LP/OP

Guest Writer: Emerson Dameron on Jail Weddings

Emerson is a writer, comedian, and all around swell guy. Go to his site, read his stuff, become is friend. The following is from an interview with Jail Weddings

“It has to do with a couple of goats,” says Matthew Eagleson, the relentlessly sarcastic keyboardist for the 10-piece Los Angeles pop-noir band Jail Weddings, describing the band’s creation myth. “And a genre of music Gabe [frontman Gabriel Hart] came up with called ‘pleasure funk.’ It was mostly about pleasure. And mostly about funk.”

The smooth, deadpan Hart chimes in. “Being in Jail Weddings is like… Do you remember every single scene in Lord of the Flies? It’s kind of like that. Every single one. Except that there’s three really beautiful women involved. And that’s when things get really bad.”

“All those girls have really hairy arms,” Eagleson throws in.

All joshing aside, Jail Weddings have some serious hustle. Hart has been working the LA music scene for a minute, most notably fronting the Gun Club-indebted punk outfit the Starvations, an experience he brushes off as “ten years of being in a marginally relevant band in Los Angeles.” (Don’t take him too seriously: Hart may be over it, but the ’05 LP Get Well Soon (Gold Standard Labs) holds up remarkably well and is worth picking up, particularly for those who weren’t in the Starvations.) “It felt really good to put a period on the end of that. It did run its course. It was something that had a lot to do with youth. We were, like, teenagers. If we’d gone any further, we would have been a parody of ourselves.

“This is the next thing that needed to happen.”

Hart always loved the posh, dense, sentimentally fearless sounds of Roy Orbison, Phil Spector and the Walker Brothers, and knew he wanted to build his next project on that ground. But took some time to materialize, depending on real-time instinct. “I didn’t know who was going to be in it,” he recalls. “But they needed to have a total sense of investment. To be ready for anything. So I sent that out… For a lot of people, it was a great leap of faith.”

“He came over to my house,” says Eagleson. “I had just moved back from Portland. I had known Gabe for a really long time.” The two grew up a few exits down from each other and bonded in their SoCal area’s one cool record store. “I was the Starvations’ biggest fanboy… They never got their shit together enough to get t-shirts, but I would have worn one. I had a bunch of synthesizers in my room. Gabe was like, ‘Oh, you could play piano in my band.’ I was like, ‘I don’t play piano, man.’” After some token cajoling, Eagleson decided to learn piano and organ as a core member of Jail Weddings. “It’s been an adventure.”

“I knew Gabe from around,” recollects Josh Puklavetz, the band’s handsome, soft-spoken young bassist. “The band started out with eight people, and he got me to play bass. Slowly, more and more people started jumping on board. Some of us had never met each other before. Some of us were friends.” Puklavetz, at 23, is the youngest member of Jail Weddings. Others are pushing 40. “The age gap,” says Hart, “is hilarious.”

“We make our influences known,” says Hart, “but we’re not a throwback act.” Indeed, if these ten shrewd and imaginative musicians wanted to create retro-riffic replicas, they could do a much cleaner job of it. According to their publicist, the Weddings have been repeatedly described as “Nick Cave fronting the Shangra-Las.” (And, admittedly, Hart does bear a striking resemblance to Cave, at least facially.) But the band doesn’t do walls of sound – this stuff is all about exposed seams and gritty edges. And Hart, while pretty damned dramatic, isn’t preoccupied with mythology like Cave is. He’s tortured by the simple things. Mostly sexual relationships: the good, the bad and the outright abusive.

In 2009, Jail Weddings dropped Inconvenient Dreams (White Noise/Tru-Vow), a resolute, promising five-song EP that got the scenesters, the haters and the LA Weekly flapping gums. In 2010 came the revelatory LP Love Is Lawless (also White Noise/Tru-Vow), a relentlessly melodramatic, ornate and infectious concept album about co-dependence, complete with unapologetic torch songs, jumpy dis tracks, an eerie experiment featuring just Hart and sax player Brad Caulkins, a dedication to Hart’s “phantom harem,” and an agonizingly cathartic closer (“The Impossible”). If you take love too seriously, Jail Weddings bring you your world in just over 30 minutes.

The October ’10 release party at the Bootleg Theater featured sets from comedian-to-watch Allen Strickland Williams and, like all things Jail Weddings, teetered between glamour and grit, precision and chaos. In his blurb for a San Diego gig, critic Chris Maroulakos resorted to pure puffery: “If you don’t like Jail Weddings, you don’t like music.” But, to be fair, the band spent the second half of ’10 lending it credence.

Jail Weddings can never quite be described as a self-parody, but they ride the line between the sublime and the ridiculous as boldly as any band in the Southland. In the early days, says Eagleson, “every time we got together, it would be this blackout party. Practice would start, and it would end, but the night would keep going. It was this fucking runaway train.”

If recent gigs are any indication, JW remain a group of righteous imbibers, taking the risk with the inspiration. But don’t call them undisciplined, at least not anymore. According to Eagleson, things got more businesslike “once Brad [Caulkins] got in the picture.”

Hart concurs. “Brad is the arranger of the band. He’ll take my songs and we’ll go back and forth, trying everything under the sun. He’s usually… 99 percent of the time, he’s right.”

“We write our own parts,” says Eagleson, “and he figures it out.”

Or, by Puklavetz’s reckoning, “Most of the time, what happens is that Gabe comes to the studio with the songs. We all kind of jam out on them for a few rehearsals. And Brad usually comes into the studio and changes everything we’ve done.”

The sax man’s technical expertise aside, Jail Weddings still embrace chaos as a defining principle. And, more than before, the chaos is drawn from, as the Hollywood pitch-men call it,  “real life.”

“I’m starting to write songs about the band,” says Hart. “The band is generating fodder.”

“It’s cool how quickly we bonded,” says Puklavetz. “We get along like a family and we fight like a family.”

“A few of us,” adds Eagleson, “have had relationships.” And they haven’t always ended well. But they haven’t wrecked the band.

“As much as you’d like to be very dramatic,” says Eagleson, “and be like, ‘Fuck you! I’m outta here,’ you can’t. Speaking for myself, I like this band more than I actually like the people. And I like the people a lot. So that’s saying something.”

Don’t expect Jail Weddings to break up any time soon, but don’t expect them to go Hollywood, either. They’re East Siders. “At our first show,” remembers Hart, “I was like, ‘Everybody look nice!’ I get up there looking the worst out of everybody. But it was fun to see what everyone’s interpretation of ‘nice’ was. We’ve had fashion designers latch onto us. They took us out for lunch and brought us blueprints and shit.”

“I wasn’t there for that conversation,” says Eagleson, “but I hear it was really awkward.”

“After that,” continues Hart, “I’m like, ‘Fuck. Everyone wear whatever they want.’ We’re better off just being ourselves.”

Jail Weddings just wrapped a video for the pissed off, catchy “Tough Love,” a key track from Love Is Lawless. Also, did you know Hart writes? Like, write-writes? Tru-Vow, aside from releasing the band’s records, is also about to publish The Intrusion, a novella “to be filed under True Crime/Philosophy/Autobiography/Reference.” Skylight clerks be ready.