The Pistoleros have been a fixture of the Valley music scene for over 20 years and is probably best known for its role in Tempe's jangle pop scene of the 1990s. Now the band is releasing its first album in 10 years, "Shine."
The Pistoleros are fronted by two brothers, Mark and Lawrence Zubia. While they are very close, both as brothers and collaborators, they were estranged for some time while Lawrence was experiencing some severe substance abuse issues. And even though the pair put out music during that 10-year period, for many fans this new Pistoleros album represents a big transition, both symbolically and stylistically.
The Show invited Mark and Lawrence Zubia into the KJZZ studios to play a Tiny Desert Concert and they began by sharing how one of the members, Mark, defines artistic growth.
The Pistoleros CD release show is Saturday night at Last Exit Live in Phoenix.
Full conversation
LAWRENCE ZUBIA: Back in the ‘90s, it was full speed ahead. It was Mill Avenue, and it was really fun, and the energy was awesome. Almost every night of the week, there were so many places to play live music along Mill Avenue, and we could play live, original music.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, so you founded the band with your brother and with some other folks I know in the music scene at the time, but it sounds like you two were incredibly close. Were you always growing up writing music together?
ZUBIA: You know looking back now, because that's what this whole induction and this legacy thing has done. It's made me remember and think about a lot of the past. And yes, Mark and I, as teenagers, played guitar. I started writing songs immediately. The minute I could put three chords together, it just kind of happened, because that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to write songs and sing them.
Mark and I learned to play guitar from my dad, who was a musician. He was a mariachi musician with his brother. So it wasn't a huge leap to, you know, have guitars and be creating music in our house. We graduated from acoustic mariachi music into, you know, our teenage years, finding out about people like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, The Rolling Stones, and we started learning how to play those songs, and then that morphed into writing our own songs.
GILGER: So when the band, you know, had that first kind of hit and like, really kind of made it on a different level, what did that feel like? Like, how satisfying, how exciting was it at the time?
ZUBIA: It was awesome. I remember the first time I heard our song on the radio. We were going to do a show in Miami, and we got picked up at the airport. We usually got picked up in a, you know, like a van, like a 15 passenger van, church van type thing. But this time the guy came, and he picked us up in this long, stretch white limo. He must have known what was about to happen. So we were cruising out of the airport, down the highway, heading to Hard Rock Cafe to have lunch with a bunch of listeners that won tickets to have lunch with The Pistoleros. It was like this whole surreal moment and the song came on the radio.
(Music)
ZUBIA: It was like something out of a movie, you know.
GILGER: That is a movie.
ZUBIA: It was crazy. Miami, white limo, song on the radio, and it was the greatest feeling in the world. I'm not gonna lie, it was awesome.
(Music)
GILGER: So you had a long estrangement from your brother, though?
ZUBIA: We did.
GILGER: And it sounds like, and you came back together in 2015. Can you tell us how that changed the relationship? How did that change the music?
ZUBIA: Right. We actually had no contact with each other, and we got back together, and almost immediately, we signed a record deal with Fervor Records. Fervor Records is based here in Sunnyslope, and Fervor lets us give us basically 100% artistic control over the record. We made the record we wanted.
Fervor's main business model is licensing songs to television and film, and that's the first time in our career that that has happened. Now we are, we're very happy. It ends up, you know, validating a lot of things. You know, it was a paycheck, it was also just validating our songwriting over the years, and it felt like a little bit of a payoff after everything we put into this.
(Music)
ZUBIA: So my brother and I, our estrangement was one thing, but after we got back together, it really sparked a creative period. And we wrote a bunch of songs in the last couple years.
GILGER: Yeah, and you had another record out just a couple years ago in 2017, so let's talk about that creative boom you've been experiencing the last couple years writing all this music again with your brother. How is the music different?
ZUBIA: In a lot of ways, the music is different. In a lot of ways, the recording techniques are different. Which kind of changes the way you know, you think about writing songs. It's changed a lot. What hasn't changed is the basic creative process of being inspired, getting inspired. When you're inspired, are you near a guitar when you know the sparks are going, can you capture that inspiration and put it in a song? A lot of that hasn't changed how you write a song.
GILGER: You're one of those who, when you get the idea, you have to go write it right then?
ZUBIA: Have to write it, then have to hit the voice thing on my phone. I've got literally hundreds of ideas like that in my phone. And then sometimes, and this is when it's at its most beautiful, is when you write a song and the entire song is written within, like, the length of the song, in four and a half minutes, and its song is done.
GILGER: You've written the whole thing.
ZUBIA: Yeah, and those are the, I think, the best songs.
GILGER: Fall into your hand right?
(Music)
GILGER: Arizona Music Hall of Fame. So this feels like a, like you mentioned, like a legacy moment, right? So what do you think your legacy is? What do you hope your legacy is to Arizona music in particular?
ZUBIA: Right. Well, it's hard to have perspective, but I look at it like these two native to Phoenix Chicano brothers kind of just made this unspoken bond, and it was through guitars and lyrics and melody, and we muscled our way into opening for the Blossoms and getting into that scene.
And in a beautiful way, everyone accepted us and loved us, and we just wanted to contribute to that music scene. And we kind of, you know, by osmosis, adopted the sound. I guess it used to be called the Tempe sound, and I was, I totally rejected that idea that there was a sound and that, you know, it was, you know, native to Tempe. But I have turned around 180 degrees on that, looking back through this Hall of Fame induction and looking back in the last 30 years and listening to a lot of songs, there is most definitely a Tempe sound.
GILGER: You accepted the Tempe sound.
ZUBIA: I have! And I can't believe I'm even saying that on radio and admitting it to the public, but there is, man, yeah, we were right smack in the middle of it for better or for worse.
GILGER: There's also a distinctly Arizona sound to you, because like you say, like you you can tell when you listen to your music that you, you grew up playing mariachi. There's the horns in there. You have Spanish.
ZUBIA: Yeah.
GILGER: Like, there's something in there that feels very Arizona.
ZUBIA: Definitely. You know, I'm not a really crafty songwriter. I don't think, “oh, I'm gonna write a song that has some Spanish vibe in it, or flamenco vibe in it,” or anything. It just happens. You know, it's like you were kind of alluding to it's just part of the DNA.
If you’re in a band or know of one you’d like to hear on air, send us a note at [email protected].
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