“If people are scared enough by the performance to want to actually leave, then we’re doing a good thing.”
So declares Jack Xander, the 23-year-old shapeshifting L.A. artist formerly and occasionally still known as Jack HW. He’s sitting with LPTV at Licorice Pizza Records in the San Fernando Valley, about to perform a new concept album that was inspired by a short, strange trip to a very un-Valley-like destination.
“It was somewhere in France. And there was a casino,” Xander recalls with a chuckle. “We were trapped in this place, and I couldn’t think of a worse place to be trapped. I mean, it was all right; I was there with my grandma and her boyfriend. But there were a lot of other old Europeans there, and an Elton John cover band. Which was very cool, but the concert was long, and I was like, ‘OK, this would be a great concept for… almost like hell.’”
The result is Casino Heist, conjuring a very unique sort of French Surrealism, by the semi-fictional “recently reunited rock ‘n’ roll duo” of “Jack Xander and Le Gerrymandeur.” Says Xander: “Everybody finds themselves at an old, decrepit casino in the French Riviera once in their lives, right? And there’s always a band in the corner — the dustiest, quietest, darkest corner of the room. And we are that band.”
The scripted concept record, partially inspired by the Who’s Tommy (the original 1969 album, not the 1975 cult movie, which Xander shockingly has not yet seen) and Dr. Dog’s Psychedelic Swamp, is described in a recent Instagram post as taking place “in the middle of a Euro seaside retirement haven, where pensions run wild and memories retreat.” Casino Heist’s ”wild and random recordings” were actually captured live, in one take, not in decaying coastal France but at Los Angeles’s left-of-the-dial radio station KXLU, where “they’re always playing some crazy shit, and the DJs are fried out of their mind.” Combine all that with the album’s faux French accents and Shining-like visuals, and it sets quite a surreal scene.
“The [real-life] casino director — I had to take his picture, he’s on the vinyl [album art], he probably doesn’t know — he had a little mustache and bow-tie and this kind of nice-but-shabby suit, and he had a certain way about him that I was very inspired by,” muses Xander.
Xander’s ambitions haven’t quite caught up with Casino Heist’s live presentation, just yet; his performance at Licorice Pizza will be a more raw and punk-rock affair, with the only thing that might scare spectators away being some impromptu in-store moshing. But he already has visions for a Casino Heist rock musical (“the further off-Broadway, the better”); a film version starring Christopher Walken and Joaquin Phoenix (“they could play all the characters”); or maybe some sort of immersive theater experience, where “you start at this casino, you’re trapped as the listener in the audience, and as the show moves on, things start to go wrong. There’s a break-in at the casino. The guests are cordoned off into these quarantines-like little sections, containment pods. And it further devolves as you go deeper and deeper into the rings of hell.”
All Xander knows is, “I want people gambling away their money and their pensions while my music plays. It’s gotta be gone by the end of the [show].”
In the meantime, the prolific artist, who writes/records/produces in his DIY home studio and has been making music ever he was in “the most stacked band to ever exist out of 8th grade” called Pack of Wolves, is keeping busy. He just dropped his new hyperpop single, “Drug Free Nation” (which was inspired by another strange vacation, in London), and he’ll soon release a Britpop/synthpop/psych-rock LP titled Slander. And there may even be a Casino Heist sequel in the works.
“Casino Heist, Folie à Deux — with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga,” Xander quips. “What could possibly go wrong?”
