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I See Hawks in LA

Here is something of a dirty secret about me: I love country music. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

In fact, I feel that I can, with at least a little authority, proclaim that one of the best country bands in California (hell, in the world) is I See Hawks in LA, co-led by my friend Rob Waller (the band’s lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and contributing songwriter). Waller and I met in grad school, where we both taught in USC’s freshman writing program. We started our respective groups at roughly the same time, and even played a quirky double-bill together at Hollywood’s version of the Knitting Factory (referenced in the discussion that ensues below). Later, occasional Hawks collaborator Joe Berardi played in the IJG for a short time (long enough to hold down the drumming duties for our Industrial Jazz a Go Go! album).

After I left USC, Waller and I stopped running into each other regularly (except for that one time our two bands, heading in opposite directions through the heart of California, happened to stop, mid-tour, at the same rest-stop on the 5 freeway). But with social media, none of us are ever really out of touch, I guess. At least, that was how I learned that the Hawks had released their fifth album, Shoulda Been Gold — a “best of” compilation, but one that also included several new tracks (as well as a few rarities). I thought the occasion was a perfect opportunity to have an email conversation about this great band, and music in general.

If you’ve never heard the Hawks, here’s a good place to start.

* * * * *

Durkin: Though at first blush it probably appears to the outsider that there could not be two genres more divergent than jazz and country, we’ve joked in the past about possible points of resonance too. A music historian might mention the existence of folks like Bob Wills, or the musical roots of someone like Charlie Haden, or even Sonny Rollins’ cover for the Way Out West album. But I’m thinking too of deeper connections.

For instance: anyone playing jazz today has to deal somehow with the notion of authenticity. The music now has a history, a “tradition,” and a scholarship, and it is understood that each new generation of artists has to respond to that in one way or another (by fulfilling, tweaking, or rejecting certain expectations).

I could be wrong, but it seems like modern country musicians are faced with a similar dilemma. The music’s conventions are so well established that it must be hard for a young artist to maneuver without seeming to be derivative, or else too self-consciously “weird.” Plus, with country, you have that whole “Heartland of America” image to contend with. (Am I wrong in assuming that some audiences take that very seriously?)

Is this minefield real for you? Is it a minefield at all? And if so, how have the Hawks navigated it so elegantly?

RW: Ah, yes. “Jazz and Country, Together Again.” I remember our Jazz and Country night at the Knitting Factory in LA some years back. If I remember correctly it went pretty well, our crowds weren’t as divergent as we might’ve expected. But then we worked together and had some of the same friends. But yes, on to your question.

Authenticity is a major goal for us. It’s something we aim at. The problem is that it’s a moving target. Or, perhaps we’re the ones who are moving and the target is getting farther away. I have a suspicion that it is getting more difficult to make authentic music today in any genre precisely because of the accumulation of recorded music (not to mention all the scholarship, ‘zines, websites, listeners, authorities, etc.). There’s so much music to listen to and be influenced by it’s more difficult to just play it and feel it spontaneously, light-heartedly.

We’ve had the ability to record and reproduce music now for a little more than one hundred years. That’s really not that long compared to the history of music. I imagine that if you stumbled upon some band playing music in 1850 you would be thrilled, you’d grab your friends and bring them over, you’d sit dumbfounded and delighted as you watched and listened to them play. But now music is everywhere, in the elevator, on the radio, at the grocery store, stacked in gigabytes in your computer. Its value has shrunk to zero, basically. Music is now free because it’s everywhere and there’s no need to actually pay for it. This is a real problem for musicians who take years to develop their craft.

Oh shit, I’ve gotten away from the question and headed into a bitter rant against technology once again. Sorry, let me get back to your question….

Yes. The answer is yes, it is a minefield but a minefield is only dangerous if you walk into it. And pretty much we haven’t. It’s more like, “Hey, there’s a nasty minefield over there. Fuck it. Let’s go in the opposite direction.” Luckily we’ve had a group of people who has been interested and supportive of going with us. We take the things we love from the tradition, vocal harmonies, song structure, melodies, a connection to the earth, freak or outsider status (yes, even that is part of the tradition) and ignored the rest (bogus patriotism, xenophobia, trucks, mama).

