While most know Tim Bluhm as the frontman of Chico, California’s greatest export since the beer bong, The Mother Hips, the singer/songwriter has also dabbled in many other projects with great effect. For the uninitiated, Bluhm also played in the Skinny Singers (with Jackie Greene), Brokedown In Bakersfield, Ball-Point Birds, The Rhythm Devils (featuring The Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann) and more. His upcoming show at Grass Valley’s Center For The Arts pairs him up with friend and musician Scott Law in what is sure to be a heady evening of music. Submerge caught up with him in between sets at a recent Mother Hips show to hear more. “The set up will be me on an acoustic guitar and Scott on an acoustic guitar and an acoustic baritone guitar. When you play in this configuration it emphasizes the playing itself and, of course, the songs themselves,” said Bluhm. “We are going to be playing songs that we have been writing together over the past year or so. We will sprinkle in a few of our respective songs from the past, maybe a brand new Mother Hips tune, and maybe one or two covers. In October we will go to Italy for a month and play some shows with some Italian and American musicians. Scott is a musical resident at Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael and he will often invite me to come and play an impromptu show there.” Tickets for the 8 p.m. show are $17 for members, $20 for non-members. Find out more and secure your tickets online at Thecenterforthearts.org/tim-bluhm

Here is your first look at the 2013 Concerts in the Park lineup. Last summer saw record setting attendance for the Friday night series and by the looks of it this year shouldn’t be any different. Here is what we’re particularly stoked about: local hip-hop from the likes of Rasar, Live Manikins, DLRN and a couple others. Also Kill the Precedent is one of our absolute local favorites and we didn’t expect to see them on the listing at all, as they are rather heavy and in-your-face. And of course we’re pumped to see !!! (Chk Chk Chk) headlining a night not long after their new record THR!!!ER comes out. The Mother Hips are closing one night and they also have a new record out soon, same goes for Middle Class Rut. All in all it’s a pretty solid lineup in our opinion, but hey, what do we know? Best of all, the shows are all free. Let us know which bands you are excited about!

May 3rd:
Element Of Soul
Musical Charis
They Went Ghost
DJ Epik

May 10th:
Middle Class Rut
Jonny Craig
Dogfood
I’m Dirty Too
RCK:RMX (Blackheart+Buckdog)

May 17th:
Arden Park Roots
Syncro
Rasar (formerly Random Abiladeze)
Live Manikins
DJ Whores

May 24th:
James Cavern
Iconoclast Robot
Rock N’ Rhyme
DLRN
Heartworm

May 31st:
!!! (Chk Chk Chk)
Exquisite Corps
Paper Pistols
Sam I Jam

June 7th:
Mumbo Gumbo
The Quinn Hedges Band
Tel Cairo

June 14th:
Infamous Swanks
The Lesdystics
Avenue Saints
The Bar Fly Effect
Shaun Slaughter

June 21st:
Mother Hips
Jackpot
The Old Screen Door
Roger Carpio

June 28th:
Brodie Stewart
Nevada Backwards
The Carly DuHain Band
Big Trouble
DJ Rigatoni

NO SHOW JULY 5th

July 12th:
ZuhG
Joy & Madness
Harley White Jr. Orchestra
DJ Oasis and INKDUP

July 19th:
FallRise
Kill the Precedent
Restrayned
Fair Struggle
Z Rokk

July 26th:
The Brodys
Hero’s Last Mission
The Bell Boys
Humble Wolf
DJ Billy Lane

Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers go viral for all the right reasons

Words by James Barone –

Much of how the music industry does business has changed, especially over the past decade, but some things remain the same. Perhaps labels aren’t the way to go anymore, and maybe artists are better off releasing EPs or singles as opposed to full-length albums. That’s really just window dressing. What matters is good voices and musicianship plus good songwriting usually equal good music. Unfortunately, another constant of the business seems to hold true: Good music doesn’t always equal success. If there really was a formula that guaranteed a hit, everyone would be using it. In most cases it’s just a matter of chance.

