Picture this. It’s autumn 2023. LA psych rock n rollers The Warlocks play their first date on Merseyside in over a decade. A couple of songs in, the band stops. Bobby Hecksher comes closer to the microphone, looking a bit sheepish. Last time they played the area the gig ended prematurely, see. Bobby starts to talk. He’s gutted it concluded in such a way last time he explains, and he and the band are highly appreciative we’re all here tonight. What’s more he’s gonna make it up to everybody.
And he bloody well did, you know. Played a belting set, one living clear in the memory. Wiped the slate clean, I put to him on a Zoom call from his home in LA nearly two years later, as we meet to talk about new record The Manic Excessive Sounds Of The Warlocks. A big and painful part of being an adult is admitting our mistakes. And making good. Everyone has a bad gig sometimes. ‘I learned a lot of lessons with that show,’ he nods. ‘The band’s been together 25 years now, right? And when you have those few and far between gigs, probably three times out of 1200 shows, they really make a mark in your brain. Like, I had a meltdown that day. The whole thing just gave me so much anxiety, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I did not have the tools even being a pro on stage to handle it that day. I never heard the fucking end of it for that show. I felt so bad! You forget all the smooth and awesome, rad shows. You can easily remember the few times you totally fucked up.’
2025 finds Bobby in a much better place. He’s good humoured and fun, and unashamedly excited to share the inspirational The Manic Excessive Sounds Of with the world. He didn’t envisage making a new album at all, yet during our conversation, he sings verses of the songs and it’s bloody delightful to talk to a man so clearly thrilled with his record. No too cool for school nonsense here. Literally. He didn’t finish school as a young adult, he explains. So he’s gone back to finish the job. With three classes to go, he’s working on anthropology class later today.
‘If you get a great teacher who knows how to communicate and has insights on the world that are different from yours then I feel you can really learn stuff, it doesn’t matter what the subject is.’ Graduating was something he promised his mother. ‘I joked with the Warlocks, I’ll invite all of you ok!’
On top of that, Bobby has a five-year-old daughter. He takes great pleasure from seeing and exploring the world through her eyes. Enjoying the simple stuff like hanging out at the beach. ‘It’s pretty neat. You know, I never thought I would have kids as a young, crazy adult in a rock and roll band touring all the time.’
The Warlocks release the new album this week. It’s bloody glorious, written in hours and recorded quickly, over four days. The songs came out of nowhere Bobby says, after period of creative inactivity in which he felt like maybe he was done making records. ‘Nothing was coming,’ he reports simply. Then he moved house – one of the most stressful experiences a human can go through, note – and was sat in the very same room he talks to me today. ‘I don’t know how to explain it, but I just had this built up feeling of anxiety. I was in this regular old room, not that exciting, just a desk.’ The songs came. In one day. ‘One after another. I have the pages here. I wrote it all down, and then it was done. It was like a gift or a beam of light. It never happens, all in a row like that. Hence, manic excessive!’
He wrote it so fast he still hasn’t got the lyrics fully memorized yet. Something he noticed yesterday when The Warlocks – himself, C. Rees (guitar), Earl V. Miller (guitar), Marlena Schwenck (bass), and Oscar Ruvalcaba (drums) Rob Campanella (organ) and Elina Yakubova (tambourine and percussion) rehearsed, in preparation for forthcoming dates around Europe and UK.
The record is bookended by ‘It’s a Fucked Up World’ and ‘Don’t Blame It On The Jam’. Not songs in the conventional sense, more leaning towards jams. ‘There isn’t really a chorus, and then it goes into another chord change,’ he says of It’s A Fucked Up World. ‘It isn’t like a verse, chorus, verse, chorus or anything.’
The opener sums up the world at present, pretty much? The pressures of dealing with modern life, encapsulated in five minutes. ‘It’s just total burnout. It really is. That was the first thing I wrote for the record. It felt like the trigger.’
And yet, the song has nuggets of dark humour. The lyrics ‘I need a hug, give me all your drugs/I want to break up with me’ are deliciously funny. Almost Randy Newman in parts?
