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The Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles has turn out to be a vacation spot location. Billie Eilish and Finneas grew up right here, however they aren’t the one attraction. The world’s principal artery, the quickly gentrifying York Boulevard, has a protracted stretch of kitschy, bohemian, owner-operated outlets, eating places, ice cream parlors, and pizza joints housed within the authentic interval buildings.
The tiny and tasteful Honeywood Classic boutique, dwelling to Lone Hawk Hats, is tucked in right here. With its curated and distinct indigenous flavors, Honeywood looks like somebody’s private self-importance room. The store has been rearranged to permit for a efficiency setup and a small viewers. Tonight on the Honeywood, Lone Hawk Hats milliner Charlie Overbey, who can also be a longstanding musician and Southern California native, shall be celebrating the discharge of his album, In Good Firm, with an intimate present.
A small assortment of Lone Hawk hats covers one wall of Honeywood. Every has a definite persona and appears prefer it has a narrative to inform. This stuff are custom-made for the likes of Beyoncé and Sheryl Crow, and they’re featured on the collection 1883. A choose few are embellished with hand embroidery by Vanessa Dingwell, Honeywood’s proprietor and Overbey’s associate.
As Charlie tells me, Lone Hawk Hats raised $100,000 throughout the pandemic for United Natives (aimed toward New Mexico’s Navajo Nation inhabitants) by auctioning celebrity-donated hats. There’s a months-long ready record for a bespoke Lone Hawk hat, however Overbey retains a couple of readily available within the Highland Park store. It’s also possible to discover some on the Honeywood location the couple has opened of their adopted dwelling state of New Mexico.
It was throughout his ‘80s glam/hair steel period that Overbey received into the hat recreation. Initially it was as a result of he wished “flamboyant, loopy hats, and also you couldn’t purchase them.” Overbey provides, “I began doing my very own hats. I purchased hats that have been large enough to work with and reshaped them and dressed them up.”
This technique continues to be how Overbey makes his collectible hats. He makes use of our bodies from the Seventies, or older, for his or her high quality and the sustainability issue. Forgoing instruments, Overbey handshapes these for hours every single day, as much as six days per hat. “I can get pinches and pulls you’ll be able to’t get with a block,” he says. “It’s a creative outlet for me as nicely, like sculpting.”
Naturally, Overbey is sporting certainly one of his stunning creations. Designed with elaborate element, the hat has feathers, beads, and leather-based straps. It perches atop a black bandana tied in a knot on Overbey’s brow. Two skinny braids path over his shoulders, partially overlaying the white flowers on the lapels of his black vest. He sports activities a very good variety of chains round his neck, plus extra leather-based straps. His black denims have a beneficiant rip. This goes nicely together with his busted-up boots, whose distressed look is incredible.
Overbey is projecting a glance that matches the sonics and message of In Good Firm. The roots rock album faucets into all Overbey’s musical leanings: rock ‘n roll, cowpunk, outlaw, Americana. His a long time of musicianship, his singular life experiences, his publicity to quite a lot of musical kinds, and his wide-reaching musician buddy group feed into In Good Firm. “Champagne, Cocaine, Cadillacs & Money” options Marcus King’s blues. “The Innocence” brings basic sensibilities from Nils Lofgren. The Wallflowers’ Stuart Mathis joins in on “Punk Rock Spy.” These are just some of the namedropper-y musicians collected on the aptly titled album. But their presence considerably detracts from the songs that Overbey has lived with, in some kind or one other, for years.
“My dad was a hillbilly from Arkansas, and my mother was British, actually off the boat from England,” says Overbey. “It was both Hee Haw or The Benny Hill Present on our TV. My dad performed guitar, however the very last thing I wished to do at that age was play or take heed to what my dad was doing. I received into punk, then rock ‘n’ roll then cowpunk. The transition into nation was one I didn’t wish to make once I was youthful. However it was nation with punk rock perspective, which was good. I all the time wrote songs that I mentioned, ‘After I’m sufficiently old, I’ll launch these.’”
4 a long time in the past, Overbey, who had rebranded himself as Package Ashley, was stomping up and down the Sundown Strip with lengthy bleached and sprayed locks, heavy eyeliner, and a trashy wardrobe. He was “sponsored” (his time period) by two strippers, which allowed him to deal with his glam/hair steel group, Massive Bang Infants. The group shaped simply when the Strip was approaching its expiration date. Nonetheless, the late Invoice Aucoin and Kenny Kerner stepped in to handle them.
By the point Massive Bang Infants have been able to take off for Japan, the place their music “Everyone Wants a Hero” had turn out to be the theme music for the Japanese soccer league, Nirvana took over. Overbey lower his hair and dyed it black. He left the group and centered on “cleansing my act up.” He provides, “To get off the nostril sweet, I received strung out on drugs.” He returned to his hometown of La Habra, California, whose gang tag of “LH” is tattooed on Overbey’s cheek, besides now it stands for “Lone Hawk.”
Over time, Overbey joined and left varied teams, and shaped and dissolved a couple of musical tasks: Customized Made Scare, Women Crash Vehicles, Deadbolt, Charlie and the Dimestore Junkies, Charlie & The Valentine Killers, and Charlie Overbey and the Damaged Arrows, to call a couple of. In the meantime, he served a jail sentence, saved slipping into his partying methods, and to cite him, “was a little bit of a multitude.”
“My very own worst enemy in these days,” admits Overbey. “I needed to go on a ‘lengthy trip,’ however this one, I wasn’t allowed to go away. I used to be not left to my very own gadgets. I used to be saved below lock and key, so to talk.”
With completely different bands, Overbey performed gigs with the likes of Social Distortion, Motörhead, Foo Fighters, and Blackberry Smoke all around the globe. Whereas in Europe within the early 2000s, he determined to remain in Berlin. He opened a bar on the east aspect of town, and, after all, fell off the wagon. He returned dwelling to dry out and have become Pat Smear’s roommate. He had a daughter, Katie Overbey—who, at 18 years of age, bears an unsettling resemblance to Package Ashley—an achieved musician in her personal proper.
Overbey by no means stopped writing or releasing music. However there have been many songs he held on to, ready for the suitable second to unleash them to the general public. In Good Firm collects songs that go way back to the Nineties: “Caught in This City” and his Berlin years, “Expensive Captain” and “Miss Me.” They’re reimagined and remolded to attach with how Overbey feels at this level in his life, in his late 50s.
“It’s a pure development as a songwriter to wish to write songs which are extra heartfelt, ship extra of a message than singing about vehicles and ladies and beer and whiskey,” says Overbey. “I all the time performed acoustic guitar. To start out eager to make data with actual songs, actual which means, and actual messages was a simple entrance for me. I’m simply an outdated punker that’s nonetheless writing songs that aren’t punk—sorta. The perspective continues to be there in a few of them, however it’s not an offended punk perspective.”
Overbey is much from offended, however he nonetheless is type of a punk. He sticks his head into Arroyo Data subsequent door to Honeywood and makes a beeline for the punk bin and an Adolescents album. He takes an extended stroll down the road, bypassing all of the Mexican meals on supply, to order tacos from “the perfect taco truck within the metropolis” and walks again with a aromatic bag. After lunch he stops by Classic Tattoo Artwork Parlor, the place the world-famous Baba inks, to get a small “3” tattooed on his hand—the one out there pores and skin house left—marking In Good Firm because the third album he has launched below his personal title.
Because it will get nearer to soundcheck time, the thrill, and pressure, for tonight’s present ramps up. Overbey’s daughter Katie arrives, prepared to supply vocals and play violin in her father’s band. She is pleasant, personable, and successful—qualities she probably inherited from her father, however with out the muddying parts that derailed him time and time once more. When Katie joins Overbey, Miranda Lee Richards, Matt Pynn (pedal metal and lap metal) and Micky Madden (guitar and mandolin) for this particular efficiency—for which he’s taking part in his father’s guitar, it looks like the right full-circle second.
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