During their recent gig at The Roxy Theatre, The Darlings treated their audience to an impersonation of the creepy noise that the half-man/half-pigeon, which haunted them during a recent stay in Nevada City, uttered outside their hotel window. The fans seemed amused but had more fun singing along to their hit single “Broken Heart Still Beating.” Perhaps they needed the full story behind the eerie war cry, as we were lucky enough to be privy to.

In an interview with ChinaShop, the Los Angeles rockers told us all about this hybrid creature, which they decided had to be something worthy of a role on the X-Files. They also discussed their wide array of influences, bizarre childhood incidents involving mannequins, and their quest to bring real rock and roll back to the music scene.

You initially got your start after the Anaheim Ducks picked up your song “What Lies Below” for promo spots…?

Buddy: Yeah! My buddy Steve hooked that up. He worked at Fox and plugged us in over there. I think it actually helped the Ducks out a lot too. They kicked ass.

What was the song about? Did it fit lyrically into the promo spots?

Chris: Probably not. You can’t really understand the lyrics anyways.

What was it about?

Buddy: It’s actually pretty weird…pillaging a village or something.

Chris: Like deep down, what’s really going on? “What Lies Below?”

Buddy: It’s about execution a little bit.

Tell us about your influences. I’ve read that it’s a mixture of classic rock and punk… What bands exactly?

Chris: I like Rise Against a lot and The Rolling Stones.

Zacc: Old blues stuff and jazz for me.

Chris: We like timeless music and roots rock and all kind of stuff.

What are some of your favorite up and coming bands?

Chris: The Gaslight Anthem I like.

Buddy: The Growlers.

Zacc: Put the Goodfellows on there. Those guys are rad.

 I saw a photo of you guys playing poker in the dessert. What was that shoot for?

Zacc: It was for our annual poker party that we like to host.

Chris: It was a photo shoot for our new CD release. The New Escape came out a few months back in November.

Did you actually play poker afterwards?

Chris: I’ve played poker but never in the dessert with skull heads in the background.

What’s your preshow drink of choice?

Chris: Red Bull vodka

Buddy: Amp energy

Zacc: A good enema and a rice cake.

The rice cake after the enema?

Zacc: Before!

What about after the show?

Zacc: Josh likes cottage cheese and peaches.

Chris: Let’s get weird on this one.

Josh: I love tequila.

Zacc: Ovaltine.

Chris: Prune juice and vodka.

Josh: Because we’re getting old you know. We have to keep things flowing.

Do you remember the strangest show you’ve ever played?

Buddy: We played in the front yard of some frat houses that were pretty weird.

Chris: I fell one time and I split my eye open. I’ll never forget that. I was getting pretty into it on the last song. I was on the monitor and my bass flew up in the air and I cut my eye open.

Zacc: It was the last song and I looked over and saw Chris bleeding. We played some crazy shows in Canada that were great.

Chris: Montreal is like our best crowd!

Josh: We just did this festival recently and the promoter put us up on this haunted hotel. We were all like, “Should we sleep in the same room?” We each had our own room but were like, “Who wants to sleep in my room with me?”

Did you have anything weird happen?

Josh: There was like a killer pigeon outside of our room.

What makes it a killer pigeon?

Zacc: It sounded like an old man with a Puerto Rican accent mixed with a pigeon.

John: It started off as a pigeon and then after that it started becoming more human.

How much tequila did you have before this happened?

Josh: None. It was a like 9:00 in the morning. We weren’t drunk or anything! Remember the X-Files? It was half man, half pigeon we think.

Did you all sleep in the same room?

Zacc: We all got our own rooms and mine had this old Victorian bathtub and it had creepy angel pictures and I didn’t even sleep in my room. It was too creepy. I wouldn’t do it.

Where was this?

Chris: Nevada City.

Josh: It was this hotel called The National and when we got there, we immediately Googled it and it was on paranormalinvestigation.com. It was one of the most haunted hotels in California.

What makes your sound so unique?

Buddy: I think that we all have different favorite bands and we each bring something of that into this which kind of makes up the style that we have.

Do you remember what made you decide that you wanted to play music for a living? Was there a particular moment?

Buddy: The movie Crossroads made me want to play guitar, with Ralph Macchio in it.

Josh: I remember being like 13 and having this VHS of Guns ‘n Roses Live in Tokyo and I remember watching the drummer and he was up on his own mini stage and I thought it was so cool. And I thought too that he probably got a lot of girls.

It always has to do with the girls!

Chris: For me, my dad had a bass hanging up in the garage with no strings on it and it was all torn apart and I always would ask him, “Hey what are you gonna do with that?” Him and I did a little project together and restored it and started playing bass together. It was pretty cool.

Zacc: My mom was a pianist and she came from a really musical background and so she’d taught me how to sing and she’d take me to piano lessons and stuff like that. It’s all for you mom. It’s all for you.

Josh: Tell her about the songs that you sang when you were a kid that your mom told me about.

Zacc: I had an incident with a mannequin when I was little. That’s what he was talking about. My mom was going to this maternity section for clothes and I was a little kid – like 3 or 4, and I looked up this mannequin’s blouse and it fell down and I freaked out. It just fell out on it’s own. My brother played a joke on me and when I’d go to bed he’d go “Pull up my pants.” It’s so stupid.

Josh: But you used to sing your mom songs though right?

Zacc: Well yeah. I’d sing to my mom all the time as a kid.

Josh: When I met his mom for the first time, she told me all these stories about how he’d sing songs and she told me about the mannequin story.

Zacc: His [Josh’s] mom makes great Mexican hot chocolate.

Josh: His [Zack’s] mom was in 80’s music videos. She was in Ozzy videos.

What’s the best thing about being in this band?

Buddy: Sleeping in beds with other men in hotel rooms. Yeah. Write that down!

Josh: 13 hour drives in tiny cars with men.

Zacc: Sweaty man hugs and silverback gorillas in the back of the van.

If all of you have these different influences, there has to be one of you that puts their foot down sometimes and says, “No, we’re not doing that?”

Buddy: That’s me. Well I have to sing the fucking songs so…[Laughs}.

Where did the band name come from?

Buddy: We couldn’t think of a name forever. We were like The Sleepwalkers. Then finally I was like, “let’s do the Darlings.” It kind of sounds old school – Queens of the Stone Age, The Ramones…it kind of reminded me of that a little bit. We were all going to be Darling. I’m Buddy Darling and he was supposed to be Josh Darling, etc… but then they all changed at the last minute.

What’s a random fun fact about The Darlings?

Buddy: We’re trying to bring real rock and roll back.

Zacc: We’re rarely late and we smell good.

Words by Nicole Pajer (@NicolePajer). Photos by Lisa Johnson.