Finding treasure in the Valley through Old Californio
By Naughty Mickie  notymickie@earthlink.net

I first learned of Old Californio through a press release. An unsigned band based in the Pasadena environs of the San Gabriel Valley area of California isn't that unusual, but one that practices and records in a chicken coop-- now that's different. Intrigued I listened to their CD and before the third cut I knew I had to interview them... hopefully I'd get to see their digs in the process.

Old Californio consists of vocalist and guitarist Rich Dembowski, guitarist Woody Aplanalp, bassist Jason Chesney, Levi Nunez on keyboards and drummer Justin Smith. The band self-released "Westering Again" (Californio Records) on April 7, 2009, which was co-produced by Grammy Award-winning  producer Alfonso Rodenas (Mark Olson, Ben Vaughn, Los Tigres Del Norte) and mixed and mastered at Las Virgenes Recording. Also on the album are guitarist Dave Gleason (Mike Stinton, Dave Gleason's Wasted Days),  bassist Tony Russell, accordionist Debra Tala, trumpeter Slim Zwerling (Ben Vaughn Band) and pianist Dan Mudd.

Old Californio's influences include Moby Grape, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Spirit, Canned Heat Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead. Their sound is folky rock inset with lyrics all based in California, with a special emphasis on the San Gabriel Valley. Their music may seem extremely focused, but it is easygoing and down-home enough that just about anyone in the world could find something it in to which they relate.

I park my car on a skinny street and find my way to the back of a simple house. There, I discover Dembowski screening album covers on a picnic bench underneath a bougainvillea festooned gazebo. He tells me that the area was originally all farms and his house was built in 1926. It had a chicken coop structure, which featured two rooms for chickens plus a garage.

When Demboski moved in, it was obvious that the space was a chicken shack and garage-- it smelled bad and there were opossums and skunks and other creatures living in and underneath it. It had to be cleaned and refurbished in steps over several years. The coop house leaked, so had to be reroofed, the garage walls were built up and the door and windows put in. Later the chicken coop was turned into useable space, in fact, Smith, who was living in the back room of the main house when Dembowski's son was born, moved into the converted coop and stayed there until he got the house a couple of doors down in 2003. The structure then became a studio. The garage has always been used for playing music.

All told, Dembowski has lived at the house for 11 years and the chicken coop has been a studio for the past five- three albums have been recorded there.

"(The main room) had maybe 18-24 little coops where you could keep the hens. We took all that out and that made space for the recording unit here," Dembowski says.

The garage is the rehearsal and main recording room, the first chicken coop area is the engineering section and vocal recording area and the second outer coop is another sound booth. Simply speaking in the space proved that the sound is bouncy.
 
"It gets a really warm sound, but you're stuck with it," Dembowski agrees. "If you wanted a more modern sound, you couldn't get it in here."

But it's perfect for Old Californio.

Dembowski goes on, "The idea behind the album was this is all we have, we don't have a lot of money, let's make it sound like it does in here, but as clean as possible."

Old Californio asked their producer to not over-produce "Westering Again" and to keep it as close to the original recording as possible, but still make the sound consistent from song to song. The album was recorded over a year as well, so that affected the sound too.

Smith states how the band formed, "Rich was writing a bunch of songs and he was starting to put them together on his own in the studio, just piecing them together bit by bit. It was late 2005, 2006 and he asked me to help out on some of the tunes he was doing, so we put out this first little album of stuff that was called 'Along the Cosmic Grass.' We had a friend, Greg Totten, who had asked us to play his wedding so we got the band together and figured as long  as we were doing this, we might as well turn this into a live thing."

"The idea was not to have a band per se." Dembowski explains, "We were all tired of being in bands and trying to 'make it.' I came up with the idea of Old Californio that would me with some sort of idea behind it all and once a year I would write an album because I like writing and then I would put whoever together, whoever wanted to do it who could do it because all of us are busy doing music elsewhere. I'd come up with 10 or 15 songs a year and we'd record them and go do a few gigs to promote it and then go on to the next one. Instead of waiting for a record company to give us a deal, just do it ourselves and have fun, create new songs, promote ourselves."

Chesney adds. "We had been playing together in different things for quite a while. It's a fact for a bunch of like-minded people to get together, we all grew up listening to the same things, and we already had developed a language together so it's really about having fun rather than let's go out and promote ourselves or let's try to make it, it's let's really go have fun."

