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Beat Surrender: I See Hawks in LA – Shoulda Been Gold (Collectors’ Choice)

January 26th will see the release of Shoulda Been Gold the fifth album from Californian country-rockers I See Hawks in LA, a 17 track tongue-in-cheek greatest hits collection that takes in tunes from the bands previous albums as well as five new tracks, so you get the best of both worlds as the band, Rob Waller (guitar , lead vocals), Paul Lacques (guitar, vocals), Paul Marshall (bass, vocals) and Shawn Nourse (drums), take you on a 80 minute Cosmic American ride through their song repertoire old and new.

The guitars twang and shimmer around three part harmonies and fiddle, there are hooky choruses a plenty as the band play out their musical manifesto that calls heavily on the influence of Gram Parsons era Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, what they do they do very well with excellent writing and consummate playing this a glorious collection of country rock originals, including my pick Humboldt

Check out the band at their website and Myspace for more tracks and get yourself a copy of the CD from the band’s shop.

See full article here.

“Hittin’ The Note” Review of SBG

Review from the Allman Brothers Fanzine:

* I See Hawks In L.A. is a great name for a band, the idea behind it, a stoned vision, going hand in hand with their adventurously-written country/rock of the Burritos-Poco-etc. classic kind. The liner notes to the boisterously but very appropriately-titled Shoulda Been Gold 2001-2009 shoulda been printed on the back of the jacket. A rambling, absorbing, funny as hell tome of up-to-date hippy ideology, it alone would be enough to coerce a purchase of the album. But every one of the songs is just superb. From the harmonies and driving rhythm of “Humboldt” to the kick-ass hick bluegrass of “The Salesman,” these guys go to great lengths with steel guitars and lonesome harmonies. “Hope Against Hope” is melancholy magnificence. “Raised By Hippies” could be Gram Parsons projecting down from psychedelic heaven. Singer Rob Waller has a fantastic, somewhat Springsteen-like voice, and the live cut, “The Mystery of Life,” is like something from the bare-bones country flip side of Nebraska. New material plays well alongside album tracks and vault material. Going forward, I See Hawks In L.A. every chance I get. (ISeeHawks.com)

Shoulda Been Gold makes 2009 Best of List

Even though it’s not out until 2010! Check out Gary Miller’s Best of List at State of Mind Music out of Vermont:

“OK‚ so I lied. Technically‚ Shoulda Been Gold will be released on January 26‚ 2010‚ but it’s a stunning work of Post-Parsons Americana‚ and I want you to know about it now. Who knows‚ maybe it will make my “Best of” for next year‚ too. ” — Gary Miller

LOST HILLS REVIEW: I SEE HAWKS LIVE IN L.A.


I See Hawks In L.A.
Live at the Cinema Bar, December 4th, 2009

Being stuck in L.A. for a couple of weeks can be trying, but it also has it’s bright spots. There are listenable radio programs here, readable free tabloids and world class live music any night of the week. I always gravitate to the Cinema Bar (the oldest bar in Culver City, as they say) because it’s free and because it’s a good scene. They book the coolest Alt.Country/ Americana acts around and the patrons are mellow and down to earth. Beers are six dollars and the stage is right in front of you. Went down to see I See Hawks In LA and, brothers and sisters, they made a joyful noise.

I bought two of their albums about a year and a half ago and had them in my truck’s cd player for months, but I never had the chance to see them live before. Their albums are great, but I think you really have to see this band live to grasp what they’re all about. They’ve been touring and they were very tight, creating their hawk world for the home crowd in this cool and intimate space. Their songs are humorous with surprisingly deep undertones, their sound is a seamless blend of classic country and psychedelia, and their musicianship is top notch. Front man, Rob Waller plays acoustic guitar and is warm and engaging on lead vocals. Shawn Nourse is an impeccable beat master on the drums. Bassman, Paul Marshall, a veteran of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, is a real pro and an outstanding singer and songwriter in his own right. Lead guitar player, Paul Lacques is mind blowing. If there’s a lick that he doesn’t know, then no one else knows it either. Leo Fender invented the Telecaster and the Deluxe Reverb Amp just for Paul to do his trip with. They’re a fun band to see live, and you can’t avoid having a great time.

This is California country in style and spirit. Their lyrics are full of references to California places and their jams riff-check California rock tunes. In Hawkworld you can go to a New Year’s Eve party where Slash is playing, only to find out that Slash is also playing at the party across the street. Hippies bum rides with redneck truckers. A dude tries to pass himself off as a biker so he can ride with the Motorcycle Mama. In Hawkworld you score big on some Humboldt Green and you quit your job and buy an airplane ticket to Tibet. Somebody once said there are two kinds of country music; beer drinkin’ country music and whiskey drinkin’ country music. This is Tequila drinkin’ and Sensemilla smokin’ country music. Buck and Merle meet the Graterful Dead and have one hell of a party together…
The Cinema is great because it’s the real thing. You’re standing right in front of the band hearing and feeling the guitars straight from the amps and the drums directly from the sticks. The Hawks sometimes have lots of instruments on their albums, and sometimes play live with pedal steel, fiddle, etcetera, but this night it was just the four of them, and that’s probably the best way to hear it. It worked for me. Albums are great, but you really get to know a band by seeing them live. I had a chance to get to know a great live band, and get to know L.A. a little better, too. The Grapevine will never be the same…..
Lost Hills
photo by Erin
— “The Earth is not dying. She is being murdered, and we know who is killing her and we have their names and addresses.” Utah Phillips

