Too Hip to Quit

Frustration
"I’m sure everyone feels frustrated," says the Mother Hips’ Tim Bluhm. "I think that’s a pretty common feeling."
Tim is breaking down John Hofer’s drum kit after a show at the Boardwalk in Orangevale, California and we’re talking about the band’s new album, Green Hills of Earth. The Boardwalk is a gritty joint in a tough north Sacramento neighborhood, the sort of place they’ve probably played a thousand times in their 10-year touring career. I can’t help asking Tim about frustration.
To be sure, the Mother Hips have seen real high points in what Tim calls a "magic decade": a major-label contract, national tours, H.O.R.D.E. shows, sold-out gigs at the Fillmore and the Great American in San Francisco — not to mention a die-hard grassroots following. But as tantalizingly close as the band has gotten to the level of the industry where the big bucks are, they’ve by and large remained one of the West Coast’s best-kept secrets.
The album that should have put them over the top, 1996’s Shootout, was released on American Recordings with little fanfare and almost no marketing and tour support. It was a lushly orchestrated effort the Hips had poured their souls into, then were rewarded by losing their record deal when the financially troubled American Recordings imploded and carved up their roster.
Tim has sung about the frustration of the situation with American before, most notably on "Third Floor Story": "The company quit / They didn’t do shit for that new record / What do I have to do / To get a break? / Will somebody please give me a hit?" Since the American fiasco, the band has put out just one full-length, 1998’s Later Days, a twang-laden album with a passel of the best songs Bluhm has ever written. One of the greatest California albums of the year, Later Days was self-released to critical acclaim, then largely ignored.
As challenging and ambitious a songwriter as Bluhm is, it’s no great wonder, then, if he’s a bit frustrated at the band’s plateau. A solo album in the summer of 1999 provided a new creative outlet for him, but I suspect he’d really like the band to get broader exposure. I cite the new album’s lyrics: "All this time / I’m like dying on the vine," Bluhm sings as "Channel Island Girl" winds up. Does this signal a feeling of unfulfilled aspirations?
"No, I wouldn’t say that was directed towards the act of playing music professionally," he says judiciously, rolling up an electrical cord. "I had a bunch of lyrics for that song, and I just weeded out the ones I wanted to use. I think that last line sort of…sort of throws you for a loop. It kind of comes out of nowhere."
Tim Bluhm is one of the most straightforwardly expressive people I’ve met, but I’m skeptical. Call me crazy, but I don’t believe that people do things for no reason, especially artists.

Tragedy
Robert Heinlein’s short story, "The Green Hills of Earth," is the tale of Rhysling, the blind minstrel of the spaceways — an old-school spaceman-turned-culture hero, a holdover from the early days of intergalactic exploration. Longing to come back to Earth one last time after years of ringing the outer planets, Rhysling catches a ride home. On the way, the ship experiences a meltdown and Rhysling perishes of radiation exposure while saving the ship and its passengers, but not before he uses his final moments to broadcast the last verses of his masterpiece: a song, "The Green Hills of Earth." What had Tim found so compelling in the story that he’d made it the name of the album?
"Mainly I just like the title, I just like the sound of it," he says. "I like the images that it evokes more than anything. But the story has to do with a sort of folk musician. But I didn’t really expect people to get the reference," he adds hastily, admitting, "actually, you can make pretty good parallels. But it wasn’t really my intention at the time."
Tim says his songs are often inspired when he sees a certain phrases and feels his way into a song that should have that name, like "Daisy and Joaquin," from a swim-hole graffito he saw in Arizona. But I keep thinking, "Green Hills" is not a song, it was chosen as a title for the album, after the fact.
"It’s such a dramatic story, though," I press him. "The guy’s, like, dying, and sings the last verse of his song over the radio, you know, so it can be recorded."
"Yeah," Tim agrees ruefully. "I mean, I think that could easily be applied to our situation, but it’s kind of a bleak image."
That’s what worries me, I tell him.
"Well, it’s been… fuck, man, we’ve been working really hard," he exclaims, a little exasperated, then quickly recovers his composure. "We’re still playing the same stages we played eight, nine years ago. It definitely wears you down after a while. If we didn’t love the playing so much, we’d have quit a long time ago, but we love doing it so much that it would take a lot more than little frustrations to stop us."

