meanbeat, march 2008
crooked cowboy and the freshwater indians
on the trail to inner space with "portishead in chaps"
BY reuben perelman + photographs by myles pettengill
Follow me, dear reader, down the dusty ArroyoSeco, along Figueroa Avenue in Highland Park, Los Angeles.Take a left at Avenue 57 and pull into a parking lot. Go to the back corner and look for faded white lettering on a brick wall that announces a certain Mr. T's Bowl. Descend the stairs and find yourself in a strange amalgamation of
bar, diner and derelict bowling alley, awash in red light. Next to curtained-off lanes, a seven-piece band spills over a low stage and onto the floor. The band is in the middle of a number, a feisty bit of two-step twang with wordless vocals. At the end of every
verse, a moan of feedback beckons the band to explode into a feverish climax, and just as you think the song must spiral off into abandon, it just as quickly hunkers back down into its tight and menacing shuffle. The song ends, and as the last hit is still wallowing in its lush reverb, the bassist puts down his bass and turns to the MPC sampler sitting on the chair next to him. You barely have time to wonder if a drumbeat or pre-recorded synth loop is
imminent before gamelan bells ring out incongruously, ominously, and the band lurches into a martial apocalyptic dirge that sounds like something Ennio Morricone would write after spending 10 years in a Balinese rock cult. The sound. The sound is a very physical thing—
immense without being cacophonous, echoing without being murky, possessed of a great and terrible clarity and power. The Freshwater Indians are not a particularly loud band, but they are certainly one you can feel in your chest. Have you ever heard of a hug
machine? Essentially an iron maiden with cushions instead of spikes, it was created by Temple Grandin, a high-functioning autistic woman best known for designing slaughterhouses. This is the best analogy for what the music of Crooked Cowboy feels like.
The man playing the gamelan line on the sampler half sways, half bobs his head, his whole upper body really, not in rhythm with the music, but to some beat that only he can hear. Occasionally he will half-sing, half growl into the microphone in front of him. This is Bron Tieman, songwriter and chief wrangler of the Freshwater Indians, a rotating assortment of musicians averaging one keyboard player, two vocalists, two-and-a-half percussionists
and the odd extra guitarist or cellist. You get the sense that Bron knows a lot of musicians.
"A sense of community is so important to what we do," says Bron. "I have to really trust these guys—I don't want to always be telling them what to play and what not to play."
"You tell me what to sing," interjects Kate Hill, Bron's girlfriend, and owner of a voice that could entice Eurydice to stay underground just a while longer. "Maybe a little bit," acknowledges Bron, his eyes twinkling above a scruffy beard. In many ways, Bron's musical past resembles that of one of the lone riders who populate the imagery of his songs. Bron was a founding member of the avant surfrock lounge band The Blue Hawaiians. Upon their signing to Capitol Records, he "walked and bought a ticket to Poland and rode trains for six weeks to understand why the hell I was pursuing music." He toured America with Soul Coughing and played lap steel for Everlast when he "went country." This eclecticism carries over to Tieman's own music, which appends just about every prefix known to man (psych/space/experimental/noise, etc.) to "countryrock." "Someone once called it 'Portishead in chaps.' I liked that." His backing band, the Freshwater Indians,is both motley and talented enough to accommodate Bron's fearsome whimsy. The Indians fluctuate from four to eight musicians, coalescing around a core of singer Francoise Blound, drummer Nick Murray, keyboardist Neil Schuh and percussionist Tyler Thacker. "I've been writing songs since I was eight," says Bron, after mentioning he was kicked out of the eighth grade for lighting an M-80 in math class. "Lately, I've been taking songs I wrote on a guitar or something and
re-creating them using sampled sounds. I might bring it back to the band after that," says Bron. "Layers of translation, you know? I just love vinyl. Old stuff. I've been getting really into the sounds on some Mexican records from the '50s and '60s. You can't get those sounds
anywhere else." In Bron's hands, the samples seem less a knowing wink and nudge to cognoscenti than they are an evocation of musical territory that exists somewhere outside of time. "I've actually constructed songs completely from samples before," Bron says, before quickly qualifying that. "I'm not sampling a drum break or a melody, or even a lick. I'll spend hours looking for the right kick drum sound or an E6 chord. This can take days, or weeks."
The Crooked Cowboy took the Freshwater Indians into the recording studio in December, with an ambitious plan to release five singles in as many months. You get the sense that he knows the iron is hot and is itching to strike again and again. "That isolated musician, alone in your living room, making a record—yeah, I've been there. Hell, I have a whole album that no one's ever heard and likely no one ever will…Fuck isolation, I want to go to Disneyland."