THE MOTHER HIPS
Tim Bluhm Interview
by Matt Dornan

We number thirty, those of us compacted inside the cosy quarters of Jack’s Coffee Shop, deep in the heart of New York’s West Village. The words “SOLD OUT” sprawled across the flyer on the door leave hopeful latecomers to stare mournfully through windowpanes to no avail. The fortunate few within sit contentedly while the tall blonde songwriter serenades us the California way. Drawing from a mental set-list and ceding to the occasional request, Tim Bluhm delivers beautiful, bare renditions of Mother Hips classics flanked by material from his three solo albums, unified by his gently commanding West Coast lilt and the pick and strum of a hardy acoustic guitar.
Some fifteen years since forming The Mother Hips, Bluhm boasts a formidable if largely overlooked back catalogue, from self-released to major label and back again. Mindful of (if essentially unimpressed by) any perceived contemporaries, his resolute music-first stance continues to reward the faithful and is undoubtedly deserving of a wider audience. With his band now signed to a new NY-based label (the first fruits of which, the Red Tandy EP, saw release in October ‘05 at the time of this meeting), an imminent second collaboration with fellow Hips vocalist/guitarist Greg Loiacono (under the Ball Point Birds moniker) and two recent solo projects (including the as-yet-unreleased ‘Wingbeats’ project - see below), Bluhm enters 2006 on a creative high.
Forty minutes prior to his set at Jack’s, Tim and I had relocated to a quiet bar where he talked about his various ongoing projects, his thoughts on music in the digital realm and the occasional musical hero.

What brought you to New York and Jon Salter’s Camera Records? With the experiences you’ve had with both major and indie labels, was there a sense of “here we go again” when you put pen to paper and struck this deal?
Despite the Hips' terrible track record with labels, I am still an optimist. The odds are in our favour! I was in NYC playing some solo shows and I met Jon one night. We had played on some of the same bills back in the mid-‘90s so we kind of knew each other already. He has this amazing drive and I could see right away that he was a man of his word. He is perhaps more motivated than anyone I can think of, and what is really amazing is that he is sensitive and sincere too. He has become a close friend and, even though he is just starting out, I feel really positive about that situation.

How’s it going to work having a New York-based label for a band so associated with California and the West Coast? It’s rare for you to travel East, correct?
Yeah, we rarely go to the East Coast. It’s actually an accidental strategy that is gonna work really well because [Jon] can service the West Coast easily, because it’s already in place. The existing fans are easy to reach and it’s a given, so the West Coast takes a lot less energy to cover. What we really need, if we’re gonna sustain ourselves and if we’re gonna grow and reach new people is to have a focused effort in other parts of the country and the world. New York is a great place to start because it’s so populist.

What is the current state of play with the Wingbeats album?
It’s not really. Nothing happened. It was surprising that I couldn’t get anything going with that. It was the sort of reaction to that, or the lack of reaction to that recording, had a lot to do with motivating me to get The Mother Hips going again. Not that that was entirely in my control, but when Greg expressed an interest in doing it again I was more than excited to do that, because it taught me a lot about the importance of a name. It made me realise how important The Mother Hips has been to my career and my lifestyle. I was pretty ambitious when The Mother Hips broke up. I figured I was the lead singer, and I was the main songwriter and I would inherit all the fans and all the business that was coming through. I found out pretty quickly that that was not the case. As much as I enjoy playing music in any format I definitely enjoy seeing it get received by more people as opposed to less people. My ego is involved [laughs]. I’m counting people in the audience, for sure. Hopefully I’ll release that record at some point.

Is it likely some of those Wingbeats songs will be absorbed into the new Mother Hips’ record?
Yes. ‘Cause some of them were Mother Hips songs that were absorbed into my solo project [laughs], that will be reabsorbed into The Mother Hips. So songs like I’m No Good, Deep Space Team, Why Try Hard When You’re Number One… those are songs that The Mother Hips recorded in the studio [for the Wingbeats project]. So I could just use those recordings but I don’t think I will because we’re really trying to go for a cohesive sound and we may rerecord them with different instrumentation. I think the new Mother Hips LP will be just like a Crazy Horse kinda thing, with two guitars, bass and drums. Not all that produced, y’know. Coming after ‘Green Hills of Earth’ which was essentially that, but was cooked, with lots of layering… I think we’re gonna accomplish that kind of fullness but without so many overdubs.