Durkin: As one who is interested in freak / outsider status, I’d love to hear more about the freaks and outsiders of country music. Because that’s not really part of the general perception of country music, as far as I can tell.

RW: One of my favorite aspects of country/folk music is precisely that freak, outsider, drunk perspective. My favorite country artists (Merle Haggard, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Stanley Brothers, Louvin Brothers) are always flaunting their flaws. Whether it’s alcohol or being poor or being a criminal or turning your back on Jesus, the theme is often confessional and by association outsider. Here is who I am, here is what I’ve done, who I’ve killed, etc. I am guilty!

I first started getting into this music when I started dating my future wife. At the beginning of our relationship she made me a tape of murder ballads. Songs like “Katie Dear” or “Knoxville Girl” by the Louvin Brothers or “Pretty Polly” by whoever wrote that. These songs really got me and that’s when I started writing in this tradition. David Allen Coe and Johnny Cash played shows in prisons and related to prisoners because they had been prisoners. It was a genuine connection. When you listen to Live at Folsom Prison, Johnny is one of them. He’s not patronizing or clowning, he really feels for their circumstance and knows he might end up back there. He’s a freak and a fuck-up too.

To me, classic country and folk often maintained a legitimate connection to real people and real problems. Of course, that’s all pretty much gone from mainstream country now. It’s mostly about the girls getting wild on Saturday night, kicking Osama’s ass, and bullshit nostalgia for calculated, phony family values. It’s not just the connection to real people that’s been lost but the people themselves have become disconnected from their own reality. We’re a nation in denial of how bad we have it, how bad we feel. We can’t even properly imagine our own lack of freedom, our own cultural poverty, our own pain. We don’t have the words for it. We can’t even describe the pickle we’re in. In much of the heartland including Minnesota where I grew up, any hint of dissatisfaction is somehow unpatriotic, whiny, and liberal.

Durkin: As a fellow leader-of-a-ten-year-old-band-sans-hits, I’d love to know more about the Hawks’ adventures in the modern music industry. Ten years ago I seem to recall all sorts of exciting predictions about how we were entering a new age, in which independent musicians would use the tools of the digital era to storm the corrupt citadels of the music business. (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little.) Looking back, having survived the decade with a working band, what did you learn about how things actually went down? And where do you fall on the despair / hope continuum when it comes to the future of music? Is Twitter going to save us all?

RW: No, we are not going to be saved by Twitter. We are all going to die. But this is not a hopeless statement. It should be a galvanizing one. We are going to die! We are most likely not going to be rich or famous or even have health insurance. But so what? Everyone on the planet is going to die, the vast majority of them poor and unknown. And all of us are going to attempt to create meaning in our lives. By having families, jobs, growing plants, going to church, doing yoga, eating well, whatever. One of the main ways I create meaning in my life is by making music that I think is good according to my own twisted aesthetics. Ultimately, it’s a spiritual practice. I do it with daily regularity to sustain meaning, to keep going back to that place where the muse lives, to avoid loneliness, isolation, CNN. But I don’t want to minimize it and make it sound like a hobby. It’s not. God, I hope music is never my hobby! It’s my spiritual practice, identity, source of inspiration and meaning.

Durkin: That’s great. I completely relate. It’s interesting that most of the people I admire in music these days have some sort of “second job” to support what they do — but I also think most of us aspire to be able to play music without having to worry about that distraction. And yet maybe making music into your “career” would kill the very things that attracted you to it (spiritual practice, etc.).

RW: Yes, the tension between day job and music career is ongoing. In that same spirit of contradiction, they do often each make the other possible. I suspect that if I quit my day job altogether, I might be more likely to make more mainstream music, or play more covers, or play more weddings, or be more concerned with being timely and hip. The fact that I keep a day job which provides for me and my family also helps to maintain artistic freedom and integrity, I think (hope). My family’s next meal does not depend on the song I’m writing.

Or maybe it just makes me lazy. I also wonder if the day job allows me to be too complacent, too comfortable being a freak, an outsider, an obscure toiling artist. Maybe I’d write better songs, more urgent songs, if I didn’t have any safety net whatsoever. It’s difficult to know the answer precisely.

Durkin: What was the selection process for including the previously released material on the new album? Were there any hard choices? Did you feel like anything got left out?

