Josh Haden of Spain

Spain frontman Josh Haden at the Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown

JOSH HADEN of SPAIN 

At Gaylord Apartments
3355 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles (Koreatown)

When interviewing an artist about his latest album, it’s such a treat to get to visit the studio where the music was actually recorded. Such an experience is even greater when the location is as rich in history as the Gaylord Apartments.

“I think everyone who lives in Los Angeles knows about the Gaylord, even if they don’t know its specific history,” says Josh Haden, the founder, bassist and songwriter of pioneering slowcore band Spain. “It’s pretty old, and anyone who drives through here to Downtown has to pass this building – it’s pretty noticeable.” 

Spain’s sixth release, Carolina, was recorded in musician Kenny Lyon’s (the Lemonheads, Divinyls, NoFX) studio that is located in the building (Drummer Danny Frankel (John Cale, k.d. lang, Lou Reed) laid down his tracks at his home in Joshua Tree.). Kenny played acoustic and electric guitars, piano, keyboards, banjo and lap and pedal steel on Carolina, and he also served as the album’s producer, engineer and mixer. 

Kenny graciously opens his doors at the Gaylord to Josh and I the day after Spain’s first show of a three-week residency at the Love Song Bar. The trio premiered songs from the new album, which is set for release June 3, and they also play tonight, May 10, and May 17.

After Josh and Kenny show me the studio space, we sit down to discuss some of Josh’s musical history, Carolina being a bit of a departure from past Spain albums, the rekindling of his passion for storytelling and how he began to deal with the death of his father, groundbreaking jazz bassist Charlie Haden, while writing the new songs.

“My mom says that after my triplet sisters were born when I was 3 and a half, the house descended into chaos, and I would just go into my room. That’s when I taught myself to read as an escape. I’ve always been a reader, and I went to school for writing as an undergrad. So I’m kind of like a failed writer/novelist. It’s too difficult an art that I can’t even master, especially short stories. For this record, I decided I was going to write short stories but make them songs,” Josh explains. “It’s hard to write a song that’s a story. It takes a lot of concentration and time, and I was being a little lazy on my earlier records, writing not so story-like songs. With the new record, almost every song can be a story with a beginning, middle and end.” 

From “Battle of Saratoga,” which tells the tale of a heroin-addicted musician trapped in his New York hotel room by a snowstorm in the 1960s, and recounting the Farmington Mine Disaster of 1968 in “One Last Look” to the world of a 1875 homesteader in “Tennessee” and images from Josh's own childhood in Malibu in “Station 2,” Carolina is full of vivid portraits of a wide range of characters.

“My dad is from the Midwest, so I’m exploring that general territory. A lot of it was my dad passing away [in July 2014], dealing with those emotions. In the first song, ‘Tennessee,’ I’m leaving Tennessee to go to the Missouri line. Missouri is where my dad grew up, so that is more of it than picking the South as a symbol," Josh responds when I ask if he specifically concentrated on the region while writing Carolina. "At the same time, there is a lot of symbolism with the South, and I’m working with that as well. The worst of American history happened in the South, and that is a very powerful topic for songwriting; many songwriters have used that for themes. I’m just starting to, and I think the next record is going to go even deeper than that.”

With all this talk of stories from the past, both real and fictional, it’s hard not to take in the immense history of the building that we’re sitting in. The Gaylord – named for land developer, publisher and eponym of Wilshire Boulevard, Henry Gaylord Wilshire – was built in 1924 as one of Los Angeles’ first co-ops, but when the lavish apartments didn’t all sell, the co-op dissolved. From 1930 on, the units became long and short-term rentals for the likes of John Barrymore, Richard Nixon, Yo Gabba Gabba’s DJ Lance and Kevin Dillon of “Entourage.”

The bottom floor used to house a grand ballroom, which became a nightclub called the Gay Room in 1948. This space eventually became the nautically themed HMS Bounty bar in 1962.

