Double Naught Spy Car''s Paul Lacques and Marcus Watkins on their hilariously heady blend of surf-informed jazz-noir instrumentals.
LEFT: Paul Lacques wailing onstage with his 1953 Fender lap steel. RIGHT: Marcus Watkinsā main Spy guitar is a ā62 Strat reissue from 1986. Photos by Greg Allen
āSometimes the audience at our shows is nearly half musicians,ā laughs Double Naught Spy Car guitarist and lap-steel player Paul Lacques. āI mean, when someone starts laughing at something you snuck into the middle of a phrase, you know thatās gotta be a guitar player!ā
The all-instrumental L.A. quartetās exceptional new album, Western Violence, boasts amusing titles like āHalliburton Snowboard,ā āTwo Bones from Skeletor,ā and the instant classic āJourney to the Center of Guitar Centerāāa rollicking cacophony of spaghetti Western/surfabilly/spy-movie sounds that the band describes as āan interpretation of a Saturday afternoon noodle-fest at the Sherman Oaks Guitar Center, punctuated by tasteless simultaneous wanking by our guitarists.ā
Double Naughtās jazz-noir artrock certainly contains enough harmonic in-jokes and snippets of old TV themes and ācheesy listeningā references to keep any guitar nerd chuckling for hours. But that hardly diminishes (pun intended!) the seriousness of Lacques and co-guitarist Marcus Watkinsā inventive, richly seasoned playing and the coolness of their compositionsāwhich evoke the angular licks and interplay of bands like Television, Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and King Crimson alongside nods to Ennio Morricone and Dick Dale. The two well-traveled guitarists have done stints with 311, the Dust Brothers, Bo Diddley and many more. These Spy Cars get around.
Double Naught Spy Car (left to right): Lacques, drummer Joe Berardi, bassist Marc Doten, and Watkins, whoās playing a Tele through a Top Hat combo.
Photo by Greg Allen
Despite all those influences, perhaps the biggest throughline in the Double Naught sound is the mighty harmonic minor scale, which suffuses their tunes with its spirit of Eastern European intrigue. But Lacquesā and Watkinsā approaches to harmonic minorāessentially a natural minor scale with a raised seventh degreeācome from very different perspectives.
āIām a pretty self-taught, seat-of-your-pants player,ā says Lacques, āand I got into it from playing with a group called the Aman Folk Ensemble, where I had to learn lots of Turkish and Eastern European material. But Marcus comes to it more from Gypsy jazz and from a background in theory and reading. But yeah, itās really at the core of our music. I mean, weāll lead with a major seventh over a minor chord!ā
Another unifying principle is what Watkins calls the bandās āuncensoredā creative process. āWe spend a lot of time saying āWouldnāt it be great if ā¦ ā and since thereās no one telling us āNo, you canāt,ā we do!ā
Lacquesāa righteous lapsteel and Telecaster player with a background in classic country, Afro-pop, and roots rockāagrees. āThe spirit is that there are no rules, so you can be as atonal and avant-garde as you like.ā
Watkinsā ā62 Strat reissue, Lacquesā ā53 Fender lap steel, and Watkinsā Johnson resonator.
According to Lacques, Double Naught Spy Car came to life in the mid ā90s under the influence of Chris Isaak guitarist Jimmy Wilsey, whose cavernous Fender clean tones and dreamy articulation cast a powerful neo-surf spell.
āIt was in that approach to using the harmonic minor scale and the blues scaleāwith that gorgeous tone and reverbā and I thought, āI want to play like that.āā That set Lacques off into using Fender Super Reverb amps (though he uses a 1969 Fender Princeton Reverb with Double Naught), running them clean with ample spring reverbāa pretty big change for a guy whose āgurusā include country pickers like James Burton, Albert Lee, and Clarence White.
āClarence White is amazing because he pushed both acoustic bluegrass and electric country guitar so far forward,ā Lacques notes. āItās unusual to be that influential on both acoustic and electric music.ā Lacques studied Whiteās trademark half- and wholestep bends in detail, though he attempted to approximate them on his ā68 Fender Telecaster without the aid of a B-Bender.
Paul Lacques' Gear
Guitars
1968 Fender Tele, 1953 Fender lap steel,
1966 Fender Tele (left-handed), Beard Guitars Mike
Auldridge resonator, 1966 Martin D-18
Amps
1969 Fender Princeton Reverb
Effects
Z.Vex Box of Rock, Dunlop Cry Baby wah, Ernie
Ball VP Jr. volume pedal, MXR Carbon Copy
Strings, Picks, and Accessories
DāAddario EXL 110s, metal fingerpicks,
plastic thumbpick
Marcus Watkinsā Gear
Guitars
1986 Fender ā62 Strat reissue, 2002 Fender ā52 Tele
reissue, Schecter TSH-1, 2005 Gibson Les Paul
Standard, Johnson resonator
Amps
Matchless Spitfire 2x10 combo
Effects
Xotic Effects RC Booster, Love Pedal Kalamazoo,
Voodoo Lab Tremolo, Electro-Harmonix Small Stone
Nano, BBE Two Timer, Malekko Chicklet, Way Huge
Swollen Pickle, Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Reverb
Strings, Picks, and Accessories
DāAddario EXL 115s, Dunlop Ultex 1.14 mm picks,
Pedaltrain JR pedalboard, George Lās cables, Boss
TU-3 tuner
Ironically, Lacquesā technique on the lap steel comes more from trying to mimic the Nigerian Afro-pop sounds of King Sunny Ade than anything out of Nashville or the California country scene. He tunes his 1953 Fender lap steel to AāCāD G#āBāD (low to high), what he describes as a āD13 tuning,ā one inspired by Hawaiian guitarist Sol Hoopii. āItās not like those [resonator] tunings where youāve got this big, fat major chord,ā says Lacques. āBut itās really good at minor chords and 13 chords, and just puts all these dense jazz voicings at your fingertips. Itās a bit tricky to learn, but itās a rich palette.ā As a nod to the pickand- fingers technique of country, Lacques wears metal fingerpicks on his middle and ring fingers, and a plastic one on his thumb, when playing steel.
Watkins, who cut his teeth as a precocious teenager playing Randy Travis and ZZ Top in the bars of Northern Californiaās San Joaquin Valley, also plays Teles, but is more likely to be seen with his 1985 Fender ā62 Stratocaster reissue, which is loaded with DiMarzio Virtual Vintage pickups and plugged into a Matchless Spitfire combo. āPerhaps [the DiMarzios] arenāt the purest Strat sound, in one sense, but I gotta say, when youāre playing in all these different clubs, with all their different wiring and grounding issues, itās awful nice to show up and know you arenāt going to get any buzz at all from your guitarā benefits of a humbucker, sound of a Strat.ā
As demonstrated by their choice of amps, both players find low-wattage amps key to their tones. āLow stage volume is the better way to go,ā says Lacques. āWhen I first switched from my old ā55 Deluxe to the Princeton, I didnāt think it would be loud enough, but after a few gigs I got used to it, and now I canāt imagine going back to a bigger amp.ā He says another secret is to not use monitors. āAs soon as you start using the big drum wedge in the drummerās face, youāre deadābecause that thing floods the stage with extraneous sound. Youāre doubling the onstage volume and getting all sorts of phasing and noise. The house guy can make you sound huge if he wants, but onstage itās like youāre playing in your living room.ā
One assumes that is worlds better than what it sounds like in the middle of Guitar Center on a Saturday afternoon in Sherman Oaks.