It was perhaps good fortune that Nicki Bluhm’s career in music began at all. Her now-husband Tim Bluhm, frontman for The Mother Hips, overheard her sing at a New Year’s Eve party, as the story goes, and encouraged her to start writing songs and perform live. Along with her band The Gramblers, Nicki released her first album, Toby’s Song, in 2009 and has since shared stages with notable rockers such as Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Jackie Greene.

But despite all that, Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers recently had an unlikely breakthrough that brought their music to a wider audience. One of a series of videos called “The Van Sessions” the band posted to YouTube went viral. The video features the band singing as they drive between gigs, in this case a cover of Hall and Oates’ classic “I Can’t Go for That.” Posted March 23, 2012 the video currently has over 1.2 million hits, and when Submerge conducted a Google search for the song title, Nicki and the Gramblers’ video came up second only to the original.

“Subconsciously, I think we knew that it was good content to have, but again, you can never really premeditate or expect anything like that to happen,” Nicki says of the impetus to post the videos in a recent interview. “There are tons of people in the world who do really incredible stuff, and it doesn’t get any attention at all.

“For us, we’ve had way more triumphant moments, whether they’re at a show or in the studio or whatever, that people don’t really know or hear about, but for whatever reason, these videos in our van were the things that people like. There’s no way to know that. But what we do know, what we were doing was pure and fun and real.”

The video brought the band some much-deserved attention. Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers’ most recent album, 2011’s Driftwood, is a beautiful collection of country-fried pop-rock mixed with sun-baked soul–the kind of songs that seem as though they would be far more at home spinning on vinyl than queued up on Spotify. Nicki is happy to report that once the extra attention was turned her and her band’s way, she and the Gramblers were able to hold on to it.

“It was interesting to see something go viral,” she says. “Ultimately, you have all this attention that you weren’t expecting, and your goal is to direct it to your original music. I think we did. I think we managed to do that. I think people saw the video and got curious about who we were. A lot of people really did check out our original stuff and bought our records, and I hope that continues.”

As long as they keep putting out good music, it should. Nicki says that the band is currently hard at work on their third album, which should be out in early 2013. When we caught up with Nicki Bluhm, she was fresh back from a rehearsal where the band was revisiting some of their earlier material.

When you go back to the old stuff, do you feel the need to tinker with it a little bit or do you leave it as is?
A little bit of both actually. I know when I hear a song off a record, I really appreciate it being played the way I know it and not deviating from that. I guess just putting a little extra glitter on top is what we aim to do, so maybe we’ll add an extra harmony or maybe we’ll add a little extra instrumentation, but structurally we like to stick with how the song was originally written and arranged.

You said you’re working on some new songs…
We’re in the studio recording our third full-length album. We’ve been playing one song off of that. We’re just so excited to play some of the new songs. We definitely continuously work on the new songs. We’re trying to save a lot of them for the album release, because it’s a lot more fun when the album is fresh, but we can’t help it sometimes. They’ll slowly trickle into our set, I think, leading up to the third album’s release.

How long have you been in the studio working on the next record?
We’ve been in for a couple of months. We did a lot of it live, full band in the studio, which was really fun. And now we’re doing a lot of going back and listening. Initially we were planning a fall release, but now we’ve pushed it back to 2013 so we can really take our time and make sure we’re really happy with the way the songs turn out. We’re hoping to be done in the next couple months, but we’re still spending some time on it and giving it some extra love and care.

Did you start trying out different things than on your last album writing-wise?
I think so. Like Driftwood, there were multiple songwriters, so I’ll do a lot of the writing, and so will my husband Tim and Deren Ney, our lead guitar player, and our newest member of almost two years now, David Mulligan, will have a song on the new record. It’s really fun to have multiple songwriters. I think this album will be a little different, because we’re coming more at it as a band in the way that it was recorded–the nature of how the songs were arranged. We went in with skeletons of ideas, and we all helped arranged each other’s songs. There was a bit more of a group effort, I think, in this record as opposed to coming to the studio with a totally finished product and having other people play on it. We all put a little bit of our two cents in on each song.

