The Darlings get warped
The Darlings (left to right) Josh Kearney, Buddy Harris, Chris Kranes and Josh Fasen. Photo courtesy of Sribour Artist Managment
by Andrea Ruse
Like many journeys in the South Bay, The Darlings’ began on a skateboard.
In the summer of 1996, Josh Kearney had just moved from his hometown, San Diego, to Manhattan Beach before the start of his ninth grade year at Mira Costa High School. He didn’t know anyone in town when he hopped on his skateboard and headed toward Mira Costa on the first day of school.
Along with his board, he had brought with him to the South Bay a guitar and a love of the So-Cal surf/skate/snow lifestyle’s quintessential soundtrack: lots of punk rock and reggae.
When Kearney was in fourth grade, his mom’s boyfriend, a musician, had bought him the guitar and taught him to play.
“I also had two older brothers and I always looked up to what they were listening to,” Kearney said. “They were really into punk and reggae. That’s what I started playing.”
Social Distortion. Black Flag. Sublime. Descendents. The Offspring.
As Kearney stopped to walk up a hill on his way to school, he spotted another guy up ahead, also carrying his board — a kid who turned out to be into the same kind of music. A kid named Chris Kranes from Redondo Beach.
“I said, ‘What’s up? I just moved here,’” Kearney recalled. “Then it was like, ‘You skate. I skate.’ And that’s pretty much how we became friends.”
They had no idea a decade later they would play together in a band that would earn recognition as one of the top punk rock bands to come out of the South Bay in recent years. Nor did they know that their band, The Darlings, would perform with some of the iconic punk musicians that inspired Kearney, including Pennywise, Social D, Bad Religion, Youth Brigade, and the Circle Jerks.
They certainly didn’t imagine that The Darlings’ self-described “So Cal melodic punk rock with attitude” sound — clean, straightforward, no-nonsense, no-tricks punk and rock ‘n’ roll — would earn them a ticket onto this summer’s Vans Warped Tour, a national, two-month music and extreme sports festival.
At the time, it was just about skateboarding.
“Kranes was the first person I met skating to school,” Kearney said. “Literally the first person I met in L.A. Now he’s he the bass player in our band.”
Straight rock, no chasers
For a band that wants to bring rock n’ roll back to the underground scene, The Darlings have been getting their fair share of the local spotlight.
Since forming in 2005, the band has put out a seven track EP, added a few more names to the growing list of well-known punk bands they’ve played with — including Guttermouth, Strung Out, Ignite and Street Dogs – and is expecting to release their first full-length album in October.
In 2009, The Darlings — out of roughly 20,000 contestants — won the Ernie Ball Vans Warped Tour Battle of the Bands. They were also voted one of the top five L.A. bands in a contest put on by a popular local morning radio show on KROQ. The contest for first place ends later this month.
Considering that mainstream music sounds far from anything resembling traditional punk right now, The Darlings, themselves, are a little surprised at their success.
“Not a lot of bands are doing what we’re doing,” lead singer Buddy Harris said with a hint of a Southern drawl. “There’s a lot of poppy, fake-soundin’ stuff out there. We’re like an old leather jacket, not the new, plastic 2010 mockup. It’s kind of scary.”
Harris moved to California in 2002 from Fort Walton Beach, a city near the southwest of the Florida’s panhandle. After he came out West he enrolled in a recording school for music production.
“I wanted to come out here to fulfill my dream,” Harris said. “But I didn’t know I’d start a band.”
After a short stay in Encino, Harris moved to Manhattan Beach, next door to a friend of Kearney’s.
“Something was just callin’ me out here to the South Bay,” Harris said. “All the kids on the street had skateboards and tattoos. They were punk kids.”
Punk and rock and roll got into Harris’ blood at an early age. Face to Face and Bouncing Souls were huge influences on Harris.
“I also listened to Guns N Roses, Nirvana — stuff like that,” he said. “Dad had an old jukebox. As I got older, I also started to appreciate the old stuff, like Chuck Berry.”
“I started playing guitar when I was real young,” he added. “I got a guitar from a pawn shop when I was in fifth grade. It was a Les Paul knockoff.”
Kearney began to notice Harris skateboard past his friend’s house nearly every day and soon the two met in the much the same way many people meet in the beach cities.
“One day my friends and I were all surfing and afterward we were just chillin’ at my friend’s place.” Kearney said. “There were a bunch of people hanging out and Buddy skated over.”
In no time, the guitars came out, along with the songs, riffs and lyrics that both had written independently. Within a month, Kearney and Harris started discussing plans to form a band.
“When I first met Bud, we both had songs and we brought them together,” Kearney said. “It’s cool to have someone on your level musically, that you can inspire something with,”
When they started looking for more members, Kearney called on his first South Bay friend.
“Kranes jumped into band and next thing we knew, we had a rippin’ bass player,” Kearney said.
By 2005, the band was fully formed with Harris, Kearney, Kranes and Sean Sugar on drums. In 2008, Josh Fasen from Redondo Beach replaced Sugar and continues to play with The Darlings.
