The Warlocks
Hurricane Dressed in Black
Published
by Under The Radar
It’s
a quiet Sunday afternoon, and The Warlocks are shooting a video in one stinky
part of downtown L.A. Although several porta-potties flank Main Street -- one
assumes because of the large homeless population -- there’s literally
shit and piss everywhere. The name of the club/art space that’s serving
as the band’s soundstage: The Smell.
Outside in the alley, a homeless guy peels himself off the pavement long enough to pee in a styrofoam cup. Inside, things are less outrageous than they should be. See, many a music mag of late has preferred to focus on one part of this band’s story: drugs. And if they don’t particularly like it, The Warlocks aren’t exactly wondering why. If every one of their seven members were squeaky clean, there would still be the small matter of singing about drugs -- and just plain sounding like drugs.
Lead Warlock Bobby Hecksher has switched to bottled water after a couple cans of German beer. The blackboard menu behind him offers the vegan tip of the day: Make sure you get enough vitamin B12. The others are working, napping, or having a Budweiser. Guitarist Corey Lee Granet attempts skateboard tricks wearing bell-bottoms and vintage boots. For what it’s worth, nobody seems the least bit fucked up.
Production for their new video, “Hurricane Heart Attack,” involves each member synching his part alone in front of a gray curtain. As bassist Bobby Martine gets coaching from director Greg Quatannens on how to most artistically hunch over his bass, Hecksher hangs in the foyer and seems a bit anxious. In a couple weeks’ time The Warlocks will embark on a U.K. tour. Hecksher’s never gigged in England, but he seems to be thinking more about the large-hall shows they’ll play afterwards as part of their short U.S. tour with Interpol. The crowds at San Francisco’s Fillmore and L.A.’s Henry Fonda Theatre will be the biggest they’ve faced. As for the recent NME headline reading “Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to,” Hecksher’s learning to laugh it off. And he isn’t complaining about the abundance of press his band’s been getting.
The attention The Warlocks have gotten comes not so much from their dark ethos -- although it surely helps -- as from a ton of hard work. Since their 1999 inception, they’ve made their name on the road, touring extensively on their own, opening for friends Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and playing to a packed room at CMJ. According to Betsy, their publicist, one paper seemed to appreciate that fact, saying that if The Warlocks did as many drugs as they sound like they do, they’d never be able to endure the heavy touring -- something like 115 gigs last year.
A few weeks ago Hecksher and I spoke at a Los Feliz restaurant of his choosing. Vida’s the place, a hip minimalist number with a dick bartender and a stylish mob that renders service superfluous. “L.A. sucks, man,” Hecksher says over a Manhattan on the rocks. “I’m really liking New York a lot, though. It’s a gossip hotline around here -- a lot of drama. It’s time for me to move. As soon as I can, I will. Brooklyn, Chicago and Vancouver are great.”
When a Fischerspooner song comes on, Hecksher pauses to enjoy it. He tells me how the road has taught his band to sweat the details: “BRMC taught us such a strong work ethic that we were totally unfamiliar with. It was our first real tour that meant shit. They taught us how to work: if you’re gonna do the shit, do it right, come to sound check. They were such workaholics; it really rubbed off on me. You get used to the L.A. mentality of ‘fuck it, dude.’ Now if we can get there at 5:00, we’ll stay ’til 7:00 and really try to make it great.”
If you know The Warlocks’ music, you know there’s lots to work out. With two drummers, three guitarists (four prior to Jeff Levitz’s recent departure), a bassist and a keyboardist/percussionist, they’ve gotta have their shit together. And the press is right about one thing: The Warlocks’ wall of sound is built on a solid foundation of The Velvet Undergound and Spacemen 3. Hecksher doesn’t mind being placed in such company; he loves those bands. In fact, he got the Spacemen’s Sonic Boom to play guitar on “The Dope Feels Good” from the new Warlocks album, Phoenix.
Hecksher’s vision of big sounds has more to do with Phil Spector than Jerry Garcia, whose iconic double-drummer jam band was once called The Warlocks. “I was trying to create a wall of sound without being loud,” Hecksher explains. “The double drums and all the guitars playing the same thing really creates a hypnotic pulse, and it’s entrancing. It makes the simplest chords sound so amazing.” It’s true. Their din is thunderous, with Danny Hole and Jason Anchondo’s unison sticking amounting to one massive drum track. Hecksher says they’ve come a long way toward mastering the layered effect, but admits frustration with budgetary constraints that don’t allow them to pursue “perfection recordings.”