Listening to Driftwood, it felt like a live album. It sounds like a band record as opposed to a producer’s record. Was a lot of that recorded live?
Honestly, I can’t even remember that well. I think it was probably a mix of both. But certainly, I think it was done a bit more piece by piece than the album we’re working on now. We always strive to have that live feel. None of us really like over-produced records. I think the best way to achieve that is to do stuff live, but certainly the current record was done more in that fashion than Driftwood. On Driftwood, there was a little bit less of the live happening, though, of course, there was some.

Do you go back and listen to your previous albums?
Typically, I don’t love to go back and listen to them. We obviously will reference them. Like today, we were referencing an old record of ours that we’re going to start playing again. It always feels so good. It had been a couple years since I’d listened to the recording and I’d finally listen back and laugh at it, or sometimes it just really warms me too. A lot of times I listen to live recordings and I’m like, “Oh God, I can’t believe this is in the world.” With a lot of the recordings from the studio, you go back and remember the time that you were doing it and what was going on in your life, and it can be very nostalgic, which is always really fun–or it can be really sad, or whatever it was that you were going through. But I don’t make a habit of it, but when I do I typically enjoy re-listening to the recorded songs.

Before you were talking about how you like having multiple songwriters. Do you write all the lyrics, or do the guys writing the songs chip in lyrics also?
Tim and I will co-write songs, but typically we’ll write our songs independently. One person will write the lyrics and melody. There are exceptions where Tim and I co-write, but for the most part, the songwriter does music and the lyrics.

When you’re writing your own lyrics, you know what place it comes from emotionally or mentally or whatever, but when you’re singing someone else’s lyrics, do you have to change your approach to how you connect with the words?
I think that because we all know each other so well, but I think we all come at the songwriting–and I obviously can’t speak for everybody else–but it feels like everyone comes from a place where they’re writing songs for the band. So, I’m not sure how personal the songs are to the writer, because they know that they’re writing songs that will be sung by me in this band, so they’re specifically crafted songs. I tend to relate to them all pretty closely. Daren will write songs sometimes from my perspective, so it’s almost like me singing this story of what he thinks about me. It’s all very intimate. We’re all very close…we’re family. If the song is written as a deep emotion for the writer, I feel like I know that person so well, I don’t really have to talk to them about it. I can feel and sense. I don’t know. All I can say is that we’re all really close, and the songs are vehicles for each other and this band, I think.

Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers will play Marilyn’s on K in Sacramento on June 1, 2012. Tickets are just $8 and the show will get underway at 8:30 p.m. For tickets, go to http://marilynsonk.com/ or http://www.nickibluhm.com/

Downtown Sacramento does not lack fun things to do on New Year’s Eve, that’s for sure. Allow this breakdown of NYE options to be a bit of a road map to your having an epic night. This surely isn’t everything happening in town, but here are a some great options nonetheless: District 30 (1022 K Street) has DJ Serafin (who is huge in the Los Angeles and Las Vegas club scenes) spinning his seamless integration of house, hip-hop, pop, Bmore and rock. Ace of Spades (1417 R Street) has Hollywood-based rapper Mickey Avalon with openers Big Chocolate and Richard the Rockstar. The Hyatt Regency Sacramento (1209 L Street) has an “Acoustic Lounge” with Quinn Hedges and Ryan Hernandez as well as a bigger/louder party inside their new L on 12 Nightclub with DJ Rated R and the super-fun cover band Cheeseballs. Speaking of cover bands, Shenanigans (705 J Street) has a huge party lined up featuring live music from Departure, a Journey tribute band, as well as 8 Track Massacre, an ‘80s cover band. Old Ironsides (1901 10th Street) has DJs Shaun Slaughter and Roger Carpio for a special NYE Lipstick party. The Blue Lamp (1400 Alhambra Boulevard.) has The Pine Box Boys, an Americana/bluegrass/experimental band from San Francisco along with three opening bands and Marilyn’s on K (908 K Street) has The Mother Hips. This list could easily go on and on, but we’ll spare you. For more NYE party options, click here for our calendar

The Mother Hips Settle into a steady groove on their latest album

The rumors of The Mother Hips’ demise have been greatly exaggerated—and for quite some time now. In 2003, the venerable San Francisco-based psychedelic-tinged rock band went on a hiatus that lasted a year. But to hear people talk about it, you’d think they were gone for decades.

