Larry and His Flask
by Tim Wenger
Photo Credit Max Giffin
The name “Larry and His Flask” just seems to bring to mind whiskey-filled nights of frolicking fantasy, and for the six-piece band from the hills of Oregon, that is only the beginning. The sold-out crowd that watched them play with Lucero at the Bluebird Theatre on March 31, witnessed first-hand the mayhem-ic carnival that “The Flask” brings to the stage, and Colorado Music Buzz was fortunate enough to get in a few words with founding member Jesse Marshall after the band returned home from the tour.
Their most recent run also put them up with the likes of the Goddamned Gallows and the Reverend Horton Heat before they joined up with the Lucero party for the final week. “It’s just the music, man!” says Marshall. “It gives us the energy to do it, and the people in the crowd make us just want to go apeshit!”
The band reconstructed itself in 2008 following the departure of their longtime drummer. Marshall says that the natural evolution of the group began to push them more in the direction of the harmonic bluegrass-style punk that they play these days, as opposed to the more straight-forward punk that they played for the first few years. “We started working on these acoustic songs that we had written,” says Marshall. “Some of the songs we had written for years, but we could never turn them into electric punk rock songs, so they just sat there for a while. When the drummer quit, we kind of switched things around, brought it back into the living room, and had a bunch of our friends that played different instruments join and just starting jamming.”
They essentially redid the band from the ground up, and while they kept things like the name and the motivation that had driven the band from the beginning, they regrouped themselves with the new members and began focusing heavily on progressing their music. “We were all going that direction anyway as songwriters,” says Marshall. “We always had some country background, but the more you get into music, the further you want to dig deeper into the roots of it, so we just kept getting into more like roots music, and folk stuff.
“We also started listening to stuff that was going on similar to what we are doing now, like Devil Makes Three, who were blending it. When our drummer quit, we didn’t really know what we were going to do, so we started working on these other songs. When we got a solid set, and people started liking it, we decided to keep the same name and it just went from there.”
Long term, the guys want to keep taking the band to new heights, but are pretty open ended as far as super specific goals are concerned. “Our motive is just to keep going and having fun,” Marshall says. “Everything that has happened has been f*!@ing amazing, but we want to write good music and progress, and keep our music changing, and put on a good show. As far as a traveling band, we want to see the whole world and play to everybody that we can possibly play to.”
The band will be out of the country for much of the summer, but look for them to be back in the 303 as soon as they can be. Colorado reminds them a lot of their home turf. “We can relate a lot, because we are from a mountain town in Oregon, it’s kind of a similar mentality,” says Marshall. Whenever it happens, we will be there, drink in the air and ready to rock.
Category: Planet Buzz
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