More than any drug jones, it’s the quest for the bigger and better that propels this band. Hecksher wants to get more hi-fi: “I want all the gear to be much better. It sounds really cheesy, but I’m sick of vintage gear not working right. When you apply the same techniques in perfect intonation, using better gear, you make what you’re doing more focused and sound bigger and better.” To me, their albums sound big and clear, without being overproduced. Hecksher’s not satisfied: “All those records were recorded for under $5,000 apiece, which is fucking change in the scheme of things. I’m not gonna do any more recordings until we get a decent budget to really focus this vision. Otherwise I don’t give a shit, I’m not gonna fuckin’ do it anymore. I’m tired of half-ass shit.” He doesn’t want to go Spiritualized just yet, but rather wants to make more out of the instruments they’ve got.
And if they got some money, he’d love to go nuts on visuals for the live show. The Warlocks can certainly find their way around a fog machine, but Hecksher can’t wait to step it up with full-on sci-fi flourishes. What’s he have in mind? “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, man,” he says, grinning. “I’d totally do the spaceship, Pompeii, the whole fuckin’ thing. That’s what I’d want to go see.” But for the time being, their strobes, oil lamps and foggers are holding their own. “In the right places it looks amazing… and I like how it pretty much bums everybody out.”
The second Lord Of The Rings picture came out recently, and I’d bet that Hecksher saw it within the first week. Reading his song titles is like browsing a fantasy bookshop: “Angry Demons,” “Jam Of The Witches,” “Whips Of Mercy.” Chalk it up to a lifelong obsession with sorcerers and spaceships. “I’m a sci-fi dork,” he admits. “I love that shit. I went to both Star Wars on the first day. I read all the Tolkein, the Harry Potter stuff, all The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe stuff, all the Dune shit.” And all that shit has worked its way into the very fiber of his songs. A Warlock tune will often unfold like a battle in Middle Earth: stone-faced sounds assemble mightily beneath a menacing sky, march toward melee, and lumber on like thinned ranks. It’s operatic in that the words are foreign (buried), but the music tells all.
It’s music that’s often scary -- something that has less to do with wizards gone bad. “The songs were written about people,” Hecksher explains. “So it’s a view of a certain person that brings that out of me. It’s already all done before I even know it’s done, which is really fuckin’ weird. It’s like sometimes I’m just a messenger -- for what, I don’t know. A messenger for somebody else but me -- a soul, I guess.”
That same process of channeling explains the drug references, according to him. Regarding “Shake The Dope Out,” “The Dope Feels Good,” and “Cocaine Blues,” for instance, “The songs are about people and about people using [the drugs] at the time,” he says. And he cops to the fact that, “Yeah, we’re a psychedelic group. Yeah, everybody’s done everything under the sun.” But in contrast to an early version of The Warlocks’ Web site that offered up a drug meltdown or two, Hecksher wants to point out that chemical culture is not the emphasis of the band.
The sensational swell reached its high water mark with the recent NME piece, which seems to have been met mostly with a sense of humor. That wasn’t the case a couple months ago when SPIN covered The Warlocks. “I’m appreciative, and it’s really flattering,” he says, “but the text really bothered me. It’s like, now I’ve gotta live all this shit down and explain…I couldn’t even show my parents or my cousin.” Drummer Jason Anchondo isn’t afraid of what his mom might think, but he thinks it’s all kind of silly, pointing out that he’s pretty much just a beer drinker.
At the video shoot I stand outside and chat with Anchondo and multi-instrumentalist Laura Grisby. Back with the band after a period of job conflicts, Grisby’s trying to work out some kind of leave arrangement with her employer. She’s a buyer for several vintage clothing stores, which partly explains The Warlocks’ access to the cream of the cool duds. She shows me a recent score: a killer MC5 tee that looks like it’s seen three decades. Anchondo hates days like this. He tells me how he skipped their first video shoot -- for “Baby Blue,” the first single from Phoenix. He beams when UTR Editor Mark Redfern mentions the upcoming shoegaze feature and chimes in with some serious knowledge of Ride. He also loves a new two-piece called The Kills.
All this talk points up an unfortunate oversight. Since work on this story began, I’ve become a fan of The Warlocks’ music. Repeated exposure has revealed it to be more interesting rather than less. That’s no accident; there’s a lot of musical scheming going on behind Hecksher’s dark utterances, stuff that doesn’t mystically galvanize out of a narcotic haze. These guys work, and part of what’s lame about all the tabloid talk is that it obscures a music as serious and complex as anything coalescing in a crystalline mind.
