Return of The Rock

It hit me how interesting the Chico music scene is to follow, sitting on the back patio of Joe's Bar last week with The iMPS - one of Chico's more established and long-standing rock bands, who've been laying low for the last year or so. Anyone who has spent any time taking in a show by a local band knows there is plethora of talent in this small town, but what's most interesting about it isn't the local talent pool itself or how many bands have broken out of Chico, it's how this talent moves through the scene.

The three-piece power trio known from Fresno, CA known as The iMPS moved to Chico about five years ago after a short stint in San Francisco. At the time, John McCall (guitar, vocals), Erik Morton (bass) and Scott Lehman (drums) had been playing together since high school, and had a repertoire of songs and a cohesion seldom achieved by young rock bands. They became quick favorites in the Chico scene, making fans out of people from many different facets of Chico's music culture.

They paid their dues, played many shows for free, many more for free beer, and through steady gigging here and on the road, and through releasing a series of recorded works - a seven inch record for "Capsized" b/w "Disease Named After Me," a handful of cassettes, a song on the Superwinners Summer Rock Academy album and their own CD, KRFW - The iMPS made a name for themselves.

One day last year, things changed. Longtime drummer Scott Lehman awoke suffering extreme pain stemming from existing medical conditions and the path of The iMPS was forever diverted.

"He's got the diabetes, and he woke up one morning yelling in pain," says John McCall between slugs off his Budweiser. "He had dislocated and fractured his right shoulder and broke a couple of ribs in his sleep. Seizures, probably."

"He said he had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and he couldn't get out of bed 'cause his arm hurt so much. So he crawled to the bathroom and climbed up to look in the mirror, and saw that his shoulder was all mangled, so he got a ride to the emergency room," recalls Erik. "Shortly after that he moved back to his parents' house in Fresno because he couldn't do anything. Then he decided to move out to New York City to be with his girlfriend and get his shit together. It's understandable."

Losing a member from a band has been making music together for nearly a decade can be an irreparable blow, especially for such a tight-knit group like The iMPS, in which every members' contribution is an important aspect of the music. But John and Erik had worked too long and hard at this to let it destroy the group, and that certainly wasn't Scott's intention. It was a Universal curve ball, and the iMPS just had to deal with it.

"There was a while when I didn't talk to Scott for enough time to deal with everything," says John, whose history with his former drummer is far too deep to have any adverse effects on the longterm friendship. "Everybody's gotta live their life. I was worried when I found out I was going to have a daughter that the band was going to be over. Well, the band's not over, there're just changes, and that's fine."

So The iMPS moved on as a duo, John and Erik playing acoustic shows when they wanted to play out, occasionally enlisting the services of other drummers to sit in here and there. They continued to represent in the scene - albeit quietly - and even managed to release a few recordings.

"We got on a couple of CDs," says Erik. "There's The Blue Room CD, which we've got a couple songs on, and there's a song on the third Chico City Limits CD."

"Yeah, so even though we weren't playing as much as we used to, we always kind of justified our continued existence by saying, 'well, we're still putting out music,'" declares John. "We were still productively doing something, we just weren't playing constantly. In a weird way, it was one of the best things - not the best that Scotty was out of the band and left town - but because in a weird way, it made Erik and myself learn the songs differently, and it kinda made us grow in a certain way. It's a lot easier to get a crowd pumped up when you have a rock band, but how do you do that when it's just two guys with acoustic guitars? It made us learn how to do things simply but at the same time make them more complex so that it still reached people. We had to learn how to do that…at least I think we learned how to do that."

"They say that there's good and bad in everything," he adds, "and that was probably the best part of it." But lately, things have been changing again.

