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Taylor Hawkins & The Coattail Riders
Someday, Taylor Hawkins may decide to step out from behind the shadow of his 13 year day job as drummer for rock stalwarts the Foo Fighters. When he does, his fairly extensive musical work experience with Grohl and others he’s played and wood shedded with – like some guys from some band called Led Zeppellin and some other dudes from another band called Queen – should come across in honed chops, creativity and confidence. With journeyman cred like that, he will most likely have found a way to offer something uniquely his own, and when he does it could be wildly entertaining. Until then, though, his current side project, Taylor Hawkins & the Coattail Riders, is pretty much just that, but that ain’t all bad.Hawkins has appeared with his side project at the Fuji Rock Festival before (I think it was 2008, but I can’t find a report – anyone?), but he’s been to Japan more than enough times with the Foos that he ought to even know the location of the festival. In fact, he probably knows what the Field of Heaven stage is all about, so his sunny California disposition rock and roll will probably fit in really well there on Friday evening.
With two full album releases under his belt now (Hawkins’ latest release, Red Light Fever, was just released last month and features a slew of guests including Dave Grohl, as well as Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen and Elliot Easton of The Cars – a cool 8 track cassette preview is here) that have each been recorded while the Foo Fighters were on hitaus, he may well ditch the “Coattail Riders” moniker next time around. Unfortunately, at the moment its pretty apropos.
Hawkins’ career got going when he joined as drummer for Alannis Morissette’s touring band, Sensual Chocolate, during Jagged Little Pill. He played with them along with other Coattail Rider, Chris Chaney on bass, until he joined the Foo Fighters way back in 1997.
Bass player Chaney has his own coattail rider cred and ties with playing Japan, as well. After leaving Morissette’s group in 2002, Chaney was recruited to replace Eric Avery on bass for the 2003 Janes Addiction reunion tour and subsequent Dave Navarro project The Panic Channel, as well as being called in by Slash for his latest album. Probably more important to Japanese fans, though, is his work with diva Ayumi Hamasaki on her 2007 album Guilty – notably the song “Together When”. How he got involved in the depths of J-Pop, I have no explanation for, but the paycheck was probably pretty good.
Rounding the trio on guitar is Gannin Arnold, who goes simply by the name of “Gannin”. Together, they play some pretty upbeat west coast rock with Hawkins using a lot of Foos-esque soft-loud lyric patterns and some country tinged balladry. Hardly earth shattering, but this stuff isn’t about making waves. It’s more about surfing them and having some fun (as side project, apparently, are supposed to be). This is a definite coattail rider example, “Louise”, from TH&TCR first album:
Playing Friday night at Field of Heaven, Taylor Hawkins should make it back to he Green Stage just in time to catch his boss Dave Grohl play in the much more high profile side project, Them Crooked Vultures. You, on the other hand, may get stuck in foot traffic without the artist van or all-access wristband.
Here they are live on Jimmy Kimmel, playing their newest track “Not Bad Luck” with Mr. Hawkins looking decidedly Dave Grohl-y:
