Music

Lenguas Largas’ Isaac Reyes on the band’s Life Is Sh*t set and ties to the Vegas scene

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Isaac Reyes—the second guy from the back—talks to the Weekly about his Vegas ties.
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If you’re familiar with the local music scene, you might have heard of Lenguas Largas. Not because they’re from here (they aren’t), but because singer and guitarist Isaac Reyes has a long-standing relationship with Las Vegas. It’s no surprise, then, that the unconventional, indie-focused six-piece is topping the list of must-see acts playing the Life Is Beautiful-alternative Life Is Sh*t mini-fest this year. We caught up with Reyes to talk about the band’s hard-to-pigeonhole line of rock 'n' roll, (literally) performing in the desert and letting the music speak for itself.

Every song that I’ve heard sounds completely different. What’s influencing you? Are there certain bands or themes you look to as you’re writing? I guess throughout—not that I’m perfect or anything—perfecting your craft, you just evolve and progress. Basically for me, it was just not giving a f*ck if anybody thought it was punk enough or too slow. It was just growing up playing music in the punk scene and basically letting go and not caring and being in a band where I wasn’t restricted to just a bass, drum, guitar type of thing.

It started mostly as a recording project, for me to get out of my mind and just basically explore whatever. I love all kinds of music. Yes, there are obvious influences in punk, garage, rock, rap, everything. I don’t know. I just get really high (laughs) and basically [force] myself to write songs, and then they kind of come out. And it’s not just necessarily me, it’s me and Ricky [Shimo], we bounce ideas off of each other.

It looks like you guys are signed to a bunch of different labels. How does that work? The main label that we’re on right now is Recess Records. They do our LPs and stuff. The reason that we’re on Recess is because of a Las Vegas band, Civic Minded 5—it’s the guys from The Mapes. My old band[s] (Swing Ding Amigos and Shark Pants) used to play with them a lot. Recess Records put out the records for those bands too.

It’s been a while since you’ve had a gig here. Do you like Las Vegas? I like it. It’s always about making friends or hanging out with old friends I don’t get to see a lot. I’m friends with the Black Camaro guys and The Mapes. Basically we play and hang out with those guys. Back in the day we just used to go play desert parties like every Fourth of July and New Year’s. We’d go up there and play these crazy desert parties.

In Vegas? Yeah. And I guess the places that we used to play, there [are] like houses built now. Then we started playing bars. That’s basically what we would play, just parties. Desert parties.

I read that you’re not so much into a specific scene, just making music. We are all into all types of music. With this band we feel like we can play anything, any type of music. As long as we like it, it’s cool. We’ve been booking shows for, me personally, probably almost fifteen years. Mark [Beef]’s been booking shows probably since the ‘80s.

What’s the scene like in Tucson? It’s cool. A few years ago we had this bar downtown called the Red Room that was basically the hub, basically everybody used to go there. There was always somebody playing, it was always free. It was a big community thing. Then developers started buying up everything downtown and started gentrifying it. It’s all different now, but there [are] still a few bars downtown that do shows. There [are] a lot of younger bands that are touring and stuff now, too. It’s cool, it’s a new renaissance, I guess.

That sounds like what’s going on here. Speaking of, how do you feel about playing Life Is Sh*t while there’s a big glamorous festival, Life Is Beautiful, going on down the street? We’re not glamorous at all. We’re still the piece of sh*t band. (laughs) I don’t mind it. It’s weird sometimes, you know, when you see younger bands doing something that, to me, isn’t really that interesting. I guess to the masses it is, or you know, they got money behind them promoting them or something. But, I mean, it’s cool. Somebody likes it. They’re doing something right.

The video for “Yardsale Heart” is so funny. I’m really hoping you’ll share the story behind the wooden, naked man-bird statue that flies around. We filmed that at [my friend’s] wife’s dad’s house. His wife has two dads, and they’ve got a weird erotic art collection. He [was like] “There’s a bunch of crap in the backyard ... we can pretend it’s a yard sale” and he brought out that weird naked guy bird-thing, and then we just made up the story. It came out pretty f*cking good.

Your latest LP, Come On In, came out in August. Will we be hearing a lot of stuff from that, or are you digging into your five-year catalog? It’s kind of half-and-half. We don’t really play all of the songs on the album because we’ve had people change. Our original drummer moved back to California, then we got my brother to fill in. Then him and our bass player both had babies around the same time. We’ve had to restart the band a bunch, so there [are] songs that kinda get lost.

What’s the current lineup look like? Right now there’s six of us. We just did a tour and there were seven of us. We had three people playing drums with us for a while. It didn’t start out that way. We originally started with one drummer, then we got another drummer to do accents and weird stuff, percussion. The secondary drummer couldn’t tour, so we got another friend of ours to fill in for a tour and couldn’t get rid of him because he was so good. It kind of snowballed like that.

Should we expect anything crazy to happen during your show? Hopefully it’ll get people to shake their butts around. It’s Vegas, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve been kicked out of a few bars, well, just one bar in Vegas, but that was a long time ago. We’re competent enough musicians and confident in the music that we don’t really have to have a gimmick or anything.

Life Is Sh*t October 25, 4 p.m., free. Dive Bar, 4110 S. Maryland Pkwy.

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