by Brett Leigh Dicks
When a trio of Texan brothers released their 2004 single, “Heaven,” not only did it top the billboard charts and earn the collective a Grammy Award, after several years of playing dive bars and holes in the wall around Nashville and their native Texas, it also made Los Lonely Boys an overnight sensation. Los Lonely Boys has now released a total of seven studio albums and while none of their subsequent releases have reached the lofty heights of “Heaven,” they have instilled the band of brothers as one of the finest exponents of Texican Rock and Roll. Despite finding radio success with the recording, Los Lonely Boys had long carved out their renown as a blistering live band and it is that arena where they have continued to build a devout following. Last year their musical crusade was again recognized by the Grammy organization when they headlined a performance at Los Angeles’s Grammy Museum to celebrate the release of their latest album, “Rockpango.” This month the Texan trio will make a long awaited return to Santa Barbara, but, rather than converge on the Santa Barbara Bowl, the site of their previous visits, Los Lonely Boys will perform a special Sings Like Hell promoted benefit performance for the La Cumbre Junior High School Music and Theater departments. For a collective of brothers where music is a family legacy, as Jojo Garza explains to Sounds of Santa Barbara, the stately surrounds of a historic theater seems a very appropriate alternative.
The last few times Los Lonely Boys played Santa Barbara, it was at the Bowl. This time you are performing at an historic school auditorium. Are excited at the prospect of taking rock and roll into a stately old theater that started life as an opera house?
Oh that’s a good question man. I think it is great taking it any place. But taking rock and roll into old theaters and places like that is great. Those places are already part of history and to combine that with rock and roll and its tradition makes for a really cool thing. Why can’t places like that have rock and roll concerts? Some of the old productions were pretty far out things in their day, just like rock and roll is now.
Speaking of tradition, the band played the Grammy Museum last year. Having been bestowed with a Grammy Award yourselves, that must have been quite a night …
It was fun. It was a great time. The guy that was doing the interview prepared some really good questions and some pretty funny stuff and there was a lot of improvisation during the Q & A. It was just a really good time. There were a lot of different people there. There were a lot of fans that had been very loyal fans of Los Lonely Boys for a very long time as well as other people who had just come in off the street. Just the experience of being in the building was a whole other thing. We walked up to where they show the videos of who had won Grammys and they just happened to be showing us and we were like ‘wow that’s crazy.’ There we were along with all the other people who have won throughout the years. The experience was phenomenal.
Kind of like winning the award in the first instance? That must have been quite a period in your life?
That was totally unexpected. We had always played music just to survive man. When we won the Grammy with “Heaven” and then got into the Billboard charts with “More than Love,” that was all totally unexpected as I said. We just played music to survive and all the attention that came with it wasn’t something we were used to. There were demands for us being on TV and radio and newspapers and it was all the time and we didn’t really know what was going on. And looking back on it today, it was really a big blur. There are a lot of things that I really appreciate, don’t get me wrong, but for the most part it was whirlwind.
You literally went from playing bars to topping the charts. How did that impact upon you personally?
We were just these boys from San Angelo, Texas, and all of a sudden we were being stopped and being recognized and that was a really cool, but we were just trying to make a living, you know? It’s crazy that people recognize us and want to give us props and stuff, it really is, but it’s a beautiful thing too.
It must have been strange for your success to come from radio and the single “Heaven.” For me you guys are a very much a live band and had been for a long time prior to that record and single …
That’s a great observation man because it is that way. We really are a live band. We didn’t start out recording or anything like that, that came later. We had been playing for many years before any of that. We had played a lot of dive bars and hole in the walls and that’s what really gave us our practice over the years. But that’s the way things took their course. As far as being a live band, that’s where you can see how good any band really is. That’s where you can see what a band is really about. That’s why we’re not all about antics and over the top fireworks productions or anything like that, for us it’s about the music and the people and the connection.
