Living In La La Land - By Matt Ashare
It's the end of January and the Gigolo Aunts, a four-piece Boston-based guitar-pop band that's spent the past decade being a sort of East Coast version of the Posies, are in Los Angeles, playing a weekly residency gig at the Martini Lounge and gearing up to celebrate a CD release party at the infamous Viper Room. It's an unusually long way from home for a band to be on the eve of a big release, but the Gigolo Aunts have found themselves in a rather unusual situation. "God bless the Boston fans for sticking with us and waiting five years for a new record, but for some reason we're cooler here in L.A. right now," explains Aunts frontman Dave Gibbs.
"We've been accepted by this weird group of in-crowd people as like their token pop band or something," he adds. "Maybe it's because we know like eight billion stupid cover songs. In L.A. it's like in New York: bands are so serious and they play every gig like it's some kind of showcase. But we're like, 'We're playing here because we want to play here, and to have fun.' And I think people are pleasantly surprised when we pull out a cover like '867-5309 (Jenny).'"
The in-crowd person who's had the biggest impact on Gibbs and his band--guitarist Jon Skibic, drummer Fred Eltringham, and bassist Steve Hurley--is Counting Crow Adam Duritz. Not only is he releasing the Gigolos' first album in five years, Minor Chords And Major Themes, on his own E Pluribus Unum imprint, but he's been putting the Aunts up at his Hollywood Hills mansion while they're in town.
The Aunts/ Duritz relationship dates back to 1993, when the Counting Crows were touring as the opening act for the Cranberries. "We opened the first half of that tour and they did the second half," Gibbs recalls. "So we met them and they were just schmoes like us. We started talking and we found out we were all Big Star fanatics and we liked the same sh-t: mid-'60s Dylan and all this stuff. So we [became] friends with them and they'd have us over to their place whenever they could. And then last fall, Adam invited us to do a massive tour opening for the Counting Crows and the Wallflowers, and he kept saying, 'I'm going to sign you guys. Get ready to go in the studio in February.' And he did."
It wasn't quite that simple. First the Gigolo Aunts had to extract themselves from a deal gone wrong with RCA, which had yielded only the 1994 full-length Flippin' Out and then kept the band tied up in a drawn-out legal battle for freedom. The hooky harmony-laced sound of Flippin' Out, however, did earn the young Gigolos their first 15 minutes of fame in England, where their tune "Where I Find My Heaven" was licensed as the theme song for a popular sitcom. And the five-year layoff, during which they released an indie EP, left Gibbs and Hurley plenty of time to write strong material for the new disc, including the tough and tuneful standout anthem "Super Ultra Wicked Mega Love"--and to learn a bucketload of crowd-pleasing cover tunes. Now, on the eve of Minor Chords' release, the Gigolo Aunts can cheerfully attest to two things: 1) Adam Duritz is a damn fine fellow, and 2) L.A. crowds do appreciate a little Tommy Tutone.