RW: Okay, an easy one. We went to the iTunes store and sorted all our songs by popularity then picked the tops ten songs. We wanted to let the fans decide and also avoid having a big band fight. We then added 5 new tunes, and a couple of curiosities for our die hard fans. If I had decided the list myself it would’ve been different but not that different. We do plan on a SBG: Volume Two down the road so there will be another opportunity to gather some of the left out tunes.

Durkin: The new album, from the title on down, is steeped in metaphors and images of despair, missed possibilities, promises broken. And yet you keep coming back to hope too. The upbeat protagonist in “Raised by Hippies,” the salvation of someone like Robert Byrd, the beautiful melodies and harmonies of “Laissez Les Bontemps Roulet,” all suggest an underlying belief in the possibility of redemption and happiness, even if bittersweet. Is there a coherent philosophy tying these extremes together? Or: as a thoughtful person making thoughtful music in a thoughtless age, how do you cope?

RW: I’m not sure how coherent the philosophy is but there is one. Even our band name is a metaphor. Here in Los Angeles, this concrete metropolis of monoculture, there is still wildlife (hawks, coyotes, skunks, possums, hummingbirds, the occasional condor) there are are still strange country rock bands like ours even though we don’t get the kind of attention that say, Britney Spears or some other pop star gets. Yes, on a grand scale things are a bit hopeless. The earth really is headed for an environmental catastrophe. The political system and the economy really have been hijacked by the obscenely wealthy. These are troubling times and the problems are so big it’s overwhelming.

But life goes on. Children are born and they shine some light in, some optimism. The hopelessness and the optimism exist side by side. I take some refuge in my own personal contradictions. I’m an environmentalist but I drive a GMC Yukon. I’m a country rock musician and lead singer who wears flashy outfits onstage but I’m also a mild-mannered writing instructor at a university (a job I compare to working in a convent, fashion and other-wise). I’m a parent but I’m still fairly reckless at times when it comes to money and planning for the future. I guess the thing that holds it all together is a belief in the grand life cycle of it all. Things will be born, hopefully thrive for some period, then die. Then something else will be born. In this way, I welcome the coming apocalypse.

Durkin: We’re both dads, and in our art, if not our lives, we’re both a little wry. I don’t think either of us is predisposed to sugar-coating. And yet children, to some extent at least, inevitably require at least a little sugar-coating in their initial understanding of the world.

How do you reconcile these things? How does fatherhood coexist with the hint of nihilism, the vaguely apocalyptic strain that runs through your music? Do you play your music for your kids?

RW: Yes, I sure do play my music for my kids. They also know lots of the songs and sing along. My daughter Zola (5) came on the road with us to Scotland at one and a half. She still likes to sleep in my guitar case. For about six months she listened to one of our albums (Hallowed Ground) every night as she fell asleep. She knows the songs inside out. We recently played a show in Santa Barbara at a coffee house type place and there was a couch on stage behind the drums. Both Zola and her brother Henry (almost 2) danced around for a while then passed out on the couch for the rest of the show, sleeping right there on stage. That’s how it’s gone. Some of our tunes are fairly dark and require some censorship or explanation but overall there is a great deal of joyfulness present in music and the act of making the music that children pick up on the most. We’ll see how it all turns out as they get older. But I do see a real creative spirit in both of them that I take some credit for and that I think will continue to develop. I’d be surprised if they ended up as nihilistic and apocalyptic as their old man just because their lives and experiences are inevitably going to be so much different than mine. Again, I guess I see the apocalypse as a good time!

Cross-eyed hawks: it’s too bad they don’t have a sense of humor.

Durkin: What is the unlikeliest thing (musical or otherwise) you have been inspired or influenced by?

RW: I think my wife’s cooking has really influenced me as an artist. She’s an amazing cook. She develops new techniques, explores unusual ingredients, takes her time and develops her craft but it is all done in a loving way that’s about nurturing and feeding her family. I hope I can do the same with my music. Often, the dough I do make at gigs, etc goes right to the grocery store and turns into breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That’s a good feeling.