You started out playing in Nashville which is a very traditional country music town. That must have been quite a musical education for three kids from rural Texas?
It definitely was. Not to mention that we were also still in school and trying to keep that up and cope with that. Nashville is definitely a big country based city, but luckily for us there was just enough work to the pay the bills. It was where we cut our teeth and there were a lot of things we had to endure, things that people still have to endure. There was a lot of racism. There was a lot of taking down, saying you’re not as good as what people say you are. But once you get up on stage and you play something they’re used to hearing, it totally takes them home and all of a sudden they forget about who they’re looking at and it’s just about the music. And when you get off stage, although there wasn’t much of a stage back then, they were buying us cokes and our dad a beer and we were all buddies. A lot of good came out of the hardships of that time because we learned a lot from it.
Such as?
Acceptance man, that was the big thing. Nobody’s the way you really want them to be. We learned that. Everybody’s whose they are. And that’s pretty much how it is with everything. That crosses over to music and being grown men with our own families now.
I have been listening to “Rockpango” a lot of late and I have to say it is quite a broad album. There’s a lot of different sounds on there. Was that a conscious thing? Did you set out to broaden your sound and challenge yourselves with that?
Absolutely. It was something we were very well aware of. People were talking about the pressure of trying to make another hit song. But we have always created music just to create music. With “Rockpango” it was really no different other than that we did put a little more emphasis on challenging ourselves and wanting to create different sounds and use different guitars and adding an orchestrated quartet on a couple of songs and things. There is even some DJ scratch on one of the songs. I think we really stretched what we were able to do musically with this album.
Talk me through how that came together …
We have always been able to play whatever we feel or hear. With this we wanted to take on a few other influences. There’s funky things on the record with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder influences. But there’s also the natural elements of being Latino that’s always there in our music. Like the song “Road to Nowhere.” You could call it country, you could call it pop, you could call it ballad rock, and it’s all the same kind of thing. Then there’s “American Idol” and “Baby Girl,” these funky songs that’s having a great time, but also “American Idol” has a great message. And with “Believe” and “Change the World” we definitely wanted to let people know that the music we create is still about what we see and what we hear and what we feel.
The album certainly has a diverse sound, but it is tied together nicely by the harmonies. That’s one element of you music that hasn’t changed much. What is it exactly about brothers and harmonies?
That’s the question and the answer right there isn’t it? It’s just that, it’s being brothers. To be completely honest with you, if there we were people who weren’t brothers that grew up together and sang together all their lives and it was something they experienced and kept doing it, there would be a lot of similarities in sound. But the DNA being the same does account for a lot for the sound and range and tone I think. It’s an influence that goes back to when we were little kids. My mom and her brothers and sisters sang and on my dad’s side his brothers and sisters all sang and cut records and they had bits of fame on both sides of our family. There wasn’t any Grammys being won or anything like that, but music was a family thing and sibling harmonies was always there and big part of it.
As is Texas I presume?
You’re right. It’s where we come from and it’s our heritage. We like to present ourselves well and we are very honored to be part of Texas and its history and culture and we embrace that. It is something really cool. You know there’s a lot of great music in the world and a lot of great music just in the United States too. We can talk about Chicago and New York and California and all these great musical places. Texas is definitely a place for many great things and music is definitely one of those things that is great in Texas.
And the coming year, apart from a visit to Santa Barbara, what does 2012 have in store for Los Lonely Boys?
We’re going to Japan at the beginning of February and then we’re going to head to California for some other dates when we come to visit you in Santa Barbara. Aside from that we’re just going to be creating like we always do. We’ll write some new songs, but as far as the approach as to how we are going to deliver the new songs, maybe that’s not going to be the same as it’s always been. I don’t know what form it’s going to take. But we are going to be creating and definitely going to be in people’s ears.
Los Lonely Boys will perform at La Cumbre Junior High School on February 12th. Purchase tickets through the Lobero Theater, call 963-0761 or visit lobero.com