In days past, the original Brown Derby restaurant sat just to the west, while the Ambassador Hotel – where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 and currently the site of a group of schools named in his honor – and its famed Coconut Grove nightclub was located across the street from the Gaylord. Although Koreatown is rapidly gentrifying, and change is happening all around the HMS Bounty and Gaylord, there is still an air of old-school elegance to the building’s lobby, patio and pool area. Josh informs me that jazz musicians would stay at the Gaylord when touring, and Kenny points to a pile of rubble across the street that used to be a jazz club. 

Charlie Haden first saw saxophonist Ornette Coleman – who eventually became his longtime associate – play at a club that was formerly around the corner from the Gaylord, so the area definitely has significance to Josh. He has vivid memories of being 12 and hopping on a bus from Malibu with a friend to attend the Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention at the Ambassador Hotel.

“My friend and I used to bother Bruce [Schwartz], the guy who puts on the shows, by following him around, trying to distract him from his duties at the convention. He would try to introduce special guests on stage, and my friend and I would catcall him from the audience. He would get so annoyed and frustrated with us. He would run away as soon as he saw us, but in a joking way. He was always so nice,” he recalls. “I stopped going for years, and then on a lark, I saw they were having another convention. Thirty-plus years later, he still puts out the same fliers in the same font. I went to it and found him at the convention. I introduced myself as one of the two kids who used to torture him 30 years earlier. He joked, ‘You’re the kid who was bothering me years ago. How dare you show your face here!’ Now we’re kind of friends, so when I go, he stops and talks to me. When I go to his conventions, I go into the 25-cent boxes, buy 30 or 40 comic books and bring them home. It takes me a few months to get through them, but it’s fun.”

Josh also has strong memories attached to a certain album he would stare at in his parents’ record collection as a child.

“I would put headphones on and stare at the album artwork on the Beatles’ Revolver,” he shares. “I would just stare at the great black-and-white psychedelic drawing on the front and listen to ‘Taxman’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ when I was between 5 and 7 years old.”

As he grew up, Josh and his buddies would listen to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen, but that all changed one day when another friend introduced them all to something else entirely.

“My friend brought his boombox to school, slammed it on the lunch table, said, ‘Josh, listen to this,’ and pressed play. It was ‘Jealous Again’ by Black Flag, and all those other bands went out the window. From then on it was Adolescents, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, Shattered Faith and Bad Religion. We loved The Decline of Western Civilization soundtrack,” he tells. “The first punk show I went to was Fear and the Minutemen at the Whisky when I had just turned 13 or 14.” 

It was around this time when Josh began playing his own music.

“My parents split up when I was pretty young, and my mom did not want me to be a musician, so she kept me isolated from musical instruments,” he says. “In her mind, maybe if she could keep me from being a musician I wouldn’t end up like my dad. My sisters got the piano, violin and cello lessons, but I didn’t really start playing an instrument until I was into punk rock. I tried playing guitar, but it didn’t click with me, and then I switched to bass. My dad bought me a bass when I was 14, I took some lessons for about a year and then I was in a punk rock band. I said, ‘I don’t really need lessons. I can do this; this is easy.”

Although he harbored dreams of being a writer, all Josh wanted to do at this time in his life was play music.

“When I was 16, we started a band called Treacherous Jaywalkers and literally rehearsed five days a week. We would get out of school, go to James’ [Fenton] house and play music until we had to go home,” he remembers. “We didn’t think of it as dedication, it was just fun. We didn’t have any other responsibilities, so that’s what we did.”

Josh shared all of the bands that were inspiring him with his dad and his three sisters – Tanya, Petra and Rachel. 

“Then when we got a little older, my sisters [Rachel on bass, Petra on violin/vocals] started a band called That Dog with their friend Anna [Waronker], and that actually influenced Spain a lot because their songs were mellow and quiet. I heard those songs, and they reinforced the direction I was going in. I thought, ‘If they can play songs like that and people are going to their shows and they’re getting attention, I could probably do it, too.”