“There’s a common misconception that we took a bunch of time off, but it wasn’t really that long,” says The Mother Hips’ co-founder and co-songwriter Tim Blum. “We actually only skipped 75 shows that we would have normally played, but we’re definitely on a roll right now.”

Bluhm says the band decided to take a break due to its members’ frustration over touring, and also to “see what else was out there in life, and we wanted to see what would happen if we weren’t playing with the Mother Hips,” Bluhm says.

But like Bluhm says, The Mother Hips’ hiatus is a distant memory. In late October, the group released its second post-break studio album, Pacific Dust, on New York City-based indie label Camera Records. Bluhm credits the band’s productivity in part to the environs in which Pacific Dust was recorded; the band laid down the tracks for the album at Bluhm’s Mission Bells studio in San Francisco.

“The record went beautifully,” Bluhm says of recording Pacific Dust. “Owning a studio is a big part of that. Just having a studio with all the guys in the band feels really comfortable. They’ve been in there a lot, playing on other records that I’ve produced over the past three years. I always call on them to play parts on other people’s records, so all of the guys have spent a lot of time recording there”¦ It’s a dream come true.”

Bluhm also gives a big nod to the band’s current label for its support. The Mother Hips have had difficulty with record labels in the past, and these experiences are documented in seething detail on the fuzzed-out, bluesy rocker “Third Floor Story” from Pacific Dust. However, things are different at Camera Records. In fact, if it wasn’t for the label, The Mother Hips may not have decided to end their hiatus at all. Bluhm explains that when The Mother Hips took their break, there wasn’t a grand scheme involved.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen really,” Bluhm says. “We didn’t have an agreement. We decided that we needed some time off. We were just taking one step at a time, and we weren’t thinking about the future. The first six months that we got back together, it was just touch and go. We were just doing them one at a time and see how it went.”
It was Bluhm’s correspondence with Camera Records’ owner Jon Salter that got the ball rolling for the The Mother Hips’ reformation.

“To have those guys on our team is the best things we got going for us right now,” Bluhm says of the small label. “Their enthusiasm and their passion have a lot to do with why we stopped our hiatus and started playing again.

“We always talked about how there had to be some way [Salter] could help us out with our advancement,” he continues. “And he finally figured out that the best way to do that was to start a record label of his own.”

Submerge spoke with Bluhm from his Bay Area home, just “100 yards from the ocean,” before he was to indulge in a feast of fresh-caught Dungeness crab.

I saw on your Twitter account that you’ve been doing some crabbing recently. Is that a regular hobby of yours?
It hasn’t been. I’ve always enjoyed a little bit of abalone diving, and I’ve always enjoyed eating seafood. My buddy has a little boat that we take out to access surfing spots that you can’t walk into or drive into. He recently got some traps, and so we’ve been going out and getting crabs out in the Bay Area. This morning was really lucrative. Today, we woke up super early and found them, and we limited out. We got 20 large crabs.

Crab is my favorite seafood, I think.
Well it’s too bad we’re not doing this interview in person, because you could hang out afterwards and join us. We certainly have enough.

Thank you! How are you serving them?
We boiled them as soon as we caught them. They were all cooked by 11 this morning, and now they’re chilling in the fridge. We’re doing Vietnamese garlic noodles and crusty French bread and that’s it. Melted butter doesn’t even seem necessary if they’re really fresh like that, and they’re big and they’re sweet. Sometimes butter is really good, but it’s not really necessary.

Pacific Dust was recorded in your studio, but did you produce the album also?
I didn’t. The band produced it along with David Simon-Baker, who’s my studio partner and an extremely talented guy. We usually do stuff together, but on this project, since it was my band, it wasn’t appropriate for me to play the role of the producer. I wanted it to be like all the other records, where everyone [in The Mother Hips] is on a level playing field.

