A COUNTRY RIDDLE IN A JAM BAND ENIGMA WRAPPED IN CORDOVAS
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 minutes ago
- 7 min read
THE MAN LIKES A CHAT. Is very happy to talk. Has plenty to say, and the wherewithal to say it well. By comparison with most of your artistic/creative/musical types, not just with Lucca Soria, his slower-to-burn guitar-playing bandmate seated alongside him who is politely reticent, Joe Firstman is made for this trip.
Not only because Firstman is the most aptly named frontman and spokesman you might find, for this band, Cordovas, or any band. Not only because before the band he had two careers: one as a solo artist on a major country label with major label aspirations, and another as the bandleader on the nighttime chat show, Last Call With Carson Daly, jobs that thrust him into spotlights most sane people avoid. And not only because an upbringing in the South may have predisposed him to both cosmic and comic sermonising of the kind that will decorate their Australian shows in October.
Those are foundational bits of his story, but the truth is Firstman has been giving this – all of this – a lot of thought, and the songs of his old school Nashville-meets-jam-meets-southern rock band can only contain a fraction of those thoughts. As you might discern when he is asked, given this is how he is described in the band’s pr material, what’s it like being an “enigmatic frontman”? And what does it mean?
“I don’t think anything that we’ve been called or anything that’s been written matters on a big enough scale man. It’s nice that anybody is going to pay attention to our trip,” he says. “Enigma means can’t quite put your finger on it and I like that term. Perhaps an author would describe me as that. Would you Lucca?”
Soria hesitates briefly, “Yeah. I mean yeah, yeah.”
Firstman sweeps back in. “So how does that feel? I mean, man, I don’t do anything in a business mind; everything is done on the passion of the next step forward in art. Not one thing in my life isn’t associated and connected to the art. Even when we are in the basketball league in Mexico [one of the places, along with Nashville, where Cordovas record and refresh] you have to have that because if you are doing art all the time then you are Rachmaninov and you go crazy. Everything in our lives is art-driven, and we fail, we fail all the time.”
And you just fail better next time?
“Exactly! Exactly. I knew I was going to get along with you [Australians].”
It does seem like enigmatic is what people are called when they drop in Rachmaninov, basketball and Samuel Beckett into an interview. You are either really smart or really obscure, but who knows? So let’s call you enigmatic.
“I tell people I’m the dumbest in the room all the time,” Firstman says. “You speak what you know. You know what I mean? That took me a long time in interviews. I tell Lucca when he is doing his own interviews, just tell the truth man. Don’t try and make yourself look all good, that never plays.”
So is Sorria enigmatic? Perplexed? What would be the appropriate journalistic cliché for the Argentinian (with a bit of Bolivian) be?
“I don’t know. I play guitar. I guess the whole thing is we are improvising a lot,” Sorria says. “My only goal is to be good at that.”
Okay, while we’re on the subject of smart/not smart, and this says much more about me than them, I want to know why until I heard the rhyme in High Roller, a pedal steel-drenched track from 2023’s The Rose Of Aces album, I had never thought about or heard anyone else find the perfect symmetry or synchronicity of Reno and casino. It’s like god made them for each other.
“It was Branson and Reno man, when Lucca and I were writing that with our friend Mark,” Firstman says, checking that I know of this Ozarks town, famous for its family-themed and country music-themed amusements, before going on. “This kid was playing drums with us at the time, and I go, yo, do you know what Branson is drum kid? And he goes, no, and I said, exactly. So I went, ‘Vegas, casino … what other word?’ [He chuckles]. It was so dumb. Even when we sing it, I think, here comes this dumb rhyme.
“But listen my brother, it accounts for a narrative and it accounts for an attitude that we very much need within our live set. If you listen to all the songs come out it could be an overflow of love songs, and that is just not good for the live atmosphere because that’s not what we came here for. We came for energy and all those other things.
“When we get to Stanley [the character in High Roller] I’m going, all right, finally now I’m talking about a bad boy. Those characters are the most me.”