He formed Spain in 1993, and their debut album, The Blue Moods of Spain, released two years later. The album featured the haunting song “Spiritual,” which has been covered by artists that run the gamut, from Johnny Cash to Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny. Spain went on to release two more albums, She Haunts My Dreams and I Believe, before taking a break then reforming in 2007.

The Soul of Spain debuted in 2012, featuring Petra, Rachel and Tanya – the Haden Triplets – to critical acclaim, and the band toured all over Europe. The following year, Sargent Place (named for the Echo Park studio it was recorded in), was released, featuring the final recorded performance of Charlie Haden on the track “You And I.” 

With Carolina, Josh makes a conscious effort to move away from Spain’s past material, and the album artwork is indicative of this. 

“[Nate Pottker] sent me this portrait that he drew out of the blue. The drawing itself is great, but what really struck me was the color that he used, that blue. It was this very unique and creative wash that he used, like a pen drawing, for a really interesting, spontaneous background. I thought, ‘If this was an album cover, people would notice it,’ so I contacted him,” he says. “It was happy circumstance because I really wanted to get away from what I was doing with Spain album covers in the past. I wanted to make a clean break from that, musically advance to another level and do the same with the art – break out of a rut I had found myself in after many years.”

When I ask if one of the new songs, “Starry Night,” was so named because he is an art lover, Josh replies with “Probably.”

“I got a love of visual art from my grandparents, my mom’s parents, who were always members of LACMA. My grandma would always say, ‘There are two things you always need to have: a membership to an art museum and a subscription to a newspaper,’ so I’ve tried to be a member of LACMA as much as I can,” he says. “I also like the Norton Simon. It’s smaller, nicer to hang out at, and they have really great art, too.”

While he admits to loving too many restaurants in his neighborhood of Silver Lake, Josh does have a few favorites.

“We go to a Brazilian chicken place on Hillhurst [Tropicalia Brazilian Grill?] a lot. They do one thing really well. Tomato Pie has the best pizza in our neighborhood,” he reveals. “On the west side there’s a French restaurant, Mélisse, which is so expensive I wouldn’t be able to eat there, but my dad loved that place and we would go there on special occasions. It is amazing. We do like Cafe Stella, it’s expensive but not as bad, so we go there a couple times a year.” 

As Spain gears up for a month-long European tour, Josh admits to really only missing two things when he’s away from home: his family and good Mexican food. He thinks Los Angeles is great, but if he had his way, he would live in New York City and make every Angeleno spend time someplace else.

“I think that every young person should at least live in New York City for a couple of years to experience it because it’s so different and inspiring in a way that L.A. isn’t, and L.A. is inspiring in ways that New York isn’t. If I was the president of L.A. Unified School District, I would put millions of dollars into a program to get every student to be a roadie for a band on tour in Europe just to experience the cosmopolitan nature of life and to meet people from all walks of life,” he concludes. “Most people don’t have the money to travel. If I wasn’t a musician, I probably wouldn’t be traveling either, but I think it’s important to force kids to have those experiences because that’s what opens their minds, lets them be peaceful, aware and thoughtful people.”

Carolina will be available June 3. Spain performs May 10 and 17 at the Love Song Bar. For more information, visit spaintheband.com.

Ethan Gold

Ethan Gold at the Prince Restaurant and Bar

ETHAN GOLD

At The Prince Restaurant & Bar

3198 1/2 W. 7th St., Los Angeles (Koreatown) 213-389-1586

In the time that I've spent profiling the people and places of Los Angeles thus far, I have yet to encounter anyone who is as passionate about this city as Ethan Gold. Although the singer-songwriter was born and raised in San Francisco, he has explored virtually every nook and cranny of his adopted hometown.