Live review: Artists try to cope with the loss of Amy Farris — and honor her — in a tribute concert

Amy F from LA TimesDave Alvin hosts the event in remembrance of the late singer-violinist, who died in September at age 40.

“When we lose a member of our tribe, we don’t mourn, we celebrate, and we make a lot of racket,” Dave Alvin said at the outset of a 3½-hour tribute to the late violinist, singer and songwriter Amy Farris Sunday night at McCabe’s in Santa Monica.

The event, which Alvin hosted, featured some of the most revered members of the L.A. roots music scene including veteran singer-songwriters Peter Case, Stan Ridgway, Rick Shea and the trio I See Hawks in L.A.

The musicians played on a stage outfitted with a piano bench adorned with candles, flowers and photos of the Texas-born Farris, who died at Sept. 29 at the age of 40. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office is still awaiting toxicology results from an autopsy to determine the cause of death, but it is being investigated as a possible suicide

Each set reflected the various ways of coping with grief. I See Hawks leaned on songs Farris often performed with them when she joined them at their local gigs. The band began with Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me,” with its layered expression of affection for the kind of artist who “can take the dark out of the nighttime / And paint the daytime black.”

The group brought both levity and poignancy to their choice of one of Farris’ own songs, a honky-tonk weeper called “Pretty Dresses” about a heartbroken woman hoping that if she wears the right dress, her former lover will return to her. They often played it together, singer Rob Waller said. “She would do a verse then I’d do a verse, and sometimes we’d do it even when she wasn’t with us. That was our little secret.”

Ridgway turned to a couple of songs he’d written in recent days, inspired to an extent by feelings Farris’ death had sparked and what came across as a wish to understand what leads some people to desperation. “Through the sunshine and the rain / I gave it everything / Where others tried to walk/I always tried to run.”

Upstairs after the show, Ridgway addressed the complexity of the evening’s emotions. “What do you do? Everything seemed inappropriate . . . She was dealing with a major illness, and sometimes people do things in a desperate attempt to get some kind of control. It’s just sad.”

Case seemed to yield to exploring the moment, following a year with losses of several musician friends. “It’s kind of rough up here,” he said before also offering eloquent compositions emphasizing the spiritual dimensions of life and death rather than personal anecdotes about Farris.

Alvin brought Shea out for his set, starting with “Downey Girl,” a song that carries with it the idea that assessing the full measure of a life sometimes takes years. Noting that none of the previous performers had included anything addressing Farris’ pride in her Texas heritage and her role as the only women ever to play in country crooner Ray Price’s band, Alvin turned the microphone over to Shea to sing Price’s aching hit “Faded Love.”

The title song from Alvin’s 2004 album “Ashgrove” addressed the futility of the desire to return to imagined happier days gone by, at the same time recognizing the role that a deep yearning for another time and place can play in life: “We all need something just to get us through.”

Alvin, who had produced Farris’ only solo album, also had performed at another memorial event held three weeks ago in her hometown of Austin; there, he was accompanied by his band, the Guilty Women, of which Farris had been a member, in addition to Texas singer songwriter Kelly Willis and X founding member Exene Cervenka.

Alvin mentioned during Sunday’s show that proceeds from donations collected from the two tribute concerts are going to Hungry for Music, a nonprofit group that supplies instruments to underprivileged children. (Two young violin students Farris had taught, 8-year-old Aeden Gasser-Brennan, and his 4-year-old brother Jonathan, opened the event with a short recital.)

Alvin ended the show on an upbeat note, choosing an all-hands-on-deck finale of Wanda Jackson’s rockabilly rave-up “Let’s Have a Party,” each singer grabbing one verse. “When Amy did her own shows,” Alvin explained, “she always ended with this song.”

A more spirited send-off would be hard to imagine.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Photo: Dave Alvin. Credit: Stefano Paltera / For The Times

Humboldt named to top pot anthems list, Houston Press

WM Smith of the Houston Press named our “Humboldt” one of the alltime marijuana anthems.

http://blogs.houstonpress.com

Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues: Eight Great Pot Songs
By William Michael Smith Sep. 21 2009

John Prine may have set the standard for pot songs in American music with his sardonic “Illegal Smile,” but that snowball picked up considerable speed as it rolled downhill. Here are eight more excellent odes to the sweetest leaf.