I know what I think about their sound, but I want to hear their thoughts.

"Californian, I tend to write about geography and geology and California history," states Dembowski.  "A lot of it has to do when we all play together here in the garage," says Smith. "Usually you're getting together on a hot, sunny day and playing all day and drinking beer and barbecuing afterwards and letting this Southern California heat settle on us. It seems like that's present in our sound."

"I'm always writing words and then I'll put them to music at one point," Dembowski goes on. "It's not consistent, it's different every time. I'm always writing songs. Because I play all day at work, I'm constantly coming up with ideas. Then I'll go through a period of reading a lot, of hiking a lot, of trying not to write and just observing stuff, that would go on for months and then I'll sit down and write a lot."

Dembowski shares that he sets aside time to write, "And then inspiration comes, sometimes. I don't like being on stage and playing, I like making up music. I love sitting and reading and coming up with lyrics and I do that all year round. I come in with completely finished pieces the way I see them on acoustic guitar and I usually have a demo of some sort, I record on my own all the time. When I give it to these guys, I never tell anybody what to play."

Chesney agrees, "There's a loose form around it and if something doesn't sound good, we tell one another."

"If the way I had them written does not translate to playing live, we change them a lot," says Dembowski. "It's a complete group effort."

"Live things tend to morph into whatever they're going to be. It's very organic," sums up Chesney.

I ask about the themes to the band's lyrics.

"I'm a big geography fan, so I study geography," responds Dembowski. "My big goal right now is to know all the plants in the San Gabriel Valley Mountains. I go hiking regularly and a lot of the lyrics refer to that. I love California history, because I work in a school, I teach a lot of it. I combine the writers I like, like Steinbeck has a huge influence, and geology and history and then combine them into what I'm doing, how I relate to myself and work through problems."

The songs are not necessarily stories.

"This last batch was a concerted effort to identify myself through my surroundings." Dembowski explains, "You play in so many bands where you're writing love songs, what's going on with me right now? I live right next to the San Gabriel Valley Mountains, I go hiking, I have my son who I hang out with, I have all these things that I do, let's just write about that via these vehicles of geology, geography, history. The original goal was to document what I'm going through and I could hand it off and my son could see what I was going through, hear it, and I'd be able to grapple with it."

"A lot of it seems to be about having a sense of self-sufficiency," offers Smith. "Like you don't ask for anything from the outside, you rely on yourself.

During the summertime you're growing vegetables over here and raiding my orange tree next door. It's like how can we survive on as little as possible but still have a viable house with electricity and everything?"

When I comment about Old Californio being very DIY, the guys laugh, as at one time Dembowski didn't even know what DIY meant: "I'd don't have a cell phone, I don't have a computer, I don't watch TV, I'm completely out of the whole loop of stuff, I don't answer the phone."

Chesney teases that if he wants to speak with Dembowski, he has to talk to the answering machine, asking for someone else in the house to pick up the phone.

Dembowski gets serious, "We do everything. Our record company is us."

Smith and his girlfriend do the promotion for the band: "It came down to this, there are these avenues where we can do this ourselves so we'll be grassroots about it, we'll put all the responsibility in our own hands and that way we don't have to answer to anybody else. The only things we've had to outsource is having somebody actually mix what we finally came up with, an outside source of ears, and then having the discs printed because we don't have that technology. We're doing the covers ourselves."

The group was introduced to Alfonso Rodenas through a friend. Rodenas mastered the album. Nunez designed the album cover and had the screen made. The the company where he bought it normally does all the work, but Nunez convinced them to sell them the screen so the band could do its own printing.  Each album cover has to be silk-screened, folded and glued.

"It takes three days to do 150," Dembowski says looking around at his stacks of work. "But we've got 1,000, we've got a lot of work ahead of us. And there's a high failure rate and a learning curve. You want to make them as professional as possible."

"The whole goal was to make something that was unique, every one was going to be somewhat unique," adds Chesney.

Old Californio usually gigs close to home, but you can check out their music and ask for them to visit your town at www.myspace.com/oldcalifornio

Also visit my blogs at http://mickieszoo.blogspot.com and www.insidesocal.com/doodah

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