"I used to live near Koreatown, in a neighborhood that's technically called Mid-City. Most people don't know what you mean when you say that, so I used to call it North South Central. It was sort of a nether zone, so I explored the rest of the city, honestly, more than anyone. I know the city's streets better than some realtors," Ethan admits. "I really went everywhere, from Boyle Heights and Venice to the Valley and Artesia. Before Yelp, or before I got on it anyway, I had my own list of restaurants, and people would e-mail me for it because I'm a guy who goes into every single restaurant and tries it. I really explore weird places where I say, 'I don't know what that is, therefore, I'm going in.' Sometimes you find great stuff that way."

Throughout his adventures, Ethan has discovered some pretty amazing places, including the location he chooses for our interview, the Prince Restaurant and Bar, in Koreatown.

"I found this place because of the alluring sign in the sky and walked into this strange Korean version of an English gentlemen's club. I used to have this rap, 'Cuz I'm a Koreatown clown not an Okie from Muskogee. I like my kimchi with my pork bulgogi.' So, I do love Koreatown. It's a huge part of the city that most people are only dimly aware of and don't realize is not like Little Tokyo or Chinatown, it's a massive swath of the city with its own culture. I've been thrown out of bars because of my race, which is something that doesn't happen often," he shares. "This neighborhood has so many weird, cool bars. It feels like another world. You go south and there's Central American stuff, as well as some classic, old Hollywood steak houses. It's an interesting mix, and I like neighborhoods that are a mix. I live in Silver Lake now, but I still have a fondness for this part of town. It's still close to my heart."

Originally established in 1920s as the Windsor, one is at first taken aback at the Prince's mash-up of old English decor adorned with slightly zany knick knacks with patrons that are primarily Korean, but there is something oddly appealing about walking into a place that looks like it should be in the English countryside and being greeted with distinctly Asian aromas wafting from the kitchen. Over the years, Korean and non-Korean notables from politicians to Hollywood celebrities have walked through the Prince's doors for a cocktail or plate of KFC (Korean fried chicken). The restaurant and its bar have been in films such as Chinatown and Thank You for Smoking, but I'm fairly certain that Ethan is oblivious to the fact that the Prince serves as one of the main locations for Fox's "New Girl" and was featured in "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations" because he doesn't own a television. In fact, as we take a seat in a red leather, corner booth, Ethan tells me that the TV sets that hang over the Prince's bar definitely rub him the wrong way.

"I chose the Prince as a place for us to meet tonight because it's amusing, and I'm always happy to be here. I love the environment – the walls, the paintings, the music – although they have televisions now, which they didn't used to, and I feel televisions are spreading like a scourge across restaurants and bars. I partly blame flat screens because it's so easy for people to put them up, but they just ruin the atmosphere of a place for me," he emphasizes. "There are TVs here now, and I'm pissed about it. It's a real downer for me. It's not how I live. I certainly waste a lot of time on the Internet, so I can't really be on a high horse about not owning a television, but I find it an instant depressor."

Luckily our booth is next to a piano, and a pianist has begun a medley of holiday songs so the lights and sounds from the televisions soon fade into the background. Ethan is in the mood for something spicy and, at the waiter's suggestion, places an order for the Sautéed Kimchi with Pork. He then divulges one of the most fascinating things I've ever heard ("Something you're not going to believe, but is completely true.").

"When I moved to Silver Lake a couple of years ago, I systematically began going to every single restaurant in the neighborhood. I now have been to, I kid you not, every restaurant, and when I say restaurant I mean even the little sandwich shop that you wonder, 'who ever goes in there?' Yes, I've been there. Every place in Atwater, Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Echo Park. Literally, every single one," he stresses. "It's taken me a few years, of course, and people always say to me, 'You should blog about this. But it's something I share with friends, and the experience itself was like climbing 40 peaks in the Adirondacks or climbing Everest. It was about the experience and doing it, not the writing of it. We live in a time when a lot of people turn everything they do into part of their personal brand. I enjoy going to restaurants, and I just wanted to do it and not have it be turned into something other than eating, being part of a community and meeting the people who run these places. Especially because when you go to the places that nobody else is going to, which by math is going to happen when you're eating at all of them, you're often in there by yourself with the owner. That, to me, is the real Los Angeles right there."