Why do you think it’s important to keep yourself separated from that process?
I’m not really sure. I’ve produced enough records to see that if”¦ I don’t know. It’s different. If you produce it yourself, then it isn’t really a producer. I think a producer has to be separate from the material, because otherwise”¦ It can still work fine, but I think a large part of the producer’s role is to have an objective perspective. It’s very difficult to produce yourself, because that’s sort of an oxymoron.

In a couple years, you’ll be looking at your 20th anniversary. Has the chemistry between you and Greg [Loiacono, guitarist], changed a lot over
the years?
It really hasn’t changed that much, interestingly enough. I think that the relationship between Greg’s songwriting and my songwriting has always stayed somewhat the same. We both write songs; we don’t collaborate that often, but we certainly help each other with songs and we always bounce ideas off of each other and value each other’s opinions. But it’s the same as it’s always been. Greg’s been getting more and more songs on the record as the records have progressed, but I’ve always written more songs that show up on the record than he has. That’s the way it started, and that’s the way it still is, but he’s stepped up more on the last few records, and I think that’s a good thing.

Do you think having two primary songwriters in a group intensifies the need for an outside person to be a producer?
I think it does. Typically, The Mother Hips have had producers here and there, but we’ve done a lot of the recording without a producer, but I think in the future, we’ve seen that having someone who can act as a producer is really important to the quality of the record. What David Simon-Baker brought to this project was a strong outside opinion—among a lot of other things. I think this record is better, because we listened to someone else who had a strong opinion and a really strong talent for understanding other people’s music. We haven’t really worked with producers much, but I think we should.

I wanted to talk about the title track from the album. I was wondering why you chose that song as the title track, or if you’d just had the title in mind already and then assigned the title to that song.
Yes, it was more like that than the other way around. The title had been kicking around for a while. I came up with it years ago, and I just liked it. Actually, my first studio was called Pacific Dust, when I first started recording stuff, and I always liked it. But when I switched spaces and I got partners, the name got lost, and I always wanted to bring it back. The record label suggested that we call the record Pacific Dust, and we just chewed on that for a while, and it just seemed appropriate. When I came up with the words for the title track, the song that became “Pacific Dust,” it just worked really well for the vibe that song has.

It seemed to be one of the more psychedelic tracks on the album, both musically and lyrically. Could you talk about the vibe of that song for a bit?
It’s definitely psychedelic. It was a song that wasn’t a song at all. We kind of came up with a couple of these riffs, and during sound checks over the last couple of years, we kind of messed around with that main chorus riff a couple of times, and it was really fun to play. It was really powerful, and we really liked it. We were in the recording sessions, and we ended up playing it. There were no words. It wasn’t really a song, we just put it down, and that’s what it came out as. It was definitely psychedelic, because we didn’t have a form, and it was very improvisational. But it sounded really good, so I decided I’d try to write some lyrics for it, and I just sang whatever came off the top of my head and kind of carved it out.

Is that indicative of how you like to work?
No. It’s actually the opposite of our typical way of working, but it was really cool, and it inspired us to do more stuff like that.

You’ve been a San Francisco-based band for a while now, but you started out up in Chico. Do you still consider yourself a Chico band in a way?
You know, Chico is my alma mater, and I spent a lot of my formative years there and I loved it, but I don’t feel like we’re a Chico band anymore. Maybe that’s the wrong answer, but Greg and I still love playing up there. We had a lot of good times up in Chico, but we had a lot of bad times up in Chico too. We were going through a hard time in our lives in Chico toward the end. It’s bittersweet when we go up there. It’s a beautiful town. Anyone who’s lived up there knows that. It just seems that things are cheaper and quieter, but honestly, my history with it keeps me away. As fond as my memories are of Chico, I also have some reasons to keep that chapter of my life in the past.

The Mother Hips played a New Year’s Eve [Dec 31, 2009] show at Marilyn’s on K.