‘Thing is, we’re not that kind of band. Not normally, but this record does have a lot of humour. That makes me happy you notice that.’ He recites the lyrics with a smile. ‘”Everybody’s using you and cutting you off in the traffic jam…” The problem is me. I am the problem in this fucked up world! The cool thing about this record is that there’s actually some real consistent meaning in here.’
For The Manic Excessive Sounds Of, The band voted to have side A be the two jams and side B full of the songs. But due to a boring technicality, that didn’t fit the format for vinyl. ‘It just wouldn’t be possible.’
Don’t tell me that. I want rock and roll tales of debauchery. Bobby! I don’t want practicalities.
‘The label (Cleopatra) called me. “You can’t have it the way you want it.” But it would have been fun to do a jam side and then a song side. Not an exciting story at all! I like it the way it is,’ he adds.
Fate played her magical part in getting the album recorded, in the form of a friendship set in years past. Bobby was at a local instruments swap meet. An opportunity to hang out with his own kind, musically speaking. ‘I will occasionally sell instruments and stuff at swap meets when I get too much stuff. And it’s also I’m an introverted person, and to get out of my skin I’ll do that, and that will kind of wake you up, and I end up feeling better. So I almost do them as a therapy. I don’t really care if I sell anything or not, because you’re forced to talk to people. And I run into good people.’
And on this occasion he did indeed get talking to someone. ‘We were talking about records and gear, and I really hit it off with this guy. And he’s like, I think I know you. And I was like, I think I know you too.’ Serendipity was at work. It was Rik Collins, from the last incarnation of The Seeds with Sky Saxon, over 20 years ago. It brought back creatively nourishing memories for Bobby. ‘We did a bunch of shows (with The Seeds). Anton (Newcombe, Brian Jonestown Massacre) was actually at some of those shows, and that was the time that we lived together, before he moved to Berlin. And so that brought back those memories, too.’ Rik invited Bobby to his studio, not far from where he’d moved. Things fell into place, and talking to Bobby it sounds too like it was potentially his most enjoyable recording experience.
He lists a few good experiences and others not so much. Recording 2005’s Surgery was an ‘absolute nightmare. It just took forever and so stressful, so much money involved, so many decisions all the time. Oh, my god….’ He exhales as he recalls. With Heavy Deavy Skull Lover, a popular record with the fans a couple of years later, half the band left. ‘So it was very like mundane and boring, because I’m not a great guitar player, and to do that one, I had to sit in the same spot and do these songs over and over and over again, because I had no guitar players and I’m mediocre at best, right? So that wasn’t a very exciting recording environment.’ The Chain was fun, he concedes, and exciting. But with the new record, everything and everybody fell into place.
‘I was in shock,’ he recalls when he listened back to what they’d done. ‘I was like, oh, man, I think we have something here!’
Bobby found it liberating to work on the record so quickly. Less stressful.
‘It felt so good. Very real and very to the point and everything was fun.’ Usually The Warlocks style is take the song to the band first and see if it works. The songs on the album were all he wrote, no alternatives if they didn’t make the democratic cut. ‘We didn’t do any of that. It was like, “this is all I got!’“‘
‘You Can’t Lose A Broken Heart’ is about the struggles of managing a good love and life balance. Modern life as we’ve already discussed, is a challenge. The boss of the record label liked the song so much he wanted The Warlocks to film a video for it. ‘So yeah, it that was another thing too. Videos are like pulling teeth with bands, right? And I was like, guys, it’s optional attendance, as always in the Warlocks, when it comes to press photos and videos, if you don’t want to be there, you don’t have to be there. That’s why all of our videos are kind of random. It just depends on what’s going on that day, right?’ he laughs. ‘Can’t make anyone go. But it came out good. And everyone showed up!’
Everything came so easy, and with that came the freedom to look outside the box. A Duel Between You And I is quite gothy, and We Are All Lost the third and final single has Scottish vibes, The Vaselines or The Pastels, with a side line of The Violent Femmes. ‘The songs, to me, each one has a little bit of a different genre in them, which we haven’t done before.’
