Calexico.

DESPITE THE NAME, Calexico is a Tucson-based group, focusing on originality and character. Their music stems from an urge to shun the cookie-cutter industry, which envelops most up-and-coming bands. With more studio time, tours, and style than most of your favorite artists, Calexico remains a testament to true working-class musicianship. These are well-rounded sounds put down by folks who know their stuff, who aren't afraid to give you a Latin-influenced lashing while lulling you to sleep with the sweetest percussion around. John Convertino, perfect beats, and Joey Burns, lyrics and licks, are the backbone and heart of Calexico. What follows is a conversation with two of independent music's most under-appreciated talents.

For those that don't know, give us some history on the band.

Joey Burns: John and I met in 1990 or 1989 in Los Angeles, CA, through a mutual connection at a studio called Radio Tokyo; it's the place that Ethan James owned, where Black Flag recorded some of their records, and the Minutemen. I was an uptight bass player and John played in a band called Giant Sand who were looking for a bass player, so that's how we met. Around '92 or '93 we moved out to Tucson, AZ.

John Convertino: There was a 90-dollar train from LA to Tucson; we started making trips out there, almost like a getaway. It was like an 11-hour train ride and the train station was right across the street from the Hotel Congress, this old hotel built in the '20s. You could stay there for 25 bucks a night, and right about that time--a little earlier, maybe the late '80s--they started having bands play at this old hotel. So this kind of started a little music scene right downtown; Giant Sand was, of course, one of the bands that played there a lot. It just made more sense; it was so cheap to live there, it was laid back, and you had the feeling that there wasn't so many people trying to do the same thing. In LA there's so many bands, such a glut.

Joey: The focus wasn't on the music, it was more on getting signed and making it. But after being there [Tucson] for awhile, we started shopping around in some of these old thrift stores and old music stores, like the Chicago music store, getting old records for 50 cents.

John: Martin Denny.

Joey: Yeah, Martin Denny. For me, Al Cayola. The stuff you hear when you walk into an old Italian restaurant and there's like a whole sea of mandolins, I love that shit. I think it's so cool. As well as classics like Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews--who sings "Cry Me A River"?

John: I think it's Julie Christie, the actress; she sang, too.

Joey: Yeah. Then we started playing with this band called the Friends of Dean Martin. That was kind of a lounge band and it was more a joke, in that it was called the Friends of Dean Martin and we played lounge. They only did one show or so before we joined up. Becoming friends with these guys, we pushed them to learn some songs, so it basically was a Santo and Johnny cover band. Santo and Johnny did the song "Sleepwalk," which, when you're watching the movie La Bamba and Ritchie Valens' plane crashes, it's the music that comes directly after that.

John: Santo and Johnny is great, great instrumental music, great production; I love the acoustic bass and brushes on the drums. All that along with Link Wray really influenced us a lot, it was brushes on drums and acoustic bass, but it still rocked. For me it rocked a lot harder than when things got electric and people were pounding on the drums with all their might. It just had a certain swing to it and strength to it.

Joey: And we had been playing that for quite a few years, just really loud, it had gotten louder and louder. In some ways music is, in itself, very cyclical; things return, come back, go away for a while, start to come back. That's kind of what happened with us. On this new record there are some rock songs creeping back in.

John: Coming back around to it on this new record actually felt good rather than being a burden. Sometimes that kind of beat, to me, just felt like it was too heavy.

Joey: Touring with bands like Yo La Tango had a big influence on us, who was one of our favorite bands. They'll pull things out that are kind of abstract jazz influenced by Sun Ra, or they'll do a really quiet kind of pop song that sounds like it's an outtake from the Beach Boys.

That covers some of the next question, which was about the new album and where you're going with that.

Joey: Going into the studio, we thought, "Why don't we try to get together and rehearse some songs, some ideas, get comfortable working with a producer," which we've never done before. We hired JD Foster from New York to come out and work with us. We went to Bisbee, AZ, which is a small town. It's got steep streets and these old Victorian houses from the turn of the century that remind you of being in some parts of San Francisco.

John: It's pretty bizarre; it's quite a bit cooler down there, 'cause it's up in the hills and it's really tucked away. It was a mining town, a copper mine, so it didn't have any room to grow.

Joey: Maybe two-hours' drive, so it's just far enough away from downtown Tucson, where we live. And cell phone signals don't work down there so you really get cut off and focus more on just being together. We had some friends who worked at a really nice restaurant called Cafe Roka and they said they had a fourth floor available. This place wound up working out really well. The third floor was empty but it had tables down there in case the restaurant got crowded on the first and second floors. We wound up eating there quite a bit and hanging out on the third floor like Goodfellas or something. We had the place to ourselves.

John: We had bottles of wine brought up. It was mostly just great to be able to try some different ideas out before we went into the studio so we weren't blatantly green.