 

The iMPS had been playing as a duo for about nine months when Jim Rizzuto returned from a two-year teaching stint in Japan. Jim is a Chico scene stalwart, the former drummer for such legendary local bands as Pitchfork Tuning and Deathstar, whose two releases - a CD (Strikes The Earth, St. Francis Records) and a 10" record (Silvergirl Records, half of which was produced by John McCall) - gained national distribution and notoriety. Though Jim is now a full-time teacher, he still plays drums for Antfarm, a local circus-funk outfit whose sound is a bit mellower than some of Jim's other projects. A friend of The iMPS from back in the trio's early Chico days, Jim had no idea when he returned what had transpired with his friends' band.

"I didn't know about all this Scotty stuff until I got back," he states, adding that he missed playing rock in Japan, and he looked forward to returning partially for that reason. "When I got back I was really flattered with all the offers to stay on couches and play in good bands. We tried to get my other band from before, Deathstar, back together, but after one fun practice, we knew that it wasn't meant to be. I really used to have fun playing loud music, and in Japan I didn't get the chance. I was playing a lot of ambient stuff, along with samplers and stuff, but I hadn't really played any straight, loud rock - something that I love."

It was a bit awkward at first, say John and Erik, approaching Jim to play, and the two were pleasantly surprised to find the notion of playing with The iMPS was something he was thinking about, too.

"The funny thing was, with Jim Rizzuto back in town, we thought, 'Wow it would be really fun to play with this guy,' but we knew he was going to have a bunch of other shit gong on, and we didn't want to push it," says John. "We saw him when he and Erik played for the Becky Sagers, and that's when Jim said, 'Hey, when are we gonna play?' So it was almost too convenient, too easy. But we all wanted to play the rock, and it's just kind of gone on from there."

Of course, Jim is a different kind of drummer than Scotty (who's now living in Manhattan, working in the Sam Ash Drum Store and playing in a band called UDET). Both players are incredibly talented - something The iMPS have been lucky with, since good drummers aren't easy to find - but the band's sound as a trio is so reliant on each member's contribution to the music, that with Jim in the drum stool, things have changed just slightly.

"Scotty's more of a finesse player," Jim explains. "I noticed that the first few times we played together. I mean, I knew all the songs, I went to the shows, and it's cool to join a band you like because you don't have to do as much homework. So I knew all the songs…or so I thought. Then I played them and I realized that there was a lot more going on than I thought - a lot of really subtle things, and I can't play subtle and loud. That was Scotty's strength. I can do subtle and quiet really well, and I can do loud and bone-headed, and I'm trying to work on loud and subtle."

The result is music with bit of a heavier edge, stronger, more authoritative fills and more driving percussive parts. For Erik, the other half of The iMPS' rhythm section, the change in drummers means a lot.

"It's easily comparable," says Erik. "I almost feel guilty because I don't think a band that's been playing together for over a decade should be able to lose a member and be able to step back in it as quickly as we have. It's been nearly a year since we played electric as The iMPS, but with just a little over a month that Jim's been with us, he's been picking it up so fast and I've been learning how to communicate with his drumming. When Scott would play something a certain way, it would determine the way I was playing the same part of the song, and now I'm learning how to read Jim that way, and I'm doing it quicker than I thought I'd be able to. Like I said, I feel guilty. I felt like we were a really good band when Scott left, I felt like we were pretty much at our peak, and it was only getting better. Then he had to split. I felt like we were ruined, but we held it together, and Jim stepped in at the perfect time. He's picking it up so fast, it's great, and I'm diggin' it."

"What it really comes down to as far as playing music, and specifically playing the rock, I think we're all in it to play simply because we want to play," says John. "We've gotten this far without making a million dollars and making it on MTV, and we're still able to play music. It's kinda stupid, we're sitting here talking, trying to be all poetic with the mic on, but you know who we are, and we know who you are. The fact is, we're a band, I like to write songs and hopefully people dig 'em. Hell, we're doing what we want to do. We're having fun and that's really all there is to it."

"Besides," adds Jim with a grin, "doing it for the money at this point would be pretty foolish, anyway."

Bookmark:

Comments down for maintenance.