Recent songs like Envelope Please and Colonized highlight aspects of the entertainment industry that have little to do with creativity and artistic integrity. How do you reconcile any misgivings you may have about the record industry with the desire to create and be heard?
I think the reality of me making a living is as a musician, that’s my lot in life. I don’t really have any other way of making a living. But a song like Colonized isn’t so much about the music industry as being a human being in this capitalistic, market-heavy culture that we live in. It’s not coming from a musician, it’s coming from a consumer [laughs], an unwilling consumer. I am just constantly blown away by how much of our brain is bombarded with marketing. You trade your time and your life energy for money, and then you end up spending that money on things that are almost entirely useless and are about status. And everyone wants to look like a rich person, it’s hard to resist all that marketing pressure. To me that’s so glaringly obvious and I’m a victim of it as much as anybody else. The fact that we have to buy water? And the fact that we’re confronted with choices, like do you want to buy the expensive water because it’s “cooler” than the cheaper water? And cars as status symbols, I’m surrounded by that in California.

In an age where the download is increasingly becoming the format of choice, do you fear for the future of “real” music, or does it simply signal the further alienation of the audiophile? You seem to be striking a good balance with your download-only music.
The guys who do our website--Fast Atmosphere--are really good about finding decent stuff to offer on our website and having it be exclusive drives traffic through for sure. I actually like the concept of downloading music--‘though the only song I've ever bought from iTunes is Sail On by The Commodores--because it takes the CD out of the picture for the most part. CD is a horrible, uncompelling format. Vinyl is coming back strong and for good reason. It looks great, sounds great and lasts far longer than CD. I heard of a band, I think from the UK, that includes a coupon inside the vinyl package that allows the purchaser to download the album one time for free, so you can buy the vinyl and have it at home but you also get to load the music into your iPod or whatever. I am hoping to do the same thing.

Since you announced the split of The Mother Hips, you’ve each undertaken a variety of different projects. Did this time away open the door to different styles of writing that didn’t fit with the band’s remit?
Yeah, and I feel like I’ve always written stuff that didn’t fit within the structure of The Mother Hips and that structure’s mainly dictated by the setting, namely live shows where there’s six hundred people and they wanna hear live music. We’ve been pretty routinely frustrated by playing quiet songs and having people chat over them. There’s nothing more humiliating as a musician than that [laughs]. So, y’know, starting many years ago I’ve been recording my own stuff which is quieter and didn’t have the perceived constraints of The Mother Hips. That just continued when the band broke up. For me it intensified because I started putting all of my energy into my solo stuff and, as I said before, I was further humbled that without that name, without those guys and without the chemistry that is The Mother Hips, I was starting from the beginning, all over again.

Will the time away impact on the new Hips record, with directions taken in the solo realm brought to the table?
Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely a new sense of music, and new things happening. The Mother Hips stick to a basic formula that works for us, and it’s fun and it works well, and it’s fun to execute, and there’s still plenty of ideas to mine out in that area. But mainly I think our attitude has been different, more relaxed about the whole situation. We’ve all accepted the conditions that exist and we’re doing it for different reasons I think. We’re not as ambitious in the bad sense of that word. We’re more motivated by musical ideas and enjoying playing with people we have a chemistry with. That’s what I’d call the internal part of music, and the external part is what happens after it leaves the practice space…and that’s something we try to outsource more now and let other people worry about. And fortunately we have some good people involved.

How is [2004’s solo album] ‘California Way’ doing?
It’s doing OK. The label is pretty… casual. I get along with the label but there hasn’t been a lot of pro-active work going into promoting that record. For me that’s just another of my solo records that’s almost like a hobby, something that I have to do.

Reviews of your solo records often compare you to the likes of Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. If you were able to sub-edit reviews before they were printed, who, if anyone, would you swap those names with?
When you write a bio or a press release, whatever you put down--as you know--gets regurgitated a million times and that becomes your ethos. And you try to choose those wisely, but it’s hard. I mean Gram Parsons is great but his “cool” factor… I mean I haven’t listened to those records for years, and I used to, and I still like him just as much, but after you’ve heard a record a hundred times you don’t have to listen to it anymore. And I don’t spin those records on my turntable anymore and he’s become so [long pause] digested, that it isn’t such a compelling reference anymore. So you try to keep those updated. People like… Jackson C Frank really turns me on now, and you try to keep that updated and list that as your influence even if it might not have physically influenced you.

