Jack Ruby was a bagman for Al Capone. My sweet Lord, Oswald came back from two years in Russia with his American citizenship renounced and wasn’t even detained by a U.S. intelligence agency!So, back to work. Mandolin or Dobro? Lick selection. Slick election. Self-protection. They’re fighting each other. It’s the Vietnam War acted out by traditional American folk instruments. PL and PM put on the French hats of the Paris Peace Talks, trying to hammer out a deal between those two, tough, trebly cousins.

Paul Lacques says, “When you really stretch out the ProTools wave forms they look really stoney.” We decide that ProTools wave forms, Paul Marshall’s lava lamp, and Mike Stinson will costar in the video for Barrier Reef. Then the computer crashes. The computer! Goddamn it!But, thankfully, full recovery. Session Back Up was enabled and fully engaged. Why is Paul Marshall the only ProTools engineer in the country with this software? We will continue comping, selecting, peace-making. We are mastering the computers bit by bit. Science Fictions threatening the take over of the world by computers forgot one thing: Calisthenics! Yes, through the power of calisthenics we will overcome the machines, my friends. Be strong, be fit, send email.

With summer, as we all know, Paul L’s thoughts turn to impeachment. The 2002 vintage “Impeach Bush” sticker still clinging to his 1988 Mazda hatchback doesn’t seem so alone and hopeless. Another big summer thrill: Denny Moynahan aka King Kukule has a girlfriend, she’s supercool, and two days ago she managed to flip off both President Bush and the First Lady as they were limoing out of the White House compound. This really happened.**Paul M wishes to register his protest at this rude action; he believes in the political system, not
personal attacks.
Paul L, on the other hand, views history as a raw, vicious struggle between those with money and those without, and that the veneer of civility still clung to by the hopeful has masked the greatest transfer of wealth upward in the history of mankind. The Bush administration’s attack on the well being of the planet and its people is not getting the response of moral outrage it deserves. Kill the rich.