I have to admit, I knew very little about who the Lions were or their music before doing this interview. Of course, I had heard word of them in passing. Their name seemed to echo and whisper from behind Lone Star bottles and cigarette smoke at joints like Trophy’s, Club DeVille, and Emo’s.

I’ve been out of town for the last three years. Three years during which Lions (comprised of Matt Drenik on vocals and guitar, Austin Kalman on lead guitar, Trevor Sutcliffe on bass, and Jake Perlman on the drums) have literally exploded from the Austin music scene. The meteoric rise of Lions from an impromptu Emo’s gig in July 2005 to a tour with the Toadies and a track appearance on Guitar Hero III seems too surreal, too absurd to be actually happening.

The lovely crunkbox photographer, Ashley, and I sat down with the guys from Lions for a few beers at the equally surreal and absurd front patio seating at Guerro’s Taco Bar on South Congress. Unfortunately, Trevor, the bassist, was stranded somewhere in the nether regions of north Austin on account of an uncooperative automobile and was spared the task of fielding the questions of a music journalist over a makeshift recording device placed strategically amongst margarita glasses, Dos Equis bottles, and smoking ashtrays.

After all the routine of introductions and mindless banter, we started from the beginning (more or less) when Jake and Austin were playing gigs with The Palms School Choir, a musical group made up of professional musicians and grade school kids between third and fifth grade who perform original material alongside cover tunes ranging from Wilco to The Flaming Lips..



photos courtesy of Ashley Cole

 

Jake: “…but we did a lot of good stuff. We did the Today Show, played ACL for a few years.  It was a blast, great songs, and not as creepy as it sounds.”

 

Austin:  “It was fun, ‘cause a lot of it was like 8AM shows for teachers conferences and stuff.  So we’d all show up, you know, either still drunk or wickedly hung over and be huddled out back smoking cigarettes behind the building drinking coffee.”

 

Jake: Yeah, you don’t wanna smoke around the kids.  A gig’s a gig…I got wicked stoned with Al Roker.

 

Really?  I always suspected Al Roker.

 

Jake: No! Not really. He’s actually a very sweet man.

 

Out of nowhere, Matt arrives and takes a seat.

 

Matt:  “I’m always late…”

I ask Matt where he’s originally from.

 

Matt: I’m from Ohio originally.

 

Tell me about your formative musical years…

 

Matt: I went to the battle of the bands when I was 16, and there was this band Ta Ja Ra, a reggae band.  It was packed, and my friend Andy McFarlane was singing and he had the crowd rocking with his band. That’s when I thought to myself, “That would be a good thing to do.”

That’s when it all began. When I went and saw Ta Ja Ra.  I betcha no one’s talked about that band.  You know, I was thinking about it about six months ago.  I was wondering if I could find a tape for it, because I’m sure it was pretty bad.  Now.   But, looking back, I remember they had this song called “Coming in with Force” that I thought was pretty good.

 

Jake:  Did they win?

 

Matt: I don’t know. I don’t think so.  They were…you know…he was good.

 

He’d probably be flattered if he ever knew.

 

Austin: I didn’t want to be a musician until I was like 19.  And some kids are, you know, they say they knew from day one or "I started playing when I was five years old" or whatever.  But I was gonna be either a writer or an anthropologist and major in lit and psychology. Then I went with this friend of mine to Denton and we dropped a bunch of acid with this awesome jazz piano player guy she knew.  We were just hangin’ out and she was like. “Hey! Let’s go get some acid!” I was like, “Alright.” 

And so we’re hangin’ out with this guy named Pete Grungol, who’s a really amazing jazz pianist, and, uh, we end up like getting naked for no reason.  You know what a melodeca is?  It’s an air-powered keyboard. You blow into it when you play. So he busts this out and we’re listening to Ornette Coleman and he starts accompanying Ornett Coleman songs on the melodeca! Just shredding on this thing and I’m bombed out of my mind, naked, on acid, sitting on the living room floor saying, ‘I wanna do that.’ And I went and bought a guitar the next day.  Spent a year teaching myself to play.

 

The guitar?  You decided the guitar is the way to go from a melodica?

 

Austin: Yeah, well, piano is really hard to learn how to play and the guitar is easier to learn to play.

 

They have the talk box…

 

Austin: Oh yeah! I rocked the talkbox.  On the last record anyway.

 

The new album “No Generation”. First, tell me about the title.

 

Jake: It was one of Matt’s lyrics that really rang true to me.

Matt: This where we’re gonna talk about how great of artists we are right now.

Jake had titled this song off of a lyric that I wrote that was in the song. And we had talked about the idea of what we were gonna call the record and that one stuck out.  I think I wrote you guys an email about that about why it should be called that.  Some pretentious email.

 

It’d be really awesome if you could forward that email to me.

 

Matt: No way!

 

Jake: We deleted all the copies of that.

 

Matt: I don’t even know what I said really something about the social views of the band and how we should call it that because of all those views.

 

Austin: It was like, remember when we were kids and it was the 90s, you know. We were kids in the 90’s and we all had our big grunge thing, and the kids in the 80s had their Devo thing or their cocaine or whatever they had.  And it seems like, since the 60’s, every generation has kind of had a thing, you know.  And a thing that was like a formative experience when their younger in life, you know.  Now that everything’s so fragmented that doesn’t really happen anymore.  Except for, you know, Britney Spears and fucking, you know, Flight of the Concords. And you’ve got all this Internet culture.

 

Matt: There’s no culture in pop culture anymore.  It’s just POP.

 

Jake: …and its shattered everywhere

 

Matt: It’s shattered everywhere and if you have these corporate places like Hot Topic and they’re telling you what’s cool and what’s not you might have a problem.  And I think that’s what the overall view of the record title was.