He really isn't exaggerating when he says that he's tried every place in the area. I am in awe when Ethan proves his restaurant savvy by rattling off details about each of the places on my own list of neighborhood favorites in Echo Park. While he has enjoyed trying all of the food at these establishments, the people behind the places are what really excite him.

"I used to go to the HMS Bounty where there was a waitress who was very sweet. She told me that she had been the roommate of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, but it was believable because she was the right age and she just looked like she would be their roommate. It was both a wonderful slice of old Hollywood and kind of sad. She was working in this bar and carried herself with this elegance, she was incredible," he remembers. "That's a place that feels like it has history. I would go in, and there would be a bunch of old fishermen."

Although it would be impossible for him to choose just one favorite out of the hundreds he has visited, Ethan – whose friends have joked is a mini Jonathan Gold, the food critic, and although they are not related, they have similar names that share a "-than Gold" in common – does offer a few recommendations when asked.

"I love the Griffith Park trail that comes up from Fern Dell Drive and the eatery there, Trails Cafe, is a great spot. The Avocado Sandwich reminds me of Northern California. I really love Sake House Miro on La Brea. They have posters of old Godzilla movies. It's chaotic, loud and sort of ramshackle. I like places that feel like a crazy person made them, as opposed to a perfectly designed concept. I prefer places where somebody wanted to make their mom's food in a restaurant and then put up a bunch of random art," he details. "Have you been to Los Tacos on Santa Monica? I never understood refried beans until Los Tacos and El Cholo.  Plus, Los Tacos is open all night. As an insomniac, I go there a lot at 3 a.m. and get a full meal for $6. That's my kind of place."

The vast selection of food options available in Los Angeles is not the only thing Ethan loves about the city, though.

"There's an expression that Los Angeles is the capital of the Third World. Third World is an old term that has a loaded political connotation, but it's a funny way to describe Los Angeles and its mix of cultures. Behind the veneer of Hollywood, there's a massive megalopolis of millions of people. There's a massive Koreatown, a massive Indian community in Artesia, a huge Central American population. I love that you can travel the world in Los Angeles, you can explore this city forever and not get bored if you're active." He continues, "The more you put in, the more you get out. There's an incredible mix of people here, way more of a mix than there is in San Francisco, economically, which makes it more colorful for me."

Ethan's early life in San Francisco with his twin brother Ari and sister Nina was not an easy one or as full of rock 'n' roll tales as some might make it out to be. Some time after Ethan's mother parted ways with his novelist father, she began a relationship with renowned concert promoter Bill Graham.

"Because my mother was dating Bill Graham, we would sometimes be at these huge concerts, which was a strange experience, being a 5-year-old kid on stage at these massive shows. People think that we must have grown up in that world, but we didn't really. We were a couple of steps removed," he clarifies. "That's something people misunderstand. My mother was with him, and they died together in a helicopter crash, which made it historic, but it wasn't where we grew up. It's not the milieu that I was in."

The Golds' childhood was clearly not about glitz and glamour, but Ethan has always been able to find refuge in music.

"Music was my private way to create space in my head. Writing music was a world that I could escape into. I was writing music on the piano without lessons. (I spent a lot of time wishing that I had lessons. The flip side of that is there are people for whom lessons beat the creativity out of, so at least that didn't happen.) I approached every instrument with what Buddhists would call beginner's mind. I feel like I'm still figuring them out, and writing songs is partly figuring things out, so it's a real childlike feeling to be writing," he says. "I sat at the piano playing what I called 'arabesques' at age 6. I don't know where I picked that word up, but I think they had a slightly Oriental flavor to them. I also had what I called 'Frenchy pieces,' which was whatever felt French to me at 6, the chords probably sounded like something an accordion would play."