“That’s how we got our sound today,” Harris said.
The Darlings play a sold-out June 4 show at The Brixton in Redondo Beach. Photo by Mike Colacino
No one seems to remember where the name “The Darlings” came from.
“I’m not sure who threw it out there,” Kearney said. “It’s hard to come up with a name that sounds catchy. But I think we did.”
More than just a catchy name, The Darlings hope to stand out at this year’s Warped Tour as one of the bands representing the spirit the event originally showcased: good, old-fashioned punk and rock.
“There are not a lot of Warped Tour bands like us,” he said. “We’re trying to write timeless rock and roll music that will be good 20 years from now. The trick is to just stay true to ourselves. If we’re up there being true to our roots, I think people can see that on stage.”
Where do we go?
There is one thing Harris is worried about on Warped Tour — the heat. And the subsequent dreaded possibility of having to adjust his wardrobe because of it.
“I have skinny legs,” Harris said. “I don’t want to have to wear shorts.”
The Darlings will kick off the first show of the tour June 25 at the Home Depot Center in Carson, before traveling through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Indiana and Pennsylvania during their two-week run on tour. The last of the 12 shows they will play will be in Kearney’s hometown San Diego on August 10.
“This is the largest tour I’ve ever done,” Harris said. “I can’t wait to get over to the east coast.”
Roughly a hundred bands usually play at each all-day show – each for about 40 minutes — on as many as 10 stages. The Darlings will play on a side stage while headliners, including Pennywise, Face to Face, Bouncing Souls, Dropkick Murphys and Anti-flag will take the main stage.
The Darlings will leave it to other bands to bring the “plastic,” emo sound that has crept into the tour over the years.
“But we definitely have a different sound than the South Bay 1990’s punk scene, too,” Kearney said.
The punk flavor is obvious in Kearney’s brazen guitar riffs, Fasen’s rushing drum beats and those familiar punk backup vocals that always somehow sound like 50 guys singing in a warehouse.
But The Darlings are exploring new territory to create a sound beyond the punk of their youth.
“We have a new twist with bluesy vocals that are a little more melodic,” Kearney said. “We also have some slower acoustic songs. We try to switch it up and explore all of our options.”
The band incorporates trumpets and a saxophone into tracks such as “It’s Gone,” written by Harris for the upcoming album, which comes out October 5. Kearney would like to bring other instruments, such as a piano and slack-key guitar on certain tracks.
“We live in the South Bay and we could be like other garage bands and sing monotone with no melody, but we’re not following that,” Harris said. “And we’re also not following the poppy, bubblegum, boys-like-girls and girls-like-boys new punk.”
The band has no real method to songwriting. Just an organic approach.
“Songwriting is tough,” Harris said. “Sometimes I’ll write and bring in what I wrote. Sometimes we end up writing it together. We stumble upon all kinds of ideas and then it clicks, or sometimes it doesn’t click. But we just try to stay positive.”
“Where Do We Go,” one of the band’s most recognizable songs, is a testament to the process.
“We all wrote that,” Harris said. “It was one of the first collaborative joints where everybody pitched in. It has a different sound that’s more major and less minor.”
The band records all its own music and produced a music video for “Where Do We Go,” which they shot themselves and features scenes from all over Hermosa Beach, including The Green Store on Hermosa Avenue.
On the side, Harris jams with Jason Cruz, lead singer of Strung Out, at sporadic Kilkenny’s gigs at the Redondo pier.
“We got this acoustic, loungy thing goin’ on,” Harris said. “Trippy, desert, lullaby stuff. It’s pretty much whenever we have time and he’s home.”
Last month, The Darlings played for the first time at The Brixton in Redondo Beach — a venue that holds roughly 450 people — and sold out the show before heading off to get ready for Warped Tour.
“There was good energy and a great vibe,” Harris said of the show. “We want all our shows to be like that from now on.”
Harris hopes that the recent openings of rock and roll bars Johnny’s Dive and Gasser Lounge, both in Redondo Beach, will help keep punk spirit of the South Bay alive.
“That’s what I call culture,” he said. “And it’s pretty slim without those places. Where else can you go around here where they’re not playing Black Eyed Peas and Britney Spears? That what I call ‘not a cool culture.’ It’s really nice to have two rock and roll bars.”
“We’re just trying to stay rock and roll,” he added. “Just good, solid, timeless music that’s never going to go away and that gets better with age.”
When the Warped Tour kicks off a the Home Depot Center, The Darlings will probably be somewhere between the main stage — where South Bay legends Pennywise will play — and the half pipe where skaters will wow the audience with tricks Tony Hawk didn’t even dream about when Kearney first came out here and skated to Costa.
“It’s not about money,” Harris said. “But it is hard nowadays and we have to keep pushing forward. Passing out CDs. Guerilla marketing. We’re on our skateboards sticker-slappin’ the whole town.”
For more information about The Darlings, their upcoming album available October 5, or their appearance at the Vans Warped Tour, visit www.myspace.com/thedarlings. ER