Sitting around a North Hollywood rehearsal studio on a recent Wednesday evening, the members of the Hard Quartet are taking a break from prepping for the first concert by this indie-rock supergroup by recounting the first gigs they played with some of their other bands.
Drummer Jim White volunteers a recollection of his first show with Dirty Three, which formed in Melbourne in the early 1990s because “this guy had a bar, and he wanted a band,” as White puts it. “We played three sets for three people, and we got 60 bucks.”
“Each?” asks singer and guitarist Matt Sweeney, known for founding New York’s Chavez around the same time.
“Total,” White answers. “Plus all you can drink.”
Says Stephen Malkmus, indie-rock famous as the frontman of Pavement: “That’s a f— deal in Australia.”
Does White reckon the Dirty Three downed more than $60 worth of booze?
“Oh yeah,” the drummer says. “We left our gear there and came back again the next day. The drinks were still flowing.”
Given their established-veteran status — the Hard Quartet’s fourth member is Emmett Kelly, who’s played with the Cairo Gang and with Will Oldham for years — these guys ranging in age from mid-40s to early 60s seem not in the least bit anxious about the fact that, 24 hours from now, they’ll make their debut in front of an audience at the Belasco in downtown Los Angeles. Sweeney passes around a tray of brie and raspberries as we chat; Malkmus is wearing tennis shorts and tennis shoes, having come here straight from an afternoon match at a friend’s place.
Yet their laid-back attitude is accompanied by an endearing excitement about the music they make together. “It’s good, right?” Malkmus asks. “Some of the lyrics are kind of blah-blah-blah. But I get a kick out of the songs.”
As he should: The band’s self-titled debut, which came out last month, is a tuneful blast of fuzz-bomb pop — glammy, folky, a little psychedelic — with great riffs and a loping, late-Beatles-era groove. Malkmus, Sweeney and Kelly take turns singing lead, evoking memories of each of their past projects (especially Pavement). Yet the pleasingly off-kilter way they combine these familiar parts feels fresh.
The Hard Quartet came together after Malkmus and Sweeney worked on Malkmus’ 2020 solo album “Traditional Techniques.” Nobody in the band pushes back particularly hard on the term “supergroup,” though it does seem slightly embarrassing to all of them. The way Sweeney sees it, each member’s ample experience just meant “we didn’t have to talk about a lot of stuff” in order for everyone to find common ground. The Hard Quartet having more than one lead singer and songwriter was part of the deal from the get-go; Malkmus says that setup puts the band in a lineage that also includes the B-52’s, Sonic Youth, X and Royal Trux.
“It adds this communal element,” he explains. Adds Sweeney: “Different points of view from the same spaceship.”
So far, at least, the guy playing bass on any given Hard Quartet song is one of the guys who didn’t write the song — which shouldn’t lead anyone to conclude that bass is an undesirable instrument. In fact, Kelly says, “it’s the one that everyone wants to play the most — even Jim.” (Sitting behind his drum kit, White nods in agreement.) “There’s all these weird myths about rock ’n’ roll, but maybe the weirdest is that nobody wants to play bass,” Sweeney says.
“Back in the hardcore days, it was a rite of passage that the new guy would be on bass,” Malkmus points out. “People wanted to move up to guitar. I don’t know why. I guess Johnny Thunders was cooler,” he adds of the famously dissolute New York Dolls member. “The guitar hero and all that.”
“Which is hilarious now because nobody cares about the guitar anymore,” Sweeney says with a laugh. “Young people come up to me and ask how I do what I do, and it’s like they’re saying: ‘Oh, it’s so cool that you still sew your clothes by hand while everybody else wears real clothes.’ ”
The Hard Quartet started recording its album in New York before finishing it at the storied Shangri-La studio in Malibu owned by producer Rick Rubin, for whom Sweeney has worked frequently as a session player, including on albums by Adele, Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond. (Fun fact involving the well-connected Sweeney: The rehearsal space where the Hard Quartet is practicing in North Hollywood is owned by Bob Brunner, whose father was a writing partner on TV’s “Happy Days” with the late Garry Marshall, whose son Scott played bass in Chavez.)
For the sweetly shuffling “Rio’s Song” — which Sweeney wrote about his friend Rio Hackford, the actor and bar owner who died in 2022 — the band filmed a music video in the form of a shot-for-shot remake of the Rolling Stones’ charming early-MTV-era clip for “Waiting on a Friend.” Asked whether the Stones’ endurance is inspiring, Kelly says, “I think it’s cool that rock ’n’ roll still seems vital to them. They’re still trying to tap into it instead of being like, ‘I’m too old for this s—.’ ”
Sweeney recalls seeing the Stones in 2002 at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom. “I went with [David] Pajo,” he says, referring to the prolific indie-rock musician with whom Sweeney played in Billy Corgan’s short-lived Zwan. “We were joking beforehand like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if they did “Turd on the Run”?’ And then they did like every song we wanted to hear. They started ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,’ and the crowd’s going apes—. I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ It was because Bono came out onstage. We had to leave in protest.”
Speaking of the U2 frontman, has anyone in the Hard Quartet been to Sphere in Las Vegas?
“I know about it because Phish played there,” Malkmus says. “And I’m in the Phish hive. Accidentally. I clicked on something one time in my ‘For you’ feed, and now if I look over there…”
“This is Twitter-related?” Sweeney asks.
“Yeah, there’s this ‘For you’ thing — this dark, weird, instant algorithm that makes you regret your decisions immediately,” Malkmus says. “You know how you try heroin once and then your whole life’s over? It’s like that, except in a social-media way.”