Baseball fans, we’ve got some bad news for you: former California Angels first baseman Wally Joyner has not recently started playing rock shows in Santa Cruz. “Wally Joyner” is the name of a new local indie rock quartet—and no one in the band is even a pro baseball player!
“We’re all huge baseball fans,” guitarist/singer Alan Trybom explains. “We’re not trying to be ‘the baseball band’ or anything. It was just a name we could all agree on.”
The band name is where the baseball references end; otherwise they are a solid guitar-driven, high-energy ’90s indie-rock-influenced outfit. They’ve only been a band for nine months, and in that short time they’ve produced a demo on Bandcamp that sounds well beyond a band still cutting its teeth. Not only is the recording quality top-notch, but the guitar interplay between Trybom and Drew Erskine is also layered and complex.
Trybom, Erskine and bassist Chris Kruger have all been playing together in some band or another—most recently in Little Sister—for 15 years, and they’ve known drummer Marc Yinger for a number of years.
“We’re just like four best friends,” Trybom says. “We’ve been playing together forever, it’s just in a band that nobody’s ever heard of.”
As intricate as the songs sound, they actually spend very little time working them out. Instead, they take a more punk-rock approach of capturing the immediacy of their ideas.
“If we have an idea for a song, we try to get it done that night,” Trybom says. “We always talk about bands like the Replacements and Guided By Voices—that’s who we’re influenced by—these guys that just crank it out and it sounds like what it sounds like.”
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11. Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $10. 429-6994.
