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.”

Because Rick Rubin is one of the last guys out there that’s gonna be like, “This is what you did that was good.”  I mean, he’s done it with a lot of people, you know.

 

Jake: Neil Diamond.  I gotta fit Neil Diamond into every interview.

 

I gotta be honest with you, I really like Neil Diamond. His performance in the “Last Waltz…my mom was big Neil Diamond fan.

 

Jake:  He’s the Fugazi of 70’s band rock.

 

Matt: Don’t put that down!

 

Jake:  It’s true! You try to play “Cherry, Cherry”! That shit’s …like…Fugazi!

 

Matt: Why is that like Fugazi?

 

Jake: Learn the song, man!  It’s really, it’s really clever. It’s really, very clever.

 

Austin: Are we still talking about Neil Diamond?

 

Jake: Not anymore.

 

Matt: It’s four chords!!!

 

Jake: Time changes, man! It’s fucking brilliant!

 

Alright, I want to know about the creative process.

 

Austin: No creative process.

 

Jake: It usually starts with the riff and then we kind of build it from there.  It varies pretty widely.

 

Matt: It’s usually, like, the band fleshes it out.

 

Austin: Matt’ll come in with a chord progression and lyrics and everything. And we’ll flesh it all out and, you know, I’ll show him how to play cool guitar things with them.

 

Matt: Usually, if we come in with a riff, it’s not gonna go anywhere but bad.  It usually turns pretty bad.  There’s been a few successes, but, for the most part, if there’s not a vision behind…like usually probably like 75% of the time we usually have a concise vision.  This is what we were thinking about a verse. This is what we were thinking about a chorus.  And here’s the tie-in and other songs are kind of I would say, maybe like a small fraction are written from a riff.

 

Austin: We don’t have a lot of time.  We’re on the road so much, you know, like a couple months ago we were hanging out in the studio and, uh…(orders another margarita)

If we have time to hang out and goof off, you know, in the space, we’ll come up with a couple cool ideas and then …but the thing is, we get kicked around, you know, for three or four months and during that its so sporadic.  It’s hard, you know, because we’re on the road all the time.

But it’s stuff like that.  And we’ll end up in the back of the van trying to like figure out shit on the acoustic guitar and that shit’s hard!

 

Matt: Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do now.  I’m in the mode of trying to write a song on the acoustic guitar and trying to translate that into the band.  And we don’t know if that’s gonna really work but I sure hope that it does.

 

What are some of the things that sort of inspired your songwriting?

 

Austin: Good things?  All things that are good?

 

There’s an aggressiveness to your songs. . Where does that come from? 
You guys are coming out of Austin and, I hate to go this route, but it’s a pretty politically-charged town and it seems that that comes out in your music.

 

Matt: You know, it does.  And it ties into what the record was called.  It’s the whole vibe of the record, you know.  With the first record, we were in a very hot place above a bar with no AC and it turns into a very kind of angry feeling when you’re trapped up there.  And the songs become a little more aggressive. 

And, you know, we were playing live a lot and when you do that and when you’ve got 30 minutes to convince a crowd that wants to hear high energy shit, they don’t really care for - you gotta have stuff that’s pumping and that you can get behind and if its not?  It quickly goes out of the set and eventually doesn’t make the record.  That’s how we’ve done it.

And the second record was made more, for more of a refined sound.  And we were having fun and now.  It’s time for something new. 

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.  I have a lot of old demos of Kurt Cobain, and you can buy demos of Billy Corgan, you know.  You can buy...Neil Diamond.  And they all started on acoustic guitars and a melody lines and they built them up.  You know that whole Siamese Dream record?  You could break that down into five chords nearly every song and then he supplies guitar and melody riffs over it but the song was essentially just a small piece.  That’s kind of what I would like to tack onto the next record and that’s something that we haven’t really done on the older stuff.  You can’t really do that with our older songs.  It probably wouldn’t be very interesting.

 

Austin: And, you know, the other thing is, we haven’t really had like time to really write like a record. The last two records we wrote…the first record we wrote and recorded in less than a month, in like 2 or 3 weeks.

 

Matt: We had time on the last record?

 

Austin: We had like a month or a month and a half, maybe.  But I mean it was pretty much like we were in the studio for a week, pretty much just kind of like pounding it out.  We’ve never had time to just sit down and let things stretch out for like a month or two.

 

Matt: I think the last two records have been the search for the ultimate riff…and now it’s the search for the song.

 

Austin: That sounded really pretentious.

 

Jake: The trick with all that is to capture it with the same kind of relative energy that we play with live.

