The Hard Lessons would like to thank you.
Singer/guitarist Augie Visocchi and singer/key- boardist Korin Visocchi see you, their fans, as the big- gest reason they’ve endured past their recent 10-year- anniversary.
“There are fans who’ve grown up with us at this point,” says Augie, looking back to when the HLs were born in a dorm room at Michigan State in 2003. “Most bands never make it.”
Actually, Toledo provided them vital, hospitable support “from day one,” he adds. The wedded Detroit pop/rock duo have made a lot of friends down here (at Frankie’s, particularly, and with bands like Mind Fish and Silent Lions), and they consider this, essentially, their new home away from home.
If they’ve seemed somewhat silent lately on the cir- cuit of stage-rocking and album-dropping, it’s because they’ve been day-jobbing as music instructors at a metro -Detroit area school while also raising their first child, Santino, into toddlerhood. Reflecting upon the last decade, Augie zeroed in on the fickle nature of Detroit’s music scene.
“I feel there’s a silence about what we’ve done,” he said, suggesting their role as a “coalescing” band for their home scene often goes unmentioned. “We were probably one of the most exposed bands in Detroit six years ago and we paid the price for it, getting to those heights, like, selling out venues and headlining, to that breaking point of ‘Oh! These guys again?’”
Ten years gone
The Hard Lessons have run 10 years, spanning hundreds of shows and numerous albums, evolving from scrappy soul-rockers into a keen reworking of power-pop. Their charm, early on, came from how relatable they were. You saw them sweat on the stage, where they often pulled out all the stops. Their hearts were on their sleeves—which is endearing, but still, that’s the likeliest place to get one’s heart broken.
“We never had a chance to be cynical,” Augie says, “we were barely old enough to get into the bars we were playing in when we started. We were so grateful! I just wanted to get into the place and now I get to headline it?” The dude spent his 21st birthday in a legendary garage-rock venue with a handful of people in the booths, including Jack White, watching the Wild Bunch, soon to be the Electric Six. “It sounds like fan fiction about shows. We were those fans, when we started.”
Feedback and backlash
Augie recently watched the Pearl Jam documentary Twenty (2011) and identifies with their unique predic- aments—and back-biting—discovered after attaining certain success. “[Pearl Jam] came along at the tail end of a hip scene happening in a particular city … ” (i.e. 1991: Grunge in Seattle / similar to HL scene in 2001: Garage-rock in Detroit) “… and they got big to the point where some who had come before them started ques- tioning their integrity … and they were so heart-on-the-sleeve that they didn’t realize it, but they ended up sur- viving longer than any of the other bands there. Love us or hate us,” he surmises, “we were something people could rally around.”
They wrapped a 7” single, coming soon, on Gang- plank records. (The flip side features a Stooges cover.) Local drummer Steve Warstler plans to join them this month, while they’ll also debut a music video shot around Detroit’s famous Heidelberg Project. They’re writing and recording new works, going back to their origins, fittingly: “raw, sloppy guitars, Farfisas, vintage organs” and lots of feedback.
Saturday, October 19. 9pm. $5 (advance), $8 (door), Frankie’s Inner City, 308 S. Main St. 419-693-5300. frankiesinnercity.com