Durkin: Can music be effectively “political” (i.e., can it really matter, politically) in 2010, with its 24-hour hyper-media-with-a-vengeance vibe? Do you want the Hawks’ music to be political? And if so, how do you know the difference between offending somebody (I’m thinking of the dropped line from “Humboldt”) and educating them? [Editor’s note: “Humboldt” originally ended with the line “You can have your September 11 / I’m heading off to a Stoney Heaven.” According to the liner notes for Shoulda Been Gold, “when we sang the line in summer 2002 at Galapogos club in Brooklyn and the Knitting Factory only a stone’s throw from the twin towers site, we could see a moment of hurt bewilderment sweep through the audience like a slap in the face. We dropped the line.”]

RW: Hmm, not sure I have a good answer to this one. I guess music can be sort of political but I don’t really expect it to change anything in any direct way. So, not too effective. I think the Hawks are a political band in many respects (particularly with regards to the environment) despite the fact that as a band we have diverging view points.

The Humboldt line change was an interesting phenomena. We definitely lost a few fans and one writer in particular who had written glowingly about us before really turned on us because of it. Part of the reason the line was changed (which we didn’t mention in the liner notes) was I thought it might date the song too much to include September 11th. I don’t know if I was right about that since 9/11 has become a permanent thing, also we kept the Bush line which also dates it but I just didn’t have a good substitute for that one. “I quit my job at the 7/11” also seemed to fit the narrative of the song a bit better. Mostly, I think for myself as the the lead singer (the one singing the line) I didn’t want to reflect on that event over and over every time we played that song. The song is kind of our big closer and it’s a pot anthem that’s mostly just about rocking out and having fun. The political element seemed out of place, somewhat. It also seemed cold and unfeeling to those who really did suffer on that day. Also, our libertarian bass player never said anything about it but I knew it was eating at him. His son is in the Air Force in the desert. The personal outweighed the political in that sense and that also lead to the line change. Who knows, maybe it was big mistake.

by Gary Miller
State of Mind Music

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What’s it like to be playing country, bluegrass, and Americana in Los Angeles in the 21st century? The name of the band I See Hawks in L.A. provides a clue. “A lot of people say there aren’t hawks in LA.,” says frontman Rob Waller. “It’s because they don’t look up in the sky. They aren’t aware of the wildlife that’s still very present in this concrete urban metropolis… As a band we’re sort of a coyote or a hawk or some sort of wildlife that people don’t think is still here but is.”

Since its founding in 2000, the Hawks have enjoyed a status that’s far from that of an endangered species. They’ve spun out an impressive series of albums, ranging in tone from old-timey jams to Byrdesque country rock and dark, noisy rock and roll. They’ve held a long-term residency at Cole’s Bar in downtown L.A., toured both the US and Europe, and built a loyal following. Their new release Shoulda Been Gold (American Beat), celebrates this status, compiling the best of a decade’s work into a “greatest hits” compilation that’s worthy of the bigger audience its title ironically hints at–and is 100% hit-free.

Understanding how this all worked out means understanding California’s tenuous yet tenacious connection to country music. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl brought refugees by the thousands from Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and points east. These migrants came in search of a better life, and brought their music with them. In the 1950s, it evolved into the “Bakersfield Sound,” stripped down honky-tonk played by the likes of Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard. In the 1960s, acid-droppers like Gram Parsons, the Byrds, and Texan import Doug Sahm put a psychedelic twist on honky-tonk. They, in turn, were succeeded by new traditionalist Dwight Yoakam, punker John Doe, Blaster Dave Alvin, and the like.
So it wasn’t entirely improbable that when Rob Waller moved to L.A. from San Francisco he carried his love of traditional bluegrass, country, rock and roll and three-part harmonies with him, or that he’d find people of a like mind to share that love.

Aptly, the Hawks’ genesis involves a wilderness connection pilgrimage. In March 1999, Waller traveled to Vegas with drummer Anthony Lacques and his brother Paul, a guitarist. According to Waller, “Paul’s girlfriend was with us and we went hiking in the Mojave Desert and we were running around and being boyish and she was lollygagging behind us and we lost her. And we were certain we would find her very quickly. At some point, somebody said, ‘We should have a country band in Los Angeles named I See Hawks in L.A.’ Then all of us agreed to it. I don’t know why, but we did.”
There was, of course, a happy ending. Hours later, the girlfriend emerged from the desert, seriously pissed off but unscathed. And I See Hawks in L.A. was born, at least as a concept. The first jam sessions wouldn’t happen until the following year.

