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The Wilcox Hotel takes its name from a song by the seminal LA punk band Fear. On the surface it is difficult to understand why a State College, Pennsylvania
based band whose sound has more to do with Mid 1970’s Neil Young, The Drive-By Truckers, and Nebraska–era Bruce Springsteen, would choose a
name from one of the most notorious and irreverent bands to ever come out of Los Angeles.
The reasons are simple. From 1994 until 2002, band members Jason De Leon and Geoffrey Vasile made up ½ of the Los Angeles based hardcore punk/reggae band Youth In Asia. Youth In Asia blended elements of early LA and D.C. hardcore with reggae in attempts to emulate their heroes Bad Brains, The Clash, and Fishbone. In the eight years of the bands existence, Youth In Asia recorded two full length albums (“Absolutely Nothing to Fall Back On”-Dental Record 1996 and “This Side of Janky”-This Guy Records 2000), were featured on a series of punk rock compilations, and completed two U.S. tours. Youth
In Asia broke up in 2002 when De Leon started graduate school in anthropology at Penn State.
Vasile moved to State College in 2003 and together with De Leon started The Wilcox Hotel in 2005. Band Members Kirk Straight (guitar and mandolin) and Ryan Peterson (drums) joined the band in the Fall of 2005. The punk rock spirit and ethos that characterized Youth In Asia, was carried over to The Wilcox Hotel. However, this time The Wilcox Hotel is attempting to blend elements of country, folk, rock, and punk with lyrics that reflect the most visceral (and often miserable) parts of the human experience. Given that De Leon works and has lived in Mexico and on the Southern Texas border for years, many of the songs describe experiences of the downtrodden souls who cross the border, those that
pray on the weak and disenfranchised, and generally the darker side of life.
In addition to the aforementioned influences, The Wilcox Hotel also draws
strongly from bands such as Uncle Tupelo, The Carter Family, Los Tigre del Norte, Johnny Cash, and Townes Van Zandt. All of these country influences are filtered through a series of distortion pedals and over-driven amps and
regurgitated as the bastard step-child from some country-rock nightmare.
The Wilcox Hotel have played extensively on the East Coast since 2006.In the summer of 2006, The Wilcox Hotel completed a 12 day tour of Mexico with blues artist Brownbird Rudy Relic. The band play ten shows in 12 days and visited the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla, Tlaxcala, and the Federal District of
Mexico (Mexico City).
In July of 2007, The Wilcox Hotel completed the recording of their debut record. The new album by The Wilcox Hotel entitled “The Sacred and the Profane” is a 12 song fable about good and evil, where the moral of the story is that you can never draw a clean line between the two. The title is fitting given that De Leon’s lyrics describe a world where the “sacred” is often wrapped in hypocrisy, greed, and hate, while the “profane” can show us that beauty lies both in madness and in the recognition that hate and love are impossible to disentangle. In this era
where it is all too fashionable for “songwriters” to make crude and uninformed political statements railing against everything under the sun, De Leon attempts to paint a nonjudgmental picture of the faces that hide behind and underneath the American flag (“Homecoming”, “Coyote Blues”), the cross of self-righteousness (“Second to Jesus”, “Ties that Bind”), and broken bottles of rye whisky (“Weekend”, “Glass”).
thewilcoxhotel.blogspot.com
Janky
1. The epitome of dirt, grime, and disrepair.
2. An action word that denotes bad taste with admiration.
i.e. Check out that one-eyed cat, he sure is janky