“I bring a song to the table, and it’s pretty much set how it is,” Hecksher says. “They just make it better. It’s 90% there, but I write according to what their talents are -- like I know J.C. is amazing at feedback, so I’ll have that tool envisioned in my head of where to put it… It’s getting easier to work with when I have all their talents totally focused.” Their gel has come from lots of stage time and a dose of jam-band juju. “We almost magically plug electrodes in each other’s heads when it’s time to do it,” he says of a good live moment. “I don’t need to say anything or even look anymore. I totally know, ‘OK, I’d better stop playing, because J.C.’s feedback is coming in here and then after that Corey’s gonna do a solo and then we’re gonna stop because the drummers are gonna jam. For the most part there’s very little communication verbally or physically. In the beginning there was a lot of that.”
When I’m not surveying the myriad motion of this many-membered band, my eye gravitates often toward guitarist J.C. Rees. The guy stands like a statue, his left hand often spanning the space of just a couple frets. Evoking a back-lit photo of The Jesus And Mary Chain with his high tussled hair and hollowbody, he’s lost in concentration, whether wringing a tight texture or lightly stomping a pedal. I’m intrigued by his sound science and reputation as feedback guy, so I ask him what he’s building up there.
“I use the feedback as a separate instrument,” he says. “I’m trying to add layers. The sound the guitar makes when it’s feeding back I’ve always been enamored with. It’s not that easy to control feedback. I’ve watched people do it and do a poor job at it, so you do have to focus to some degree to make sure you can stay in key or have just the right sound for the right moment. Even though our songs are structured, there’s some slack to them, and you never know which way they’re gonna change. The feedback builds a kind of suspense. In a pause you want it to crescendo right before you come back into the song, so you have to make sure you’re ringing out. But you don’t want to cut out too early or carry over and step on the song.”
Hecksher plays mostly chiming chords on a beast of a Vox hollowbody. While it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s responsible for what part of the soundstorm, Rees clarifies: “Corey’s able to do more of a lush, pastoral…his leads are real drippy, pretty. He uses a lot of delay, where I tend to put down more of the simple hooks and melodies as well as feedback to add sound. Corey’s style is more Nick McCabe of The Verve, or our friend in Acetone, Mark Lightcap. He’s technically a much better guitar player than I am. I attack my guitar more, and wrestle it and strangle it. He is more caressing and not as aggressive.” Rees lists The Birthday Party’s Rowland Howard, The Cramps’ Bryan Gregory and The MGs’ Steve Cropper among his own favorite players.
Until just recently, there was a fourth guitar in The Warlocks’ arsenal. Jeff Levitz could be found stage-right, playing a Telecaster Custom, chewing gum and wearing a peacoat. I gather that interpersonal issues precipitated his exit. “We argue all the time and get in fistfights,” Hecksher says of the general mood in the van. “Bobby [Martine] and Jeff duke it out. They weren’t really fighting each other, but they had such a friction that the bouncers got involved and Bobby got a black eye. I get along with pretty much everybody at a certain time, but it’s love/hate. It’s very hard to explain -- dysfunctional family.” So with Levitz out and Grisby back in, Warlock membership hovers at a mere seven.
I’m trying to picture the scene inside their van as it swings cigarette denim and a several-headed hangover through the vast monotony of, say, Nebraska. Then there’s the matter of shit breaking and wallets draining. If a black eye is the worst of it, The Warlocks might want to consider a more saintly moniker. Hecksher: “The third day the transmission breaks -- $1,200. To rent the vans to make it to the Texas gigs, another $500. The van was located so far that we had to drive for 24 hours straight. Then in Arlington we parked in a handicapped space -- $500. Cory sideswiped a Lexus. That was $700. Then we totaled the van. It’s at least $10,000 for that fuckin’ thing. So we had to rent vans to get to MTV the next day in Canada. That was $1,800.”
So by the time they got to promoting their “Baby Blue” video at the MTV Select studios in Canada, they were unable to savor their growing success. “Everyone was in a bad fuckin’ mood. It came out really bad,” Hecksher says. “Then we did Much Music -- they premiered the video too. But everybody had such a bad taste in their mouth by then, because we were just plagued by problems.”
The bad shit will pass, but will The Warlocks be happy with good? Hecksher says there won’t be another album until they get the cash to do it right. Even the interviews have forced him to be chatty at a time when remaining genuinely mysterious must be tempting and altogether convenient. “I’m a hermit, dude,” he admits. “I gotta get used to it. This is the hardest part for me.” But with the business of being a band bearing down, Hecksher sees signs that The Warlocks’ phoenix is still ascending. “If the shows weren’t packed, we would be bummed,” he says of the tour from hell. “I’d do it all again, because the shows were amazing.”