If Hotbox Harry were a disc jockey, his classic country show would feature the likes of Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams and be piped into your living room via a staticky AM signal. Hotbox Harry is not a DJ, though—he’s a roly-poly train-hopping hobo Mike Scutari met perched on a barstool in Arcadia years ago.
According to lore, on the night they met Harry wrote out a list of 15 essential country albums—among them Willie Nelson’s Redheaded Stranger, Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits—and made a gift of it to Scutari, who keeps the list folded in his wallet to this day.
An inspired Scutari assembled the seven-piece Songs Hotbox Harry Taught Us to perform classic country covers—songs that are so ingrained in American culture that you find yourself singing along without knowing the title, the original artist or even how it is that you know the words at all. That’s part of the fun of playing a Hotbox Harry show, Scutari says.
“Every girl in the crowd, without a doubt, 100 percent, knows every single word to ‘Walking After Midnight,’ regardless of her age,” Scutari says. “But then we do a song by Marty Robbins called ‘A White Sport Coat’—and no one under 30 should know that song—so it’s always fun to see some of the older folks sing along, and you can tell they’re kind of surprised, like, ‘What the hell? Who are these young people singing this song?’”
Who are these young people? Well, first of all, they’re not all young—they range from their early twenties to their fifties—and they come from various backgrounds and hometowns. What they all have in common is the fact that they each somehow exist in the orbit of Big Sur’s Henry Miller Memorial Library.
Scutari (guitar, vocals, piano) is originally from the East Coast, where he performed with the Decemberists and the Walkmen as part of the D.C. psych-folk outfit Nethers; these days he lives and works at the library. His boss, Magnus Toren (guitar, vocals), is the library’s executive director. Wally Barnick (bass, vocals) was roped in after playing a wedding held at HMML, and vocalist Tara Wings met Scutari while volunteering at FolkYeah events there.
Coming together in Big Sur, along with all the other benefits it entails, has given the band a loyal built-in fan base. Scutari described a recent show at Fernwood, the Big Sur bar and dance hall, saying, “I was afraid there were going to be bottles flying. People we’re literally hootin’ and hollerin’ and we were hanging on for dear life and it was amazing. Those shows are really, really fun to play.”
“We’re fortunate that we that we don’t have to play in dive bars for like four people, that we can play a Fernwood show with a lot of people who are interested,” Scutari says. “And the kind of music we play makes it easy for that.”
SONGS HOTBOX HARRY TAUGHT US
Wednesday, May 25, 9pm
Crepe Place
$8
.
