I would see Tripp Rezac from time to time in Hollywood in the early 2000s having drinks at the French place at the end of the Franklin “block.” He’s a big ol’ dude and always wore a jeans jacket. I’d be weaving through the crowds or banging on the piano and he would be by the wall, maybe with a few band guys, drinking whiskey, not talkin’ much, smilin’.
I didn’t know where exactly he was from but knew he was from the south and for that, always took a moment to greet him. I heard he played a little guitar.
I saw him again years later plugging in his hollowbody whatever-it-was guitar into an amplifier at Hollywood’s Piano Bar. Drunk and surprised, “You got a band?!” I idiotically inquired. “Yeauh!” he howled with a smile. He had grown a great big grey beard and wore a beat-to-shit cowboy hat. He had a crack band in full on rock n’ roll uniforms. They were perfect, celebratory, tight, serious, loose. Tripp could write and sing too. The place was loud, hot and packed full of hipsters on a boulevard Saturday night. That was 3 years back.
A few weeks ago I invited him and his band down to join a double bill at the Studio here in Hermosa. Beard flying, Rezac, on 3 hours notice and 3 hours sleep, who recently turned 50, a divorced father of two, after working a 15-hour day of construction in downtown LA, swigged from a flask, nodded to his men and stepped onto the bandstand. McDermott was on deadline and was gonna split but he stayed. Nobody left. They only kept coming in. The jam went till 2. I think we all needed it.
His sound is old and bright. His singing is his strongest tool, for it is a rare thing these days to hear what we like to call around here “man singing loudly.” He doesn’t hide, duck or scare. He’s got stories and notes, direct and pure. He smiles, he talks to the crowd between songs, he flings his head back to suit a lyric, stomps a booted foot, grits and growls, moans and wails,
You will hear the California country of the Flying Burrito Brothers in his songs, electric guitar slinking around the vocal, mixed with country waltzes like the lonesome ones George Jones sung, and whose music seven of us sang at my place in Porto until 5 a.m. (it was a Tuesday, and yes, he had to work that day) and you will hear clear uniqueness, stylings and swagger all his own, in the musical transitions, lyric choices and delivery, laying out his failings and triumphs and failings again over the durable mode of country, where, in atlas of an old songwriter, failings feel and heal best, and where redemption is a always a song and a gig away.
