Home on the Range

If you were to see the Asskickers (comprised of Bob Howard on vocals and guitar, John LaPado on pedal steel guitar, Alan Wood on bass, Steve Bragg on drums and Scott Pressman on lead guitar) on stage, or just casually listen to their music, you would probably think they were a traditional country outfit, right down to their button-down shirts, blue jeans and cowboy hats. However, appearances are often deceiving. While their look and sound might be steeped in tradition, the Asskickers' lyrics and attitude seem to lean more toward the unruly realm of punk rock. Porno queens, drug devouring dogs and little green men are just a few of the odd characters you might come across in the Asskickers' songs.
But playing with people's expectations is nothing new for Asskickers' frontman Bob Howard. He came to Chico just a couple of years ago via Southern California, where he played bass for the Transexpistols in Los Angeles. Decked out in full drag, Howard went by the name Cynthia Vicious and covered the songs of the Sex Pistols. Oddly enough, it was through this persona that Howard met his wife, Trish Rowland, who prompted his move up to Chico.
"The Transexpistols came up here to play a show," Howard says. "And my wife's band at the time, the Repeat Offenders - I think we actually opened for them - I met Trish that way. She was singing for them. We dated long distance for about four months. We figured that it was working pretty well, so we got married and I moved up here."
Howard admits that relocating to Chico from such a large, developed urban area definitely gave him a bit of a culture shock. As it would be for anyone in an unfamiliar place, it took some time for him to get adjusted to his new, rural environs.
"I wasn't really all that familiar with Chico to begin with, and I guess my impression hasn't changed so much as formed as I've learned more about Chico," Howard remarks on his growing perception of his current hometown. "It's great, it's a great place, especially musically. My only complaints would be the job market. It took me a long time to find a decent job. Especially coming from down south where the economy is a little more robust, a little more diverse."
Though it may have taken Howard a while to get his bearings, it didn't take him long to hook up with the other members of the Asskickers. Only six months after he relocated, the band was formed and playing their first gig, and their live performances began generating a buzz just as quickly.
Now, with one full-length CD, 2001's The Other Side of Town already to their credit, this Chico-based five-piece is set to release their follow-up, Home on the Range. As Howard's voice, smooth like good whiskey, sings "Leather and whips and LSD trips" over the pleasant twang of the banjo on the album's opening title track, a tone is set that is consistent throughout the songs that follow. Like a headline for a supermarket tabloid or a topic on the Jerry Springer Show, the songs are over-the-top and sensational, yet deceptively clever and dangerously addictive.
Their songs may tell rowdy, often bawdy, tales of hard living, hard drinking and hard drugs, but the music is far from haphazard. One listen will prove that the Asskickers are undeniably tight, accomplished musicians. "One of the things we take into the studio, which is a testimony to the quality of musicians I have in the band, is that we're always really well rehearsed," says Howard. "So, it doesn't really take us all that long to get our basic tracks down."
As Howard puts it, this level of professionalism is a big help given the band's limited resources. "We don't have a lot of money or time, but the fact that we can nail the tracks when we go in there gives us more flexibility and more chance afterwards to kind of listen to them and figure out what we want to do with each song. But we do it pretty live. The Other Side of Town we recorded pretty live, because we were on a shoestring budget."
Luckily, for Home on the Range, Howard and the Asskickers had a little more room to maneuver financially. This coupled with the experience gained from recording their first CD made this most recent time around in the studio a lot less tense.
"One of the things I learned was how to listen to the mix - I hadn't done a whole lot of mixing before that," Howard comments on lessons learned from his past experience in the studio. "With a little coaching from my wife and other people, I figured out what to listen for and how to get it sounding just so. I took that into the new one, Home on the Range, but also, with the new one, we had more time, and more money, because we had been playing. We just had a lot more studio time to sit in there and add things as we needed them. We were still pretty much on a budget, but we had a little more breathing room than we did on The Other Side of Town."
This greater amount of freedom allowed the Asskickers to throw a few extra instrumental tracks - such as banjo and sitar - into the mix.
"We didn't do a lot of that on the first one - we just didn't have the time or money. But, yeah, that's the kind of thing. We had a little more breathing room," Howard remarks on the differences between recording the first and second album. "Some of the ideas we had, we were able to make them a little more realized than we could on the first album. Though the first one was a really good representation of where the band was at the time, I think between the first and the second, we really gelled more as a band, so we had developed more of [our own] sound."
Howard is the chief songwriter for the band, and he finds inspiration for his songs in a variety of places, ranging from local cranksters to the details of his own life, though he is quick to point out that his lyrics are not exactly autobiographical. Listening to Howard's words will reveal his penchant for strong, often hilarious storytelling. However, Howard admits that there is no definite pattern, formula or master plan behind his songwriting process - he simply writes what feels right for the band.
"Sometimes I come up with just a phrase or a chorus, and I build the song around that," Howard states. "Sometimes they just write themselves in a sitting. We've got a few that are riff rock, where we just come up with a riff, and I just end up fitting lyrics around that.
"I write songs pretty prolifically, but I just get songs that sound right for the Asskickers, and as soon as we get 15 or 16 songs down we're just trying to get them recorded with some regularity," Howard goes on to say. "I don't sit down and try to come up with a theme for the album or anything like that. These are just songs that we've been working on."
Not only can Howard write songs efficiently, but he is also rather proficient as well, which is why it might come as a bit of a surprise to find out that his relationship with country music is a young one. While the Asskickers sound is rooted in traditional country, sharpened by the barbs of punk rock lyrics and swagger, Howard confesses these genres are relatively new territory for him. As a child, he numbers releases from Sister Sledge, Queen, the Village People and the Bee Gees as some of his first albums. But as he grew, Howard's tastes in music began to change.
"When I got into high school, I kind of had a short new wave phase, and then went into metal pretty much. I listened to a lot of AC/DC, a lot of butthead metal: Metallica, Iron Maiden, Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, all those headbanging bands," Howard recollects. "More recently than that, after metal, I discovered punk, and I liked that a lot and then later on I discovered country."
Howard and country seem to fit together naturally, probably like you'd expect them to. However, the Asskickers' affiliation with the local music scene has not come so easily. Though Howard says that the band has gotten good feedback when they've played both here in town and outside of Chico, he admits that his band are somewhat like outsiders on the local scene.
"The local music scene is a little bit disjointed now, so it's hard to say," Howard says of how he thinks the Asskickers fit into the local music picture. "It's hard to get shows. There are not a lot of places to play. We've been getting out of town a little more, but we would like to play more in Chico. We've just had a hard time getting the right shows. I don't think the band has necessarily been that connected with the local music scene, though I would like to be more - maybe because we're an older band, so we're not out a lot. I don't know how we fit in on the local scene."

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