Vision
We move outside to the Boardwalk parking lot so Tim can load the guitars into the van. The late January night is cool and clear, and while Tim searches for the Econoline keys in a guitar case, I look through the cyclone fence at the back of the lot into a junkyard, and ask him about the band’s approach to the new album. Did he feel Green Hills moved away from the usual tools of the contemporary recording industry? "I definitely think we succeeded in leaving our peers…somewhere else," he says with his typical dramatic timing, looking up from his fruitless search in the guitar case, a broad grin spreading across his face.
Greg Loiacono, Tim’s musical counterpart, walks up with the keys and opens the back of the van. We talk about the excitement of releasing the new album, which is due out in just over a month, and the help the band is getting from Future Farmer, the Nor Cal-based indie label they’ve cautiously agreed to work with. The best part is, the band has the option to buy out their contract if a big fish bites.
"It’s a super-small label," Tim says, "but it’s gonna help us a lot. It’s not a huge step, but it’s a small step in the right direction." Greg adds that "having some people on our team — a publicist, people thinking about those other things — gives us a little more time just to think about music."
At the same time, it has been suggested that allying themselves with the West Coast-focused independent might help them to shake the "jam band" label that has clung like a tar baby to their media image. Some have also seen a quest for change in their recent approach to both music and publicity: not so much a denial of the jam band description (which might have been merited five years ago), as a refutation of it — just doing something different. A new publicity photo, for example, shows the group dressed in all-white, tai-chi-esque outfits, goofing off in the middle of a busy S.F. financial district intersection.
"Yeah, it goes with the record," Tim says. "We just wanted to do something that people haven’t seen before. You know, just being a human in this…crowded place, it’s just really easy to just…be cliché and do and act just like everyone else. And that’s just not a very good feeling. Everyone wants to feel like they’re different from anybody else, in some way."
But is it even possible to purposely change one’s sound to be more popular?
"I think it’s definitely possible, I know people who are doing it right now, and having success at it," he responds. "But, being a professional musician, you have to balance the marketability with being faithful to your visions …" he says, searching for words.
"Your art," Greg adds.
"…with being faithful to your artistic visions," Tim finishes.
"Because, I mean, it’s not that likely that the vision you have for your art is going to be marketable on, like a mass scale. Maybe, but not ours. We’ll never be Top-40," he says, pausing. "We’ll never be Top-40, and we’re not even trying for that. But, it’s nice to be able to have your artistic endeavors support themselves."
I think of Rhysling, profoundly isolated in the engine room as he guides the doomed ship home; knowing he has but moments to live and spending them singing the final verse of "The Green Hills of Earth."
I snap out of it, and Tim’s saying, "So, there’s obviously a balance that you have to find. But I think what people, in our case, find attractive about our band, is the chemistry."

Chemistry
The uniqueness of the Mother Hips unquestionably involves the band as a four-man unit: Tim, Greg, Hofer on drums, and Isaac Parsons on bass guitar. The changes in the group’s style from 1995 to 1997 probably have as much to do with the replacement of Mike Wofchuck with Hofer — two drummers who could hardly be more different — as any other factor.
Songs, however, are what fuel bands, and Tim has written the overwhelming majority of the group’s original tunes. Still, one of the principal building blocks of the Mother Hips’ music are vocal harmonies — on Green Hills more than ever, with its stylistic nods to the early Bee Gees, Beach Boys, and Kinks — and so much of the chemistry that so deeply hooks fans on the Mother Hips comes out of the musical relationship between Tim and Greg.
It’s a few days after the Sacramento gig, and I have a chance to talk to Greg by phone between Chico and his home in the Bay Area. I still have the question of chemistry in mind, and so I ask him about the influence that playing acoustic duo shows with Tim had on the new record.
"That’s basically been the beginning for us, the sort of underlying foundation of our music: that really stripped-down combination of just Tim and I singing and playing guitar."
What is it about that combination that makes it work? Whatever it is, Greg says it has been there all along.
"It’s hard to describe," he admits. "We’ve always felt really comfortable musically together, I think, right from the start, and always understood what the other is trying to get across. And usually, if one person is doing something, showing the other a song, that the other person will come up with the right [complement].
"I didn’t realize that it just wasn’t like that with everybody, because I hadn’t really played with anybody that much before. So, when I started playing with Tim, and he would be singing a song, and I’d start singing a harmony or playing a guitar part, and vice-versa, and it would just feel right, it’d be like, yeah, great, that’s…it. And I was used to that, and then I started playing with other people, in college and sitting around — ‘oh, let’s go pick’ — and play a song, other people can’t do that. Most of the time, I’ll just be like, ‘I wish Tim was singing on this,’ or playing a part on it, you know what I mean? It’s rare, you know. There are other people that I love, love to play with, and then…there’s also the majority of people. I guess it’s like anything else: there’s some people you click with, and some you don’t. He and I clicked immediately, and it still goes like that. If I have a new song, I can’t wait to play it for Tim."