Born and raised in the ‘boring’ environment of Fort Myers, Florida, Bobby as a boy remembers praying for anything exciting to happen. ‘You only had a couple things to do, skateboarding, the beach which had no waves, and school, and me and my brother, we would get these skateboard magazines, youth culture type magazines, there’s a bazillion of them. We started ordering shit, right? Records, like Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth and I was like, “Oh my God, there’s another world here”.’ Those pleas were answered, Bobby moved to LA aged 16 with his father and brother with a week’s notice. No time to think. Going from nothing to the rush of early 1990s Los Angeles. Another location change setting him off in a different direction. ‘You got the best stuff every week. We were so spoiled. You know Melvins one week, Sonic Youth. It almost seemed like it was a portal from the beyond, to have all this stuff every week as a young adult was very exciting.’
Does it feel odd to be described as a veteran band or musician is a good question to ask at this juncture. It feels a bit weird, Bobby admits, to consider how he and the band are viewed through a wider lens. The Warlocks are not followers and don’t fit easily within any description. He’s not fond of psych as a category too much. ‘We’re more a rock band,’ he says. His identity as a songwriter has firmed itself over the years. Initially when playing bass for Brian Jonestown Massacre and sharing a place with Anton he didn’t even think of himself as a songwriter. ‘It was 1998, 2000, I had landed the best gig in the world, they wanted a bass player and I thought this is what I wanted, to be in a really great rock n roll band, I’m trained on bass, it’s my first instrument. The guitar was way later. Anton had the room next to me and we would have these conversations and he said “I hate to say this but you aren’t a bass player. You’re a songwriter, I can hear you writing stuff. I can hear you. These are great songs. Caveman Rock, I don’t know what you’re on about but they’re hilarious and fun and I’m gonna prove it.” So he took a tape and gave it to Greg Shaw (of Bomp! Records) and I got signed that same week.’
Bobby initially imagined balancing BJM with The Warlocks. There was no way he could be in both, it blew up that quickly. ‘It was kind of incredible.’
It still took Bobby three years to accept himself as a songwriter.
‘It was weird he could see it before I could see it.’
He was right.
‘Yeah. Thanks Anton, I appreciate that!’
The Manic Excessive Sounds Of is very beautiful in places. ‘The Dotted Line’ is absolutely glorious. ‘Again, this is about relationships. A lot of The Warlocks songs past and future are about people that I see around me. Maybe it’s this world too, a lot of friends and acquaintances, they get in such they get in such toxic relationships. You observe, but you can’t do anything, can’t say anything, because they’re your friends, and you love them.’
And you have to keep your mouth shut until they come out of it, and then you can say I didn’t like him or her anyway without saying I told you so.
‘Exactly. Thank you! I observed certain people. And again, I just got it done the one time there was no revisions or anything like that.’
‘I do feel that it is more hopeful, more beautiful record than a lot of earlier Warlocks work, which is darker,’ Bobby continues. He mentions 2023’s In Between Sad, a deeply personal sharing about his brother’s death from cancer. ‘That was another thing too. I can’t leave it with In Between Sad, an album about my brother’s death, right? To Cleopatra I was like, you can have this, okay, but I don’t want to promote it. I don’t want to talk about it.’
If this is to be The Warlocks last album, he’s content to leave us in a Manic Excessive state.
‘But that was another thing too with In Between Sad. It was like, I don’t want to leave it like this. Whereas, if this is our last album, I feel pretty good about it, you know, I feel pretty fucking good. And that we made it to the end.’ He smiles to himself. ‘Isn’t that weird? What band makes it to the very end?’
The Manic Excessive Sounds Of The Warlocks is released on 1 August on Cleopatra Records.
Live dates:
5.8.25 BIRMINGHAM Castle & Falcon
6.8.25 LONDON O2 Academy2 Islington
7.8.25 GLASGOW The Rum Shack
8.8.25 MANCHESTER Yes
9.8.25 STOWMARKET John Peel Centre
10.8.25 SOUTHAMPTON Heartbreakers
11.8.25 SHEFFIELD Sidney & Matilda
12.8.25 CARDIFF Clwb Ifor Bach
13.8.25 HASTINGS The Piper
Photo credit: Piper Ferguson
