The desert can be a hostile place. Just ask Lawrence Zubia, lead singer of the Pistoleros. “I think the weather here has a lot to do with our songwriting,” he says. “It’s just searing heat from May to October. A friend of ours says that an Arizona summer is equivalent to a Buffalo winter. It’s relentless and depressing.”
The 12 songs on the Pistoleros’ debut album on Hollywood Records, Hang On To Nothing, may not brim with images of stolid cacti and eternal suns, but the parched stretch of Southwestern earth the band calls home underlies each tune like a heat-stroked plateau undulates the air above it. Whether it’s the self-squandering rut of “Wasting My Time”, the poignant isolation of “The Hardest Part”, the hangover psychodrama of “Wild Love Coast” or the bleary-eyed nihilism of “Nothing Lasts Forever”, Zubia and company — brother Mark Zubia (guitar), Scott Andrews (bass), Gary Smith (drums) and Thomas Laufenberg (guitar) — evoke the desperation, loneliness and all-too-human vices that can come with inhabiting such a barren, inhospitable place.
“I listened to the record recently and wondered about what kind of lifestyles were being portrayed,” Zubia muses. “Some of the songs have to do with learning to live through the abuses of drugs and alcohol. Others deal with the results of broken relationships. When you’re living that lifestyle, or living on any sort of an edge, you just want to know what it’s going to be like when you get out of it. What are you going to be left with when the pattern of destruction is over? We’re big fans of old country music, so we’re not afraid of those themes.”
Old country themes, yes, but the Pistoleros’ brand of barn-burnin’ roots rock owes at least as much to the Zubias’ Chicano heritage. “My father and his brother were mariachi musicians,” recalls Mark, 30 years old and Lawrence’s junior by three years. “When we were old enough, Lawrence and I started playing music with them, mostly at Spanish-speaking parishes in Phoenix for fiestas, quincinedas, weddings and funerals. To me, growing up playing mariachi was like growing up playing the blues.”
Nowhere on Hang On To Nothing are the celebratory strains of mariachi blues more palpable than on “My Guardian Angel”, a snappy number written by the late Gin Blossoms guitarist Douglas Hopkins (who did a stint with the Zubias’ pre-Pistoleros band, the Chimeras) and featuring a cameo by a legendary trumpeter from the brothers’ past. “Every year when they came to town,” Lawrence explains, “my dad would buy tickets to see Mariachi del Sol, which was Jose Hernandez’s group. During the recording of ‘My Guardian Angel’, we told the producer [Julian Raymond] that we wanted some mariachi horns. He said, ‘Okay, I know the perfect guy,’ and it turned out to be Jose Hernandez.”
There were other distinguished outsiders who had a hand in shaping Hang On To Nothing, including the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris, who co-wrote “Wasting My Time” and the title track; Smithereens frontman Pat DiNizio, co-author of “Somehow, Someway”, “Nothing Lasts Forever” and “The Game”; and country crooner Radney Foster, who helped pen “Just to Hold on to You”. “Sometimes it’s difficult with just Mark and I writing,” Lawrence admits, chuckling. “The democratic process doesn’t work when there’s only two people.” Mark elaborates: “Collaborating with other people is a natural thing for us, because that’s how we started — our family and friends just passing around the guitar and singing.”
The Pistoleros — who branded themselves such after hearing Marlon Brando snarl the term in On the Waterfront — are the latest (and best) Phoenix-area band to sign with a major label in the wake of the Gin Blossoms’ breakthrough. The jump to the big leagues couldn’t have come at a better time, for Lawrence and Mark are beginning to feel the winds of change whip across their hostile desert hometown, uprooting along the way some of the region’s traditional sounds. “I see how the Tempe music scene has changed,” Mark says. “Before, it was a local phenomenon; now people are coming here from other places. This younger generation has come up and they’re playing in the bars. It’s a completely different thing.”
“I heard the Refreshments’ new album for the first time yesterday,” Lawrence adds, “and I thought, yes, there’s definitely a ‘Tempe sound.’ Or at least there was a Tempe sound. I think we’re the last ones.”