I think all those people we’ve listed are dead, so are there any living songwriters who’ve impressed you of late?
Gosh, I dunno. I definitely hear stuff that I like, but I have a hard time accepting things that are new because I have this tendency to reject stuff that’s too popular or too hip, y’know? Because I feel I have to be ahead of the curve or behind the curve, I don’t wanna be on the curve. So, people like Iron & Wine, that guy, he’s obviously doing stuff that’s a lot in the same vein as what I’m doing, and is so much more successful than I’ve ever been able to be. He does great things and I like it but at the same time I’m annoyed by it. Like Devendra Barnhart is pretty interesting but, again, I don’t listen to any of those records. I don’t listen to many new records at all. Brian Jonestown Massacre had some cool stuff and I like that… I really don’t listen to many new records at all. There’s something that prevents me from enjoying music that is really hyped or really popular. I think it goes back to my brother who got me into music and has always been really snotty about stuff. Like he’ll like something but if it gets really popular he won’t like it anymore.

There’s definitely that knee-jerk response among those of us who consider themselves “true music fans.” Last night I saw Death Cab for Cutie in the huge Hammerstein Ballroom. Thankfully they were great, but it’s not so long ago when they first visited the UK and played to eighty people on a borrowed back-line. You can’t tell who or what is going to take off.
Right, and it’s good to be able to stay open-minded, but that goes back to the other question about Colonized and things getting colonized. When a band gets a label behind them and that label starts shoving it down people’s throats, that’s getting colonized and it just turns me off. And I know that’s wrong, but that’s my emotional reaction.

I think it’s justified. When I was waiting in line last night, I couldn’t help but notice I was among a crowd of people at least eighty percent of whom were fourteen or fifteen year old kids. I felt like I was baby-sitting. Had I come on the wrong night? But then again you can’t blame the kids. If a lead character on a popular TV show says his favourite band is Death Cab for Cutie it’s going to have a knock-on effect.
Yeah, it makes you question the power of marketing. I like to be sure I like something for the right reasons. It must be strange to be in a band and be thirty-five, forty years old and look down at the audience and see that they’re fourteen and fifteen-year olds. That would freak me out.

And it’s hard to say whether these kids are getting the fact that Ben Gibbard is a great songwriter and he’s in a great band. Those factors seem also secondary…
They’re just picking up on the hype and the marketing push. I’ve never even heard them [laughs].

The recent download-only Hips reworking of ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ indicates an obvious affection for Neil Young. Are you a hard core or selective fan?
That’s an interesting point because if I looked at his entire discography-- and I’m not even conscious of some of his later records, although I like some of them a lot, like, ‘Sleeps With Angels’? My girlfriend bought that on vinyl and I actually like it a lot. But I’m one of those people who would say that I only like certain things [that he’s done]. But the thing that I like about him is I love the fact that he puts out a bunch of records that are terrible, because he’s a risk taker and won’t do anything to please anyone else. And he may not even like those records, but he has to make ‘em and he does. And he takes risks and he sucks and then he comes back and rules again.

And he’s in a position where he can afford to take those risks. I don’t think he’d make those records if he weren’t ‘established’.
Well of course he couldn’t, but he’s a unique-- It’s like an experiment.

And he’s earned the right.
He has and I just think it’s so refreshing that someone can swing so wide in any direction. He takes his chances. I read that book called ‘Shakey’ and he talks about how you have to write a song and never edit it. Just write it down and that’s it, don’t go back. Finish it at the first sitting and then don’t change it. I respect that a lot because it’s risky.

Have you applied that rule to your own writing?
I have but I don’t have the confidence that Neil Young has because I’m not a billionaire musician [laughs]. My insecurity makes me edit things more carefully than I think he has to, because I have a lot more to prove than he does. I also have a lot less to lose [laughs]. But he doesn’t care, that’s what’s so cool about him.

In light of the recent Scorcese documentary and our being in New York I wondered about your feelings toward Bob Dylan’s music. Have you covered any of his songs?
I’ve played a couple here and there, not too widely. But I love Bob Dylan, I’m a huge fan.

Is there a feeling that The Byrds pretty much nailed the West Coast interpretations?
Yeah, The Byrds were already there. Bob Dylan’s the same as Neil Young for me in that I don’t like all his records, but he’ll have six bad records and then one will pop out that I just love. Like ‘Self Portrait’ I think is one of my favourites. I love that record.