Joey: Working with JD and getting his feel on the band, him just listening. Our soundman, Jelle, was there recording the rehearsals. He had a little mini-PA set up and recorded all the rehearsals and catalogued them. Then we went into Wavelab Studio, where we've recorded many, many records, and set up the whole band and started going to work for about two weeks or so. We went on tour to Europe in the summer, and then we started our tour with Iron and Wine. Recording with Sam Beam in the studio had a big influence for me, in the way he was approaching the vocals and the arrangements and the use of rhythms, so I ended up trying some of the vocal ideas that he was encouraging me to do. He'd say, "Get in there, put some vocals on it, take it up an octave." I don't think I've sung that high before. So that had an influence, as well as touring with bands like Yo La Tango and Wilco, and touting more in the States. We played some festivals like Bonnaroo, we played a festival in Quebec City, we played Castle Clinton in New York two summers in a row. Just starting to get the feel of different crowds in the States.

John: Opening up for Los Lonely Boys was a crowd we would never have played in front of, but they appreciated what we were doing. It's a little more difficult for an independent band to get things going in the States because it's so vast and touting costs a lot of money. You have to span so much territory.

Joey: The industry is a double-edged sword. You always hear people, like, wow a band got signed to a major label, and then on one hand fans are saying they sold out, but the industry is like, "Okay, now we'll put you on late night television, now we'll put you on radio or on front pages of media," and stuff, and it sends really mixed messages. We've seen enough bands that have gone down the route of major labels and it just seems like it's for all the wrong reasons. It's never about the music, or the quality, or working with people that love music and are willing to go out on a Sunday and go record shopping or turn you on to music that you might like; it's all about whatever they're working on, whatever the buzz is. Working with Touch and Go and Quarterstick Records has been a great experience.

John: They give us the freedom to do what we want to do--it's not like we feel pressure from them. The president of the company, Corey, he's always saying, "It's your band, you guys do what you want to do." He makes great suggestions, he's been in the business for 25 years.

Joey: He started out when he was 16, putting out seven-inch singles of the Nekros and punk rock out of Detroit, then he moved to Chicago, so he's pretty much seen it all.

John: It's always sage advice coming from him and well appreciated, and at the same time you're free to make your own choices. "This is what I've seen happen with this band," he'll give good examples, so it's been a good relationship. And I think, too, a band develops and a lot of times the fans will develop with them. A journalist asked me yesterday, "Don't you think some of your fans will be disappointed because you're not doing what you were doing before?" And it's like, no, it should be refreshing, do they want us to make the same record every single time?

What would you consider to be your favorite piece of recording equipment?

John: My favorite is a four-track cassette. It's so easy to use, you just click the first channel on, press play, and record just like a cassette deck. You can lay a track down with piano or an accordion piece, it's just so simple. For me it's my favorite piece of recording equipment. In the studio we like using the old school tape machine.

John: That computer stuff, too, is scary 'cause of the programs. Sometimes it's hard to tell if it's the program or somebody actually playing. We have a friend who is using that kind of technology in a really great way, Brad Denboer. They are also known as Thermos Malling. He was in this band called Doo Rag in Tucson, and he has a band with his wife now called Coin. He writes all the music from video game samples; even some of the vocals he's done from computer games. But they actually play live, too.

Here's the skate question--did you?

Joey: Yeah sure, growing up. We had a song on this EP called "Convict Pool," which is inspired by a pool article. One of the pools was Convict Pool and I thought that was the most beautiful name, so I thought, why not a song?

John: I remember when I was skating the whole Skateboarding Is Not A Crime slogan was becoming more and more popular. It's just interesting how in society, in this country, that criminals are people having some fun or doing something with their own bodies or helping people out. It's terrible. Some of the stuff nowadays is amazing. It's like poetry.

Joey: I grew up near a town called Palos Verdes, right on the coast in Southern California, so I used to always watch the surfers. I was really into surf music, the Ventures and all that stuff growing up, Link Wray. John was in a surf band.

John: Two actually, the Fugitive Kind, we did more garage-type punk rock stuff like the Sonics but we also did some surf that we wrote. Then I was in the Insect Surfers. It's fun music to play, especially if you're a drummer.

Joey: And guitar, there is that twang; I started hearing that, the combination of twang and surf beats and drums in Tucson more, started thinking about it more listening to Link Wray, who was really popular in Tucson. He lived there for a while in the '70s and wrote a song called "Tucson Arizona," it's pretty bizarre. Then I started listening to Ennio Marconi, who did the music for a lot of spaghetti westerns that Clint Eastwood was in, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Fist Full of Dollars, stuff like that, and started hearing this connection. In the '60s that was such a popular sound.

John: That really low baritone, twangy guitar sound, it kind of relates because Southern Italy is really a desert--it's very much like California.

Joey: Isn't that where they filmed all of those movies?

John: They film those movies down there and Ennio Marconi was recording the music, and they take a break and the guitar player puts his guitar next to a radiator, like a heater, not knowing it was on and they come back from the break and start to play the song again and his guitar is completely warped, the strings, you know. He can't tune it up, it's so low. He doesn't know what to do so he goes plays the part and they finish it, and the maestro says, "Whatever you're doing with the guitar it's beautiful, keep doing it." Turns out he loved it, and it became his signature sound.

Joey: Sometimes it can be a beautiful mistake, it can take you somewhere where you never thought music could go.