With a band family bigger than ‘The Brady Bunch’ and a sound with more flair than Don King’s hair, Jail Weddings have created a sound that pays homage to the crooners and softies from yesteryear, and married it with the slashers and stompers from today’s rock scene. Being able to keep a three-piece band together without imminent implosion and self -estruction is one of the hardest challenges to all musicians, but the 10-person band Jail Weddings have taken a group of strangers and turned them into fast friends with a fierce sound. Spinner recently spoke with singer-songwriter Gabe Hart about the group’s songs, their name, and their upcoming appearance at SXSW.

Describe your sound in your own words.

We pull a lot from ’60s pop vocal stuff, [like] Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ type stuff, but we’re definitely not some kind of throwback act. Pop music to me is like a thinly veiled mask for really insane people displaying their guts. A great pop song to me is gonna have a real massive precariousness to it, and the sentiment might have this upbeat feel, but it’ll have an element of death to it. It’s like there’s this morbid undercurrent in pop music when it’s done correct, almost like you’re celebrating the fear of losing everything you love.

How did your band form?

I had come out of a four-year relationship with a woman and I was devastated, and my band at the time was breaking up at the time. So, I decided, “F— it, let’s start from total scratch. Instead of finding another girl, I’m going to make this big musical gang and put all the love I have into it.” I put a bulletin out, and all these different people [responded]. About half of the members of Jail Weddings, actually, I didn’t know, but they were familiar with my music before, and they ended up dropping everything [and] moved across the country to LA. No one really knew each other before the band started, so it was this collective leap of faith. And it somehow worked out.

What are your musical influences?

The Shangri-Las are probably my favorite band of all time, and Scott Walker has my favorite voice of all time. Definitely growing up listening to [LA radio station] K Earth 101, the oldies station. I grew up listening to punk rock and all that stuff, but I was always obsessed with the oldies station. It’s the utopian sentimental vibe from oldies mixed with the aggressiveness of punk rock [that] really sculpted my output these days. Some of the early bands like Loves and Ex and the Flesh Eaters, I felt a strong kind of kinship with as far as iconography. Probably my favorite band right now is the Dutchess and the Duke.

How did you come up with your band name?

It’s like another instance of synchronicity with us. It turns out our [former] singer Tina and Tony, our [former] drummer, were both in downtown Los Angeles within an hour of each other by the Twin Towers jail downtown. There’s an actual storefront down there that says “Jail Weddings,” and you can go in there to marry your loved one in jail. [Tina and Tony] hadn’t met each other yet, but they both took a picture of the same store front, [and when they] both showed up to my house, one of them was like, “Oh, you’ve got to check this out, it’s a sign that says ‘Jail Weddings.’” Then the other one laughed and said. “Oh my God, I took the exact same picture today!” So I saw that, and said, “Well, that’s obviously our band name.”

What’s your musical guilty pleasure?

People always laugh when I tell them where I’m pulling from with my vocal styles, but I’m really into over-the-top, audacious ’60s pop stuff like Johnnie Ray, and even some Liberace is totally amazing to me. The gut level camp of it is a lot more daring than what other people are doing these days.

What’s in your festival survival kit?

I travel as light as possible, so I usually bring a suit. I’ll seriously wear the same suit to bed, on stage [and] at the gas station. I’ll definitely bring a pad of paper, at least two book because I read like a maniac, and usually some kind of sleeping pills.

Who was your first celeb crush?

Oh man, Sherilyn Fenn who played Audrey Horne in ‘Twin Peaks.’ I remember being in sixth grade, and somehow one of my friend got an 8 1/2×11 glossy picture of her, and we would just stare at her picture for hours. It was like the most exalted image of a woman we’ve ever seen. And her character on the show was very flirtatious and kind of subtly mischievous and that was a really attractive thing to me as a kid.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or experienced while on tour?

My old band, the Starvations, we got caught in the worst blizzard that they had seen in Colorado in 20 years. It was 1993, so we were one of 80 automobiles that got stuck on the road, and we were basically getting snowed in to our van and we thought we were gonna starve and everything. A tow truck came 4 hours later and started towing us to this trailer park clubhouse, and the tow truck broke down. So another tow truck had to tow the other tow truck to the clubhouse, where there was about 80 people sprawled out in a very small room for 4. [The US] had just gone to war that day, so that’s all that was on the TV, [and] then this women going into labor right there. It was this crazy apocalyptic type of scene.

If you were to create a meal inspired by your music, what would you be eating?

It would have to be something rich, something indulgent and really fattening. [I would say] it would be a still beating, blood spurting, chocolate-covered human heart.