Afternoon of the Lepus
Gram Rabbit’s desert disco at the Bates Stage
By Ron Garmon
Broken Social Scene Has What You Need
Back in the mist-fogged reaches of 2004, I had this to say about Gram Rabbit:
Dry and tough as mule jerky, sexy as a swayed hip, the music weaves elements of electro-dance, Byrds-era country rock, inner-space jazz, and gnomic meditations in the manner of Spiritualized and Pink Floyd into a sound that’s unaffectedly homey, profoundly ambitious, and frankly revolutionary. Here is the ineffably personal imagery of a West Coast daydream made accessible, even commercial. KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic has given the band prominent exposure, and it’s slated to appear chockablock with big-money acts at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. All this due to a few old Gram Parsons songs, a motel room with a ghoulish past, and one woman’s disgust with her L.A. garage band.
Though purple as a fresh bruise, these are remarks to stand by. Written back when Gram Rabbit’s debut, Music to Start a Cult To, was charting an eccentric path through the earholes of Clubland, this mash note was among its first notices. I later described their sophomore album, Cultivation, as sounding like “a bulletin giving you 24 seconds to get out of your own head” and this doesn’t come near exhausting the hallucino-metaphors Gram Rabbit inspires in me and other dope-addled jades of the rock critocracy. Last year’s Radio Angel & the RobotBeat added a Euro-pop sheen to the desert disco and psilocybin atmospherics, but their album release party at Safari Sam’s was a memorably un-slick clusterfuck, in which frontbaby Jesika von Rabbit wound up wallowing on the floor under an impromptu dogpile. “We try to have a little party onstage,” Jesika admitted.
“Todd [Rutherford] and I met about eight years ago out in the desert,” Jesika recalls now, skipping the well-known parts about Gram Parsons’s motel room and the various quasi-psychic phenomena surrounding the group’s formation. “We bonded over Gram Parsons songs, got to know each other, and started playing each other’s demos, and eventually we started playing at an open-mike night on the anniversary of Parsons’s death. We decided we were what each other was looking for music-wise, him up in San Francisco and me in Los Angeles. We had some good moments and went through many lineup changes, a few too many for me, which is not so much fun. Our producer Ethan Allen is now our guitar player. We’re working on new stuff and plugging away.”
“Our sound hasn’t changed that much,” she admits. “Though our last album doesn’t have much of the desert-y feel of the earlier ones. Right now, a lot of the stuff we’re working on does have that feel. You get bored occasionally and want to change things.” The onstage antics change only so far as they move from raucous to out-of-control, with guitarist Rutherford smiling indulgently at Jesika’s surreal agitprop and the hordes of bunny-eared disciples she attracts. The druggy Cali-country swirl and the midafternoon heat haze of the Junction promise an out-of-body experience just when you’re likely to need it most.
Gram Rabbit play Sunday at 2:30 p.m.
Published: 08/20/2008
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