Talk:Isaiah "Ikey" Owens
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[edit] BIOGRAPHY
http://thedistrictweekly.com/dwweb/?p=78
"Chris Ziegler hitches a ride with Ikey Owens By Chris Ziegler
The future mayor of Long Beach stops his Mercedes in front of my old house—he still remembers where I lived three years ago, though he’d only been there once. He gives me burned copies of his last six records. Then he lends me the laptop that burned them. For breakfast, anything I want—and he tries to pay. We go to his apartment, a ’60s dingbat back between a beauty parlor and a psychologist’s office. “A lot of beautiful girls around here,” he says; “A lot of people with problems,” I say. He leans back into a fat old couch with a can of fancy lemonade: “Yeah, I got a varsity letter for tuba, I’ll admit it,” he says. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.” When we get back in the Mercedes, he misses my new house and stops instead in front of one of the proudest old high-rises in downtown. “Why am I stopping here?” he asks. “You used to live here,” I say. Ikey Owens, welcome home.
“I used to joke with him,” says Sonny Kay, the founder of the California independent label Gold Standard Laboratories—the label that first put out the Mars Volta, who would have been responsible for the most famous records to have Ikey in the credits had Sublime not done it years before. “I used to joke with him that if he ever got tired of music, he could run for mayor of Long Beach and win by a landslide,” says Kay.
Almost everyone who plays music here has played with Ikey: “He’s a work-for-hire-ass-motherfucker!” says rapper 2Mex, who, of course, has his own project with Ikey. Ikey Owens, now 32, was playing in bands next door in Lakewood when he was 15; playing tuba at the varsity (and national!) level before he graduated from Poly; earning gold records for keyboard work for Sublime and Reel Big Fish; playing with Mars Volta as soon as they became a band. When the Mars Volta did a triumphant hometown set at the Queen Mary, says Ikey, he remembers looking over the water and seeing his old house.
In Long Beach, says Elvis Estela, better known as Nobody, the internationally-known producer and multi-instrumentalist who has just finished a month of work on a collaborative album with Ikey, we can look up to him: “He’s just like any one of the kids in band class at any high school around here.” And when you ask Ikey directly and impolitely about this kind of thing, he squeaks backward into that couch and says: “I don’t do anything that anyone else can’t do.”
His hair, says Jesse Wilder: Ikey’s hair has changed the most. Trimmed down a little bit. No more “little nerdy glasses” and WEST SIDE T-shirt. “And I won’t tell you the story when he puked on me,” he adds. But he does tell a story about the final 1998 tour of his band Teen Heroes—they were already about to break up when Wilder accidentally slipped loose his cigarette during a shouting match and it sizzled right into keyboardist Ikey. “I thought I was gonna die!” he laughs now. “I remember talking to him recently, and he said, ‘That was when I didn’t like you very much!’”
But otherwise, says Wilder, Ikey’s essential character remains the same. He has a Mercedes now, and he had one then, dusting a bunch of friends off Poly campus the day of the LA riots. “No one realizes that all that shit by the Red Room—all that shit was on fire!” Ikey says. “I was like, ‘Okay, we have to get out!’ So I have like eight white kids piled in my family Mercedes, running red lights with people in the streets—really fucking bananas!”
He grew up in Lakewood when Mighty 690 was playing the Clash, Stray Cats and Earth, Wind & Fire, brother to two prodigy-level jazz musicians—Aaron the guitarist, Eugene the bassist—and the son of a man who liked to say the only thing he could play was the checkbook. (And somehow, through some kind of loose genealogical loop-de-loop, also a blood relative of T-Bone Walker, the Texas guitarist Hendrix claimed as inspiration.)
He got his love of music from his mother, he says. She loved music, but she didn’t like how concerts conflicted with Jehovah’s Witness meetings: “I was raised Jehovah’s Witness, and it was interesting, to say the least,” he says. His mom once discovered teenage Ikey alone in the dark in his room with his keyboard and first real amp, just making cheerful crazy noise: “My mom always thought I was on drugs,” he says. “Way before I did any drugs ever.”
He almost went to college in Indiana to study with renowned tubaist Harvey Phillips, but Ikey liked keyboard better than tuba—“They made me play it because I had big lips!” Normally, he says, “the people that do the shit I do had private teachers. But my dad didn’t believe in private lessons.” Instead, he studied with Miss Norwood at Hughes and Mr. Osmond at Poly (he doesn’t have to be asked to remember their names). And when the Mars Volta takes time off tour—as they are now—he co-pilots 2Mex’s Look Daggers (who played their first-ever show at the old Open location downtown), leads his Free Moral Agents and produces Dusty Rhodes and the River Band—while still living about two surface streets away from where he grew up.
“When I come home,” he says, “I really wanna come home. I spent a lot of my time lost in cities where I don’t know where anything is—I don’t wanna be lost!”
For the last 15 years, Long Beach was Snoop Dogg, Sublime and the Mars Volta to the rest of the western world. To the eastern world, too: when Ikey walked into a Japanese bootleg store, illegal Volta records were the number three top seller and the clerks were so happy to recognize him that they handed him a marker and a stack to sign. But radio-hit rap-reggae is from a very different planet than the Mars Volta—genres and generations that don’t happily overlap.
Then Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the two Texans who’d fronted At The Drive-In, relocated to Long Beach with soundman and friend Jeremy Ward, wanting to re-form their dub band, De Facto. A handshake at the second day of This Ain’t No Picnic in Irvine in 1998 was the invitation to a house party downtown, and Ikey rolled his amp three blocks down the street to set up alongside them. “They were playing dub, and I remembered everything I had learned in the Long Beach Dub All Stars, so I pulled up all those sounds,” he says. “And so I was in De Facto.”
