For California rockers the Mother Hips (playing Saturday at the Belly Up Tavern), the lack of Top 40 success has allowed the band to last for two decades.
"It's not like we're playing our hits from 1993, because we never had one," lead singer and co-founder Tim Bluhm said last week from his home in the Bay Area. "In a way, I think that's kind of saved us. We're still a band that's making new records that I think are better than our old records."
The band was founded in 1990 when Bluhm met fellow poetry major Greg Loiacono at Cal State Chico, and they discovered a shared love of music.
"We were kids. ... when we first started messing around, I was probably 19. Just moved away from home. I barely even knew how to play guitar.
"We were definitely into writing words, not necessarily poetry. When I figured out I could write songs, instead of poetry, it made so much more sense."
Adding a bassist and drummer, the band began playing gigs around and off campus ---- and soon came to the attention of Hollywood's talent scouts, despite their location a couple of hours north of Sacramento. It was this early success that Bluhm blames for his shortened educational track.
"We were all living in a house in the sort of student ghetto. We were getting multiple phone calls from major label A&R guys, and they wanted to come up to Chico and take us out to dinner and watch us play.
"The second time it happened, I stopped going to class. I thought, 'I'm going to be a rock star.'
"We all left (school) ---- Greg and I both had maybe two semesters left. We almost finished ---- it was real hard, but we were real deep into playing rock. My grade-point average was terrible by the time I quit."
Signed to Warner Bros., the band saw its debut, "Back to the Grotto," come out in 1992. And while the Mother Hips' string of albums and steady touring helped cultivate a steady enough fan base to sustain the members most of the past two decades, they still haven't had that big radio hit.
Not that Bluhm's giving up.
"Anything's possible," he said, before adding the caveat that "radio's so complicated. It's really changed, and I think it's gotten harder to have an accidental hit."
Bluhm also said the music business is geared toward finding and promoting the next great band, making it a bit tougher for a band of guys in their late 30s to generate the same kind of buzz they once did.
"It's definitely an adjustment. You reach past a certain age, and you're an older guy.
"In my personal life, I think it's nothing but good. I take better care of myself. You hope you get a little bit smarter as you get older. My life has gotten better as I've gotten older.
"I'm still young and writing better songs than ever before, and the band's playing better than ever before."
But Bluhm acknowledged that in the entertainment business, perception matters more than reality.
"When it comes to a band, it can be good and bad. People definitely look at you differently as you get older, and take you more seriously ---- and younger bands look at you a little differently. The industry itself tends to look for younger bands, in general.
"There's plenty of bands coming up that deserve to have a buzz, and we've already had that. It's very hard to have it again."
Still, with a new album out last fall ("Pacific Dust"), and a steady diet of short tours to accommodate the family life of some of the band's members, Bluhm said the band continues to have fun playing for its fans.
"We're like brothers. We're friends. We're at odds sometimes ---- but it's like a family. There seems to be something that happens when we play together that is very rare. Other people know about it, too. We've worked really hard to build this thing.
"I still have a lot to prove in regard to this band. I think it can go a lot further than it has."
The Mother Hips
When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros Ave., Solana Beach
Tickets: $16-$18
Info: bellyup.com or 858-481-8140
Web: motherhips.com
