Gabe Soria
July 2006

I first saw Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky’s shoestring budget road movie Half-Cocked at Los Angeles’s Jabberjaw, a fabled hole-in-the-wall venue on a less than savory stretch of Pico Boulevard sometime in 1995. It was one of THE places to stop if you were a touring band of a certain level/ability/label status at the time. They didn’t serve alcohol – bad coffee only. People would SIT DOWN during some shows, and at others, the place would EXPLODE. If you were lucky, Gary, the proprietor, would have commissioned a silk-screened poster for the show that could be had for ‘round about five bucks.

That night at Jabberjaw was a strange one: this couple from New York was on a trip around the country showing the 16mm black and white movie they’d made about the scene somewhere in the South. The film lived and breathed from start to finish. It was a road movie about folks like US. We were the HEROES of this thing. Practically every character in the film was played by someone who had hit the stage of the club we were sitting in sometime in the past couple of years, and the film was packed with THEIR SONGS, which sounded GREAT in context. And the film was funny, wise, earnest, scattered, a little bit angry and actually NOT BORING. It felt like we were witnessing a minor miracle. (It felt that way to this viewer, at least.)

If you don’t remember early- to mid-90s, that long-ago age when it seemed for a hot moment that indie rock was going to take over the world AND fix the hole in the ozone layer, let me paint a picture for you: Stock in the Tascam company, manufacturers of the Porta 04 four-track recording machines, was temporarily hovering above Microsoft’s due to the craze of kids everywhere figuring out the magic of home bedroom recording In short, it was a musical and intellectual PARADISE. Man, the early- to mid-90s: You should’ve been there.

Of course, if you were there, you know that I lie like a dog. Those Tascams more often than not were used to create tuneless, moaning variations on the I-IV-V chord progression or, even worse, were purchased and promptly forgotten after a couple of aborted recording experiments. And yet, the rosy picture I paint above does, I believe, approximate how everybody who was involved in the loose aggregate that was the indie rock scene back then felt, if even for only a minute every couple of days. You felt like you were part of somzething great, something proud, something elementally and non-debatably COOL. And if you had to pick a filmed account of those days to bury in a box for future generations to unearth and dig, Half-Cocked would be the choice document.

For those of you who HAVEN’T seen the film before, it won’t be revealing much to describe the final sequence of events in Half-Cocked. It’s important to this ramble that I do (and the film’s not a thriller, after all). Our gang of losers and goofs from Louisville actually manage to cobble a halfway decent band together while on the run from the law and they make the big time –scoring the opening slot for Memphis, Tennessee’s the Grifters (whose album Crappin’ You Negative posterity will eventually mark as one of the finest rock records of the 90s, mark my words). It’s a ridiculously right-on plot point; legions of bands would have KILLED to get a slot like that. But the show itself isn’t the highlight of the sequence, it’s what happens before: our band, Truckstop, along with the Grifters and a bunch of friends simply HANG OUT. None of them have met before, but they drink and talk and eat like old buddies because they share a indelible bond: they’re allies whose common ground is the road and the music they love. If you’ve never been so blown away by a performance by a band that you not only invite them to stay at your house, but you blow off work the next day to show them around your town and THEN jump into their van and tag along for a few dates up the road, I don’t know if you’ll fully understand how almost tearfully beautiful this particular part of the film actually is. But damn it if Suki and Michael and their cast don’t manage to convey how amazingly alive that sort of situation can make one feel. THAT was the early- to mid-90s to me, and Half-Cocked gets it heartbreakingly, unmistakably right.