|
from RIP magazine, August 1991 (Fresh Blood)
[While I had an ear for bands that would do well in the marketplace — the first time I saw Warrant I knew they were going to be huge — my favorite groups were often those whose commercial potential was limited. One such band was liquid jesus. They blended a spacey, trippy-hippie vibe with pure power but weren't quite visionary enough to create their own scene, which is the only way they could have insured any sort of real success. The guys were nice, however, and I had a lot of fun interviewing them. When we couldn't find a good place to conduct the interview, we parked ourselves on some random Hollywood sidewalk and chatted there. To be perfectly honest, even though I knew Warrant was going to sell a ton of records, I was never a fan. But to this day, I'm perfectly happy to say that long ago, in another musical era, I adored liquid jesus.]
What do you call music that echoes a generation of changing rock 'n' roll styles; that floats over the eternal now, asking unanswerable questions and singing the blues so sadly without relinquishing an ounce of faith?
Why, the only term for music so moving is "groove object." And the only band that truly knows the deeper meaning of that is called liquid jesus. Its members are latter-day hippie minstrels who can thrash, who can see the still waters beneath a raging tempest, and who are capable of creating a few crashing torrents themselves.
How do you begin a story that has no beginning? The tale of liquid jesus could quite logically take off from the Summer of Love, back in 1967. After all, that's where the influences on the band's MCA album, Pour in the Sky, first grew wings. It's also pretty close to the time guitarist Scott Tracy and bassist Johnny Lonely were born. But perhaps that's not the right place to start — we already have a strong foothold in the '90s and rock 'n' roll is a business now, not the free-form weed growing wild that it was in the '60s. So then maybe we should start with Mac Davis.
Of course, Mac Davis doesn't seem to have much in common with thrashing hippie minstrels or the Summer of Love, but that's really where liquid jesus has its roots. "I was working as a road with Mac Davis, and I was trying to get my studio going, so I could start doing my demos," explains guitarist/ songwriter Todd Rigione. He had moved to Los Angeles to make it in the music biz, but got a bit sidetracked. "I was doing all this work for this music thing, and all of a sudden I realized, 'God! I'm 25! I've been here for five years, and I haven't even played out.'"
The answer to Todd's problem came in the form of a friend who had a comedic rock 'n' roll band that needed a guitarist. Johnny and Scott were part of the package. Before that group, the two of them, according to Johnny, "played together in garage stuff around our high-school town, Walnut, California. We'd played together at backyard parties — Misfits covers, one-chord rockers and stuff like that."
So you would think that meeting Todd, with his more sophisticated approach to music, probably took them aback. "It took me forward," Scott corrects.
Everything comes to an end eventually, and that's what happened to this band's lineup. "Slowly but surely, I started becoming very bored with playing this rinky-dink type music," Todd relates. "I'm not trying to knock it down, but I wanted to become a little more serious."
"And so did we," Scott adds.
That meant, among other things, finding a new drummer. "That's when John Molo came in," Todd continues. "He was a friend of mine. He played with Bruce Hornsby, and I met him when he was playing with Mac."
Molo played with the Captain and Tenille too. If he sounds like an unusual choice for a rock band... well, he wasn't. "He's a renaissance drummer," smiles Scott.
So liquid jesus came into being and, with Todd on vocals, they started playing around town. "Everything started to fall into place, and that was where we came into the dilemma," Todd reveals. Molo had to leave on tour with Hornsby. It wasn't like liquid jesus could just on out and get another drummer — part of groove object is its unity and undeniable chemistry. So the band wound up hiring Kellii Scott as their part-time drummer until Molo came back. "Kellii was a bandmember, and probably will be for life in my heart," says Todd. "We went out and did some tours that we couldn't have done without him."
Eventually Todd decided that the band needed someone to take over his vocal chores. Scott and Johnny knew this guy by the name of Buck Murphy, and they asked him to come down and audition. It didn't work out too well. "I had a little too much to drink, they had a little too much to smoke," Buck recalls. "They were auditioning a drummer who sucked...."
"And a singer at the same time!" Johnny interjects. "Each one being the millionth audition that month."