Still, forming a trad-based band in Los Angeles at the time, was a little bit, well… “Contrary.” says Waller. “It was kind of like ‘let’s have an old-timey band in Los Angeles in the year 2000. I mean that seems kind of bizarre.”

But the reception the band got was anything but contrary. “Country is obviously not the dominant music genre in LA, and that’s not a surprise to anyone who’s listening to music here and anyone who’s making it,” Waller says. “What was somewhat of a surprise was how people seemed to want the thing that we were doing.” The band quickly gathered a core of loyal fans and, with the release of their debut CD in 2001, the critics jumped on board.

The band’s original members included Waller on rhythm guitar and lead vocals, with Anthony Lacques on drums and Paul Lacques adding six-string and pedal steel. From the start, the band found two key anchors–vocal harmonies and the songwriting of Waller and Paul Lacques.

“To me it centers around Rob’s voice,” says Paul Lacques. “He has a very rich voice, and he’s one of my favorite singers. So when we’re working on a song, all our first inclination is to find a harmony part. Me and [current bass player] Paul Marshall have loved singing harmonies for decades, and I guess the first thing is, we jump in with harmonies. We’ve had harmonies on almost all of the songs we’ve recorded, so the choice becomes is it more heavily acoustic, or more heavily electric or totally acoustic or more hard-core electric. From there it just sort of builds organically. We just add tracks until it feels like it’s done.”

When they write songs, Lacques says, “It’s usually me and Rob, and we’ve written a lot of songs with my brother [Paul] and a few with Paul Marshall, but we basically sit down and throw a lot of ideas around. There’s a lot of laughing and goofing around and we sort of generate a lot of lyrics and then kind of turn to surgeons after that. We usually have way more lyrics than we need. So we have the fun first half, but the serious ending half. Anarchy, I would say, is the basic approach.”

The result are tunes that reflect a variety of Americana influences.

Asked to name those, Paul Lacques generously acknowledges the impact of older artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. But just as critical, he says, are contemporary players that the Hawks have shared stages and even toured with, including Mike Stinson, Randy Weeks, and Tony Gilkyson.
“We went to see Mike Stinson play and he’s just got this classic honky-tonk throwdown country-rock sound and we said we gotta write some songs like [him]. It’s such a fun vibe, and we kind of emulated it,” Paul Lacques says.

Not only musicians but national events have shaped the Hawks’s sound. The band’s self-titled debut dropped on September 11, 2001. It was largely acoustic and a bit more mellow than later efforts.

“Things got kind of dark, says Waller. “September 11 and the Bush years definitely influenced us as songwriters. We are pretty connected with and interested in political realities. California Country (2006, Western Seeds Records), which had a dark cover, was kind of our most intense, loud, dark record. We wrote a lot of those songs after the invasion of Iraq. It’s not that we [were] writing necessarily about those things directly, but I think that the energy that was coming off that stuff definitely influenced our mood and our sound.”

Hallowed Ground (2008, Big Books Records) lowered the tension a little bit, but kept the focus on the bigger sound and the literate (and occasionally sardonic) lyrics that have become the band’s stock in trade. Now comes Shoulda Been Gold, the hit-free hits album, which Waller views as somewhat emblematic of the state of music in decade 1 of the new century.

“We as a band, me as a musician, I think the culture of musicians [in general] is kind of getting over the idea of being a rock star. And if you think about it, the period of… being a rock star was pretty short in the history of music… from 1950 until about the year 2000 was the era of the rock star. And it was fuckin’ great–for the rock stars, and for the music business. They made tons of money. It was the perfect storm of being able to record music really well and also being able to control the sale of recorded music.

About I See Hawks in L.A., he adds “We’re not rock stars. But we’re not isolated and totally obscure. We’re somewhere in between. We can make records and play shows and we have certain regions where we have really good fan support and others where we don’t. We have an audience for the music and they tell us what they like and what they don’t like. And for the people who’ve been following the band for five or six or seven years, this really does feel like a greatest hits record, even though there’s no magazine chart that says so.”

For now, the Hawks are doing what they’ve always done–writing songs, doing some touring, and preparing to record another album. Musical outlaws in a city of concrete, they’ve found a niche they can call their own.