 

Austin: Which is also a problem because we haven’t been able to do that on record. I mean, the two records that we have, they’re good records, but they don’t, you know, if you go see us live its two different worlds.

 

Jake: Well, its getting them as close as we can to those two things.  You know, it’s like what’s the best sounding record we can put out and still play it live and have some pull to it?

 

So your fans have a pretty huge influence on the direction of the band?

 

Jake: Well, not necessarily. I mean we like to - well obviously we want them to freak out and stuff.  I mean, I guess it’s a consideration, but its not necessarily a major thing.

One thing that I can say about this band for any other bands that I’ve been, nearly everything that we‘ve ever done has been done organic.  And something that was created was created out of something that we all got off on.   You know, there’s nothing that’s really like, “Oooh! We need to keep playing that song!”  Some songs will get a little boring on the set and we’ll pull them, but that rarely happens. 

For the most part, we kind of think that whatever we get off on we’ll show up on stage and our fans will get off on.  I think that’s the magic of it,  I think that the minute you start trying to fake it, people see that, and they’re not gonna like it as much.  I think speaking for myself…

 

A guy walks by with a dollar bill in exchange for a cigarette.  Jake hands him a Parliament, gives him a light, and waves off the dollar, “Don’t worry about it, man.” 

 

I just think that that’s the secret to whatever success that we’ve had.  Is that we’re just trying to be honest about it, about what we do, and I think that people respond to that. I think that, when people talk about the bullshit in modern rock and all that, I think it’s because people can sense that there’s not a lot of honesty.

 

As far as I know you guys aren’t signed and it’s been a completely DIY venture.

 

Band: Absolutely! Still is.

 

Jake: ‘Till I plug my fax machine back in.

Are you guys trying to stick to that? It’s a hard thing to pass up the opportunity.

I mean at what point do your convictions about DIY get compromised?

 

Jake: You know, I think that this goes back to what we were just talking about.  We’re not going to go on stage and do something that we don’t believe in.  So if someone came to us and said you guys can do stuff that you believe in and we’ll reward you for that and you can do it the way you want to, you know, show me where to sign.

The way the industry is it almost makes more sense in a lot of ways.  We’ve done it more out of wanting to keep control of what we hold dear, you know, but in a lot of ways there’s just not that kind of industry anymore.  You know, if they put us in jump shoots and eyeliner and, you know, make us play in sequins and had their way with us - whoever those people are I’ve never met them.

 

Austin: They’re there.  They’re not interested in us!  That’s for damn sure.

 

Jake: The people in the industry that are interested in us are the people that believe in what we are doing.  But, until we can prove that we can make them a lot of money, then it doesn’t really matter.  I mean, they like our songs and that gets them out to the shows.  They love what we do but that doesn’t make them want to write our checks, which is fine.  We’ll just keep doing it ourselves and keeping all the money.

 

Matt: I mean everybody’s selling out now anyways I’m not sure if the term applies anymore.

 

How are you all funding the tour?

 

Band: We work a lot. We have jobs.  Day jobs.

 

Matt: They’re not being completely honest about it. We make money on the road.  We sell a lot of merchandise.  So the band is self-sustained within the band.  But when you’re out on the road for two or three weeks at a time, you’re not here working so you have to make up for that money somehow, you know.  And you might get paid a little bit out of the band and everybody is getting their per diems now and then. I mean, you know, it’s not this – it’s not our parents, if that’s what you’re asking.  We’re a pretty blue collar band and our fans know that too.  We’ve never had any help from any kind of outside sources that have said, you know, “Here’s 20 grand. Now go get famous!”  Nothing like that.

But we work very hard and we don’t, you know, I watch what I do. I mean, of course I want to go out every night on 6^th St. and get as drunk as I can and put as much shit in my body as I possibly can. But I don’t, because I can’t afford it.  But I get to go out and travel the country and play in front of tons of people and get as fucked up as I want to for free, because I’m in the band.  That’s the give-and-take, man.  You decide how you want to do that in the end, but its gotten a lot better.

The goal was at the end of this year we were gonna be able to quit our jobs.

 

Austin: And, theoretically, it looks like we’re gonna reach that goal.

 

Matt: And, theoretically, that looks like it’s gonna happen.  But you never know until the day you walk into your boss and say, “Hey motherfuckers! I’m quittin’!”

You know, that’s what I think. You know, when you’re 15 years old and you tell your parents your gonna be a writer.  I mean, nobody really believes that you can do it.  And whenever you pick up a guitar and join a band, nobody’s gonna be like, “You’re gonna be famous!” No one thinks that!

