by Mark McDermott
The three men in black arrive as mysteries. They carry hard cases and wear cowboy hats and embroidered shirts. Nobody at the gathering knows quite what to make of them. Somebody says they are called Cobra Cowboy. But like high plains drifters sauntering somewhat cockily into a small Western town, among the townsfolk, these men are guilty until proven innocent.
Cobra Cowboy faces the crowd. One has pulled out a guitar, another a fiddle, while the third lurks behind a set of drums. Oh shit, says someone in the rabble. Is this country music?
“I made it through the wilderness,” the singer sings. “Somehow I made it through. I didn’t know how lost I was. Until I found you.”
Confused looks of recognition begin to dawn, like someone seeing a friend from decades ago they never expected to see again, but not quite sure it’s the same person.
Then the chorus comes: “Like a virgin, touched for the very first time…”
The fiddler is sawing, the guitar player is picking, and the drummer is grooving. Suddenly the whole place is dancing. That recognition wears into a broad communal smile. These are gunslingers of joy. Cobra Cowboy is playing Madonna.
“Every time, we walk in there, and people are kind of puzzled, looking at us, wondering what they are about to get,” said Gavin Heaney, the Cobra Cowboy bandleader. “And we are smiling and acting it up, because we already know they are about to get the biggest surprise, and it’s just such a fun treat.”
As the night unfolds, the songs the band plays include “Billie Jean”, by Michael Jackson, Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl”, Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses, “Kiss” by Prince, “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins, and “Karma Chameleon” by that great country singer, Boy George. They do medleys/mashups of songs that likely have never been connected before, such as the Violent Femmes “Blister in the Sun” mashed into the Bangles “Walk Like an Eygptian”, or Dwight Yoakim’s “Guitars and Cadillacs” into Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go.” Cobra Cowboy also does some actual country songs, tending towards the old school outlaw ilk — Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard. But this ain’t country, exactly. And it isn’t pop, exactly, even those 80s gems. By stripping away the excesses — and if the 80s were known for anything, musically and otherwise, it was excess — those songs somehow ring more clearly while retaining their original spirit.
“We are liberating these songs from the pop formula,” he said.
Photo by Patrick Holmes
Cobra Cowboy, who play a special early evening line-dancing show at Saint Rocke July 20, has become a thing. Something more than a band — a small, exuberant movement. Wherever and whenever they play, a deliriously two-stepping party breaks out. They have essentially created their own genre. When asked, as he often is, what Cobra Cowboy plays, Heaney offers an explanation, “It’s 80s pop hits done Country, Bluegrass, and Americana,” but it’s something somehow more than the sum of its parts. It has to be heard and felt, not explained. Audiences get it immediately, and a gleeful 80s-tinged hoedown begins.
“You’d be surprised how much I have to explain to people what Cobra Cowboy is, because they can’t really conceptualize it at first,” he said. “But after they see it, they get it.”
Heaney, who has been a staple of the local music scene since he was a teenager, feels like he has struck gold. All his bands have been successful, starting with the punk band AWOL, which Heaney started when he was a student at Mira Costa High School, and which would end up opening up for Sublime. His next band, Slackstring, had a scruffy-souled surf vibe that helped define the SoCal early aughts music scene, and his longest running band, Latch Key Kid, occasionally broke through nationally, such as when Heaney’s song “Good Times” got picked up for a Coca Cola Super Bowl commercial and was heard by millions.
But in terms of pure joy, no musical project, for Heaney, has resonated quite like Cobra Cowboy.
“It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, as far as plugging me into the canon of song,” Heaney said. “This is probably what the Grateful Dead or Rolling Stones or the Beatles, even, when they started off — they were all cover bands, and they were putting their own energy and spin on all the club songs of the day. These songs are Americana. And in this form, with the Bluegrass or the country or Americana/folk [accompaniment], it shows that. This thing has worked on levels I never even realized were possible.”
“It’s because everyone knows these songs. These are the new folk songs of the day. Wherever we play, people know the songs, and they’re singing along, and they’re instantly engaged. Whereas, if I’m playing my original music, oftentimes, there’s not so much involvement, at least the first time people hear them. They are just watching. But with Cobra Cowboy, they’re participating, and that just unlocks a whole other level of energy to the band. It’s a feel-good happy time. And every time, I swear to God, people are coming up after the show and saying, ‘Wow!’ They’re so joyous. And they are just blowing us up.”
Cobra Cowboy’s existence comes out of both musical audacity and total unlikelihood. Only a few years ago, Heaney was staunchly averse to anything akin to a cover band. He was, in fact, actively against such bands. They were his competition, and they were winning.
“It got harder and harder for me to find original gigs, because all these cover bands just invaded,” he said.
Heaney has been a fulltime working musician for almost all his adult life, and like most musicians who start living the band life when they are still in their teens, he began with rock ‘n roll dreams — or at least, the specific rock dream that is sold by popular culture, with the riches and worldwide tours and glitzy notoriety.
But life happens, and dreams evolve. Somewhere along the way, Heaney became a practicing Buddhist, got married, had two kids, and played every kind of gig imaginable, from festivals to weddings to bars to house parties and even aboard a very big boat on Lake Michigan. He wrote hundreds of songs, scored soundtracks, taught music, “placed” music on TV shows and movies, and by hook or by crook fashioned his very own life in song. And then somewhere even deeper along the line, he came to understand — this is the dream. This is rock ‘n roll. It’s not about the size of the stage you are on — “All the world is a stage,” Shakespeare wrote — but what you bring to that stage. Heaney, three decades in, had by now become entirely a servant of song.
At a 4th of July house party gig last week, a young guy Heaney couldn’t quite place in the moment approached him and called him by his name. Seeing his somewhat puzzled look, the guy identified himself. “I’m Greg Gelb,” he said. “You taught me how to play guitar.” Gelb is now the guitarist for Fortunate Youth, a locally based successful touring band.
