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March 25 - 31, 2005 |
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Another story that starts in a bar—with bands, that’s
where a lot of stories start—and that’s where the Willowz were that night, a
long flight away from the Anaheim garage where they practice to this red-lit
bricked-up basement next to a tube stop in London, England. They had three of
their songs in a famous movie, and they were supposedly going to be the
American band that a huge British label was going to use to get equivalently
huge in America, but they were also jet-lagged and distracted—bassist Jessica
Reynoza’s purse with her passport in it had been stolen from under her seat
just minutes before at a different bar around the corner—and their U.K. debut
couldn’t rate many adjectives kinder than “hopeful.” Too bad, then, because
that was the night the International Rock Writer came out to see them.
He was from one of the big mags, the kind of publication that can sneeze a band
into 50,000 records sold and a slot on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, a
magazine that can make you famous, and as the Willowz rolled their
instruments back up, International Rock Writer was warming a dewy Tiger beer
bottle with the palm of his hand and talking cheerful conversational bullshit.
This band is good, that band is good; the usual show-biz gossip, with a bit of
an extra charge to it because this man himself could make things happen, if he
wanted. Naturally, after he made a nice joke, I gave him a little prod: What
did you think of the Willowz?
“Fuck the Willowz,” he said instantly. Then he laughed. Then he had a drink.
And that was just one more time that superstardom leaned in and over, took a
squinty look at these kids from Anaheim, and said, “Not yet, guys. Not yet.”
The Willowz started in Anaheim in 2002, when drummer Alex Willow was
still in high school—well, high school age, anyway. They were a trashy
little teen garage combo, a little older than Annette’s Got the Hits-era
Red Cross when they started, but with a very similar record collection. They
played music that had gotten famous with the Hives but had really been around
forever, and they worked hard, and you’d begin to notice things like guitarist
Richie Follin’s distinctive gums-flapping-heart-pounding vocals and Alex’s
caveman-gone-crazy drum fills. And then, as it became clearer the band would
not be content to forever open Monday-night shows at Chain Reaction, there
developed—through the sort of thing Nixon might have called a muttering
campaign—a reputation for these two then-19-year-olds and this one
then-17-year-old as the Most Hated Band in Anaheim. When they got a profile in
the Weekly in November 2003, there was an angry letter about it in the
very next issue: “I am greatly disappointed in your publication for provoking
the unethical music (so-called) talents of the Willowz and most notably Richie
Eaton [Follin]. I believe the only notable crumb of fact in the whole article
was when the Willowz were called the most hated band in Anaheim. . . . Shame on
you, OC Weekly.” In retrospect, it should have been apparent right then
that the Willowz would go on to big things.
The following spring, they fell across the line of sight of French director
Michel Gondry, who, inspired or maybe even commanded by a dream after he found
the band on the Internet, put the Willowz on the soundtrack for Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and even made a video—at the time, in a sort
of pay-me-when-you-can-mes-amies deal—for the song “I Wonder”; this
then-largely unknown suburban brat-rock band fit strangely alongside other
Gondry projects such as, say, the White Stripes, but there they were.
Their first single came out on venerable label Posh Boy—one of the original
SoCal punk labels—because the Willowz happened to practice within earshot of
Posh Boy owner/decision maker Robbie Fields, and then they negotiated that into
a debut full-length on Dionysus, one of the big three or four garage-rock
independents, and then the soundtrack for Eternal Sunshine came out
everywhere movies can be seen. This was the Willowz’s real talent: they could
connect one random lucky dot to another, and then to something else again, and
whether it was bluff or not, it all soon constellated into the sort of outline
a band likes to inspire—hot, young, hip, hungry and (of course) easy to work
with. Six months later, they got that tour to the U.K., and they spent a nice
afternoon at XL Recordings in London (once the home of the White Stripes
overseas) and a nice afternoon at XFM Radio in London (which is like the U.K.’s
KROQ), and they got another single out on an XL subsidiary with one of
Jessica’s paintings on the cover; that’s a lot of industry talk, but underneath
were promises of simple things such as money and fun and fame.
There are slow ways to get a band famous, and there are quick ways, and the
Willowz were smart enough to pursue both at the same time: they kept up a
draining touring schedule that only under-21s who lived at home and didn’t
necessarily have to go to school could maintain, and they pushed and schmoozed
and lucked themselves into the sort of fluke events—say, inclusion on a
Grammy-nominated film soundtrack—that could be gambled for something even
better if you got the attention of the right people. (One night, sitting in a
car with a Capitol A&R scout, listening to all the new music she wanted to
make famous: there, between hip-ish radio darlings such as Razorlight and Bloc
Party were the Willowz. International Rock Writer was there, too. “Bah,” he
said, turning to walk down Hollywood Boulevard. “Give me something new.”) At
19, 19 and 17, the Willowz were already the Most Hated Band in Anaheim. By 20,
20 and 18, they seemed like they could soon be one of the Most Hated Bands in
the World. That’s nice work, if you can get it. But: not yet, guys.
Analyzing rock & roll near-misses is a mess; usually, the reasons
don’t make sense. But as deals and advances and warm handshakes played tornado
around this still mostly unknown suburban brat-rock band, you could wonder if
people had forgotten to make sure there was still anything worth storming
about. There were a lot of shows on that U.K. tour that felt like Monday nights
at Chain Reaction. There were a lot of reasons why that could have happened.
