The New Hippies
Today at Beautiful Idiots LLC, we introduce our second act: enter The New Hippies.
I left Ithaca College in the winter of 2012 to pursue my music and take a year of community college classes while reassessing what I wanted to study. After a year and a half of recording songs in a friend’s bedroom, voice lessons in Manhattan, night classes at DCC, two jobs at the mall, and some work with a college counselor, I left New York for Chapman University in Orange, California in August 2014. If my memory serves correctly, it was August 25th, 2014 to be exact. I think we flew on my dad’s birthday. My family and I went to an Angels game that night, and the next day I moved into my dorm. I had been accepted to the screenwriting program in the Dodge College of Film & Media Arts and I was very excited to develop my skills as a storyteller, but I arrived with a side mission in mind too. I was going to try to find people to play and make music with if I could, and on that first day, it seemed luck was on my side.
I met Alex the same day I moved into my dorm. He lived in the same building just around the corner. We both mentioned that we played guitar and we played together a few times. Fast forward a few months to January and my friend Tanner introduced me to Zane, a kid he was taking Italian with who also made music. We all had lunch together in the caf and after a few more hangs Zane and I began to show each the songs we had made. Pretty soon after that we put together a couple ideas under the name “Captain Crush” in his room at the end of the year, which no one will ever hear. Me, Zane, Tanner, and our friend Alfonso had all decided to live together the next fall, so Zane and I went home knowing we’d be writing more when we got back.
I moved into our house on Jacaranda Ave July 13th, 2015 and Zane moved in about a week or so later. We started immediately. The day he moved in actually, we wrote “Street Dweller” and then “Temptation” not long after that. At that time we were just “Joe & Zane” recording in my bedroom. We put about seven songs together over the next couple months but when it came time to record everything and play shows we had to build a band. I knew Alex played bass so we got him on board, and Zane had mentioned he knew someone who played drums that he had jammed with a few times before. He made a call and one weekend a Mercedes G-Wagon rolled up to the house on Jacaranda. That’s when I met Understanding.
Understanding came into my room, played drums for about four hours, then played Mario Kart with everybody and spent the whole weekend at the house. He came back about two weeks later and then didn’t leave for about a year and a half. He was in the band. I still live with Alex and Understanding today. I said luck was on my side right?
Zane, being a piano performance major at the time, knew a lot of people in the music school, so he brought in Chris Traynor, who recorded trumpet, sax, and trombone on all our songs at the time and played with us for years. Zane also knew Jasmine and Alexis, who sang with us while we were in school. Chris eventually brought Sai to play sax full-time. It became pretty apparent we were getting to be a lot more than just “Joe & Zane”.
Now the question was “what are we?” I don’t think I’ve ever really told anybody this, but here’s how it happened. There was a lot going on in 2016. We were hearing a lot of music we’d never heard before, trying to rebuild the world in our minds, and learning new truths every day. Some of us were on drugs. Some of us didn’t want to be defined. Everybody felt like they were in the middle of a revolution, artistic, spiritual, educational, political and all other kinds. On top of that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, so we were pretty sure nothing was real. And to be honest, none of that really informed the decision.
I had seen an article somewhere calling millennials “the new hippies” and I thought it was funny. In my state of general distaste and contempt for any opinion or attempt to define anything, I thought to myself “if you say so”. So I proposed the name to the group and everyone liked it enough, knowing full well none of us were hippies in the slightest.
So that’s what the name is. An empty title. If you say so, then that’s what we are. We’re just friends, who like to play music together. That’s what we did while we were in school. Then in 2019 Understanding and I started working on the Wu-Tang tv show that I’ve mentioned a few times before. We were credited as The New Hippies in the hope that eventually we would get back to playing as a group. Now, we’re just me, Zane, Alex, Understanding - Zane used to call us the core four - but that’s what we’re going to keep doing. So yeah, sure, we’re The New Hippies. Our new single Wild Heart is out everywhere April 7.