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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The Hard Left: Lifers
Wednesday 07 March @ 15:47:48 |
  by NATHAN DEAN
It's easy to be excited about being in a band in your twenties. Free beer as gig payment may even seem like a good deal when there aren't any other responsibilities on one's plate. But fast-forward a decade or two and the life of a still striving rock and roller is often thought of as considerably less glamorous, one of the many reasons so many once fervently devoted musicians hang up their axes for good as they enter mid life. That's why it's always refreshing for me to discover a quality new act on the Twin Cities scene that's made up of local vets whose work I've already appreciated in other contexts. Such is the case with the Hard Left, a "new" garage rockin' quartet whose members have spent the better parts of decades living the rock (complete with bad-luck record label breaks, squalid living-out-of-a-van tours and self-destructive bandmates).
Singer/guitarist Brian Drake cut his teeth with such outfits as 60 Cycle Hum and Idiot Savants; drummer Pat McKenna and lead guitarist Tom Lischmann played in the Bleeding Hearts (featuring 'Mats firebrand Bob Stinson shortly before his untimely demise); and bassist Scott Glaser was in Octopus Harem--and that's just the short list.
The Hard Left represents a logical extension of the members' previous work, a rough-and-ready take on classic Midwestern power pop that anyone with a love for spiky guitars and soaring choruses will warm up to instantly. Jokingly naming their eight-song mini-album debut The Avant Garde Sounds of the Hard Left, the group's meat-and-potatoes rock couldn't be less trendy--and that's what makes it so damn enjoyable. Drake's biting nasality feels Tom Petty-ish at points, Lischman's wildfire riffs clearly show evidence of his time as Stinson's axe-wielding sparring partner, and the band's rhythm section chugs along with a sturdy efficiency that never calls attention to itself but is clearly the glue that holds all the righteous riffage together.
"I don't think you really know if any group has that special something happening until you get up there and actually play in front of people," admits Drake when asked if his years of experience enabled him to tell if the Hard Left were on to something special at the outset. "We played our first show on Dec. 22, 2005, at the Fine Line, opening for the Flamin' Ohs and we got a really good response right away, so that's when we thought, 'Oh, this could be something.' I had a bucket full of songs that I wanted to at least get recorded. We decided to go in and do a demo just to get more shows because the response seemed good."
 What was intended as a demo to help book a few gigs soon turned into far more once the quartet made its way to Ed Ackerson's Flowers Studio in Uptown Minneapolis to record. "Once we got in there we all just felt really good about the songs and Ed was so encouraging that we just decided, What the hell, let's put this thing out,'" recalls Drake. "We've all been around the block enough that nobody's got stars in their eyes, but we realized that as a group we were new enough we could maybe generate a little excitement."
Plenty of excitement has come the Hard Left's way since. Their tried-and-true tunes immediately resonated with the hardcore power pop devotees that drive specialty retailers like Not Lame Records (notlame.com). "It seems like ever since we bothered to put up a MySpace page people have been seeking us out," says a clearly pleased Drake whose band was also recently asked to submit a song for a 7" release on Australian indie label Smashed Records.
In addition to pasty-faced guys with Alex Chilton man-crushes, the Hard Left have managed to make fans of a living rock and roll legend, none other than E Street band guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Van Zandt currently hosts a nationally syndicated hit radio show ("Little Steven's Underground Garage") specializing in pedal-to-the-metal garage rock. As part of a promotion in conjunction with a "Little Steven"-curated tour featuring the reunited New York Dolls, Van Zandt selected three local bands (out of a deluge of entries) from each city on the itinerary to participate in a virtual battle of the bands. Each of the group's songs were posted on the contest's website and the public selected a winner to play the coveted gig spot. The Hard Left ended up taking home the honor for the Minneapolis date.
"That was already one of the most highly anticipated tours of the last 20 years for me personally because I'm such a huge New York Dolls fan," recalls Drake. "The whole night was an amazing experience. All of us had come from years of doing van tours so it was really surreal when guitar techs were coming up to us being like, 'Hey, can I tune that?'"
Bands who have had lesser brushes with stardom tend to fixate on their next big break, but clearly Drake and his seasoned compatriots aren't about to get starry-eyed--they're in it for the long haul, whether the break comes or not.
"That same feeling is still there when I was 16 and playing music," says Drake when asked about his perseverance in a game that has burned out more than a few. "The innocence is long gone, but the feeling isn't. Somebody once told me, 'You might not ever make it but that doesn't mean that you weren't born to do it.' I still get a total charge out of getting up there and making people clap. When we won that contest and played to a packed house, that was an amazing feeling but it was just as much fun a few weeks later when we played a bar show to like 25 people who were going apeshit over it. It feels just as good. It's like being in a gang. I'm sure there's some sort of adolescent arrested development going on, but that's rock 'n' roll, right?" ||
The Hard Left play on Fri., March 9, at the Turf Club with Ol' Yeller and Landing Gear. 9 p.m. $TBA. 21+. The Corner of University and Snelling Aves., St. Paul. 651-647-0486. For more on the Hard Left visit their official website at thehardleft.com.
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