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THE INDEPENDENT
april 17, 2014
HOMECOMING NIGHT: For only their second live show in more than a decade, Buellton played the Mercury Lounge in Goleta on March , which Nygren said felt “like a homecoming party.” first came to Santa Barbara to study philosophy at Westmont in the early 1990s, sang and played guitar in a band called Brown, and their album eventually found its way to the ears of Eric Herzog, thanks to mutual friend Tad “Tbone” Wagner. A third-generation local who’d been playing drums in bars since before he was 21, Zog, as he’s known, was in a band called Wasted Tape with childhood friend John Askew and Bruce Winter, who’d just returned from years of touring with Toad the Wet Sprocket. Brown and Wasted Tape disintegrated at about the same time, so Zog called up Nygren on his mom’s landline and invited him to jam. By 1999, Nygren had moved to town and started working with Zog and Tbone at the Wine Cask’s old warehouse on Haley Street, where they were allowed to turn an unused room into a small recording studio. They named the makeshift space “Buonapasta,” an ode to a nearby pasta-making factory. Nygren and Zog started writing songs together. Tbone tackled guitar and began exploring a nascent interest in production. “He starts pushing some buttons, and next thing we knew, we needed some lead parts,” said Nygren. “That’s how the nucleus happened.” From the remnants of Brown, in came bassist Cliff Hayes and multi-instrumentalist Andrew “JKO” Giacumakis. Still a relative Santa Barbara newbie, Nygren spotted the city named Buellton on a street sign in Goleta, thought it sounded “cool,” and the group was christened, in the grand tradition of naming bands after fairly meaningless things. They upped the ante by calling the album Avenue of the Flags (a nod to Buellton’s main drag) but still thought the connection more of a curiosity, having ambitiously thought that their reach would go far beyond the Central Coast, leaving the origins of both band name and album a mystery. (This was pre-pervasive Internet.) In 2001, Buellton released Avenue of the Flags on John Askew’s Portland-based FILMguerrero label, and quickly rave reviews from national magazines and websites started pouring in. (The record even received four stars from AllMusic.com, which was rather selective in even mentioning bands.) Buellton toured California and the Pacific Northwest a couple of times, opening for Death Cab for Cutie, Rilo Kiley, and My Morning Jacket (although the latter had yet to achieve their
current fame). But Nygren was already wondering whether the road life was for him. “Gee,” he recalled thinking, way before wives and kids and full-time jobs came on their scene,“is this how I want to spend my time, in a van with some smelly dudes?” From 2002-2003, Buellton tried to make a second record, but Nygren had fallen in love with an art teacher from Midland School near Los Olivos named Faith Thornton.“I was always the edge-of-the-bed, sulkingabout-relationships songwriter,” he explained. “I found myself happy, which was kind of bizarre, and I was wanting to do other things besides hole up in my bedroom and make music.” The well ran dry, and Nygren had no inclination to fill it up. By 2004, Buellton was officially on hiatus, but the other members kept at it: Winter went into composing in Los Angeles, Tbone kept producing, and Zog and JKO went on to form the metal band Moab, which is about to go on tour with Fu Manchu. Meanwhile, Nygren started working at SB Mailworks, which he now co-owns, and married Faith. Eventually the pair moved to Midland School, where two things happened to set Buellton back on track: One, a faculty member gave Nygren an old piano that had been at the school for decades, and two, as copies of Avenue of the Flags made their rounds with the students, Nygren kept hearing positive feedback.“They razzed me,” he said of the kids.“I got the bug again.” By 2008, most of the band was back together and recording at Buonapasta. That next year, with about half the album done, Haley Ashbury Studios moved in right next door, and the overflowing noise of practicing bands made laying down tracks difficult. Much more catastrophic, though, Faith was diagnosed with breast cancer that required both chemo and radiation. Buellton was again on indefinite hiatus, and this time they pulled the plug on Buonapasta, too.“It’s just bizarre driving past that place,” said Zog, who also endured a major back injury amid it all.“So much creativity went on in that little alley.” With Faith’s treatment going as perfectly as possible, Buellton got back to recording in 2010. By 2011, the band was ready to mix album number two but wound up spending lots of time and money at various studios, from John Askew’s Scenic Burrows in Portland to Barak Moffitt’s SuperMaster Destructo in Venice Beach. Their democratic approach to songwriting was causing major delays.“It’s a very collaborative process, to its demise at times, but that’s just how it is,” said Nygren.“I