Puppets
While Greg has written songs in the past, many of them have been joint efforts with Tim. On the new album, though, Greg has sole authorship on three songs. Writing songs separately has been the rule these days, Greg says, although there is a degree of collaboration that takes advantage of their musical closeness.
"There have been occasions [when] one of us sort of has most of a song, and then we work on it together, and turn it, complete it, or if it’s already complete the other guy will come up with a part. Or sometimes, the other, the person who wrote the song, will have a part for the other guy, too. We’re fine with that, too. ‘You know, I was singing along to a tape of mine with this harmony. Can you do this harmony?’ and the other guy will do it."
"Sarah Bellum," a harmony-woven, mid-tempo ballad from Green Hills, is a good example of this, Greg says.
"[Tim] had the idea of having me come in on that overlapping chorus, you know, him finishing off the line, and then me coming in on the chorus, and then us meeting up… That one was actually easy for him to explain, because there’s a song called "Melody Fair" by the Bee Gees, and it does a very similar thing — I mean, it’s a different enough song, for sure, it’s not a rip-off — but that little part, there’s a part like that, so all he needed to do was say, ‘Okay, let’s go listen to "Melody Fair," that’s basically what you need to do.’"
Greg calls those kinds of references "puppets," as in "we used a lot of puppets in the recording of this record."
"Maybe you heard a guitar tone on a Kinks record and you really like it," he explains. "We’d spend a lot of time trying to get that sound. Even though the rest of the song, all the other instruments are different, we just wanted that one sound. Gideon [Zaretsky, recording engineer and co-producer on Green Hills] had a lot of patience and good ideas for that type of research."

Shapes of Things
Certainly if one were trying to make a commercial album, taking hints from 1960s Australian and British pop would not seem like the obvious way to go about it. Did thoughts of hooking up with a major label influence the band’s approach to Green Hills?
"That didn’t shape the album at all," says Greg. "The album was completely finished by the time that we decided to work with Dennis at Future Farmer, except for the mastering, and he pointed us toward John Golden [who mastered the album], which was great. That was a great steer. But as far as the album itself, the actual creative process of the album, we were doing it for ourselves, as much as we did on Later Days, just making it sound exactly like we wanted it to sound, with the means that we had."
As an independent band, those means were rather limited. Between "trying to get the money together for it, trying get the band and Gideon’s schedule to meet up, and trying to get to that place from wherever we were on the road," piecing together Green Hills was a sometimes nightmarish logistics exercise, but worth the band’s while nevertheless.
"There’re good things in the air," Greg says. Indeed, things haven’t looked this promising for the band since their first days with American. They’re getting airplay on KFOG in the Bay Area, and scattered exposure on college stations around the country. But their biggest exposure has probably been being featured on Napster’s Web site and the February 18^th cover of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday entertainment section. If things go well, the band may be crossing the Atlantic this summer for a European tour to support their album’s release there. And to top it all off, in mid-March, Future Farmer apparently inked a deal with MTV, of all things, to use some songs from Green Hills on its Real World program. The Mother Hips? On the Real World? Believe it, baby!

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