Hurray for the scrappy football team from New Orleans. Once hurricaned out of their stadium, they put together talent and hard work, and didn’t even seem to have to rely on or require any luck at all to vanquish the more highly regarded and favored Indianapolis Colts and prime-time product hawker Peyton Manning. Can Drew Brees sell Coca-Cola? Perhaps we’ll get to find out. Perhaps because New Orleans had been so devastated by Katrina, the revelers and celebrants partied kindly, and didn’t set the town on fire or smash the windows of shoe and electronics stores. Come back to New Orleans, ye businessmen, ye conventioneers, ye who still have a weakened, erstwhile mighty, dollar to spend. It’s safe. It’s fun. It’s got great music, cool sights, delicious food…and the Super Bowl Champs!

We were driving south, the morning after the Palms in Winters. Always a stirring place to play. Crowd energy IS all it’s cracked up to be, and sometimes the crowd gives it up. No more so anywhere than when the Palms crowd hears “Well we got a big gig at the Palms in Winters tonight.”   A roar  from the darkness beyond the footlights, and 150 people feel like 10,000. We’re flying into the Yolo County Airport again.

So we were feeling fairly triumphant, cruising in Susan James’s Crouton, wending our way east through orchard and field to the reliable, familiar 5.   And then, just as we made the big turn southward, we felt (well, some of us felt) that Super Bowl Sunday yearning. The biggest game of the year, and not just a game. A thermometer of America. Who will the country get behind–the favorite? The underdog? What about the most expensive and carefully produced TV ads of the year? Shouldn’t we try to get that thrill, to feel that tension, to enjoy the exuberance; in short, shouldn’t we stop somewhere and watch the Super Bowl?

So we cut over to the 99, through Los Banos, all the while calling establishments in Bakersfield on our cell phones. Our requirements: a TV and food. Most of the places we called were closed or closing. A Greek restaurant. A Basque restaurant . Buck’s Crystal Palace. Trout’s has a small TV, but no food. Another has the TV in the bar, but we couldn’t have dinner in there. Finally, we struck paydirt. Goose Loosey’s on 18th. A real sports bar with big TV’s on every wall, and great burgers and Greek cuisine. To top it off, they had a Mardi Gras special running and Mardi Gras decorations all around.

We watched the second quarter, and the third quarter, and, oh yeah, in between those quarters: The Half Time show. Now some old guys can rock. And some grow in interesting ways. And some put the keys a little lower so they can hit the notes. And then, there’s what’s left of the Who. Won’t get fooled again?!?!? Won’t book the Who again. The real meaning behind the line, “I hope I die before I get old” has been revealed. Unfortunately, he didn’t.

It is day three of our journey. We have traded our tradition of thoughtful and descriptive blogging for the instantaneous tom foolery of the facebook era.  Rob W and Susan James’s gleaming iPhones are passed around among the less tech-current members of the band.  Paul L hogs an iPhone like a two year old with a new toy truck.  We are nothing if not suckers for the digital moment.   We are turning into machines, my friends. And it’s not so bad. Maybe it’s even better. Maybe we’re all better people, but how can we even know? Oops, almost got in an accident! Blindside is 20/20.

What we do know is that it feels good to be back on the road where life’s responsibilities narrow to guitars, espresso, and directions. Wake up late. Eat a leisurely breakfast. Drink coffee. Load the van. Head to a radio show. Head to a club. Sound check. Dinner. Gig. Whiskey. Sleep. Repeat.

Well, let’s try to recount what the last few days have held.   Santa Barbara was rainy and cool. The gig passed quickly. Zola and Henry W danced it up then slept on the couch behind the drum set on stage during the gig. These kids have certainly grown up on the road. Bars and clubs will never feel foreign to them. The smell of stale beer will likely always trigger memories of Daddy. And I think they’ll be good ones.

Then it was up the 101 along on the golden coast draped in low winter clouds, smelling of salt and rain. Paul Lacques will one day retire from the country rock circuit and start his forward-thinking hemp farm in northern California, Gray Water Farms: Where the Water is Wetter and the Weed is Better. Hawks reunion shows will be hosted at the farm among the towering green plants as the sun sets behind the ancient California hills.

