Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe is something of a Hollywood landmark. Located on Melrose just opposite the gates of Paramount Studios, the humble-looking Mexican restaurant has been an industry hangout for decades, and in the early 70s it was a haven for up-and-coming musicians. Among the regulars were Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and a Baptist minister’s son from Oklahoma, Jimmy Webb, who’d later memorialize the place as “the old cantina on the California coast” in his song “Adios.”
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Webb’s sons Christiaan, Justin, and James, better known as the Webb Brothers, have also had their share of disappointments with the music business–though their near miss, more than two decades later, was on the other side of the Atlantic. The Webbs touched off a small bidding war practically as soon as they set foot in the UK in 1999, but a combination of bad timing and record-label politics ensured that they’d watch contemporaries like the Strokes and the White Stripes pass them by. This fall, after a long, messy divorce from Warner Brothers, the band ended its decadelong stay in Chicago and moved to LA. Without a label contract or an album to shop around, they’ve holed up in a studio they set up in back of their father’s old haunt, Lucy’s El Adobe, where they’re working on a concept album and animated film called “The God Helmet,” hoping to rejuvenate their career.
“Big record companies just steer you in a way that avoids risks,” says Christiaan. “But we’ve only ever succeeded when we’ve taken risks. So we’re taking them again.”
Christiaan and Justin’s younger brother James, 26, dropped out of college in New Jersey and moved to Chicago in 2000, joining the band in time to support the new disc. Produced by Morrissey collaborator Stephen Street, Maroon was released in the U.S. in the summer of 2001. It was supposed to be the Webb Brothers’ American breakthrough, with the CMJ festival in October serving as their coming-out party. Feature stories on the band ran in Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, and the album was nudging the top ten on the college charts. On the morning of September 11, the Webbs were scheduled to leave Chicago for New York City to launch a tour with the Charlatans UK. “I was actually up, ’cause I’d been out late,” says James. “Then someone called and was like, ‘Turn on the TV!’” The tour was scuttled, and two months later Division One, the Warner subsidiary that had released Maroon, shut down. The album never regained its momentum, and the first cracks appeared in the band’s relationship with the label.
“We’re actually gonna build the helmet,” insists Christiaan. “We’ve got schematics and everything. Whether it works or not, who knows? But it’s gonna be something.”
In the meantime Jimmy Webb has put the finishing touches on Twilight of the Renegades, his first album of new material in more than a decade. Sanctuary will release the disc in May, and Webb plans to promote the record with full-band shows in Europe and the States. “One of the ideas is having the Webb Brothers be my band for that,” he says. “I think it’d be a pretty great experience.”