Heaney had come to realize the truth of a Zen-like lesson that one of his mentors, the late great Pat Dietz, had been trying to tell him all along. Dietz was both a master craftsman of a musician and a teacher who’d found a life deep in music by digging further into song, not chasing the extraneous trappings. He always joked he’d been on a lifelong, worldwide tour of Los Angeles, playing over 6,000 gigs, learning — and teaching — thousands of songs.
For Heaney, meeting his own former student, now embarked on a life in music, was a full circle of a sort.
“The Dietz Brothers were just kind of showing me the way,” Heaney said. “In that moment, I was just like, ‘Thank you, Pat, for showing me this path.”
Heaney, who had worked for Dietz Brothers Music when he was younger, at the time naively thought Pat and his brother John had missed the boat. Now he realized the vessels were the songs themselves.
“It’s not the live fast, die young thing,” he said. “It’s about these actual musicians who take music as their life path. They are all students and teachers at the same time. It’s just like a spiritual lineage, or any other tradition that’s handed down from teacher to student, or master to apprentice.”
What does any of this have to do with singing countryfied Boy George and George Micheal songs? It’s about utter devotion to song, beyond preconception. Two years ago, right as Heaney was totally fed up with the so-called tribute bands taking all the gigs, he happened upon the great country artist Dwight Yoakim performing a Prince song.
“He does a cover of ‘Purple Rain’ bluegrass style that just blew me away,” Heaney said. “I was like, ‘This is beautiful. I wonder what else works?’ And I started messing around with all these 80s songs that I knew so well from when I was a kid, and I was like, ‘Shit, they all work.’ Some of them worked so perfectly it was almost scary.”
Heaney knew he’d unlocked something special. At the same time, he’d begun playing with drummer Steve Deboard, who as Gen Xer, knew every beat to all these songs. Heaney then discovered a gallery in Hermosa Beach, Ivy Gallery, in the historic building that for decades was the legendary Greekos smoke and gift shop on Hermosa Avenue. He booked a gig there with the intention of unveiling this new approach. Just by happenstance, Christine McCaverty, an equally legendary South Bay social connector, had booked a party bus that night for some occasion among her large network for friends, and they descended upon the former Greekos.
“They all stopped by and we just lit it up,” Heaney said. “Everybody was dancing and it turned into this fun little night at Greekos, of all places. So that ignited it.”
Cobra Cowboy became whole when violinist-turned-fiddler Jonathan Morin joined the band.
“That just made it apparent, the country thing,” Heaney said. “Because we had this beautiful fiddle player who was actually a symphony violin player, but I told him to learn a blues scale, and then he came back ripping ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia.’ That instrument is what it is. It’s so expressive, truly the devil’s instrument. And it brings so much melody and gravity to every song.”
Heaney also made a decision that proved essential to what Cobra Cowboy would become. He didn’t bring in a bass player. He plays the bass line on his guitar, sending a signal both through a bass amp and his guitar amp. What this does is free him. One of things that comes to those devoted to song is that after a lifetime within music, their musical memory skills become labyrinthian. Heaney can learn a song almost immediately. Just as quickly, Deboard can figure out the beat and Morin the melody. And there’s no bass player who has to learn the changes. As a result, sometimes Heaney will walk into a CVS drugstore and hear an 80s song he’d long forgotten on the store’s sound system, and Cobra Cowboy will be playing that song the very same night.
“I’ve farmed over 380 songs alone,” Heaney said. “And we go into Willie Nelson or Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard, as well, actual classic country, on top of that. And even Nirvana. Whatever.”
Make no mistake, though. Those 80s songs are at the heart of the Cobra. And there’s nothing winking or ironic about it. As he’s immersed himself in this four-decade old music, Heaney has come to believe that pop songwriting of that era achieved a higher level than what came before or after.
“Having grown up with these songs, I have a personal opinion that songwriting was perfected in the 80s, because you get these epic verse, bridge, choruses that you don’t see nowadays,” he said. “In the 70s, it was almost there, taking shape, then in the 80s, they squared it off and perfected it. By the 90s, they had to deconstruct it, because it was already so standardized. I teach a lot of songs from artists nowadays, and the last ten songs I taught to teenagers, it’s been three chords all the way through the song. There is not a whole lot of extra craft going into the songwriting. Today’s music is more of a vibe, less of a composition.”
What is apparent at a Cobra Cowboy show is that, whatever the technical merits of 80s songwriting, these songs do what they were built to do.
Great songs have a way of somehow sounding new every time we hear them. The songs we love we can scarcely tire of, played on repeat so many days of our lives. They somehow combine the familiarity of form with the unexpectedness that is the mark of all good art. So in that way, Cobra Cowboy has indeed unlocked a particularly rich trove. These 80s songs have already stood the test of time and are thus embedded in our collective consciousness. Their power is aided and abetted by their unexpected placement within a Country and Western setting.
For Heaney, presiding over each show is almost like witnessing some kind of twangy neuroscience experiment. If you think this is an overstatement, check out the videos on CobraCowboy.com and take a look at the giddy looks of liberation on the faces in the dancing crowd.
“These songs are such pop hits, it’s in their psyche, it’s in the Zeigeist,” Heaney said. “It’s something they know. It’s in their brains already. You just have to activate them.”
Or better yet, skip the videos and go to the show.
“At this stage, we are having so much fun with the connection we are instantly making,” Heaney said. “It’s contagious….It’s joyous to watch people have such a good time.”
Cobra Cowboy plays Saint Rocke July 20. Doors open at 4 p.m., music and line dancing from 5 to 8 p.m. For those new to line dancing, a dance instructor will be on hand to help.
