The first concert Greg Loiacono attended had the biggest influence on his musical career. He was 9 years old, and the future co-founder, singer-songwriter and guitarist of The Mother Hips vividly recalls his time at the Day on the Green, a recurring concert presented by legendary California promoter Bill Graham.
“Blue Oyster Cult was one of the headliners at the Oakland Coliseum in 1980,” Loiacano says. “They rode onto the stage on Harley-Davidson motorcycles and raised a Godzilla behind the drum set that was probably 50 feet tall. At that moment, I realized anything is possible in rock ‘n’ roll.”
Loiacano and Tim Bluhm formed The Mother Hips a decade later, and the long-running band released its debut album, Back to the Grotto, in 1992. This year, they released When We Disappear, which contains a cover of a 1964 Buffy St. Marie song and nine original songs that the Hips say are rock songs inspired by psychology and literature.
The new album was a departure, because the northern California band went to New Mexico to record it.
“Blue Rose Records founder Joe Poletto, Tim and I had a discussion about changing locations for this album, and Joe mentioned Santa Fe as a possibility,” Loiacano says. “We had done the last two albums at the same studio in Oakland and had never recorded in New Mexico. When we looked into studios, we learned that an old friend, Jono Manson, has a studio in Santa Fe called the Kitchen Sink. We reached out to Jono, and it all started to take shape.”
The album was also kicked off by a rough demo of the title song “When We Disappear” that Loiacono sent to Bluhm.
“I thought it was promising,” Bluhm writes on the Hips’ website. “What he was singing was place-holder gibberish, or sounds mixed with some actual lyrics, including what would become the title. I went through it, matched words to his sounds and then tweaked the words to tell a kind of impressionistic history of our adventures together. In this way, I believe Greg’s and my subconscious worlds revealed themselves. The music is simple and loose, helping with the devil-may-care attitude of the singing.”
How does the new album differ from other albums in the band’s catalog?
“That’s a tough question to answer from our perspective as the writers, performers, producers and mixers of the album,” Loiacono says. “You get so close to the music and how you want it to sound that it takes some time to gain perspective on its place in the catalog. Ask me that question in about three years, and I might know more.”
Loiacono says fans’ favorite Hips albums are 1997’s Later Days and 2009’s Pacific Dust. In its review of the latter album, allmusic.com wrote: “For smartly assembled and played modern-day roots rock, the Mother Hips are probably the most underrated band out there, with Pacific Dust serving as further proof to this claim.”
Loiacono cannot name the best album he has heard by other artists.
“I couldn’t list just one,” he says. “I have certain songs and albums that have been super important to me during specific periods of my life. Are You Experienced? (Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 debut album) made a very big impact on me when I was around 10 years old. My older brother turned me on to Jimi Hendrix, and that’s when I decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar.”
A Midlake record has also had a big effect on Loiacono.
“For whatever reason, I can listen to Midlake’s album The Trials of Vanoccupanther endlessly,” he says. “I first heard it around the time it came out (2006), and I still listen to it today with great pleasure. Merle Haggard’s If I Could Only Fly is another one like that for me. It never gets old. It always makes me feel things.”
Loiacono has attended many artists’ concerts and says it’s also difficult to pinpoint one as the best show he has seen.
“A very memorable concert that I remember enjoying immensely was Orchestra Baobob’s performance at the San Francisco Jazz Festival,” he says. “It took place at The Palace of Fine Arts around 2004. They played so well and sounded so good.”
Mother Hips’ performance days almost ended in 2015 when Bluhm was seriously injured while speed-flying, a type of paragliding a few feet above mountain slopes. Bluhm, the former husband of singer-songwriter Nicki Bluhm, was flying at 35 mph when he crashed, shattering his pelvis and nearly separating his foot from his leg.
“Tim’s accident was a life-altering event for all of us, especially him, obviously,” says Loiacano, who attended California State University with Bluhm in Chico, California. “We almost lost him. It hit on all levels. He made a miraculous recovery, and we are grateful for that.”
Was there a founding musical aim when Loiacano and Bluhm launched Mother Hips?
“We always wanted to write great songs, play them live and do our best at recording those songs in the studio,” Loiacano responds. “After 30 years, we are still doing that. That feels pretty good.”