Did you read his view on that in the ‘Chronicles’ book? At the time it was panned by critics, and he said that he’d thrown a bunch of odds and ends at the wall and released what stuck. Then, speaking about the record ‘Dylan’, his label put out the stuff that didn’t.
Y’see Dylan’s one of those guys, and Neil Young too, where it almost seems like they’re trying to deconstruct their own career. They resent the pigeon-holing that goes on and they lash out against it. Sometimes it’s a mess but sometimes it’s amazing. I love ‘Self Portrait’ and I love ‘Time Out of Mind’, but mostly I like the earlier Dylan stuff, when he was more aggressive. He’s one of a kind, truly. You hear when someone’s called “The next Bob Dylan”. There’s never gonna be a next Bob Dylan.

What can you tell me about the second Ball Point Birds album?
We’re gonna record that in mid-November. It’s all new songs that were written specifically for that record. They haven’t been developed all the way yet, and I don’t know that they will be before we hit the studio. We’re just gonna go in there and build them on tape, which is kinda the way we did it on the last record. It’s real simple with four microphones, two guitars and two voices live. But I wanna hold back from crystallising that set of songs until we’re in the recording studio, and I think that lends a quality to the record you can’t get any other way. And Dylan and Neil Young did that stuff constantly, that under-rehearsed kind of sound. I’m real excited about that. All the songs are written but we haven’t necessarily swapped the songs so much yet. Greg has all his songs done and I have all my songs done and we have demo versions that we listen to all the time, but we haven’t worked out arrangements or played those songs live yet, so they’re kinda like sitting in this unborn form which I like.

What are your thoughts on the two Hips DVDs that surfaced recently? You didn’t seem that willing a participant in ‘Stories We Could Tell’, Paul Hoaglin appeared to be the primary spokesperson… Were you uncomfortable reminiscing?
It is an honour to have someone make a film based on your life and your creations. It was difficult to watch them though, to see yourself from another angle, from outside. I would suggest to anyone that gets a movie made about them to not watch it [laughs]. I actually did a ton of interviewing for [‘Stories We Could Tell’ director] Patrick and we travelled around a lot together during that year. I do love talking about old times because I have a lot of fond memories.

The Logical Explanations video on your site [www.timbluhm.com] finds you in a home-recording set up. Is that just a rented studio or did you finally find somewhere to live? Your bio still suggests you’re living in the van [Bluhm had spent several years living and travelling with no fixed abode].
Oh no, I should change that because I started renting a house in San Francisco. It started out as my studio apartment, my one room apartment, and it’s now turned into a studio and it’s getting crowded out. The more you get into it the more you realise a bed is not a good thing to have in a recording studio. Nor is a refrigerator.

What inspired the change, were you tired of the nomadic lifestyle?
Yeah, I’d been itinerant for about eight years and I just felt like I wanted to have some recording equipment and I wanted to get involved in that part of the process. I’d just had enough, wanted to settle down a little bit and have a place to stay. I feel like I can dedicate a lot more energy to creative pursuits when I don’t have to think about anything else. You wake up and your bathroom’s right there, your kitchen is right there, you don’t have to move around. You can focus on music for a week at a time instead of a couple hours.

I’m a long way from California, so can you tell me what the song California Way is about, expanding on your claim that it’s “a love letter from and about a disappearing place.” Are you talking environmentally or spiritually?
That quote is actually from the label, not me. But I agree with it and I can talk about it. The idea in that quote is not specific to any one place, but for me it is California, where I was born and where I have spent my whole life, and where tremendous change has been the precedent since long before the Gold Rush. It's a place people come to, not a place people flee. It holds promise like no other place but it is really as indifferent as anyplace else. When you go through your life in a rapidly growing/changing environment you seem to long for the physical places where you experienced some significant moment but those places aren't there anymore. So the physical becomes the spiritual when that happens and it is necessary to internalise the geography of your past.

Finally, are you--as the song of the same name attests--really the “time-sick son of a grizzly bear”?
When I think of the "time-sick son of a grizzly bear" I think of someone like the grandson of one of the characters in [John Steinbeck‘s] ‘Tortilla Flat’, leaning against the wall of the Greyhound station in Monterey, drunk, lost in the past, stripped of his meagre birthright. I think anyone who grew up in a place that has become too expensive to afford can relate to that image.