The Zubia brothers, singer Lawrence and guitarist Mark, hatched what would become a beautiful, beat-up and tragic musical partnership that’d last more than 30 years, basically until Lawrence’s death in 2020—pneumonia while recovering from pancreatic surgery. Really, it started long before that. The gifted working-class bros grew up in a Mexican-American family in all-white Scottsdale, Arizona, playing mariachi music with their father. Young Mark would search out Lawrence’s poetry to turn into songs. Even then, they knew they’d someday play together in a rock ’n’ roll band.
Life kicked in a bit. Lawrence left home young, married, lived in Japan, divorced and returned, where the brothers finally made good on those early plans with a band called the Shades, later, in ’88, Live Nudes, with drummer Terry Smith, bassist Vince Green and guitarist Greg Simmons.
They played every Sunday in a Scottsdale bar, armed with a total of ten songs. Yes, ten. They had to do four sets! So they’d repeat songs and stretch covers like the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” and Dylan’s “Meet Me in the Morning.” The suffering for the music had begun. “That gig was the kind of thing,” Mark laughs, “where you’d show up at the bar on a Tuesday to try and get some food, [in advance] because you were playing there on Sunday.”
The quintet soon moved to Tempe — ground zero for the dusty Tempe explosion that was just kicking up the Gin Blossoms, and The Jetzons before them—and rented a little house a few streets from the infamous Long’s Wong’s, the tiny rock ’n’ roll institution/hot wings burrow where everyone played. The Live Nudes house doubled as a late-night beer-and-bong hang for, basically, the soldiers and cast-offs of Tempe music. Their songwriting base and following grew exponentially, Long Wong’s their stage.
“We made the big shift from Scottsdale to Tempe, where all the people getting record deals were,” guitarist Mark laughs. “Live Nudes was weird because we weren’t doing jangle.” It’s true—their sound split from the usual Wong’s menu with a more soulful, bluesy rock ’n’ roll, closer to Joe Cocker/Stones than Big Star/Replacements. More, the spindly Lawrence was a quintessential frontman—the Michael Hutchence-via-Jim Morrison school. He’d slipped from the womb, cigarette intact, with a guttural voice that perfectly shaped his truthful, Bukowski-shaded poetics, just as his alcoholism was hitting in fits and starts.
The self-released five-song EP the band toured behind was lifted by Lawrence’s world- weary vocals, the dirty-blues crunch and crafty ska breakdown of “Broken Bridges,” and the big-drummed rock ’n’ soul crunch of “Always Tomorrow.” The tender slow-burn “Better Roads” revealed Ray Charles influences without pretension, and some things are damn sacred.
Live Nudes split in June ’92, after Doug Hopkins—freshly kicked out of the Gin Blossoms, the band he founded, over alcoholism and depression—asked Lawrence, himself a depressed alcoholic, to start a new group. Mark was livid. But Hopkins had other plans.
“Doug did the classic sitcom thing where he didn’t tell either of us the other was going to be at the meeting,” Mark remembers. Doug eventually talked him into joining. Hence the Chimeras (later the Pistoleros), a band Hopkins once dubbed the Mexican Beatles.
– Liner notes by Brian Jabas Smith
