City souls, country hearts

Noah Lambeth of the country band Hank Floyd leans into the song, giving the lines -- “Gonna pick up today and leave tomorrow behind me” -- all the wounded, beer-soaked ache of an Ole Opry vet. A few women in wide Stetsons and tight jeans sway by the stage -- and others who’ve come to the bar on this night respond to the lonesome vibe. As the band comes sliding in on the plaintive wail of pedal steel, a couple of wide-shouldered men cling to the bar and stare down into the empty eye of a whiskey glass.

It’s a scene that could be playing out almost anywhere in America, with a dirt parking lot outside blown over with tumbleweeds or buzzing with cicadas. But Hank Floyd is an L.A. group, and outside the traffic on busy Fairfax Avenue runs past this pub -- Molly Malone’s -- and its monthly Sweetheart of the Rodeo country music night.

Hank Floyd is playing its heart out, and Hank Floyd is not alone. More bands are tapping into a tradition here that has endured since the ‘60s.

“I don’t think the scene has ever totally gone away,” says Shilah Morrow, host of Molly Malone’s Sweethearts night with friend Lisa Jenkins, “but I do think we’re lucky in that there have been certain bands lately -- like Ryan Adams and Wilco -- that have received a certain degree of commercial success, that have allowed people to be more open to this type of music than they might have been before.”

Country music may still a bit of a hard sell in L.A., but there are signs of new energy everywhere. Partly as a reaction to the recent influx of European electronica and DJ culture and partly as an outgrowth of ‘80s-’90s indie rock, many American bands have been embracing a more organic approach, drawing on a rich vein of home-grown music from country and western to folk and blues. The result has been a steady reemergence of roots-based rock and folkie acoustic melodies.

In Los Angeles, many of the city’s younger musicians are tearing up their rock ‘n’ roll roots, looking into the past and picking up where icons like country rocker Gram Parsons and his predecessors left off in the early ‘70s. In addition to Beachwood Sparks, such local acts as the Idaho Falls, CB Brand, Hank Floyd, Jonny Kaplan and Austin Hanks have chosen to abandon standard guitar swagger and giddy pop fluff in favor of some down-home country sincerity. They play where they can, when they can, from Silver Lake’s Spaceland to the Westside’s the Joint.

For young urban music fans today, the word “country” is most likely to elicit a dismissive laugh or a smirk of distaste. But the alternative country played by Wilco, Ryan Adams and the L.A. posse is a far cry from the country heard on the airwaves. Only the most successful (read: most accessible) of Nashville’s newest generation of fresh-scrubbed and white-toothed “hat acts” actually make it to radio, leaving little room for the kind of genre-blending grit that marks the new sound.

Something special is beginning to coalesce live on small stages around the city -- a wild and woolly reinterpretation of what is best in L.A.’s long and varied country music history. Emerging from a wide variety of backgrounds and influences, these up-and-coming bands are revisiting the California sound in new ways, adding their voices to a rich tradition of musical expression.

The first Wednesday of every month, L.A.’s scattered country fans gather at Molly Malone’s for Sweethearts, a country music free-for-all inspired by Parsons’ music and named for the 1968 album Parsons recorded while a member of the Byrds.

With the Byrds (and later with the Flying Burrito Brothers and collaborating with a young Emmylou Harris), Parsons became one of the pivotal figures of L.A.’s late-’60s scene, an artist responsible for a California country music renaissance (a style he coined “cosmic American music”).

Parsons brought a more old-time Hank Williams or Jimmy Reed touch to the Dylan-inspired folk-rock Laurel Canyon scene that had come before him, with such figures as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield and Jackson Browne. He also wrote with the Rolling Stones and inspired the country twang of “Exile on Main Street,” now a touchstone for the modern scene. The reverberations of this rich L.A. tradition can still be felt. Parsons, however, wasn’t the first to bring true country to Los Angeles. There were the singing cowboys of early Hollywood, Bakersfield giants like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and the Palomino club in the Valley, which was host to scores of country greats before shutting its doors in 1995.

Yet, over the last few years, nights like Sweethearts, Ronnie Mack’s Barn Dance at Crazy Jack’s and the Rural Revival at Genghis Cohen have managed to keep the city’s country heart beating.

“The important thing is, not only does that tradition need to be kept alive, but it also needs to keep evolving,” says the Beachwood Sparks’ Dave Scher. The band’s newest album, “Make the Cowboy Robots Cry,” on Seattle’s Subpop label, is a dreamy space-age experiment with only a hint of country roots. “Everyone doing this kind of music starts at the same spot but ends up interpreting it in their own way.”

Those ways are beautifully varied. The players in L.A.’s new “Cali-country” scene are similar in that they are all young (20 to 35), fond of cowboy hats and vintage western wear and in love with the music they’re playing. But that’s where the similarities end.

Beachwood Sparks, a group of shaggy-haired Silver Lakers in their late 20s, play an atmospheric mix of country kick and late-’60s psychedelia.

Idaho Falls, led by Idaho native Raymond Richards and L.A. local Heather Goldberg, make sweeping, traditional country pop, with sweetly harmonizing male and female vocals and gorgeous pedal steel sway. Jonny Kaplan is an East Coaster with a West Coast heart who plays dirty, bluesy, desert-dust country touched with the grind of classic 1970s rock ‘n’ roll.

CB Brand is led by 27-year-old Chad Brown, who hails from rural Pennsylvania (by way of Arizona and Utah) and is influenced by everyone from Willie Nelson to Merle Haggard to Waylon Jennings. CB Brand makes a kind of music that its guitarist Daniel Papkin (a.k.a. “Smoky Mountains”) describes as “outlaw country soul.”

Hank Floyd’s Noah Lambeth grew up among the rural orange groves just outside of Riverside, and the band still practices there, playing its blend of Hank Williams twang and old-school roots rock in a ramshackle farmhouse known as “the Grove.” Austin Hanks is an Alabama transplant with a wide, white smile and a Southern-boy charm who calls his gritty smoke-and-whiskey sound “three chords and a cloud of dust.”

The adage rings true today: The only rule for the new Cali-country is that there are no rules. Just take Parsons’ lesson about the beauty of the blend (rock, country, blues -- as long as it’s got soul, throw it on in) and run with it.

“One of the main reasons I love playing this kind of music is because I’m allowed to bring in all kinds of different influences,” says Auresha Smolarski, who plays country fiddle for CB Brand and the folk-influenced act the Mercy Sweet. “Whatever the song makes you feel, you take it from there and add to it, which is really what country music is about: people getting together and having a good time and making good music.”

“It’s a tradition of storytelling,” says CB Brand’s Brown. “And it’s our story now. Our suitcase has stickers from ports of call Willie and Waylon never sang about.”

Brown is right. These new bands are hailing from not only a different time but also a very different place. Many of L.A.’s country acts were weaned in city and suburb on a mix of punk, new wave, 1980s hair metal and melodic, melancholy Brit pop. But in the end, this doesn’t seem to matter much, because roots are about how you feel, not where you’re from.

“When I finally found country music, a whole new avenue opened up to me,” Hank Floyd’s Lambeth remembers. “I was playing Brit pop stuff at the time. What first attracted me to country was that I could write exactly what I was feeling. I could put it so plain in just three chords, and it was honest and it was real.”

Lambeth’s sentiment is echoed by the other artists, many of whom spent time in rock bands and found that the genre left something to be desired in terms of lyrical narrative and raw sincerity. For the country players here, this particular brand of music allows them to convey an emotional vulnerability they were unable to express with rock ‘n’ roll.

Goldberg of the Idaho Falls was exposed to country from an early age, but it wasn’t until recently that she began to dedicate herself to the genre. “I was playing in a rock band for a long time,” she recalls, “but when I started playing pedal steel, I started listening to this music all the time. There is just something so heartfelt and so touching about this music.”

Brown agrees. “I’d always favored country sounds, beer-joint music.”

He possesses a near-encyclopedic knowledge of country music history (his manner of speech is more mid-1800s than early 21st century) and was drawn here in large part by the city’s vital country music past. “It’s the westward tendency. Go west! First Nashville, then Austin, now California,” he says. “But this place has always been in the thick of it. This is where it all began, so it’s fitting that it all start here again.”

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Around town

Hank Floyd, Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles. Tonight at 8. (323) 463-0204. Also, Silver Lake Lounge, 2906 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Next Thursday, 9 p.m. (323) 663-9636.

CB Brand, Gram Fest, Saturday. Venue not set at press time. (909) 795-7359.

Idaho Falls, radio appearance on “Blues Hotel,” KXLU-FM (88.9), Oct. 23, midnight; Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., Los Angeles, Oct. 30, 10 p.m. (213) 833-2843.

Austin Hanks, Genghis Cohen Rural Revival, 740 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. Monday, 9:30 p.m. (323) 653-0640.

Jonny Kaplan, Free & Easy at the Scene, 806 E. Colorado Blvd., Glendale. Friday nights, 10 p.m., except this Friday. (818) 241-7029.