Music

San Francisco Treat

Catching up with League City's Greg Ashley in that other city by the bay

By John Nova Lomax 

In addition to the famous sights, San Francisco is also a city of sounds. There's the jingle- clatter of the famous cable cars straining up the steep Victorian-house-encrusted hills; the raucous din of the sea lions bellowing and barking on their little platforms near Fisherman's Wharf; and the multilingual babble of dozens of languages from the people in the streets.

And then there's the more organized sounds: the music. There's the wail of local boy Carlos Santana's guitar blasting out of the taquerias; the pre-Colombian blues billowing out of the Mission District's storefront Central American Pentecostal churches, and the rock coming out of any one of several hundred bars. And some of the most notable of that stuff is being made by Greg Ashley, a young man who left one city by the bay -- League City, to be exact -- for the more famous one in California.

Well, technically he lives in Oakland, not San Francisco, but it's in San Francisco where we meet up for a rambling, multivenue, taco- and beer-fueled interview one cool June night. And on first meeting the former leader of the Houston band the Mirrors, it's immediately apparent that the Galveston County kid has gone native. As I surfaced on the escalator at the 16th and Mission subway stop -- to the strains of a lone, guitar-wielding mariachi-singing busker, there was Ashley in a threadbare blue blazer and scuffed white leather pimp shoes that probably kicked their last ho's ass in about 1978. He was clutching a dog-eared paperback copy of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and was in the act of registering to vote at a table set up there for that purpose.

Even if his voice has yet to be heard at the ballot box, music circles have already heard from him, via the two EPs he cut here with the Mirrors, the one CD he cut in Texas and released in California under his own name (Medicine Fuck Dream) and now with his album as the leader of his trio the Gris Gris. Whatever the name of the vehicle it arrives in, Ashley's specialty is ominous mid-'60s-style psychedelic garage rock, full of muffled drums, shimmery cymbal wash, anguished, lo-fi vocals that shift gears from a whisper to a scream, pulsing bass and some completely insane guitar solos. If it sounds like the 1960s, it's certainly not the primary colors, Laugh-In, hippy-dippy 1960s; Ashley's music instead puts you in mind of a reverse negative of that decade, a dark shadow image of the Age of Aquarius.

Though only 24, Ashley comes by these 1960s mannerisms more naturally than almost anyone else in his generation. As the cliché goes, he's an old soul. The late-born son of a NASA cost analyst who dug classical music, the Beach Boys and the Kingston Trio, Ashley had the same sort of squaresville childhood in the League City of the '80s and '90s that most of those who pioneered the psych-rock song form had back in the Eisenhower era. (And as many of us can attest, it's still the Eisenhower era down in the L.C.) Around the time he got to high school, he discovered Nirvana and Sonic Youth, before moving on to the early Estrus garage-rock stuff, which he quickly soured on. "After awhile, that stuff started sounding like copies of copies of copies," he says. He followed the influences all the way back to the original garage rockers and beyond, and he now cites Lightnin' Hopkins, Hank Williams and Dr. John (from one of whose songs his new band takes its name) as primary influences.

As for his hometown, he feels it is as much a fourth-generation Xerox as the '80s garage rock he now dismisses. "Every time I go back to League City, there's another Wal-Mart, more fuckin' chain restaurants, less of what made the place tolerable or okay," he says. By now, we've adjourned to a Senegalese restaurant in the Mission District. Ashley's quaffing Harp, and I've got some tasty purple African libation called a "flamboyant" in front of me. Angelique Kidjo wafts over the sounds of black guys laughing and speaking French at the bar. It is indeed a long way from the Kemah Boardwalk. "Now it could be a suburb of L.A.," he says of his former home, "just as much as it could be Houston."

That's what's great about Ashley: He's less wise old soul sometimes than crabby old man, railing against all change. For example, he's also less than impressed with Minute Maid Park. "A corporate bullshit rip-off of Wrigley Field and a bunch of other old fields with a stupid fucking bullshit train in the outfield." He's not wild about Cali-style Mexican food either. "Out here they have this shit called fresh-Mex," he says, shuddering. "It's horrible. No flavor, no sauce. It's like, nothing, you know?"

A bitter guy -- crotchety even? You could say so. Though he's modest and affable in person, after a few drinks he shows his wounded romantic side, and that's what you hear on the records. There, even when Ashley is trying to be happy, as on The Gris Gris's dazzling little tropicalia number "Me queda um bejou" and the Let It Bleed-style bluesy, country honk of "Winter Weather," an overweening, Leonard Cohen-ish sadness drapes shroudlike over the songs. They conjure the time when the last red-hot embers of youth are slowly turning to ash, when you realize most of your dreams are just romantic folderol, that life is indeed a bitch and that then you certainly die.

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