"It was kind of hectic and not put together really well," Buck continues. "I was a little concerned, because I'd never auditioned for a band that didn't call me back right away, and they didn't call me back. But from what I heard there, I was a little interested — but not completely, 'cause it was a little out there. Then I went and saw them at a show, and I was just blown away, going, 'My god, I have to play with these guys!' So I snaked a tape and learned two of the songs on it." He went down to a gig liquid jesus was doing at Al's Bar, a cozy dive in downtown L.A., and when they announced one of the tunes that Buck knew, he made his move. "I just jumped up there and took over," he says.
"By the end of that song," John beams, "there was total cacophony and disarray on the stage, and I'm sitting there stationary on the drums. I went, 'Man, this is happening shit!'"
"Bass guitars and cymbals flying through the air," Scott warmly remembers. "The guy handed me an envelope at the end of the night with 170 bucks in it. We couldn't believe it. We were, like, 'Wow, look at this! Money!'"
Even better things were in the offing now that they had a permanent singer. The guys got to make a live record for Triple X, the same indie label that released Jane's Addiction's very first album. "We did the Triple X record because of Charlie Brown," Todd explains, meaning the band's manager, not the comic-strip character. "It was actually supposed to be Pigmy Love Circus's record. They cancelled out, and I'm so glad they did! It played a big part in our timing, and in us getting out there. It was just a fluke that we got to do that. It was like two weeks before the gig, and he says, 'Hey, I'm doing this Triple X Christmas party. Do you want to record a record?' And I had to say, 'Yeah, why not?'"
After the 1990 summer release of liquid jesus Live, it was major-label time. A&R execs hovered over the band like hawks going in for the kill. "You start to learn that your music's a lot of fun, and I just try to keep focusing on that, 'cause the business side of it is dog-eat-dog," Todd advises. "There's no doubt about it. The business side is shrewd and crude and ugly. I always try to just keep looking at where we are going. If I look at it that way, all the other stuff becomes nonexistent, almost. Not really, but just kind of unimportant, 'cause you've gotta have something that puts you past all that. To me, that's the feel, the groove of the business and everything else. You want to be a human being out there, so the best way is to look at the goal that everybody's trying to accomplish, and look at the beauty in that, and you'll be able to somehow reflect that around the people you work with."
The people that liquid jesus wound up choosing were those at MCA, and by the end of '90 the band was in the studio, making Pour in the Sky.
Todd coproduced the record, working closely with Michael Beinhorn. "His main job was to make sure that Buck performed," Todd says.
"His main job was to get really mad and yell at me," Buck claims.
"He did a lot of other things besides that, but I'm just stating that that was a crucial part," Todd emphasizes. "That was so that Buck and I didn't have to punch each other anymore."
"'Cause he's a lot bigger, and hits a lot harder," Buck says of his bandmate.
"Beinhorn was more his size," Todd reasons.
The guys toiled intensely, bringing a dozen of their favorite songs vibrantly to life. Some, like "The Light" — which manages to equate TV evangelist to struggling bands — trip sarcastically over the subject matter; while in others, such as "Sacrifice," the music dances lightly over very heavy subject matter. In this particular song's case, the morality of suicide. "The Colorful Ones," which was written in pre-production, is the newest tune, and "W.H.Y.B." is the oldest. Todd first wrote it at the age of 17, and he describes it as "my buddy." That's the kind of intimate personal friendship liquid jesus has with all its songs.
"Do some of them leave you?" John rhetorically asks the other bandmembers. "Do you like some of them more, sometimes, than others?" Everyone agrees. "And one remains a true friend, and the other one leaves you every once in a while?" Familiar nods all around.
It's clear that liquid jesus lovingly gives birth to its tunes, although Johnny admits, "There's been a couple we've shit out as well, and that aren't with us anymore — just like any band."
"It like they're our life force," Buck muses. "Without them, where would we be? We'd be nothing to ourselves."
So that's the saga of liquid jesus. Does anything else need to be said?
"You're gonna make sure that you tell the world, through RIP magazine, that our music is 'groove object'?" Todd wants to know.
We think we just did.
| Comments () >> |
 |
 |
Music Writing 
