If you had to use a fairy-tale character to describe Blanche Davidian, only the Big Bad Wolf comes to mind. Not just any interaction of that mischievous dude, but specifically his appearance in Little Red Riding Hood.
In that story, you can sense there’s more to Granny than meets the eye, but you let the crooked smile draw you in. Just as you see the incisors breaking through the syrupy grin, the old lady’s got her teeth in your neck and things are getting bloody.
Translation? These guys rock and do so with enough chaos in their sound and style that it's a ride you want to stay on, see where it goes. It's a sonic stir-fry that features revved-up rock ‘n’ roll, a little glam, some psych, new wave and metal, all wrapped in a punk envelope.
Before now, I've done a few stints as an Arizona resident, and when this band formed around the turn of the century, I was away. I still kept up on Valley music and kept catching the buzz about Blanche Davidian, a group formed by some established scene folks who knew their way around their instruments.
The buzz, mixed with the band's fervor, led to releasing music, performing at 2004’s SXSW event and sharing the stage locally with a bevy of touring bands. As happens, things (and people) change. Ultimately, the group ground to a halt. It wasn’t easy to part; no one wanted that to be the next move. “It was super painful," Parkin says. "We were together all the time. I spent more time with the band at that point than I did with my actual family.”
Olsen also recalls how rough it was at that time. “When it was blowing up, my mom was dying, and I had to tell them I loved them, but I just had to be out," he says. "We had a couple of people leave. There wasn’t bad blood, and we did reunion shows. It was just a combination of straws that broke the camel’s back.”
Blanche Davidian frontman Jamie Monistat VII during a 2012 benefit for Hollywood Alley co-owner Ross Wincek.
Melissa Menzinger
Parkin was formerly known as Mike Hawk when the band members all took some festive monikers. The lineup also features Monistat on vocals, Parkin on lead guitar, Olsen on lead guitar, Tom Reardon (a frequent Phoenix New Times contributor) on bass and Mike “Munk” Soucy on drums. (Olsen joined the band about four years after they originally started. Soucy and Reardon had been on board for shorter stints in the past.)
“Mike told me, ‘It took me 10 years to get my head outta my ass. We should be making music, and when we put our minds to it, we can play with anyone anywhere,’” Monistat says. So they got it together. Everyone currently in the group has either played together or been circling one another in the music scene for years, and it shows in the camaraderie. Reardon jokes that he “absolutely hated them” before he was a member. The joke was so obviously false that it was replaced quickly by a warm smile.
You don’t have to pay Monistat to talk about his love for the band members. He constantly refers to them as family, a sentiment they all share, whether they’re lightly roasting one another, complimenting one another's musical abilities or talking about the future.
Now armed with the wisdom that comes from living and learning, these guys are well aware of how valuable time is these days and don’t want to waste any of it. Parkin rattles off all of the adult life stuff they each have going on. They're older now. They know they have to pick their spots.
“We’ll still play shows," he says. "Maybe just not as persistently as we were before — not picking up every single show we can, not practicing five nights a week. But we are serious about it."
They are working on new music, which Olsen says couldn’t help but happen. “It’s kind of impossible to get us into a room and not have us write and start to create stuff," he says. "It’s different than our previous stuff. It still sounds like Blanche Davidian, but now Tom and Mike S. are Davidians, so it sounds like a different thing, and I think it sounds like the coolest stuff we’ve written."
Drummer Soucy agrees. “It seems like every time we get back together, we start ad-libbing a song right there," he says. "Waking everything up and just get in tune with each other and then automatically have a song."
You can catch them after the Sept. 19 show at Sidewalk Surfer's annual celebration on October 18.
