From the Hips — Manhattan Beach native Tim Bluhm returns with The Mother Hips

mother hips
The Mother Hips play Saint Rocke Saturday night. Photo by Andrew Quist
The Mother Hips

The Mother Hips play Saint Rocke Saturday night. Photo by Andrew Quist

Songs come to some people.

How this happens isn’t so much science as alchemy, and it actually has less to do with musicianship than we tend to think. Many of our greatest virtuosos never pen a single song.

Tim Bluhm was a senior at Mira Costa 21 years ago when a buddy gave him a beat up nylon string guitar. He wasn’t a musician, although his brother Erik had once enlisted him to play drums for his band, The Primates, at a school gig.

“He made me play the drums at the quad at Mira Costa one time, and I didn’t even know how to play,” Bluhm said. “He said, ‘You are the drummer. You’ve got to play.’ So I had to play in front of the whole fricking school. It was terrifying.”

That was the sum of his short career as a drummer, but Bluhm took his guitar up to Chico when he left for college. As he sat around his dorm room and played around with it, a strange and somewhat wondrous thing started happening. Songs arrived, and people followed.

“I wasn’t really expecting anything out of it,” Bluhm said. “I wrote a couple little songs, and people started dropping by my dorm room to listen to the songs – even though I could barely play, people wanted to hear the songs I wrote. So I knew something was going on. It was like, ‘Wow, that weird guy across the hall can play guitar way better than me, and people still want to hear me play.’”

As a freshman, he met another guitar player and singer named Greg Loiacono. They played a few parties as a sort of folk duo – Pippi Longstocking and the Trunk-of-Funk – but by 1991 they had plugged in and begun rocking out.

Thus was born The Mother Hips. It had the making of a rock n’ roll fairy tale, as they quickly caught the attention of the recording industry. While still college students, revered music producer Rick Rubin signed them to American Recordings, and suddenly they were labelmates with Johnny Cash and Tom Petty.

It was a whirlwind. The Mother Hips toured nationally – with Cash, Wilco, and on the H.O.R.D.E. tour – and released three albums in three years. And then, as the music industry itself went into a tailspin with the advent of Internet file sharing in the mid-90s, the band was unceremoniously dumped from the label.

Strangely, this was one of the best things that ever happened to the band.

“It didn’t work for us in the way it is supposedly designed for, and at the time that was pretty disappointing,” Bluhm said. “It was like the cliché – the band gets signed, does  records, works its ass off, parties too much, gets dropped. And you are just ditched on the side of the road – but it didn’t happen that way for us. Not only did the record industry not work the way it was supposed to for us, but the aftermath actually was better for us that anything that came before it. Ours was a unique story in that way.”

They had songs, and people kept following. The band had built a national following and was particularly known for its riveting live shows.

“We just kept touring and playing to those people and we made records for cheap – we weren’t selling that many records, anyway, so that part didn’t change much,” Bluhm said. “In fact, we started making more money on records because we got to keep it all.”

The Mother Hips have not only survived, post-industry, but thrived. The band celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. They have frequently been compared to the Grateful Dead, and there is something there, not so much musically as in their longevity and the devotion of their fan base. Their musical identity is certainly Californian, though – images of trees, mountains, and beaches drift through their songs, as do swirling harmonies reminiscent of the Byrds and the hook-laden countrified rock that emanated from this state four decades ago.

Bluhm has heard the California references for years and agrees, but he’s not sure exactly why.

“It is a hard thing to try to pin down,” he said. “It has to do with place, obviously – the ideals that exist in California,” he said.”But I think more obviously it just being influenced by the rock music that came from California in the past, and that just happens naturally, growing up here.”

He actually had not even heard the Grateful Dead growing up locally, though.

“I thought the Grateful Dead was a motorcycle gang,” he said. “Growing up in Manhattan Beach, there wasn’t a whole lot of hippie culture.”

Manhattan Beach keeps reappearing in his songwriting. Most recently, a song on last year’s album Pacific Dust called “One Way Out” drifts back to his beach beginnings. “It’s a hard day/I wish I was down in the cool breeze/of a beach town…There’s only one way out/and I’m trying to figure it out….”  He lives in San Francisco now, where he lives off Ocean Beach and still surfs regularly. But his 18 years in Manhattan Beach – particularly on the beach off 1st  Street – have lingered in his music.

“Our little crew was more into bodysurfing because there’s more of a short pound down there – just little beach rats down on 1st Street,” he said. “…I’ve written a lot of songs about Manhattan Beach, more when I was younger because it was fresh in my experience.”

The Hips have an unusual quality – the band sometimes has a fairly hard rock edge, but maintains a sort of dreamy calm at the center of the storm. Bluhm’s songwriting possesses that rare pop gift for a riff and phrase that hooks you. He’s one of those people songs just come to – songs, in fact, arrive to him in dreams.

He’s a musical alchemist, California dreaming.

“That’s the great thing about playing music,” he said. “You can wake up in the morning, and out of literally nothing, out of a thought or dream you had, not even a conscious thought – this happens to me many times, I’ll wake up with an idea for a song that came to me in a dream and I’ll sit down and put in time to draft it, write it, and get it all out, then go record it, the go and put it on a record and sell it. Then comes money – so it is actually alchemy. It’s incredible that it exists in the world today.”

See motherhips.com for more information. Mother Hips headlines the Summer Concert on the Beach tonight in Hermosa Beach.

Comments:

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.