The pool balls crack in the background. Someone groans. Someone else laughs. We find ourselves in the green room with Joey Quiñones. People flutter in and out as Joey brings us in and introduces the band and crew members. They pulled in from a six-hour drive out of Pittsburgh, though you wouldn’t guess it from the mood. The atmosphere is exuberant, feeling like a big family party.
We pull up a table amidst the growing number of people coming through as Joey tells about the music he grew up on. Rancid and Operation Ivy, Green Day, and the whole East Bay punk scene helped form his early taste.
"It's like your own special thing, and punk rock was that for me."
He followed that through The Specials, through two-tone, all the way back to Jamaican music of the sixties. He’s studied live recordings of Jamaican singers from that era. Obsessing over where the key shifted between the record and the stage. Learning the phrasing, the little tricks, what made it real. "You get the credibility," he says, "but you also get yelled at by every Jamaican on the planet." They're particular. He respects that. Then the band shows up, and it's a bunch of Mexican kids from East LA, and they play, and the older guys say it makes them feel young again.
He started on trombone in marching band. Got switched to trumpet, and then whatever else needed filling. That early flexibility became a philosophy and he plays nearly everything now.
When he’s writing, it’s mainly on piano and guitar. But he’s filled in on keys when they lost a player, picked up the trumpet when that spot went empty. "I've always been the kind of guy who fills in for that spot." The one instrument that still gets him is strings. Violin especially. "That's the missing piece, I feel like." On the last record, they brought string players in, and he watched them work, tried to absorb it.
"Because you listen to those Motown songs, they incorporate the funk, soul, and jazz, and then have classical strings on top."
We shift the conversation to touring, and he tells me some of the guys in the band have never been on a plane and they’ve never seen snow. “A lot of us have never traveled very far, ever,” he says. “So it's just like a trip that we get to play music through.” Joey's been out far enough to know that the further you get from LA, the nicer people treat you.
Europe is a different league with fantastic hospitality, home-cooked meals, and a respect for touring musicians. The routing a couple tours back was brutal, six and seven-hour drives mostly, but the shows were great. "Once you get to the show, it all resets," he said. "Oh yeah, I could do this another week." He laughs as the crack of a pool cue rings out in the background.
We drink Jameson as he tells me about the operation, which is almost entirely self-built. They drive the vans, run the merch, book the rooms. A tour manager came on recently, a stage manager. Roles keep clarifying as things grow. But Joey and Steve, the sax player are still the ones who look at anything that breaks before anyone else touches it. They'll fix it or figure out how to. "Everything we do, we know how to fix it. We're all hands on, we take pride in being self-sufficient.”
About ten years ago, he was living between two studios. Bouncing back and forth depending on which band was using which room and riding buses through downtown LA in between. He and Paco the guitar player, would busk for an hour, make ten or fifteen dollars. They’d get lunch, busk another half hour, maybe get a bottle. Then around nine or ten at night end up in the studio laying it down. That was their week, for years.
When It Was Only A Dream started getting attention, the engineers and audiophiles kept asking what gear he used. He laughs as he tells me he used the built-in mic on a 2009 MacBook in a hallway in an alley. "I've always kind of been chasing that sound with the sessions," he said. "It's only gotten better."
After leaving the Steady 45s, he and Paco would clear all the furniture out of the house onto the front lawn to use the space as a studio. His dad worked graveyard shifts and would come home to find the couch on the lawn and the mattress blown halfway across the yard in the IE wind.
On a run through the Midwest, the van passed through Clear Lake, Iowa. He realized, this is where the plane went down. Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper. They pulled over in the middle of the night. Pitch black and windy as hell. They walked out into a cornfield following directions on their phones until they found the small shrine. Joey had been shooting film all day, seven or eight rolls. None of those photos came out. The only ones that developed were the ones from the cornfield, no flash, pitch dark. "I'm getting weird talking about it," he said. He tells me he’s a nerd about Valens and has read every book he can about Buddy or Big Bopper. He also made it a point to visit Charlie Parker's grave.
I ask him about his new solo record Inna Soul Steady Situation, that drops on the 29th. Terry Cole owner of Colemine Records has been fully behind it and encouraged him not to worry about making a record but to make his record. Joey wanted the ska and reggae in there alongside everything else, “That's what was important too, for me, especially if I have a chance to do my own presentation. I needed to incorporate that.” He talks about how hard it was to narrow it down. “I had so many doo-wop songs, soul songs, and actual reggae songs.”
The green room turns into a fitting room as the night draws closer. Paco needed a tie for the show, and then a few of the others did too. I walked Paco through a four-in-hand while Joey ties his own in the background without really looking. Paco shows me his favorite, a gift from Joey. A slim olive silk tie from the sixties. We talk about how they don't make them like that anymore. I tell him that's exactly why we started making them.
We head out to catch the opener, and before we'd made it ten feet, Joey is stopped by a couple. They’re older, from East LA, out here in Kentucky of all places. Photos, handshakes, laughs. It happened again. And again. He was unhurried about all of it, like each person who stopped him was the first one.
Then Thee Sinseers played. A nine-piece out of East LA, brass section blazing, sweet harmonies, the whole thing. They play Chicano soul, R&B and vintage soul rooted in the sounds of the sixties. The kind of music that used to pour out of car windows on Whittier Boulevard.
The room had young and old, all different kinds of people. Joey is fully present, belting it out song after song, the voice sounding nothing like a man who'd told me an hour earlier he was fighting through being sick. He'd said something about that in the green room: the nights when his voice is worst, he has to dig deeper for it, and those end up being the best nights. "This music is all heart," he told me. "Technique is last." You could hear that from the back of the room.
At some point, he grabbed the trumpet and took the band out into the crowd. Guitar solos, sax solos, members switching instruments mid-song. That's the show, everybody gets a feature, every player gets their moment, and you can leave with your favorite character. It's generous music, and it thinks about the room.
After the last note and calls for an encore, people press in. Photos, autographs, stories. The band was laughing and carrying on the same way they had in the green room before the show, same energy, like the performance hadn't cost them anything. That ease is real. You feel it when you're around them, in the green room with the pool game going and out in the venue after. It's a way they have about them. Always having a laugh and letting you in on it. You can find Joey on tour with Thee Sinseers, buy him a shot of Blantons, and tell him Willie sent ya.