1. Cab Calloway, “Reefer Man”: Other than Louis Armstrong, perhaps no one in the glory days of Harlem jazz had a more musical sense of the possibilities of the sacred spliff. Calloway’s turns of phrase are a perfect example of pot-addled nonsense: “If he trades you dimes for nickels and calls watermelons pickles, then you know your talkin’ to that reefer man.”

2. Fraternity of Man, “Don’t Bogart Me”: Easy Rider was a watershed event in hippie culture. From the opening scene at LAX, when Peter Fonda extracts the smuggled cocaine from his chopper’s gas tank, to the acid trip in New Orleans to the hilarious scene in which Fonda and Dennis Hopper introduce novice hick lawyer Jack Nicholson to marijuana, the movie put drugs directly into the face of authority. Having their song included in the soundtrack would mark Fraternity of Man’s career high-water mark.
3. Neil Young, “Roll Another Number (For the Road)”: A stone classic stoner anthem from the only guy who could arm-wrestle David Crosby for the title of biggest stoner in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Neil’s version is great, but to me Country Dick Montana and the Beat Farmers immortalized this mind-altered ditty on their 1989 live album Loud and Plowed.

4. Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen, “Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues”: It wasn’t long after Lonesome Onry and Mean arrived in Austin in the summer of 1973 that it seemed everyone in town could sing the words, “I saw your new man yesterday wearin’ my brand new shoes/ And I’m down to seeds and stems again too.”
Of course, this was about the time our soon to have his teat in the ringer Lt. Governor Ben Barnes made the banner of the headline of American-Statesman with his pronouncement that “Austin is the marijuana capitol of the world.” Where the fuck did he think it was, College Station?

5. New Riders of the Purple Sage, “Panama Red” and “Lonesome L.A. Cowboy”: The New Riders hit it big with these two decidedly different efforts. Peter Rowan’s “Cowboy” seemed like a script for Gram Parsons’ life when LOM first heard it. And “Panama Red” was such a fun, gentle, screw-you ode to the budding pot culture. Dig that tie-dyed backdrop!

6. Brewer & Shipley, “One Toke Over the Line”: A huge hit as FM “underground” radio was taking off and the Sixties were exploding into protest and violence, “Toke” brought serious heat down on these guys. But perhaps funnier (or scarier?) than Spiro Agnew’s castigation and inclusion on Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list,” the tune was covered by cheesemeister Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers. Go figure.

7. I See Hawks In L.A., “Humboldt”: The Hawks come in a direct line from the Byrds, Burritos, New Riders et.al. and these Los Angeles roots favorites have always traveled their musical trail surrounded by the odor of the burning bush, and they nail the whole Northern Californian pot grower vibe with “Humboldt.” Best pot dealer line ever? “I’d be glad to plant corn in the ground but corn don’t go for three thousand a pound.” And, yes, that’s Paul Marshall, formerly of Strawberry Alarm Clock (“Incense & Peppermints”), on bass.

The Bohemian, Sonoma County

http://www.metroactive.com/bohemian/06.03.09/music-hawks

That Much Further West

Being twangfully high on I See Hawks in L.A.
By Gabe Meline

No area of the country has produced what’s commonly called “cosmic American music” with such frequency and authenticity as Southern California, that strange, hot land that feels to us in NorCal like a different planet, let alone a different state. I See Hawks in L.A. are quite simply one of the finest exports from the land of contradiction—concrete and flowers, asphalt and palms, tanning salons and beaches—and their vision of life down south is one that’s as much influenced by their rugged neighborhood of Echo Park as it is Nashville twang. An added psychedelic element is key to the band’s sound, emanating from bassist Paul Mitchell’s time spent playing with Strawberry Alarm Clock—that’s him singing in Russ Meyer’s Roger Ebert–penned camp classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—and evidenced by the band’s swirly ode to their northern neighbors, “Humboldt.”

If the names Dave Alvin, Gene Clark, Gram Parsons or Tom Brumley ring any kind of bell for you, don’t miss this band. They play with David T. Carter and the Trailer Park Rangers on Friday, June 5, at Aubergine, 755 Petaluma Blvd., Sebastopol. 9pm. $10. 707.827.3460.

LE CRI DU COYOTE, French Magazine review

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“This inspired California foursome has put out its fourth CD since 2001 and the band is still alluring. Their recipe for success? Good songs, varied arrangements, a smooth sound supported by a seductive lead, vocal harmonies right on the mark, sterling electric guitar, transparent pedal steel and some guest artists on violin and accordion. Nothing revolutionary, but one bathes in their traditional virtues like a good soup in an old pot. Seen through the eyes of the Hawks, this music is easy to enjoy, light and timeless. Acoustic ballad, unbridled rock n roll, an Irish tune and a return to country music roots. Welcome to the family, enter, don’t stay out in the cold, and sit right down at the guest table, between the Foster Martin Band and the Dillard and Clark Expedition.”

FAR WEST ALMANAC review by JR SAGE

This is one of our favorite reviews, and you’ve got to check this magazine out, lots of great articles and ideas, found in hip places all over Southern California:

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