Local H, the two-piece band from Zion, Illinois, has been playing since before I was born. I actually asked a friend’s father, who introduced me to Local H, for some ideas for this interview. Originally three members, the bassist dropped out before the first album was recorded in 1995, and their current drummer, Brian St. Clair, is leaving the band in October. The Daily Cardinal spoke with lead singer and guitarist, Scott Lucas, about getting mugged in Moscow, Brian’s departure, and the music scene growing up in a dead-end, Midwest town.
Last February, Lucas was brutally attacked after a show in Russia. He was mugged and left for dead on the streets of Moscow and was forced to cancel a series of concerts due to serious injuries sustained to his vocal cords.
“I went out to hail a cab and I was by myself. Who knows how long this guy noticed me and saw me coming? He came up behind me and choked me until I passed out. When I woke up, everything was gone. My passport, all my credit cards, just everything. My cash, my phone. Somehow I managed to make it back to the hotel.”
“[My voice is] getting better all the time. It’s been a lot slower of a recovery than I would have liked, but every time I go out on a different tour, there [are] things I notice I can do that I couldn’t before. It’s not a full recovery yet, but it’s on the way.”
Brian St. Clair joined the band in 1999 after original drummer, Joe Daniels, left. Though he joined after the release of the band’s two most commercially successful albums, 1996’s As Good as Dead and 1998’s Pack Up the Cats, St. Clair drummed for the next four albums, including their newest release, 2012’s Hallelujah! I’m a Bum.
Discussing Brian’s departure, Lucas explained, “It was a situation of whether or not he had time to make for the band anymore. He’d been in the band for 14 years, you know? That’s a long time. I think he’d like to concentrate on tour managing and stuff that he does like that.”
St. Clair will play his final shows with the band in September and October. When I asked about the future of the band, Lucas made it clear that he would like the next few months to be about Brian.
“It’s definitely about Brian right now. But you know, I’ll find someone. It’s about as amicable as something like this can be. I know a lot of people say that, but it really is. Finding a new drummer for a two piece band is just like finding one for a full band. It’s just a matter of hooking into the groove with somebody. I think it’s just more visually apparent to people because it’s just the two of us. Whether or not it changes the songwriting is hard to say. With Brian, it was like a shot in the arm to the band. There was more energy involved and a lot more songs were written. Who knows? That kind of spark, you just start writing.”
Before this split, and even before Daniels’s departure from the band in 1998, Local H dealt with adversity when, in 1993, bassist Matt Garcia left the band. Local H made the decision to go forward as a two-piece by simply adding a bass pickup to Lucas’s guitar.
“When someone heard our demo, they didn’t know that we had lost our bass player. We’d just been recording and hadn’t been gigging. It was definitely a point where we had to make up our minds and we had to do it quickly. We brought a guitar to a friend at a music store and he outfitted it with a bass pickup.”
Local H is from industrial Zion, Illinois, about an hour away from Chicago.
“There really wasn’t anywhere to play in Zion. Most of the shows we played were in practice stations. There were no bars, so the first Local H show was at a college in Wisconsin. Once we got our shit together, that’s when we started playing in Chicago at places like the Avalon and the Metro.”
Though the band had most of its success in the 1990s with their grungy, bar show sound, Lucas does not look back with a wistful eye.
“I’m not one of those people who is going to be like ‘the ’90s was the golden era and everything sucks now.’ I hear that a lot and I don’t agree. Music is healthier now. Sure you had bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Screaming Trees, but you also had a lot of shit. And there was a lot of it. Now, major labels have lost their grip and their ability to tell us what to listen to. You’ve got bands who are able to take their destiny into their own hands and do things independently and make great music. There’s a lot of stuff out there and it’s really exciting. As long as people go out and they keep their ears open and look for it, it’s not hard to find.”
Lucas recognized, though, that plenty of members of generation X do not see things the same way he does.
“As for people my age, it’s easy for them to say everything sucks now. It’s kind of a thing we do in this country and you see it in our immigration policy. We’re in, we’re here and we shut the door on everyone behind us. So you get that in music. ‘Our music’s cool, your music sucks, fuck off.’ When I was in my twenties, we dealt with people talking about Woodstock all the time. I would hate to think that you have to deal with that now with everyone talking about how great the ’90s were. It wasn’t that great.”
Local H’s latest album, Hallelujah! I’m a Bum, deals with serious political undertones. Lucas said that it was something he thought was important to address in his music.
“[Politics] are everywhere. It seems the divide is getting wider and more violent. I felt guilty singing about a break up. I wanted to make a record that was bigger in scope, more about what was going on, put myself in other peoples’ shoes. I mean, how could you not comment on politics? If there’s one thing that I think is a problem with bands today it’s that nobody seems pissed off enough. And I don’t really understand that. I don’t get this whole ‘everything’s cool, let’s party’ mentality. Where are bands with anger? I’d like to see more of that.”
Local H will play High Noon Saloon on Friday, September 6.