Bad boy or not, there must be some hope that down the line they could join the likes of Dolly Parton and have a Cordovas theatre in Branson.
“Man, we try not to go to Missouri too much,” he laughs.
Clearly they are familiar with the separations in American music, the genre divisions the rule radio and record companies, though not necessarily record buyers. Some like to describe these twin poles of American music as opposites but it does seem like the Cordovas work is less Nashville vs mid coast California as Nashville AND San Lorenzo Valley AND Los Angeles AND Macon.
“I’m from the South, and down here in Nashville I always got the sense that things are put on, and the people wanted the brand of country, and cosmic country and all that just plays so well. It’s in style man, people love those clothes and stuff, and I can’t handle that at all,” says Firstman. “I know about this man. I was signed up, I was on TV, I was in Hollywood, I met those girls, I met those people, I understand the motivation of popularity as part of the trip.
"And frankly I made it past that, so I never had to give into it. Many of those years, while I was not giving in, my ass was sleeping in the back of a truck or on the floor, after I’d been on television. So I paid the price to be able to talk like this.”
The connection with The Grateful Dead, the original jam rockers who found their own country routes while remaining resolutely west coast and even more resolutely outside the establishment, are hardly casual for Cordovas, a band that is equally resolutely Southern.
“The thing that felt coolest to us was The Grateful Dead’s impression of southern music, namely Jerry [Garcia], but the freedom that the other guys brought,” Firstman explains. “Knowing all along that this was important, this was very important for Lucca’s education and who we had play with us all of these years, everything absolutely comes from the South. If you don’t play from the South first then you needed to have really memorised it like Bob Dylan: the vernacular, the beat, the way we talk, and all those famous licks. So the California thing is cool with its proper Southern basis.”
Which is not a controversial position to be fair, though if you really want to get into the weeds, ask Firstman why he thinks Arkansas is not part of the South, and Oklahoma and Texas are something else altogether.
This is not territory for an outsider to enter, so instead I tell him that I was listening to an earlier album of theirs earlier, in particular the song Storms, thinking they may have made the perfect song to drink beer by, and I don’t even drink beer. But Cordovas’ songs have a lot more at play spiritually than alcoholically, a combination that matters in the South.
“I would agree with your assessment but also say [traditionally “southern” bands] are leaning on religion and spirituality in a way that is irksome, not true, and superficial. Once again, Jerry Garcia was not Christian, but God have you ever seen him sing those gospel hymns? He’s the best at it. Why? Because he understood spirit and spirit transcends some mythological god construct. And in the same way they lean on religion, they lean on booze, don’t they?
“Now no one has consumed more liquor that you have ever talked to than me, I assure you. You don’t play that out man. If I was writing things that have been written five times that week, you and I wouldn’t even be talking right now. We will be as original as we can. There are great bands who are friends of ours and the amount of crud that they are willing to stand by, put their face on and sing, is the difference between them and us.”
Incidentally, during this conversation Firstman has been toking on a large joint. As you do.
“I smoke weed pretty much all day. I didn’t smoke weed for a long time. I read Neil Young’s book and he was yelling at people and kicking them out of the car in Hollywood, and that was me. I was the worst. If you had a joint at a high school party, I would take it and throw it in the creek. I didn’t know that it cost 20 bucks.
“My dad was a weed from the ‘70s. He is a chess master and interesting guy and plays guitar really well, but his main job all this time has been a weed dealer. And so I resented the family for that. On my second record for Atlantic we went up to Santa Barbara, working in Jackson Browne’s studio, and we were smoking weed, eating weed, and I was 25. Now I hid it pretty hard, we keep the rasta vibes going.”
My man, this we could have guessed.
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Cordovas play
Enmore Hotel, October 2
Dashville Skyline Festival, Lower Belford, October 3-4
Stag & Hunter, Newcastle, October 6
Tumut River Brewing Co., Tumut, October 8
Bridge, Castlemaine, October 9
Barwon Club, Geelong, October 10
Out On The Weekend Festival, Williamstown, October 11
Shotkickers, Melbourne, October 12