They’ve found a psychedelic groove
Justin Angelo Morey wasn’t even born when the music he loves most was being made. But his bass guitar - a 1967 Epiphone Rivoli - was.
“It took me 10 years to find that one,” says the 30-year-old Morey, singer-songwriter for the Black Hollies. “I always wanted an Epiphone because Paul Samwell-Smith from the Yardbirds had one and I always associate that bass with him.”
When he finally came across that make and model being auctioned online - and
better yet, won it for an undisclosed but, he insists, reasonable sum - he screamed with joy. Mission accomplished. Well, one of them, anyway.
The mission at hand right now for the Black Hollies is undertaking a tour, including a stop at the Abbey Lounge tomorrow night, in support of their decidedly Yardbirds-esque sophomore album, “Casting Shadows.” Released in two weeks, the album features lyrics and music drenched in a kaleidoscopic whirl of psychedelic imagery and sound but cut with a dose of lean garage pop. The Jersey City-based band’s approach is a far cry from the noisy post-punk squall that Morey and Hollies’ guitarists Herb Wiley V and Jon Gonnelli favored with their old outfit, the Rye Coalition.
“When you’re growing up, a lot of what you’re exposed to in high school has to do with who you roll with, so you don’t really find yourself until a couple of years later,” Morey says. “I think you have to go through different phases to find out who you are and finally realize what makes you happy and why you like it.”
“If you see the guys play, you get it immediately,” says Pete D’Angelo, who founded and runs the Brooklyn-based Ernest Jenning Record Co. and signed the Black Hollies after inviting them to play as a last-minute fill-in during a label showcase. “Halfway through their opening set, they said, ‘This next song is going to be our single coming out on Ernest Jenning,’ which was a surprise to us. But after hearing them, I thought, ‘Yeah, we are putting this out.’ It was fate, I suppose.”
While it’s easy to spot the influences on “Casting Shadows” - the opening riff of the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” that launches “Hamilton Park Ballerina”; the electric sitar melody purloined from the Yardbirds’ “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor” on “Patient Sparrow” - that doesn’t mean the album isn’t loads of fun. Quite the opposite, in fact. Much like the Electric Prunes, Chocolate Watchband, and other like-minded garage-psych combos of yesteryear, the Black Hollies filter their British Invasion jones through a gritty, Americanized lens.
Speaking of touring, time, and cocoa-confection connections, Morey had to ask for a furlough from his day job as a senior production coordinator for a Jersey City-based chocolate company. With Easter coming, he says, he’s been especially busy overseeing production of the company’s “semi-hollow items.” Like those hollow chocolate Easter bunnies some of us grew up eating? “Exactly,” Morey says. “It’s our busiest time of the year.”
Press Morey on what else specifically drew the Black Hollies to a pop epoch that predates their existence by several decades, and he pauses over the phone. He loves the blaze of color, fashion, sound, and energy that defined that era, he says. But first and foremost, he loves the scenery.
“I think when you view old photographs from that era, the biggest inspiration for us would be the girls in their mini-dresses and their miniskirts,” he says with a thoughtful, deliberate tone before breaking into a laugh. “It just makes you wish that America - and the world in general - was still at that place, because there’s nothing better than seeing that, you know?”
Morey pauses, as if he’s summoning up a picture in his mind. “Fortunately at our shows,” he adds, “a lot of girls do dress the part.”
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