Jaime Hernández agrees to pose perched on one of the fig trees in his garden, also in front of two twin computers in the attic that serves as his home office, next to the wall of his neighbor’s lavish mansion or on the terrace and with the laptop on knees and surrounded by the musical press that he has been consuming since adolescence. The only thing he resists is being photographed with an acoustic guitar in his hands. He would feel “an imposter.” He plays it “very rarely,” although it helped him introduce his children to music, and years ago he sold the pair of electric guitars that accompanied him on his short journey as an alternative rocker, in the band Barcelona Parkinson DC.
That is a stage that is considered “more than closed.” He left her behind 25 years ago, shortly after launch Houston Party, the record label and concert promoter into which he has been pouring his passion for music: “It started out as the label where we released the last four Parkinson DC references, a single, an album [Still in Spain, 1998] and two EPs, but by doing so I was able to verify that, after all, our previous record label was not deceiving us, that we really were a band of some prestige in the local indie scene, but with almost no commercial pull.” The band dissolved and Hernández (Barcelona, 53 years old) clung to Houston Party. His first big signing was the American power pop band The Posies: “Two good friends [Jon Auer y Ken Stringfellow] “That, in an act of trust and generosity that I will never be able to thank them for, they gave me their live album Alive Before the Iceberg, of which we ended up selling more than 12,000 copies.”
Hernández welcomes us at his house in Corçà, in the Catalan region of Baix Empordà. Houston Party turns a quarter of a century and he has decided to celebrate it by bringing Jody Stephens on tour, the only survivor of one of his fetish bands, Big Star, the legendary Memphis combo that is said, according to Hernández, to have “sold a ridiculous number of copies of their debut album, but everyone who bought that album formed a group.” Stephens performs under the umbrella of The Music of Big Star, a supergroup that also includes Mike Mills (REM), the aforementioned Jon Auer, Pat Sansone (Wilco) and Chris Stamey (The dB’s) and which begins its Spanish tour today in Barcelona’s Sala Apolo. Tomorrow they will be in Madrid (La Riviera), on the 18th in Santander (Santander Stage) and on the 19th in Valencia (Sala Moon). “A concert lasting a couple of hours, intense, emotional and very professional, with Big Star songs that deserved to be great hits in their day and today are cult pieces,” says Hernández.
Hernández remembers listening to pop songs “forever.” The first one that managed to shock him was Don’t Worry Baby, of The Beach Boys: “I was six or seven years old, I was leaving my parents’ garage and those wonderful vocal harmonies were playing on the radio that took my breath away.” His baptism of fire as a musician would come a few years later, when he participated “in a student exchange program in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.” There he studied, at the age of 15, “the equivalent of our 2nd year of BUP.” He discovered “a tiny, but very vital, local punk scene that was nourished by groups like Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, New Order, REM, Black Flag…”.
Upon returning to Barcelona, he continued to delve deeper into that tradition and discovered The Stooges, The Velvet Underground, and Sonic Youth. “All that incredible music that continues to fascinate me and that very few Spanish teenagers listened to at that time.” At 18 he formed a band, Los Replicantes, the embryo of Parkinson DC. Together with the Bonmatí brothers (Alfonso and Guillermo) and Ramón Serra, he enjoyed “six excellent years”, between 1992 and 1998, in which they released four albums and joined the first emergence of national indie.
“I remember those delirious tours in which we traveled through Spain in a Vanette, experiencing infernal heat, exhausted but euphoric.” They performed in one of the first editions of the now legendary Benicàssim Festival and were “opening acts for great youth heroes like Yo La Tengo”. Despite everything, Hernández assures that that time ended up leaving a bittersweet residue: “I feel that we did not realize our full potential. When we were beginning to grow and consolidate as a group, we suffered a maturity crisis and we were unable to overcome it.”
Houston Party began operating with amateur criteria, but quickly became professional. The worst moments came with the crises of 2008 and 2020: “15 years ago, with the massive outbreak of digital piracy, I was about to throw in the towel.” The solution was to focus on concert promotion. “Then, the 2020 confinement was another hard blow, but we were able to weather the storm.” Once those couple of moments of anxiety have been overcome, Hernández looks to the future with moderate optimism: “Our business is live music,” he argues, “and that will never die. Seeing a good artist in the right environment, in the format that best suits his abilities, is a magnificent experience. And I, modestly, have dedicated almost my entire career to making it possible.”
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Houston #Party #years #stubbornness #independence #good #songs