 

Jake: Here’s the perfect example. I didn’t answer your question about the formative part.  The first concert I ever went to was in 1984, the Jackson Victory tour.  The second concert I went to was Black Flag.  A fragmented culture can be brought together in an amalgamated way but a lot of  - the way that I had to go buy punk records - they weren’t available at Sam Goodie or Musicland or Tower (well, they were, there wasn’t a Tower in Kansas city) but …

 

Austin: …you couldn’t download them.

 

Jake: Yeah, you couldn’t download and buy them. You had to search them out. It wasn’t like there was a vintage clothing store on every corner.  We had to go to the flea market every other weekend.

There’s something that is missing in the hunt to live a certain way and have a certain kind of culture.  And now that it’s made easier, there aren’t more people living, for a lack of better word, alternatively.

People are living in a very segmented way.  People are like, “I like this kind of music and this is all I like,” and they aren’t willing to accept different things.  And I think it’s sad because it’s so easy.  I have an 18 year old sis and I’m like,  “Man! It must be awesome for you to be able to like go download Ornette Coleman and then go download the Dead Kennedys!” And she’s like, “No I just like the Dead Kennedys.  Who’s Ornette Coleman?” And I‘m like, OK, sis, here we go.”
 You think that it would be easier and that more people would get into it but they don’t. And its just sad.

 

I had a hamper full of cassette tapes till I was 16…because that was the only way I could get “Never Mind the Bullocks”

 

Jake: Right.

 

Austin: Or your friends gave you stuff.

 

Jake: The first thing I did when I was a sophomore in high school was I bought four cases of blank tape and gave them to all the seniors and juniors I knew, that I would go to Black Flag shows with or whatever. And I got “Cheech and Chong” on one side “Never Mind the Bullocks” on the other side, you know, crazy shit.  But that’s what educated me and kids have it so much easier now.  They just don’t use the social skills of the technology to gain the proper use of the technology anymore.

 

Matt: There’s not that thrill of discovery anymore.

 

Jake: Exactly. There shouldn’t be a level playing field.  There should be something’s that are more special because of …

I know I used to say I could remember a thousand CDs that I have and I remembered where I bought every single one and kids now can just say I got them off iTunes or I got them all off Kazaa and…

 

..and they’re rarely albums, mostly just singles…

 

Jake: …and that sucks!

 

Matt: So I got in an argument the other day, about I thought that Maroon 5, you know, the band, would be in Hot Topic.  I assumed that they were a Hot Topic band.

 

Why?

 

Austin: No, they're like a soul band.

 

Jake: And Hot Topic caters to the, you know, AFI, sort of Panic in the Disco.  Maroon 5 are more of a soul band.

 

Matt: Like SOUL soul?  Like Tina Turner soul?  What do mean soul?

 

Jake: Like an R&B band.

 

Austin: Like Jamiroquai.

 

Matt: Jamiroquai??  Well I don’t know why I thought that they would be.  Because I always thought that Hot Topic just tried to package commercial rock bands and that they were guilty of making everything so bland.  Like, if you were sponsored by hot topic that was like, “well…HA!  Fuck you!”

 

Matt: Well, what made kinds of bands like that cool for me was the fact that you had to find them.  And it was kind of against the parents will to have that be in the household.  And now you go and buy a Goth outfit or you buy a punk rock outfit and you listen to - I mean, that shit going on now is pretty watered-down in my book.  It’s pretty boring, pretty melodic.

 

Jake: And they’re not making it their own.

 

Matt: Well, I just thought that they would have it, Maroon 5.  And I got in this argument with my girlfriend and she was adamant that they don’t and I just couldn’t take no for an answer.  So I actually called up Hot topic in town and they were like, “No! We don’t sell anything of Maroon 5.”

I guess to end the topic of the last question, the hot topic of why we called the record this, is that, you know, a lot of bands used to turn me - when I was a kid you’d get turned onto music, it was just cool, the radio was better a lot of those bands had a lot of great - and even bands that we didn’t like in the late 90’s, you can look at them now and be like, “Well, they’re pretty good compared to what’s going on now,”  you know.  ‘Cause a lot of that shit I thought was pretty watered-down and now its like, “God…that’s really great stuff compared to what’s goin’ on now.  And nothing’s really turned, I think, all of us on in music in a long time and I think that’s apart of the record.

 

Jake: There are little bits and pieces, you know.  You know, a new record comes out and someone says, “Oh guys, you should check this out its really cool!” And you’re like, “OK.”  And there’s a few bits and pieces of it that are like, “Well, that sounds OK, but really? That sounds…”

I don’t know, and it’s really hard to find new bands or new records that are really cool or really good all the way through a record or all the way through a show.

Matt: Or that are just like trying to be progressive and they’re not trying to like just trying to imitate the same thing.  We heard the new Hives record as a band and, personally, we couldn’t believe it. We were like, “This is fucking awful!” I just didn’t like it. They put out four records that sound...the same.

Jake: Well, except for the shitty stuff on the new record.

Matt: It was, like, it was like Maroon 5 or something.

 

Jake: You know, I keep waiting. I’ve been waiting for like 5 or 6 years now for someone to come and put out a major label record that kind of saves rock and roll.  And I just heard on the radio the other day that ZZ Top are going back into the studio for a new record that is gonna be produced Rick Rubin, which means that, probably no synths no drum machines. You know, if that happens, where, you know, it’s a solid rock record, probably no one will buy it.  But people that are in bands and that are ZZ Top fans will be like, “OK. Billy Gibbons can still write a song, still a badass guitarist.”