If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Locksley were secretly a pitch for a great HBO series about shaggy-mopped Midwestern pretty boys who, through ballsy choices and happy accident, stumble into their impulsive dream to make it big in the big city. Beyond the “I wanna learn how to fly (HIGH)” elements of their tale, Locksley’s experience as a band also illustrates the chaotic state of bringing music to the masses in a world where the corporations that sell discount sandals and internet shut-ins scouring MySpace have better taste than the A&R scouts at crumbling, calcified major labels.
Jessie Laz-Hirsch, one of Locksley’s principal songwriters, guitarist, singer, and incessantly humble conversationalist, couldn’t be more reclined, if not self-diminishing, in his manner of speaking. He acknowledges weaknesses, corrects exaggerations, makes modest but hopeful demands of his art and doesn’t presume for a second to be inaugurating a rock revolution. He’s a passionate person with absolutely no persona. That nevercare and down-home realness comes through on their debut, an unapologetic paean to uplift of sixties hip-shake rock and rock and roll: The Beatles “Back in the USSR”, The Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress” and just about every other harmony-hardened pop song best sung jumping on one’s bed make roughshod cameos. But there’s grit under their nails; the band isn’t merely a math problem regurgitation of the candy-hooked past, but a make-out session with melodicism in a dirty alleyway. There enough Locksley to shake the simple-minded charge of necrophilia.
Boredom is the mother of invention and from Laz-Hirsch’s descriptions (and my personal experience), the Midwest can be a fitful place for youngsters with dreams bigger than pinholes and a penchant for the divergent or different. “When we started it was before the Strokes and all that stuff happened. In Wisconsin, it was hard to find very exciting stuff. It was either grunge or power pop, chunky guitars, Weezery, Blink 182 kind of bands. I think we listened to a lot of the older 60s stuff because that was more exciting to us.”
The band, more or less, collided, from different cliques and circles of friends in a Madison Wisconsin high school. Jessie met bassist Aaron Collins in that hotbed of repressed artistic ambition, weight training class. From the sounds of it, a story I can’t quite entirely put together, their drummer Sam Bair, who had already played in different bands around school, got roped in because he owed Jessie for a couple of rides home from school. It was hitting the skins or losing a finger. Midwesterners have an almost Japanese sense of honor. The nascent group booked themselves a show before they had even written any songs. The result of this early-period Locksley Laz-Hirsch describes grimacingly as “like the Barenaked Ladies.”
It’s this point in the story where it’s easy to get misty-eyed and think that Burl Ives should appear and tell us about the time Christmas almost didn’t happen. While most bands fall into the decision to make music in the same way one-night-stands turn into common law wives, Locksley, in the midst of their college education made a make or break stab at devoting their lives to music. “It wasn’t really until after we had all been in college for a year and we were sort of like ‘This isn’t really what we want to do. What do you guys think about moving to New York and being in a band, proper.’ Everyone preferred it to college. We knew we were into music and knew that whatever we wanted to do was probably something in that direction. We didn’t want to have that same old life when you just go to college and then figure it out. At the time, we weren’t even a band really. It was just an excuse to get to New York and, God Willing, something would happen.”
Unfortunately it didn’t take just a few lines of script between arrival and album. But Jessie attributes the aura of New York, its hard-bitten scrap-or-be-scrapped vibe as one of the elements that positively transformed their sound. “When we got here, we got the Libertines CD. And it was through that that we ended up getting exposed to a lot of punk influences that we never had growing up. People like Richard Hell and The Ramones. I know you wouldn’t listen to our CD and hear punk, but I think that aesthetic and that energy we got from coming out here. We lived in one room for the first two years. We got robbed. We got evicted. The insurance company pushed us around. The landlord pushed us around and we all had shitty employers who pushed us around and I think it builds up this sort of tension. New York gave us some dirt on top. The music has some reality in it; it’s not just bubblegum.” The preemptive defense of their “bubblegum” leanings is no doubt partially inspired by the self-perpetuating drive of the music criticism world to prefer innovators to craftsmen, as if finding the new kid on the block is like discovering a galaxy that you get to name. The sloppy condemning adjectives have already trickled in, the lazy corralling of their “New York” sound that sounds much more likely to come out of Sweden. This gauntlet has to be tough on a band that believes accessibility isn’t in a cage match with authenticity.
In many ways, those seem like debates from a different time with different expectations for the artist as ever-molting visionary or political revolutionary. The band got its first exposure through a Payless commercial and, partnering up with Starz, managed to land another cash pile and get their video paid for, a practice foreign to the record industry where musicians are essentially given loans to pay to promote themselves. The record companies just don’t have enough money to do that sort of thing for free. Jessie defends their commercial introduction as the only choice they were given. “I’m actually incredibly hostile to the music industry because the music industry is unwilling to take chances. We have done a bunch of stuff, and you’d think labels might be knocking down our door. I mean, we have talked to a couple and they tell us that they just didn’t know how to market us. The music industry has no balls. Their focus in on illegal downloading instead of actually developing acts. The top grossing acts now are like 60-years old. Because those bands were allowed to develop as artists and a lot of their greatest stuff was three or four albums in. Now, if you don’t have a hit record your first time out, you’re pretty much done. But then you look at these commercials and they’re willing to not only take a chance on bands that no one has heard of, but put you out there and support with you with the money you make and in getting you out to a broader public. How do you say no that? You’re an unsigned band, you’ve got no money behind you, and the actual music industry isn’t interested if what you’re doing is “different.” But to think of us as someone outside of the mainstream is ridiculous. We always did think of ourselves as playing pretty accessible music that pretty much anyone should be able to enjoy. But then you get Payless shoes who says we’ll give you a whole bunch of money and put you on national TV just to hock shoes.”
Just as the roadblocks to the LP gave way in creative new inroads, so did the filthy, cruel and fickle mistress of the Big Apple finally turn a flirty eye their way. “We played a Thursday at CBGB’s and it was sort of a typical night there where they had a rap rock band, some screamo band, and another band that totally didn’t sound anything like us, and we were the only band who brought anybody. We brought like 80-85 people. They were like “we’d love to have you back” and we found out while we were there that they were looking for someone to book the acoustic gigs at the CB’s gallery next door. So our bass player applied for the job and got the job. Then we asked if we could book our own night so that we could match ourselves up with bands that would sound good with us. So they gave us a night, and it was packed to the gills. And then I think it was just one or two more successful nights before they just gave us a regular night, then we stopped when we went on our tour and, of course, now they’re closed.” What happens next is anyone’s guess. Whether acclaimed or defamed, the new record, Don’t Make Me Wait, arrives in January, still currently without a label, but with rough, upbeat hummable bars familiar to anyone looking for a size nine in mint, the band can bank on the fact that, critical aspersions aside, most folks look for the clever hook, the phrase that stays, and the come hither song that makes for a suggestive mixtape selection. On those terms alone, Locksley will surely succeed or, at worst, bomb with a good story to flame out on.
~ Terry Sawyer
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LOCKSLEY's Don't Make Me Wait is out January 9, 2007.
http://www.bandoflocksley.com
Buy Album from CD Universe
