Tim and Greg Acoustic Show (with Jimmy Faye)

Mother Hips, Chico's prodigal sons, have made something of a tradition of opening and closing the summer Wednesday Concert in the Park series. When it seemed, a few years ago, that everyone in town was bitching that the Hips had abandoned Chico, that fact stood out in my mind as evidence to the contrary. I always found it hard to blame them for going where they actually had a snowball's chance of "making it," whatever that means these days. Before, during and after all the talk of rock star attitudes and drug problems (in various and several incarnations), what I saw and continued to see was four guys working hard and spreading soul wherever they'd go. I recall fondly seeing the Hips play the concert in the park, then heading over to Juanita's for the second half of what inevitably was a marathon gig. Pre- and post-original drummer Mike Wofchuck's departure, that was the pattern, like the seasons.

Juanita's is now closed, of course, so things were a little different this time. The newly established Harrington's played host to the Hips after their Hump Day gig. Though the Mo'Hips got jamming in the park after a few warm up tunes, their set at Harrington's sounded tired. In fact, it seems they may have fallen on some hard times:

As Tim Bluhm was hawking the Hips' t-shirts and CDs on the side of the gazebo in the park he told the young, stoned crowd, "We've got our new CD, Later Days for sale. If you haven't checked it out already please come buy one. We really need your support now. I'm dead serious." The tone of his voice—not to be melodramatic—was downright scary, almost desperate.

The next night found the dynamic duo of the Mother Hips, Tim and Greg Loiacono, playing an acoustic set at the Oasis. (Actually Greg played his electric at low volume. That instrument may have been responsible for the several ear-splitting waves of feedback that struck at various intervals throughout the evening.)

I only caught the last half-song of the opening act, The Team, a male-female pair featuring quick acoustic guitar interplay and plenty of harmony. They seemed to be a hit with the couple dozen people that were already there when I arrived.

Tim and Greg then took the stage and Tim remarked, "What day is it? Sunday? It feels like Sunday." Though his comment seemed eerily reminiscent of Kurt Cobain singing "Sunday morning/ Is every day for all I care," I guess he didn't sound depressed, just really mellow, perhaps from playing so much the day before. The atmosphere was relaxed, quiet but not quite solemn, as people slowly filtered in through the first few songs, lining the sides of the dance floor and later sitting in semi-circular fashion near the stage, listening raptly.

They started off with "Stories," a standard Tim n' Greg acoustic opener about the craziness of life on the road that tells the curious, "If you ever wonder why it is that we ride this carousel/ We did it for the stories we could tell." There followed a subdued version of the title song from their third album, "Shootout," an enigmatic and sometimes fearsome song about loneliness and the apparent futility of making a connection ("And if the world is getting smaller, Evangeline/ How come I have to holler ever louder in the music halls at night?"). "Stunt Double," from Later Days, finds Bluhm lamenting, "My eyelashes are heavy and my hand feels unsteady/ I guess I'll just lie on the floor," but then declaring triumphantly, defiantly, "But I've seen all my nightmares before."

I can't be sure if it was immediately preceding or just after the next tune, "Father Come Quickly," that Tim and Greg called up Jimmy Faye from the audience to play the rest of the show with them. And it doesn't really matter. Jimmy Faye, longtime local legend with Spark n' Cinder and many other outfits, has been something of a father figure to the Mother Hips, I think. Many times he has taken the stage with them to belt out Willie Nelson's "Whiskey River" and other tunes in his Jimmy Witherspoon-like basso.

Starting off with the lyrically very strange Everly Brothers tune, "Lord of the Manor" (into which was interpolated an apparently original meditation on tears and suffering), there was a long string of covers and HELLA old-school Hips tunes. And let's get real, folks. Although Jimmy Faye's mandolin was prominent on "Nobody Knows," and although Tim and Greg had a few good harmonies, most of the time it was Tim's show. (As an aside, when the trio came out for an encore, Tim walked out and sat down first, prompting the girl sitting next to me to remark, "Oh, he's going to do the encore by himself.") The better portion of these songs deal with life on the run or the absence of the loved one ("Good Love Gone Bad," "Fugitive"). Notable exceptions were a cover of Bob Marley's "Small Axe" (a song I last heard the Hips play when Jimmy Faye was filling in for a broken-handed Mike Wofchuck—but that's a story for another time), the beautifully simple paean to childhood "(Thank You) Tiera Devers," and Neil Young's "Out on the Weekend." And for those of you who always thought it would be cool to have 50 drunk chicks hanging on you before, during and after every show, you should have heard Tim sing to them on "Tinkerbell Perfume," a new one: "...it's nice to have you in the room/ But I've had it up to my guts, I guess/ With Tinkerbell perfume."

I had the impression that this half of the Hips needed the respite from the electric noise, that they needed to get back to their musical and cultural roots here in Chico. Mr. Bluhm in particular seemed reluctant to exit the stage, even after playing nearly thirty songs. This trip through town saw the Hips not at their sharpest, but still working hard. I was reminded of their lyric from "Two River Blues": "If you ever leave your home down in your green valley/ Make sure you take lots of what you need/ You might get back to find it gone (and all your friends say, 'I don't know what happened')/ You don't have to, but I suggest that you believe."

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