By Caley Cook
Emerging from the misty milieu of Northern California’s Central Valley were two boys born of the Chico State dormitories and bred of its dusty frat parties. Now tugging stubbornly at middle age, the Mother Hips’ Greg Loiacono and Tim Bluhm are staring modestly ahead at a career in making music that everyone likes but no one bothers to talk about. Critically acclaimed but largely ignored has become the rule, the boys in the band insist they just don’t care.

“I think of us as a secret,” Bluhm says in a bit of a whisper. They may be a secret, but the Mother Hips have been waltzing around America like they owned the place for 11 years. With five albums, thousands of shows and hordes of devoted fans, they could probably rent the place for a party if they wanted.

Postured against the constant crackle of his cell phone, Tim Bluhm is hard to hear, thanks to a bad connection.

”Can you hear me now? Good. Can you hear me now? Good”.

A bad commercial has invaded the mood of the interview. A joke about the situation’s similarity to a recent TV spot are rebuffed. The musician doesn’t watch TV.

“I pretty much avoid TV,” he huffs, apparently reaching a hill. “I’ve never owned a TV. TV is such a part of pop culture that when you’re a kid and you don’t know [tv] characters you’re left out… But that’s just rubbish.

“Most or all of pop culture is rubbish.”

31-year-old Bluhm was raised in Huntington Beach, a So-Cal suburban beach town of tract housing and gated communities – the sort of which he now rails against. As a teenager he “kind of screwed off” in high school and hit the road, post-graduation, in a beat up van for an accelerated crash course in solitary confinement. Arriving in a Northern California that seemed “mystical and unconquered,” Bluhm found Chico State a breeze for admissions, and enrolled.

“I was determined to be a guitar player when I got to school,” he summons up from the not-too-distant past. “That was what I was going to do. And since I didn’t know anyone at college I had a lot of time to sit around… and play.

“I heard [Greg Loiacono] playing guitar in a dorm room and I went by and poked my head in and there he was. He was stoned out, longhaired, a Marin-looking guy -- which is what I had pictured a Northern California person was supposed to be.”

The duo’s first gig was at a place whose name Bluhm cannot summon. “Sherwood Castle? Sherwood Café?” Sherwood something. The underground billiards hall housed a local Steven Stills sound-alike who one day invited the duo to play with him.

“He heard us play one time in the dorms—don’t ask me what he was doing in the dorms—and he invited us to come down and play,” Bluhm remembers. “We were too young to be in the bar so we waited in the back room before we went on. We played a few songs, there was only like five people there, and when we were leaving the doorman said that we sounded like the Meat Puppets. I didn’t know who the Meat Puppets were at the time, but it didn’t sound very attractive.”

Guitarist Loiacono remembers the circumstances of the Mother Hips inception, as well. He says within a year, he and Bluhm had tracked down former bassist Isaac Parsons and former drummer Mike Wofchuck to round out the lineup. The foursome began playing parties around town.

“We had a really hard time playing in night clubs, not only because we were underage but because they wanted cover bands because that’s safe,” Loiacono says. “It took us a while to prove to club and bar owners that we could draw people in.”

“Chico was primarily a cover band scene when we were freshmen there,” adds Bluhm. “There were very few bands that were popular at all and the ones that were, were playing Steve Miller covers. So we were one of the first to come out of Chico that had any sort of city-wide success from playing original music.”

Max Sidman, writer at the Synthesis (the Chico alternative daily paper) in the mid ‘90s, observed first hand the flowering of the Mother Hips.

“Back in 1991, there was a very strong ‘jam rock’ movement in Chico,” Sidman writes in an email. “Very few, if any, of the bands that thrived during that time are still active locally… The Hips, I think, have seen the longest post-Chico existence. In a lot of ways, the Hips were responsible for the last strong explosion of jam rock that Chico experienced. The Hips' music uses elements of pop and country, folk and rock… [they] were never just a jam band.”

Loiacono woke up early this morning and his voice is groggy. The guitarist’s bleary tone comes from early mornings with his seven-month-old son, Noah. Like most new fathers, Loiacono’s life is in steady orbit around Noah and his needs.

“I play for him every morning so it helps me to think of different things to play,” Loiacono sighs. “I don’t think I’ve written any songs directly about him yet but he’s definitely been an inspiration for the last seven months. I’ll play this one instrumental song every morning and he gets all excited. He likes to grab the guitar. He’ll mute the strings and he’ll realize that he’s doing that and he’ll let go and then the guitar will start going again and he’ll be able to hear it and he’ll put his hand on the strings again and it’ll mute the strings again…he gets a kick out of that. Then I set it on the ground and he just bangs and drools on it and plays with it for a while.”

It takes little effort to mentally juxtapose Loiacono’s stout frame wading amongst a sea of diaper-changing episodes. Squeaks are audible in the telephonic distance as Noah and his mother are in the bathroom.

“He teaches me things all the time,” says the mystified father. “Today I learned that if you blow your lips together [makes horse sound] when you have apple plum soft baby food it makes a nice spray that goes on your dad’s chest. He did that nicely this morning. He loved the reaction I had. I gave him a smirk and pretended that it didn’t happen and tried to feed him again and he did it again.

I tried not to laugh to make him realize that it wasn’t funny but… I couldn’t help it.”

The clever innocence of a newborn fits Loiacono well. “I don’t know,” he’ll verbally pause in response to most questions about the Mother Hips’ success, and yet, as he himself warns, he’ll go on for a half hour tangent per question; he just needs the tangents to be edited.

“There’s only so much you can ask a band,” goes one such rambling on. “People want to hear about a band but when they read it they realize it’s boring unless you’re throwing sharks off a hotel building or something. Whatever Led Zeppelin used to do. You can think of some profound question but then you realize that the guy is just a musician. I could put Noah on the phone. He would always answer it the same way. ‘Dada.’”

When questions turn to the Hips’ newly retired bassist, Isaac Parsons, Loiacono’s voice takes on elements of stark seriousness, if not tinges of pain. Parsons recently left the Hips to take on new responsibilities near his home in Sacramento and to spend more time with his 4-year-old son.

“We gave him a retirement watch,” giggles Loiacono. “It was all very amicable and he’s still our friend and still definitely a part of the band, he’s just inactive right now. He’s a senior member.

“I didn’t engrave anything on his watch but the Walgreen’s price tag was still on it. It came in a plastic case with a five year warrantee, so I told him if he ever wanted to rejoin the band that he’d have to not only return the watch but also the little five year warrantee.”

Loiacono describes Parsons’ hypothetical rejoining of the band with giddy possibility. In contrast, he sadly describes Parsons’ calls to his son every day of their last tour and the 4-year-old’s emotions at such a heightened state. The only connection that Loiacono fails to consciously make is that between Parsons’ son and his own.

Bluhm and Loiacono still maintain the ability to connect on a creative and musical level. Loiacono is reveling in the escapades of a new son, Bluhm in his self-professed focus on improving himself and his music. Yet neither band mate speaks for longer than two minutes before speaking of the other.

“We’ve been in the same band for 12 years,” Bluhm said. “It’s more than best friends. We’re business partners and singing partners. Singing harmony with someone is like no other connection with somebody. It’s like being brothers. It’s a very special bond.”

With the loss of Parsons the two comrades have seemingly closed their ranks even tighter.

“Sometimes I won’t see Tim for a while and we’ll come back and the first communication we have,” Loiacono says softly, “is just to pass the guitar back and forth and just play. He’ll have been on some gnarly trip to New Zealand or I’ll have learned all these things from Noah.