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.

Gin: I think you can look at the age of a band in years, or you can look at it in the number of gigs. We’re only two years old, but we’re also two hundred gigs old, from New York to LA. That’s helped with our live performances, as well as our songwriting.

KKL: We work hard for everything we get. We’re our own road managers, financial managers, publicity managers…we don’t really have a magic wand, like a manager who calls the clubs or bands for booking. We work hard, and we put on a great live show.

MPP: Speaking of great shows, you played CMJ in New York this September and ended up generating an awful lot of buzz…not just back home but nationally as well. Did that feel like a landmark?

Gin: Yeah, I guess you could call CMJ a defining moment of the whole East Coast tour. The show ended up being a pretty big deal: it was a showcase at Trash in Brooklyn, sort of a hot spot for music. There was a lot of music to be tuned in to, and we ended up headlining! It was the first time we played CMJ, and one of our first four New York shows. We played last, came on about 2 or 2:30 a.m., and just turned in a hot performance.

(The Hard Lessons sell out at Spaceland, 11.11.05 – photo by Ali Pia)

This West Coast swing has been another milestone, I guess. That stretch from Seattle to San Diego was just unbelievable: we played Spaceland in LA, for our first time in Los Angeles, and we sold it out!

MPP: This was your first time playing in that part of the country, right?

Gin: Right…our first tours were mostly in the Midwest, and really that was all we could do. We were still in school, still had jobs. We’d tour whenever we got the chance: during Spring Break, two weeks off for Christmas. We’ve only really been a full-time group since the record came out. But we’ve already been back to New York since CMJ.

MPP: With all this attention, are you getting interest from major labels?

Gin: We feel there’s been some interest, but we’re going to do our own thing for a while before we sign on to anything. I mean, our current label, No Fun, has been great…they’re the reason why we got to play CMJ in the first place. We’ll definitely need something bigger in the future, but for right now we’re just sort of laying back and letting people approach us.

MPP: Let’s talk about the beginning of the group: how did the three of you become the Hard Lessons?

(Clean-cut kids – photo by Z. Shipps, Metro Times)

Anvil: Well, Augie and I went to the same high school, then the three of us were at Michigan State together for I think two years. But he [Augie] was in a band called the Boll Weevils all the way through college; Korin used to sit in on their gigs, but ironically, I never saw the band until their very last show, when the Hard Lessons played too.

The first time we all played together was in a recording studio; that’s when we cut our first demo. After that we played a battle of the bands, and instantly the songs were really great. All the energy the first time I played with Augie on stage, it just made sense to go balls out.

MPP: As someone who lives in the Lansing area but is also a big fan of Detroit music, one thing that’s always interested me is how the Hard Lessons seem to bridge the gap between both of those cities: even when you were thought of as a “Lansing band,” you still sounded like you should be from Detroit. Do you think of either city in particular as your hometown?

Gin: Well, I grew up around Detroit – I lived in Warren for the first ten years of my life. So I would spend my weekends in high shool driving into Detroit to see shows. Then I went to MSU and met up with Ko Ko and the Anvil, and because we were all going to State, we played a lot of shows in Lansing at the time.

Anvil: Augie and Korin had been into the music scene in Detroit pretty heavily: they’d drive down four nights a week to see shows from Lansing with school the next day, and be in Detroit until two in the morning. They were out of control. [laughs]

I wasn’t as knowledgeable of the scene as they were, but I was a fan of the music. The first time I went to a club with Augie, it took twenty minutes to get to the stage. He knew everybody there. That’s just his personality: we’re always the first people to arrive at a club and the last to leave.

Gin: I guess we sort of came out of both cities at the same time. I mean obviously we took off in Lansing a little more at first, because we were living there. But we had both cities as home bases, and there would be these weird moments when we’d be on the cover of [Lansing] Noise and it would say “Lansing’s Hard Lessons,” then we’d be on the cover of [Detroit] Metro Times and it would say “Detroit’s Hard Lessons.” We’re proud to be part of the Lansing community, but we also sprang forth from the Detroit scene.

(Gin rocks the No Fun Showcase – photo by Megan Giddings, MPP)

MPP: It seems like every time I see a Hard Lessons show, the performance is better than the last. But lately there seems to be a slight change in mood, too. Your new material feels a little edgier and more introspective to me – I don’t want to say “mature.” But do you foresee these newer songs taking you in a different direction?

Gin: Yeah, I’d say there’s a difference. When we were doing our first record, it was still kind of like putting the band together: this initial excitement. We were all really young, just making as much racket as we possibly could to get everybody jumpin’. In hindsight I see that. So starting out, you make your mark, you get people to notice you. But the new songs do have a different vibe. I feel like now that we’ve established a foothold, we have the liberty to experiment a little. We’ve proven ourselves as a band, and now there are no rules. Personally I’m looking forward to doing different things, different sounds.

MPP: What about the somewhat darker edge to these new tunes? Have the Hard Lessons lost their innocence?

Gin: Touring is a tough thing to do sometimes – I mean there’s nothing we’d rather do, but you do get to see the sort of pitfalls of the business. It’s a sobering thing to deal with. When you hang out in bars six or seven nights a week until 3:00, 4:00 a.m., you’re going to be hanging out with junkies, things like that…just all the seedy shit behind the scenes. It can be a hard thing to deal with, and I do think that maybe our music is starting to reflect that. But traversing through these kind of things…it’s really just confirmed my belief in what we’re doing, which is spreading rock’n'roll music. We’re not as innocent as we were when we started this, but we’re far from jaded.

Look, I will never complain about being able to play rock’n'roll music night after night. I have a record out. I get to travel the country every night with my best friends. This tour’s been amazing and crazy, we’ve met some cool people: Scott Ian from Anthrax, Tim Armstrong from Rancid and Operation Ivy. We climbed rocks in Denver…the Anvil jumped in the ocean! It was cold, but it was like, when’s the next time we’re going to be near the Pacific Ocean?

(In Times Square, September 2005 – photo by David Dominic)

MPP: Are there plans to get any of this new stuff out on record…possibly another album?

KKL: In January and February of 2006, we’re taking the time to practice and learn new songs. A few of them are already in our set: we have a song called “Bamboo” that’s going over really well, and another one called “Move to California.” That’s what’s really nice about the road, you get to sort of test songs in front of a crowd. But there are other songs we’ve written that we haven’t even played live yet.

As far as a new record goes, we’ll want something new probably by summer. It could be another full-length, or it could be just like another five-song EP.

Gin: We might do another 7″ soon, just to get some more stuff out there, or an EP. There’s also a live DVD in the works: a six-camera live show we filmed at the Magic Stick. That should be out in the first half of 2006.

MPP: Well, it’s been great talking to you guys. Thanks so much, and good luck in 2006!

Buy The Hard Lessons’ debut album, Gasoline, direct from No Fun Records!

Interview by Zach Hoskins