If you're from the Detroit area, you may not have heard it here first...but the Hard Lessons are about two hair's breadths from becoming a fully fledged household name. With a smoking debut album, Gasoline, and a red-letter 2005 under their vintage white belts - not to mention the single best live show in the metro area - if these kids aren't the next big thing, then I'd like to see who in the hell is. But before all yer little indie-cred senses start tingling, let me put you at ease: this band's meteoric rise from local to regional and even national notoriety has a hell of a lot more to do with hard work, good music, and a superhuman tendency to play any time and place physically possible, than with some 21st century-style multi-million-dollar P.R. push. When it comes to "garage," rock, whatever the fuck they're calling it these days, Augie Visocchi, Korin Cox and Christophe Zajac-Denek (a.k.a. Gin, Ko Ko Louise and the Anvil) are the real deal. And now, with this intimate Modern Pea Pod telephone interview, conducted a few months ago in the midst of their first West Coast tour, you'll be able to say you read about them before they were famous. You can thank us later.
Modern Pea Pod: Now, 2005 has been a huge year for you guys. You came out with your first record, and then just a few weeks later you're playing CMJ, showing up in Spin magazine, touring the West Coast...does it feel weird, getting big so fast?
Ko Ko Louise: Oh yeah, definitely. There was this show in Albuquerque where somebody was singing all the words to one of our songs! That stuff is wild...it's a really amazing feeling. But I'm proud that the reason we've gotten where we are is because of word of mouth. Almost every show on the West Coast, people have come up and talked to us afterwards; 75% of the time it's been somebody who knows someone from Detroit or Lansing. When we played LA, there were five or six people there from Detroit bands - it's great to have that kind of community.
The Anvil: We've also just met so many people doing this - that's why this tour is going so amazingly well. We've built up a "friendbase": they're fans, but they're not just onlookers. They're people we actually interact with. And the more people we have closer to us, the better it is.
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