Shaun Hague was 13 years old and up to pretty much nothing. One thing he knew he liked were the old classic records his dad would play when he was out working on the car or puttering around the house – Springsteen, Billy Joel, the Beatles. He loved the music so much that occurred to him maybe he should try actually playing it.
“What these guys are doing seems like it would be kind of fun,” Hague remembered thinking.
So he talked his folks into buying him a cheap electric guitar and a few lessons. But he didn’t exactly take to it right away, and one day his dad wondered aloud what was going on with that guitar.
“Have you practiced lately?” his dad asked.
“Uh…I haven’t picked it up in about a week,” the kid replied.
“Well, go play it now, or else we are going to bring it back,” his dad said.
For once in his 13-year-old life, he did exactly what his father told him to do.
“You know, there I was, sitting in my room going, ‘Well, maybe I should go pick it up, because I’m really not good at anything else right now, and I don’t see myself doing anything else, so maybe I should try to get good at it.’ Really, that one little moment kind of pushed me, and I don’t think I ever really told him that. But now that I think about it, that moment pushed me to practice, and the more I practiced the more I fell in love with it…and the more I got into it, the more it took on a major role in my life.”
He’d spend hours and hours in his room, practicing licks he’d heard on his records, living inside a little rock n’ roll alternative universe.
“I just became that kid who through high school, when everybody else was going on first dates and trying to sneak into ‘R’ rated movies, I was just kind of sitting in my bedroom playing guitar. I’d line up my records and my CDs like it was a set list. ‘Okay, I’ll do ‘Do You Feel Like We Do’ then I’ll do ‘Born to Run’…and I’d just sit there for hours and hours burning through setlists. It got to the point my parents would kind of open the door, ‘Here’s twenty bucks, go do something.’”
He got good at it – very good, in fact. But he couldn’t find anybody to play with. The kids he knew all kind of sucked, music-wise, and the older guys in cover bands wouldn’t let him play because he wasn’t old enough to get in bars. So he continued on his own. Then, at 17, he entered a House of Blues contest for the best rock, blues, and jazz guitarists under the age 18. He kept winning each round, until finally, he was invited to journey from his little hometown of Somerset, Massachusetts, to the House of Blues in Boston.
It was Hague’s first real gig, playing on a big stage in front of a whole bunch of strangers. And he ripped it up. He won the blues category of the contest.
“That was kind of the start,” he recalled. “At that time I was 17 and everyone was like, ‘Okay, where are you going to college? What are you going to do?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know, I kind of just want to play guitar.’ Everyone said, ‘Well, that’s not much of a life….’ So when I won that thing at 17 and I was all over the news and in the newspaper, it just kind of made a statement: this is what I’m going to do.”
After high school, his parents moved to San Francisco and he joined them and then four months later left to play with a rock band in Los Angeles called Fader. The band played all the clubs on Sunset Strip and won the attention of BMI, which featured them at several showcases, and Gibson Guitars tabbed them as the best unsigned band in L.A.
“It was pretty different going from a little town in Massachusetts to L.A.,” Hague said. “In Massachusetts, if I had my sideburns too long, my hair too long, I was considered an outcast. But I got here, I grew my hair down to my shoulders, grew a beard, and all of sudden girls were asking me for my phone number.”
Fader soon faded. After a couple years, he and the lead singer weren’t really getting along and Hague happened upon an audition with Kenny Wayne Sheppard and was offered a spot in the band as second guitarist.
Next thing he knew, Hague was living a version of the rock ‘n roll dream, with his own bunk on a tour bus and big crowds every night. He remembers those first big shows with awe.
“I was 21 and the first show was in Kenny’s hometown, Shreveport, Louisiana,” he said. “We played for 2,500 people. The next night we opened for Kid Rock in Texas and that was for 30,000. I went from playing The Mint and The Roxy to playing in front of 30,000. It was a pretty weird experience. I didn’t know what to do. ‘What is happening here? Who are all these people?’”
He became known in the industry as a sideman. He did studio work and took touring gigs with Amos Lee – where he got to play on Leno, among other things – as well as Tiffany, Terra Naomi, Hodges and The Break and Repair Method. Somewhere along the way he discovered Hermosa Beach. He was just off the road from a tour and realized he’d finally found the L.A. he had been looking for.
“I just really fell in love with it,” Hague said. “To me, it’s what L.A. life should be. I lived in Hollyood and lived in Glendale, and they were both good experiences, but the beach – here the pace is a little bit slower and the mentality is just different….I have a real sense of community for the first time probably in my life – just a really good connection with people and music and everything else.”
Hague has found himself at the epicenter of the emerging local music scene. He landed gigs writing about music for the Beach Reporter and booking talent for Saint Rocke, where he is also deeply involved as a musician, taking part in the epic jam nights his friend and fellow musician Steve Aguilar used to put on. Hague himself organized a series of shows that took on classic rock sets – whole nights devoted to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Petty, and Springsteen. It was a full circle of a sort, his teenage bedroom sets writ large.
But he was also, through these shows, serving as an apprentice to the songwriters he admired. He particularly fell under the sway of Springsteen, whose vocal register is not unlike his own – that “low, raspy, gritty kind of thing,” as he described it.
And then this year it all came together. He married the woman he’s been in love with for four years – Emily Parduhn Hague – and the best songs of his life started arriving. He’d always written, but the songs were never keepers. Now they poured out: a bright little mandolin rocker called “Make It a Great Day,” the Springsteen-esque “Rainy Day in L.A.” and even a pretty ode to his wife, “Windy City Girl.”
The time had come to take center stage. And so, beginning six days ago, Hague launched a campaign on the kickstarter.com website that he hopes will help him raise $6,500 to make his first EP. It’s part of the brave new world that is the do-it-yourself digital age recording industry: he’s already raised $1,400 and has 40 days to raise the rest.
“The dream back 20, 30, 40 years ago was to find a major label and have them do it for you,” Hague said. “Today, it’s just dependent on the artists themselves to get out there, whether through something like this, or Facebook, or getting our songs put in movies or in a commercial. A lot of it is kind of self-run….and I like the idea of getting out there on your own and making it happen.”
Most importantly, it’s his own music that is finally happening. The title of his prospective EP is “The Time is Now.”
“Every time I do a show, all the way back to the Kenny Wayne days to now, whether a cover thing or playing for somebody else or at Hotel Café or Saint Rocke or wherever, the one comment I always get is, ‘Hey do you have something we can buy that is yours?’ And my thing is always, ‘Nope. No. No, I don’t. So I just kind of got sick of saying that, and I’ve been writing a lot….I’m ready to just get it out there, in front of people, and let them hear some original stuff. The time is now.”
For more information, see kickstarter.com or myspace. Hague plays Brixton on a bill with J.R. Richards on Jan 21. ER
