Although The Growlers are considered a garage band, last year’s Natural Affair reveals the LA group to have far more eclectic tastes; songs touch on funky disco-rock, psychedelic electronic jams and chiming indie pop.
As The Growlers gear up to give Vinyl a proper goodbye with a three-night stand, frontman Brooks Nielsen checked in about that album, past Vegas appearances (covering Tom Jones’ “She’s a Lady” remains a highlight), and potential surprises for the shows. “Me and my drummer were talking last night about other Vegas songs we should cover,” Nielsen says. “He sent me a Clash song and a Gram Parsons song.”
You guys have played Vinyl several times. What’s it like heading back there to close down the venue? I don’t know why and how it happened, but we have a pretty special crowd there. It feels like they’re starved every time we get back there. Vegas is always a bit of a blur, but this will be three nights, so that’s too long to be partying in Vegas for us (laughs).
How do you approach a three-night stand like this? We just keep raising the raising the stakes and making the sets bigger and longer. It’s a test of our endurance, [and] a Vegas atmosphere should not help. But we’ll have some family there, because it’s close to home.
How did your Australian tour go? I saw you had to cancel one show because of the air quality due to the brush fires. I don’t think there’s anyone that’s not being affected by it. Even if their area doesn’t have smoke, they’re hearing firsthand stories. We can relate to it being from California—being surfers and seeing what happened in Malibu last year. It’s just on a massive scale there. It’s everywhere you look.
We kept hearing, “You’re going to see some of the fire. You might drive through some old, burned-down forest,” which we did. But then, in the city of Melbourne, I had never seen anything like it. You could see not just the whole city really thick with smog—which was smoke, and you can smell it and feel it—but [there were] big plumes of clouds coming through.
Then we went off to that one show in a small beachside town. The whole drive out there I was like, “This is not looking good.” The venue was kind of open-face, so [smoke] was just billowing in. It was even smokier in the club than it was outside. It was like, “You know what, we have more shows to go and this isn’t healthy for anybody.” We never like canceling a show, but it was the real deal over there.
When you guys were making Natural Affair, was there anything you wanted to do differently from previous records? For me, it’s the songs. I wanted the songs to get the proper amount of time thought out to make it the best [album] possible. No tricks.
The Growlers have always been considered a garage band. And that was because we had amateur home recordings. We wanted to sound like the records that we listened to, but that’s just all we could afford and all that we had. I’m cool with being called or considered a garage band through that whole period, but we always did want to make a nice record.
We did it the old-school way, put it down on tape and paid attention to try and make it sound good and played well. We’re happy. We worked hard. We put in thousands of hours, and shut off a lot of people and things in our lives in order to do it. I feel confident about what’s out there.
How would you say the songs from Natural Affair are evolving live? If anything, the musicianship has stepped up a little bit, so it’s more exciting for us to play. I like trying to find a place to put [them] in a setlist, to deliver [them], without explanation. We’re lucky we have a following that’s really open-minded, and they catch on to it real quickly. It’s surprising how they already know all the words.
You’ve staged your Beach Goth festival in Southern California for eight years. What have you learned about the music industry doing that? We got a taste of, “This is getting really big, and the lineups are getting big, and the bands are getting serious.” And with that came a lot of stress and a fight for power. … And that was like, “Oh, when we lose control, this stuff gets kind of scary, because all of a sudden there’s a safety issue. And now it feels a lot more like I’m running a business, and not like I’m having fun throwing a party.”
We saw the dark side. It was the first time we had someone we thought of as a friend turn on us and sue us and try and put out the band. They went for the jugular and tried to sue us for millions of dollars and steal our name. That was a hard fight and something hard to recognize. You gotta be careful who you trust. We’ve heard that in the industry, but it was firsthand experience. That was pretty scary and really sucked.
But we pulled through it, and what we learned is, this is our thing and we need to treat it that way. We control it; we do every aspect of it. That way we know it’s cool and know it’s legit. And that’s what spells success.
THE GROWLERS January 30-February 1, 9 p.m., $45-$60. Vinyl, 702-693-5000.