Studio E in Sebastopol-adjacent, down a circuituitous series of rural roads through orchards and sprawling mini-farms with home made architecture, is a fantastic place to play. The venue doubles as a recording studio and the sound is excellent. The room’s history as a Grateful Dead party house lingers in the deep comfy couches and purple painted walls. Laurie Schaeffer, the hostess and booker, welcomes us in. She’s prepared brown rice, baked chicken, and lightly steamed asparagus with fresh aoli. I think we’re gonna love this place. We already do.

Susan James opens the show backed up with Hawks. Her songs and voice sound great and the appreciative audience is pulled right in. RW joins for a duet of Conway and Lorreta’s “You’re the Reason or Kids are Ugly” which transitions nicely into the Hawks set. Rob’s folks are in attendance as well as some old and new Hawks friends. Can’t wait to return to this place!

Like all things terrestrial, California is at the mercy of weather and its whims. This year the forces have decided to pour rain upon rain upon us, and the hills as we motor north in Susan James’s Volkswagen Routan (rechristened the Crouton) are an explosive psychedelic green. This is the California that intoxicates, seduces, soothes, and even heals the battered urban soul. Ouch. A thoughtless commuter subdivision, pastel scar against green glory, soon to be rendered obsolete by $20 per gallon gasoline, breaks the mood. And passes. We’re alone with the oaks, raptors, and moss covered stones on steep slopes once again.

We seek the 280 north, to San Francisco and beyond, to Sebastopol, host of our show tonight. Specifically Studio E, a secret hideaway among the apple orchards and foggy sheep. Will Hawks fans brave the rain and the winding directions to find us? We shall see. But all is good in the German (American) van of the future. With two iPhones on board, we are merging our virtual, and virtual virtual worlds. We can post photos of our journey in almost real time and read comments from people sitting in their dens in Eagle Rock or Raleigh or right here in Sebastopol. We can gaze at the tiny electronic map and see the brewpub we’re passing in what used to be our world but is now an alternate reality.

Our culture seems to have reached a critical digital tipping point where most people now spend slightly more time online than not online. Others are constantly jacked in. So what is the “real” world? Is it the green hills and the price of gas or that comment your high school girlfriend just posted on the silly picture of you drinking coffee? Can any of us tell? Strange times, indeed. One day the whole Internet will shut down. An act of God or an act of terrorism (is there a difference?) will interrupt our digital flow for a day or two, maybe even three. What will we do? How will we respond to this cultural detox? Will your neighbor run wild and naked in the streets? Will husbands and wives again return to regular and immediate intimate relations? Of course, the Hawks always look forward to such apocalyptic events.  Bring it on, as a not so wise man once said.

By Bill Locey
Posted January 29, 2010 at 12:01 a.m.

I See Hawks in L.A. may still be flying under the popular music radar, but they’ve hooked some very high-profile fans. Roots-rock pioneer Dave Alvin, for one, calls the band “one of California’s unique treasures.”

I See Hawks in L.A. are heading north to play a Thursday night show for the jittery clientele at Muddy Waters, a coffeehouse that rocks in Santa Barbara. I See Hawks in L.A. are a bunch of pros (or semipros, but more on that later) who have been around for a decade playing country music, good for a bunch of albums, including their latest collection of woulda shoulda coulda hits, “Shoulda Been Gold: 2001-2009.’’ The 17-track collection was released this month on Collectors’ Choice Music.

The band probably won’t see too many hawks in Santa Barbara, just those inland sea gulls too dumb to find the dump or the beach, but probably quite a few fans wearing pointy shoes, as the band has been up here before. They used to play Zoey’s in Ventura quite often.

Guitar player Paul Lacques, who used to live in Blythe and even Somis, discussed the latest during a recent phoner.

How’s the band biz?

The biz? The band is great but the biz, well, we’re in the free download age, so the biz is a little sketchy. The band’s doing good.

Don’t stop playing those gigs then.

Yeah. The gigs are our life’s blood, definitely.

Are you guys still under the radar, on the radar or country-rock stars now?

You know, we’re right at the edge. We’re just flirting with the radar thing all the time. Sometimes I think we’re well-known. We just got this review that said we were like in the past and put out these obscure records that you can’t find anywhere, you know?

Where was that from, far away? Californians should know better.

Let’s see, far away, I guess. Oh, here it is, Portland, Ore. I think it’s a blog. We’ve played there about four times. He must be a younger guy.

