I arrange to meet the 1921A on what I like to call the Southside of Santa Monica, the side of the I-10 Freeway where the working people live. It’s an unseasonably hot November night here and the Santa Ana winds are blowing while wildfires jump freeway center dividers a few miles to the East. The extreme conditions don’t seem natural. But like the desert vegetation that actually needs a good fire to grow, the 1921A’s ghost-worldly, Southern folk-noir is also about destruction as much as it is about reconstruction. 

The apocalyptic, broke-down sound comes quite naturally to this band from the otherwise tony Westside; four-fifths of them hail from the beach cities of Santa Monica and Venice, California (the drummer’s from the Valley). “It’s like we’re remembering music,” explains singer Kris Hutson of the band’s rickety and charred sound. The group runs on old and new world juxtapositions, a little like a biodiesel-fueled jalopy would. Their 21st century take on tradition is all about fractured realities, past and present. Changing time signatures, jangling minstrelsy, and found sound all peep in and out of the band’s punk-blues arrangements. But everything in the 1921A’s sepia-toned world is tweaked a little bit: Certain elements are amped up as vivid disturbances of color clash with controlled chaos, while other times the hellfire is tamped down. But you can always feel an impending burst of noise, as well as the music’s roots—it feeds from the nutritious soil of traditional American song, and that’s what makes the 1921A a concept as well as a band.

“Oh, it’s definitely a concept,” affirms guitarist and co-founder Joel Morrison. 

The musicians’ comfort with old timey-ness is partly owed to the fact that four out of five of its members also work at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, a 50-year-old musical landmark on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, not far from the Venice border. So not only are the 1921A’s personnel accustomed to handling every possible traditional instrument displayed on the store’s wood-paneled walls, assisting the likes of David Lindley and Richard Thompson, it’s where they’ve seen acoustic shows by everyone from Odetta and Country Joe McDonald to Henry Rollins and Frank Black, in some cases since they were kids. Music isn’t a hobby, it’s their lives, as evidenced by the skill with which they play and the way names like Elizabeth Cotten, Skip James, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits slide in and out of our conversation.

“I like punk guitar players—like Greg Ginn—electric guitars with a lot of distortion. It’s very different, but I think it has a similar feel to the blues,” says the band’s other co-founder and guitarist, Zac Sokolow, who comes from second generation McCabe’s stock. “My dad teaches at McCabe’s, and so I feel like I kind of got into that stuff first instead of working my way backward,” he says. “When I was 13, I got to meet Ralph Stanley, the bluegrass legend. Recently, we had Saccharine Trust,” he says, noting guitarist Joe Baiza as another inspiration.

He and Morrison originally conceived their band as one that would mimic an old-fashioned one-man band sound with washboard. “Just guitar and washboard?” I ask them. ”Just washboard,” deadpans Morrison, and he means it. But with the addition of singer Hutson (he claims vague Venice Boardwalk rag-tag origins), they formed the 1921A in 2007, slowly adding a drummer with a full kit (Nick Pillot) and most recently Mikki Itzigsohn on standup bass and perpetual red-rose hair ornament. I’m acquainted with Itzigsohn from McCabe’s, and it’s she who introduces me that night to the rest of the band, as well as to Hutson’s girlfriend, all of who are splayed out on Morrison’s bachelor-paddy furniture, two thirds of them chain-smoking. Despite the double shot of second hand smoke-inhalation on this fiery night, I stay seated, curious to find out about the Westside’s latest folk explosion, centered around McCabe’s and a couple of coffeehouses, like the Unurban and the Talking Stick, where hoot nights take place regularly.

“You used to have to work backwards, if you wanted to discover roots music,” says Morrison. “Now you can get the whole collection in one file. And it’s not just songs; it’s entire albums, every album,” he says. He’s explaining to me a phenomenon he witnessed right in our own neighborhood when about three years ago students at the local private school formed a folk club.

“I saw a bunch of kids around… they had a collection they wanted to buy and printed out a copy of it,” he explains. “When somebody would buy one, they would check it off the list, add it to the hard drive collection, and give it to everybody else.” In essence, the list contained the famous traditional music touchstone, The Anthology of American Folk Music, as well as entire catalogs from artists like Blind Willie Johnson, Sleepy John Estes, and Mississippi John Hurt. It was eventually expanded to include 30,000 songs.