Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: Rockin' the suburbs

Suburban L.A. band Hotwire gets a break

By Mike Prevatt

There's not really much to Thousand Oaks, Calif. It's a very clean, very polite and very white town between Ventura County and the San Fernando Valley, about 45 minutes away from downtown Los Angeles. While people in L.A. spend their Sundays catching brunch at a café with outside seating, followed by some shopping at the Grove, Thousand Oaks residents are more likely to go to church, grub at the neighborhood IHOP and score a best-selling self-help book at Borders. Essentially, Thousand Oaks is Green Valley with a smaller Mormon population.

While this paints a picture of prim and proper modern suburbia, as we all saw in American Beauty, nothing is as it seems, and this does not escape Hotwire vocalist/guitarist Rus Martin, who grew up in the area.

"The masks are more powdered up, know what I mean?" he says, via phone near his Hollywood residence. "Behind that is much ugliness and danger and harm, and beauty as well. It's looked at in a different way, felt in a different way. The only way you come out on top is that you didn't have to watch your back [for fear of] getting shanked. But you did have to watch your back getting eggs thrown at you!"

This says truckloads about Martin, an otherwise clean-cut guy who sings about the taboos and delusions of tract-home living sheltered from urban realities in his band's major-label debut, The Routine (set for release May 6). This running theme should not feel unfamiliar to modern/active rock listeners--Linkin Park has made a killing representing suburban youth with its anthems of angst and disillusionment. That multimillion-selling band also came from the same mall-dominated, northwestern L.A. county area. So did radio faves Incubus, Hoobastank and Onesidezero.

While Hotwire doesn't have close ties to all those bands--it's close to Hoobastank and another hometown hopeful, the appropriately monikered Home Town Hero--Martin reports the bands are friendly. And where more experienced bands may have helped Hotwire procure gigs outside the various youth centers and industrial parks of Thousand Oaks, the band in return has given a leg up to younger neighborhood bands.

"There's definitely camaraderie between [the bands]," says Martin. "We found a place where we were helping bands play gigs they'd never played before, like the Whiskey [on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood]. That's something we love trying to do. You get your foot through the door, and then you help [someone else] do the same."

Of course, once you've passed the doorjamb, you'd better be ready to deliver the goods, and that was something Hotwire learned a little too late.

"If I could do it all over again, I'd wait three years and let the band form," says Martin. "It really harmed us in the beginning--we really fouled up. The band hadn't come into its own yet. We did some recordings, and they just didn't work out, [nor did] the producers and songs we were going for, and that was really scary.

"We didn't give up. A lot of people had faith in us and we proved we wanted this more than life itself. So we harnessed the energy to make the record and here we are."

And now, before heading into the Valley for rehearsals, Martin concludes his interview by announcing he now gets to "boink my girlfriend on the head." It sounds innocent enough, but one wonders what really is going on over there. It just goes to show you: You might take the kid out of the valley, but you can never take the valley out of the kid.