Another place that has seen its share of Night Hawks gigs is Magnolia Motor Lounge. Located in the heart of the West 7th corridor, the award-winning bar/restaurant/venue is co-owned by a native Fort Worthian with a pretty lofty musical pedigree. Matthew Smith, former drummer for Austin-based Grammy- and Oscar-winner Ryan Bingham, is a huge Night Hawks fan. He caught them at The Grotto one night and was “blown away,” he said.
In 2011, not long after Matthew and his younger brother Grayland Smith launched their record label, Magnolia Records, they offered to record and release the Night Hawks’ next long-player.
The Quaker City guys had known the Smiths for a couple of years, before MML opened. “We all got along with them as friends,” Anderson said. “Just their outlook on music and the music industry. They’re good ol’ fashioned jerks like we are.”
In the spring of 2011, the Night Hawks spent five days in January Sound in Dallas. Honcho came out about a year later. The long duration between studio work and record release owed more to the hectic schedule of engineer and mixer Grant Jackson Wilborn rather than any problems with the music, Matsler and Anderson said.
With Honcho, the Night Hawks had seemingly dived deep into the Stax Records catalog, conjuring up bruising but sweet classic-rock riffs and melodies and incredibly rich grooves. Think: Booker T. & The M.G.’s meet Bad Company. Harking back mainly to traditional blues and R&B wouldn’t amount to anything, though, without some killer vocals, and Matsler and the smoky-voiced Anderson sound like two old bluesmen (“Boss Honcho,” Feb. 13, 2012).
In the summer of 2012, the Night Hawks released another recording, Live at Magnolia Motor Lounge, six songs from a Thanksgiving Day Eve performance. “It’s an honest, candid interpretation,” Matsler said, noting that the Smiths recorded the show without the performers’ knowledge.
Around the time Honcho came out, the band began touring outside of the known North Texas universe. On the day of the album release show at Magnolia Motor Lounge, the Night Hawks bought a 2006 Econoline and christened it Van Cliburn (in honor of the winner of the inaugural Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in 1958 and founder of the Van Cliburn Foundation and Van Cliburn International Piano Competition). The Night Hawks have since put nearly 63,000 miles on it.
Honcho’s release also prefigured the solidification of Quaker City Night Hawks as more than just four guys who liked to play music together. Other bands, including both of Mabe’s and EPIC RUINS, a stoner-rock collective for which Anderson sang lead and played rhythm guitar, began to seem less important. “We reached that tipping point,” Adams said.
Skates, who had spent the previous seven years playing keys in Fort Worth giants Telegraph Canyon, began spending more time onstage with the Night Hawks recreating — the guys would probably say “improving on” — the keyboard work on Honcho, done mostly by Matsler. (Actor John Gries, Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite and Ben’s dad from Lost, played clavinet on the track “Crack at the Bottle,” a new version of the song from ¡Torquila Torquila!)
“Every time we had a show, we’d call [Skates and say], ‘Come play! Come play!’ ” Mabe recalled.
Telegraph, Skates said, was slowing down, the members filtering off into other projects and into life. “There’s no way these [Telegraph Canyon] people are going to take off 200 days a year to be on tour,” Skates recalled thinking, “but that’s what I want to do! And these [Quaker City] guys wanted to do that too.”
Through ¡Torquila Torquila!’s engineer Kalb, three Honcho tracks received airplay on the popular FX drama Sons of Anarchy. “That gave us a good boost as far as national credibility,” Anderson said. “That was our first blip on the radar. It was a lot easier moving forward, considering you have a salable product.”
Honcho tracks were also getting spun on 95.9-FM/KFWR The Ranch as well as on 96.7-FM/KTCK The Ticket and on internet radio, including Pandora and Spotify.
After the songs had begun airing on Sons, the Night Hawks played an industry showcase in Nashville. Not long after their last note fluttered into the ether, they were approached backstage by the bigwigs at Paradigm Talent Agency, an international booking company. Shots of whiskey were downed, and hands were shaken.
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Good thing that deal was done on a handshake, because it is no more. “We didn’t think [Paradigm was] doing a bad job, and they didn’t think we were doing a bad job,” Anderson said. “It’s just that we wanted to do different jobs. We just saw that it wasn’t a good fit.”
The outcome was a “kick in the pants,” Anderson admitted. But nobody moped. “You can either sit there and sulk because things didn’t work out or try to use it to light a fire under your ass,” he said. “I think it took all of five seconds for us to start going again.”
Around the end of 2013, Quaker City Night Hawks released a 7-inch, Texas Heavy (“Prize to Find,” “Tell It Like It Is”), and went back into the studio, still with engineer Wilborn but not at January Sound. The band spent two weeks at his recording facility in Anahuac, just south of Houston, and laid down 17 tracks, including “Sons and Daughters,” the song from that auspicious Lola’s gig.
“I’m friends with all the guys,” Wilborn said. “I’ve known them all now for about three years and have always had a blast with them. On multiple occasions I’ve crashed in the front room of [Anderson’s] house, affectionately known as The Drunk Tank. … Just like Honcho, this project is a group effort.”
Anderson described the new material as true to the Quaker City sound, with prominent harmonies and lots of boogie, but “darker, more complicated.” However, he added, “Matsler still writes a mean hook.”
The album will be released on Magnolia Records, but no date has been set.
“The main thing we wanted to pick up for this record was distribution,” Anderson said. “That’s something we never had before. I can’t get into too many details, but it looks like that’s happening. … We’re just trying to get our end done and make sure we have all our ducks in a row. … We’re just trying to do it as soon as possible without rushing it. Every record we’ve done up until this point has been pretty fast-paced, and we’re taking our time with this one.”
The band will be on the road as much as possible over the next couple of months, with dates in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Arkansas, and Tennessee, among other places. The guys have freedom to play. None of them is tied down by either a 9-to-5 job or pressing family obligations.
The tour also includes a couple of dates in — of all places — Texas, including at Fort Worth Music Festival in mid-May.
“We’re shooting for a regional/national [profile], but we’ll always play Fort Worth pretty steadily, as much as we can,” Anderson said. “We can’t just sit here and not play. It’s too much fun.”
