“I was walking across the street to buy a lottery ticket or whatever, and Lawrence calls me out of the blue. He goes: ‘Me, you, Scotty and Philip, punk rock. You in?’ I’m like, yeah! ‘OK, call you later.’ Then he hung up. That was it. The band was formed.”
That’s guitarist Thomas Laufenberg recently talking about his old Tempe, Arizona supergroup of sorts, featuring former Gin Blossom drummer Philip Rhodes and three Pistoleros—Laufenberg, bassist Scott Andrews and frontman Lawrence Zubia.
Soon, “the stuff was flowing really well. We’d attack it …”
Now, the Persuaders made the Pistoleros sound almost reserved. There’s a no-riffs-barred freedom to it, Lawrence kicking out the jams (“he was listening to Iggy and stuff”). The quartet jacked up the distortion and the results were magnificent.
“We weren’t trying to do some Americana shit,” Laufenberg says, laughing. “It’s as close to punk rock as people like us could get. I mean punk rock more in attitude.” OK, so the dirty, muscular guitars soar and slice through catchy power-pop hooks, like really good Urge Overkill, underpinning Lawrence’s slippery magnetism. His hard-won vocal graininess and lyrical tender mercies conveyed both lived-in sadnesses and anthemic glories, all with a subtle mournful undertone.
The quartet’s 2012 10-song Ghost Ship Sailors kicks and pops on Lawrence’s gut-punch penchant for bringing heart and truth to stories of the lost, the downtrodden and the hopeless romantic—barstool saints, street-corner scores, fallen comrades, broken lovers in doomed relationships. The songs are semi-autobiographical, housing themes of love, mortality and searching for light inside darkness.
“Jesus Christ” finds Jesus drunk in L.A., cuffed in the back of a cop car. There’s wine-stained escapism (“I Ran”), loving the irredeemable (“Just the Same”), and “Subway to the City” features a beautifully unlikely sing-out chorus: “All I want is one more glass of beer/How much pain will make her disappear.” Lawrence took listeners to places he’d internalized in profound ways—San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago—while the ghost of gifted Tempe songwriter and Gin Blossoms founder Doug Hopkins haunts here and there.
The band were, as Laufenberg recalls, “vigorous at first.” Then it turned into a vehicle to earn money. “We started doing covers. I think Lawrence needed to pay his rent.” What began as a full-on rock ’n’ roll outfit fizzled after about five years, leaving behind one completely overlooked stunner of an album.
– Liner notes by Brian Jabas Smith