Except for you and it’s gonna be nice one day to finally -because now the reality is starting to really happen. It’s not some sort of farfetched dream.  And the day that that happens, it’s gonna be pretty exciting.

 

Austin:  I’m gonna do what I want to do now!

 

Matt: Like I said, it’s starting to become a reality.

 

Austin: There’s a glimmer at the end of the tunnel.

 

Matt: There’s a glimmer and we’re staring at it.

 

Jake: I hope that light’s not an oncoming train.

 

Which brings me to the tour, this is the biggest tour you guys have had…

 

Jake: Well, we just got off of the Local H tour opening for them, which was totally awesome. But this is definitely the biggest rooms we’ve ever played in.

 

The check comes and Jake takes care of it. 
* (Note from author:  Thanks again....!)

 

But, yeah, that’s gonna be great. We did three days in Texas with Toadies in December and we had an awesome time with them. They’re really great guys. I mean, they fucking rock! Yeah, they’re just awesome.  There’s a mutual admiration.

 

Austin: And the crowds were good too, you know.  Sometimes, you know, we’d go out with Local H and their opening bands can get a hard time. We usually win a crowd over live pretty quickly but with the Toadies - those shows, we’d get out there and like by the third song everybody was jumping and it’s a pretty exciting feeling when there’s like 3000 people.  We’re used to playing shows where there’s like 30 people and they’re still having a good time but…

 

Matt: Well, that’s not entirely true.  There’s a real defeatist attitude in the band sometimes.  We could sell out places in Austin or places in Texas, but he’s talking about when you go to a place you haven’t been to and you’re headlining a show because you’re on Guitar Hero and there’s like 30 people there.  You know, it does get lonely.

 

Tell me about how the Guitar Hero gig came about.

 

Jake: Trevor, our bass player, met a guy and introduced him to the band and he came to see us at our showcase two years ago at SXSW.

 

Did you know who he was?

 

Jake: No. No idea. No.  Actually I had no idea who he was until we were headed to an after party.

 

Matt: He couldn’t get in.

 

Jake: He couldn’t get into our showcase.

 

Matt: He stood watching from the street.

 

Jake: Yeah, so he ended up coming back to an after party with us and we stopped up at a 7 Eleven up here. He was like, “C’mon in!“  He ended up buying cigarettes and stuff and we got back in the van and we started talking. He was like, “Yeah, you guys like video games?” And I was like, “ Yeah, I like video games.” And he was like “ Well, if you could have your choice, would you rather be on Tony Hawk or Guitar Hero?” And I’m like, “Guitar Hero would be cool.” And he was like, “OK” And we ended up going to this after party and just hung out and drank till whatever ‘o’ clock in the morning. And we weren’t sure about if it was actually it.

 

Matt: I knew that he was with GameVision, Trevor had known.  He couldn’t get into the showcase.

 
Jake stands up to leave for another appointment. 
Handshakes and well-wishing…more gratitude for the beers.

So he came to the showcase and he couldn’t get in.  And what happened is the club, the showcase was sold out but the room wasn’t sold out.  It was weird.  They let in 200 people and then they stopped letting them in and there was a line like 30 people deep in the street trying to get in during our set.  It was one of those venues where you can see the show from the street, you remember that?

 

Austin: Yeah, it was at Bourbon or whatever.

 

Matt: And I’m looking out there and there’s a couple people we knew.  So I started pointing, and they started jumping up and down and then we figured out while we were playing that they wouldn’t let the people in.  So, while we were playing, Jake, I remember, Jake did this…but I got on the microphone and started parading the guys at the front and started screaming, “Let these fucking people in!!!”

 

Austin: Yeah! We were all yelling at the door guy.

 

Matt: And there were like 30 people over on the side that weren’t even watching the show.  I was like, “Let these fucking people in!!! They want to see our band!!!!”  And then Jake started throwing drum sticks at the security guy and that’s when Brandon (from Guitar Hero), when he got back to us, he was like, “That was the most rock and roll thing I ever saw!!!” And then he got in the van with us and bought us cigarettes ‘cause we were actually goin’ to some ‘unnamed bar’ for drinks after hours.

 

Austin: He’s like one of our best friends now.  Yeah, he’s pretty cool.

At this point, the recorder cuts out.
For what its worth, this interview was a rare opportunity where I’ve gotten to know a band before seeing them live or hearing any of their albums in their entirety.

But I do know that, a self-sustaining band that can take their show on the road for nearly two months has got something to show, something to say… So I suggest you get out there too for a look and a listen.