Even on his way to graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, Ethan continued to write songs. He played guitar, bass, keyboards and drums in other people's bands, produced Elvis Perkins' acclaimed Ash Wednesday album in 2007 and scored director/screenwriter Ari's 2010 feature film debut, Adventures of Power. But it wasn't until 2011's Songs From a Toxic Apartment that Ethan released his own songs on an album.

"I was writing my own material and hadn't come around to the confidence to put it out. Doing Songs from a Toxic Apartment, where I played it myself and engineered it myself in a very cheap way using archaic equipment, squeezing what I think is a pretty good sounding and intense record out of it is something that I needed to do. For some reason, I needed to really dig my own garden and figure out what was going on. I don't know that I would ever want to do a record like that again. I think working with other people in more proper studios, there's a real pleasure to that. My next record which will be coming out sometime in 2014, I worked with other players and engineers, so it's not a totally solo album like the first one was," Ethan tells. "I was writing a rock opera and ended up with 80 songs, it spiraled into this craziness. Songs from a Toxic Apartment started when I was demoing songs around that time, getting my own feelings down, my own explorations of my childhood and feelings that were coming up as I was working on the rock opera, which was a pretty dark thing. It was an extremely homemade experience, and the apartment that I refer to, it was literal, but the songs are not about the toxicity that happened to be in apartment. They're about the inner toxicity that a lot of us carry around from our childhoods. I wanted to structure the record so that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and I think there is. It's a fairly intense ride of a record, but light comes in through the metaphoric window."

After listening to Songs From a Toxic Apartment, it's clear that Ethan has a unique gift for finding light from darkness through song. In a recent blog post on his website, Ethan details a personal tragedy and says, 'They say music is healing, and I could actually feel that now." Music has a way of healing physical or mental pain, not only for Ethan as a songwriter, but for anyone who can relate to the emotions conveyed in his songs.

Ethan says that while most of their childhood was focused on surviving, he does remember singing funny songs with his brother and a time when they built a shoebox-sized pool table out of felt, wood and marbles together. The Gold brothers collaborated as part of the Honey Brothers and on music for Ari's film projects, and they continue to work together in several videos for Songs From a Toxic Apartments tracks. Ethan has released nine videos for the album, and each is actually more like a short film than a typical music video.

"My brother did a video for 'That (Reprise),' which was completely his own work, but the rest of them were mainly birthed images that came to me as I mixed the record. I played all the instruments on the record, mixed and recorded it myself at home; I spent a lot of time with music listening to it on headphones, obsessing on it and was so deep inside of the mixes that these the videos were playing already in my head," he says. "The illustrator for 'To Isis Sleeping' was somebody that I actually had never met in Serbia, who made made it with no input from me aside from pictures I sent of myself so she could get my face right. Another animated video, for 'Poison,' is by a brilliant animator named Tod Polson whom I met at a film festival."

"[Ari] directed "They Turned Away" and "Nonstop" – which I had strongly mapped out, including the drag stuff. That was part of the song for me," Ethan continues. "The song is a dialogue between either a john and a prostitute or these different genders and sleazy impulses within the mind that contain both the chaser, the chased and the chaste. All of that was within the song, so I wanted to do the video that way. My brother wanted to have someone else do that role, but I had to lobby hard to convince him that I could pull it off. I don't normally do drag stuff, but it was something that I wanted to do in this video, to turn the male gaze around on itself for a little bit."

Ethan is going to screen all nine of the videos at his next show, Jan. 8 at Bootleg Bar. He is also giving each audience member a copy of Songs From a Toxic Apartment, as well as playing the album in its entirety, in track by track order, with a band of comprised of other musicians.

"It's a celebration of the videos and a party for the album, as I prepare to embark on my next album," he says. "I'm excited to be moving now as an artist."

As he has come to savor all of the flavors that Los Angeles offers and after years of working to help others realize their creative visions, Ethan Gold is finally able to relish the feeling that comes from sharing his words, emotions and music through his own solo endeavors.

Ethan Gold performs Jan. 8 at Bootleg Bar. For more information, visit ethangold.com.