I don’t think most people think of L.A. as a country town. How does that work out for you guys?

The L.A. country scene is definitely under the radar, but it’s pretty driving. There’s probably a couple of hundred bands, believe it or not, and quite a few places to play.

Ten-plus years is an eternity for a band. How do you account for your longevity?

I would say it’s because we’re good friends and we figured out what each person in the band needs, you know? Some people — and I won’t mention any names — are overly ambitious while other people are underly ambitious. We kind of found the balance and we all decided, “OK, this other guy’s insane, but he needs this, and I’ll give him as much of that as I can.’’ I think it’s about balance and friendship. It feels like we’re going to put out another five albums over the next 10 years.

What’s your take on the new one?

The new one is different. It’s a compilation which, obviously, we’ve never done before. That really shaped the whole thing. The label wanted 12 songs off our earlier records and three new ones. We came up with the three new ones plus a few we’d never released but really liked. So we came up with 17 songs and they said, “OK.” They didn’t squawk about it at all. Ten years. That’s a lot of tracks.

There was a funny line in one of your bios about playing all over California, as in you’ve been to all the Sans and Santas. You’ve had numerous 805 adventures.

We played Zoey’s a bunch until they changed owners. The new people evidently don’t realize how great we are. We’d love to come back. We love that spot.

What was your strangest gig?

You know, we did a rodeo in Banning where the wind was blowing so hard that it was blowing our amps over. You could see for about 20 miles. It was just one of those flat desert valleys, and we were the first thing the wind hit coming from Blythe. Another time, we played a roadhouse in Mississippi where they wanted to hear all cover songs.

What’s your brand of country music?

Oh boy, let’s see. You know, we pretty much steal from everybody. We’re fans of old time bluegrass and of course, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Waylon Jennings in his 1970s period — a lot of influences, you know? There’s some pop and some avant-garde influences that creep in once in a while.

At your gigs, do they do that weird line-dancing thing?

You know, at the state fairs, yeah. At Banning or the Mariposa County Fair they do. Our drummer has played a lot of line-dance gigs. The bass player, too. There’s a certain beat you play and you get people out on the dance floor. We’ll do it if it’s required.

How did the band go over in Europe?

You know what? I might be generalizing, but I would say the average country music fan over there is almost like a scholar. I mean, they’ll name your influences for you and they’ll say, “So you must know about this band and this band and this band” and we’ll say, “Nope, sorry.” And they stay up on it, too. They’re very into alt-country, mainstream country. We felt a real good connection in both the U.K. and Ireland as well as Norway. It felt like kind of a homecoming.

So how does it go over in the South besides the covers gig in Mississippi? What about Nashville?

We’ve actually played in Nashville about five times. We call it the Death Star because we’re never going to break in. I mean, people are real polite there. We’ll do our set, sandwiched between five really hard country writers, and we’ll do our kind of oddball desert stuff and, you know, it’s polite. They’re like, “Thank you. Move on. Go back to California, but y’all come back.’’ It’s an interesting experience, but we will never crack the Nashville shell. It’s not going to happen.

So California country doesn’t fit into Tennessee?

It’s cool. They’re there and we’re here and there’s a lot of miles between us. That might be a good thing, you know? We’re definitely a California band. All the lyrics are rooted here, and we believe in the spirit of the land. We’ve spent a lot of time in the desert. I actually grew up in the desert out in Blythe and it influences the way you sing and play. Three of us are California natives. Later, I lived outside of Victorville in Apple Valley. Last time I went through Apple Valley, I didn’t recognize it. I thought I was in Van Nuys or something. It’s scary how fast the high desert is getting built up. I hope it stops.

How does an indie band make it in an indie world?

I think the Internet has leveled the playing field. We’re all kind of semipro now. There’s the big semipro people, like the “American Idol” people, then there’s the more marginal semipros, like ourselves. Formerly, we probably would’ve been earning a comfortable living. Now it’s sort of a marginal living. But, yeah, it’s all one big fairly happy family.

This is supposed to be fun, right?

Well, it is. We have fun. All our shows are fun. We like getting together and singing and writing songs. It’s all fun. That’s why we’re together after 10 years.

Hey Folks,
Here’s a link to where you can listen to full length stream of all the songs off “Shoulda Been Gold” Enjoy!

Click here