“We’re terrible interviews,” says Hollows bassist Emma Hospelhorn as I turn on my digital recorder. I ask her to elaborate, and she tells me about an in-studio performance the band gave at WHPK last winter. “We ended up committing a bunch of weird copyright crimes,” she says, but once I’ve heard the story I’m not sure the band did anything but dance right up to the edge of the station’s rules prohibiting advertising. During their interview they rattled off a list of businesses they claimed were sponsoring the band, but the whole thing was a joke—they’d only been playing since spring 2008, and they’ve never had a single sponsor. “The DJ freaked out and was like, ‘We would like to say that this band is not promoting any specific restaurant, blah blah blah.’”
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Hollows is a five-piece now—four women and one man—but it started with just Hospelhorn and organist Maria Jenkins, who are still the main songwriters. Hospelhorn, a PhD student in the learning sciences at UIC, has been gigging as a freelance flutist (most regularly with the local New Millennium Orchestra) since her two-year term in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago ended in 2008, but she says she was “going nuts” playing nothing but classical music. Jenkins, who’s working toward a master’s degree in women’s and gender studies at Roosevelt University, had come up with a batch of garage-pop songs that didn’t suit the band she was playing with at the time, the spazzy synth-punk outfit Parsley Flakes. Jenkins posted a Craigslist ad and Hospelhorn answered it.
Hollows had a working lineup put together by late spring. Their original drummer, who calls himself Shane Lobotomy, fronts a band called the Empty Heads, and through his drummer, Evan Jenkins (no relation to Maria), he met guitarist Megan Kasten, who works in VIP ticketing for the CSO. “Shane had seen me play guitar in previous bands,” Kasten says—she was in a local garage-punk group called the Unpretty Things and, when she lived in Kansas City, the Hot Fruits. “Then he saw me at the Damen Blue Line stop on our way to work and asked me to try out.”
All four women sing, sometimes at the same time, and on the album Evan Jenkins adds alto sax. (He’s not part of the live lineup, though, and the instrument is at a pretty noncommittal level in the mix.) Maria Jenkins’s garagey combo organ—it’s a Gibson G101, but think Farfisa and you’ll be in the ballpark—shares the spotlight with the vocals, anchoring relatively rocking songs like “Do the Scarecrow” (“What else can I do / To keep those birds away from you”), skewing the country flavor of “Muncie, IN,” and giving a slightly menacing, slightly morbid vibe to just about everything. The mixture of old-fashioned pop tropes and knife-flashing ‘tude makes Hollows sound like an alternate-universe version of the Shangri-Las who got to the end of “Leader of the Pack” and decided to start a biker gang of their own.
Disdain for professionalism used to be a defining feature of punk, but for a couple decades it hasn’t been the norm. Once we start talking about that issue, Hollows get animated.
