Everywhere has a home team band. Between long-time fans, songs that reference local places, or just the stamina to play anywhere that will have them, they start to become identified with a local style of music as much as the local style gets defined by them. When it comes to roots and Americana music, we have a few of them here in California. The Mother Hips come immediately to mind, The Coffis Brothers, and of course, LA’s Old Californio. Led by Woody Aplanalp and Rich Dembowski, the band features a set of regular, but sometimes rotating members. They’ve just released their 6th album, Metaterranea, and it hews to their country/psychedelia/pop style of play.
The first song on the record could have easily been the title track of the record, if not of the band itself. Old Kings Road, aka El Camino Real, is the thoroughfare dating back to the Spanish missionaries that connects the original California settlements, from San Diego at the border to Sonoma in the north. It’s not very majestic anymore; as Dembowski notes “she’s been broken into main streets that line sad suburban dreams.” But if you’re looking for a dive bar with live music, it’s a good place to start, and maybe end, your night.
Destining Again has a little more of a power pop sound with the road as a metaphor for life where, “I wonder where it will leave us, this road we’re on.” The pop turns a little trippy on Weeds (Wildflowers) with a nylon-string guitar putting a slightly surreal touch on a celebration of a wildflower’s journey wherever the wind and sun take it. The Seer has a little more edge to it, which is a little counterintuitive in a song about how immaterial man is in the grand scheme of things. The finishing number is Just Like A Cloud. It starts as a country blues dirge, picks up a little speed and becomes almost light and fluffy before easing back on the tempo and then finishing with a crazy, jazzy guitar solo outro.
The music world is full of examples where a musician’s upbringing and their style of music differ, from NYC country crooners to Texas troubadours doing grungy, acid rock. So it would be silly to suggest Old Californio somehow has a birthright to their style of music. Having said that, if you want to paint a picture in your mind’s eye of the Golden State’s Americana style, instead of what shows up in the cable news or tourist board ads, go grab a copy of Metaterranea.
About the author: I've actually driven from Tehatchapee to Tonopah. And I've seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night.