But there weren’t a lot of polite ways to bring it up. The British deal backed
away, something about opportunities not being right. One of the American ones
dropped, too, despite word on the sidewalk along Hollywood Boulevard being that
a certain record-company president just loved the band. Other bands got huge
instead—perhaps you saw them in International Rock Writer’s magazine or on TV,
doing the things the Willowz would have done (as Richie once said, “As lame as
TV is right now, I’d still like to be on it”). And while that was happening,
the Willowz did other things instead.
Waiting for its May release on Long Beach independent Sympathy for the Record
Industry (former home of the White Stripes; apparently, there are footsteps the
Willowz don’t mind following) is their new album, We Talk in Circles—their
Pet Sounds, Richie had joked, though you can tell they were really
trying (they’d even taken field trips to record actual live pet sounds, manager/Richie’s
mom Heidi Follin said). It’s their first as a four-piece, with new guitarist
Dan Lowe; their first record that’s really their own, instead of just a quick
freehand scribble over the songs they’ve heard and absorbed (“What’s up with
that song that sounds like ‘Gloria’?” I asked Alex once. He shrugged: “It is
‘Gloria’”). It’s been going back and forth in demo and revision for (at
least) months, starting with tracking sessions in Richie’s step-dad’s New York
apartment right after the band came back from the U.K. It was written without
Lowe, but he’s on every track now, doing some of his overdubs into a multitrack
recorder while sitting on the middle seat of the Willowz’s minivan.
And now at 21, 21 and still 18 (plus 23-year-old Dan), the Willowz have put
together a record that pushes breath back into the hype, have put together
songs that are trim and fast and alive, instead of the clumsy Frankensteins
they started with, have put together their own band in some new way that feels
fuller and more purposeful than ever before. Richie has always had the
ambition—as soon as he tracked his very first songs, he tried to walk them in
to the office of the president of Universal Records. But now the Willowz have
dropped the dead weight and streamlined their strengths: what Gondry called
Richie’s “rubber band” vocals, Richie’s instinct for a catchy chorus (they just
sold a song to a Renault commercial on the basis of his “Woo-hoos!”), Jessica’s
glamour-gal backups and Mo Tucker leads, and Alex’s precociously ferocious
drumming. And now Dan over it all, with a Telecaster sound as clear as cut
crystal and a few diminished chords on an ill-gotten Rhodes keyboard. It’s kind
of different, avers Richie. But they must be proud. The very last lyric on the
hourlong album is Jessica’s, tired but triumphant: “Yeah, we can die now.”
It was a long and ugly drive to Texas. The Willowz were going to South
By Southwest for the same reason every other band goes: to see what would
happen. They slept in their minivan alongside the Union Pacific tracks in
Deming, New Mexico, eating Subway sandwiches (which everyone agreed were sodden
and disgusting) and curling up for three hours in a below-freezing desert night
before digging their thumbs into their eyes and getting back on the interstate.
It took 31 hours. Their newest driver was named Scotty Diablo: he was neither a
hippie (like the last one) nor a transvestite (like the one before that); he
was very organized, calm and professional, and he said he’d asked to come on
the tour because he loved the Willowz’s music.
They had two shows. The first was in the whited-out Austin daylight for some
empty tables, some hipsters cooking red and black in the sun, and ex-punker
Keith Morris, who reportedly scouts for V2 Records and who watched the Willowz
set while hanging halfway over a rough wooden railing. Their songs sounded
happily and finally complete; they played nothing from the first album and even
a fuck-up sounded casual and cute, a faux pas that somehow came off as
charming, even though all the industry people were supposed to be cutthroat.
But the next was on the last night of the fest, and it was the best show I’d
seen them play. Richie’s customary melodrama—kid loves to do the splits—turned
into elaborate acrobatics; they started with an old song that ended up feeling
about as vital as soggy clay once they began peeling out the new ones, and
soon, fat, ugly drunks stumbled down from the bleachers—for some reason, the
bar had bleachers—to offer sloppy, heartfelt encouragement.
Richie looked taller and skinnier than he does in real life, stretching his
guitar from his knees to his neck, and Dan and Jessica dipped into scruffy
harmonies over each of his shoulders as he hit a firecracker stream of high
notes. They ended with that fake “Gloria,” and Richie squeezed back behind
Alex’s drums to a Mickey Mouse piñata they’d hung up—the Willowz are
fiercely proud of Anaheim, name-checking it between nearly every song—and
started smashing his guitar into the piñata’s crotch. It fell at three
strokes and split at five, and then he hoisted it over his shoulder and
shot-putted it high over the crowd, where it fluttered in pieces through
streamers of feedback into a group of beer-bellied, black-T-shirted dudes.
There was wide and generous applause. You gonna get a deal out of this? I asked
Richie. “Hopefully,” he said, grinning. I looked around for International Rock
Writer, who I knew was in Texas, too, but he wasn’t there to see it. So I
e-mailed him later to see what he’d been up to and told him I was touring with
the Willowz again. He wrote back briefly: “Could I fuck the girl from the
Willowz?” In a way, it seemed like progress. Not yet, guys. But real soon now.