“Omar was the first person to call me an artist,” he says. “I didn’t know! I thought I was a guy in a band. And then I started to get in that way of thinking—Omar and Cedric and Jeremy made an environment where it was cool to blow shit out and experiment. They were the first people I met that related music to film, to food—it was all one thing to them. Once that all happened—I saw shit in an entirely different way.”
A month before the European De Facto tour in 1999, Ikey lost his job—at a financial-management firm in Huntington Beach that handled billion-dollar accounts for Disney and the Catholic Church (he had to walk past a knot of Nazis every morning to get there). Mars Volta’s reputation for acrobatic precision would seem like a natural complement to this kind of by-the-numbers job—healthy exercise for a mathematic mind. But, says Ikey, he was really bad about writing down the numbers—that’s why he could never be in a band like Wilder’s Mister Mister Miyagi, locally known for their dot-by-dot recreations of hit ’80s kitsch (ha ha, laughs Wilder: “He’d solo over everything!”).
“I do end up in a lot of technical situations, but I’m not an analytical person,” he says. “But that philosophy—seeing how people were able to take calculated risks, and how the risks pay off, and understanding that if you don’t take a risk, nothing good is ever gonna happen. . . . Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. It changed the way I looked at life—I realized I hadn’t taken any risks.”
There was a girl he says he would have married, too: she dumped him. There was a better job waiting for him downtown that he probably could have walked to. Then there were Omar and Cedric and Jeremy, ready to go to Europe—they were crazy, he says, and he knew they were crazy, and he didn’t know much more about them: “Nothing I would have thought I’d stake my future on.” But now, he says of the tour, “I never played like that in my entire life.” Afterward, they asked him to be in a new band with them—the Mars Volta. He never took another job.
“When I saw him play in the Mars Volta, it totally made sense,” says Wilder now. “He’s got the background of loving the blues and jazz, but he definitely had a really good sense of pop music, as well as music that’s really out there. His ideas are always coming. The Teen Heroes did a reunion, and I asked Ikey, and he said, ‘I don’t wanna go backwards.’ Why go back to a band he played with seven years ago, when he’s already doing things that are doing fine?”
Mars Volta is in heavy rehearsal now—incommunicado on lock-down in a Hollywood studio, says Kay, where Ikey is one of the only people left to compose his own parts for the rigorously directed band. His role in the Mars Volta, Ikey said once, is to show up and play keyboards with the best musicians he knows (“Hands down!”) and then come home to Long Beach to participate in other parts of the creative process. On his coffee table is a little pile of unmastered studio CDRs; on the ride home, he picks out the probable Dusty Rhodes single, an adorable country-rock sing-along. “This record was like pulling teeth!” he says. “They thought they were making a Dylan record—I was like, ‘Yeah, I was 22 once—we’re making an Aerosmith record!’”
Ikey’s best quality is his worst quality, says Wilder—his stubbornness. “If you say, ‘I don’t know if that works,’” he says, “he’ll convince you that it’s exactly what it’s supposed to sound like!” But he’s open-minded, too, says DJ and Free Moral Agents bassist Dennis (no relation) Owens: “If somebody else has a good idea, he’ll immediately grab on it—he’s very intuitive.” Look Daggers guitarist Veronica Cruz remembers joining the band expecting polite instructions—instead, she was co-writing songs. “He said, ‘I want you to be part of this because I like the way you play already—I want you to bring yourself to this,’” she says.
“The kind of person I am,” says Ikey, “I have to have other people around me to get anywhere. I don’t know everything about music. I’m not a record geek or an equipment guy—I have to put those people around me to learn from them. All musicians have huge egos. Learning to take the ego out of things is what I try to make my greatest asset—to see whatever people are doing and to learn from it and apply it to me. It’s what I try to work on the most.”
Ikey’s Free Moral Agents (led by sad-soul singer Mendee Ichikawa) have their newest record awaiting release now—The Honey in the Carcass of the Lion, a sophisticated and reserved record arranged in themes and movements, which climbs from moments of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jackie Mittoo to a six-minute Sonic Youth cover and a gentle little coda. There’s a long and sometimes jagged discography behind Free Moral Agents, which started during Ikey’s lone hiatus from Mars Volta, but Carcass finds a gentle balance between dub, jazz, hip-hop and psychedelia, a cooler and more consistent record than the Mars Volta might ever make. Producer Estela says they’re now his favorite Long Beach band: “It’s where Ikey always wanted to be, though he never knew where he was going to be. He finally came to a place where he can express the sounds he hears in his head.”
When she hears about the borrowed laptop (“That’s so Ikey,” she laughs), Veronica Cruz tells me about the second-nicest thing he ever did for her. It was her birthday, and they were just hanging around . . . and then Ikey said he wanted to go look at effect pedals. They went to the guitar store, and he took his time picking out the right pedal. And then, once they were back outside, he put it in her hands and said, “This is for you.”
“I was like, ‘What? No, it’s not!’” she says. “But I’m gonna use it forever now.”
But then she calls back, because that one was too materialistic, she says, and she remembered the first-nicest thing Ikey Owens had ever done for her. She was in a band called Sexy Time Explosion, and they broke up in the usual debilitating way. She decided she was done. She was ready to give up. Then Ikey came over with his eight-track recorder and put it in her hands, and said, “Keep this as long as you want. I don’t want you to give up.”
She took it, and she still has it—and even though she’s now in a band with Ikey, she hasn’t gotten around to giving it back. “He brought my spirits up,” she says. “He put me back in. So I said, ‘Okay—I’m not gonna give up.’”"
Dude, this dude owns the pianoforte.
Seriously
Hell yeah, he's cool as hell!
