Kevin Bronson on October 21st, 2015

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2006 was a strange and wonderful time on the Los Angeles music scene. Silversun Pickups, Cold War Kids, She Wants Revenge, the Submarines, Mellowdrone, Gliss, Darker My Love and the Shys all released their debut albums. You could hear people like Ima Robot, Giant Drag, the Like, Nico Vega, the Ringers, Gram Rabbit, Monsters Are Waiting, Under the Influence of Giants, Great Northern, the Willowz, Irving, Division Day, Devics, Foreign Born, Mezzanine Owls, Something for Rockets, Sea Wolf, Sabrosa Purr, the Spores, Golden State and Everybody Else in local clubs, if not on radio station Indie 103.1. Nobody from L.A. got a decent review from Pitchfork back then, but good work was being done outside of Brooklyn. Really.

And then there was The Outline, who were something of an outlier. They released their debut album “You Smash it, We’ll Build Around It” on July 11 of that year (the same day as Nate Ruess’ band the Format released “Dog Problems,” the archives tell me). Highlighted by the single “Shotgun,” it was bold and angular and pretty much genre unspecific. It holds up well almost 10 years later.

“Oh, to be young and experimental,” singer-guitarist Graham Fink says now with wry humor.

At their peak, The Outline were Fink (now of Milo Greene), Max St. John (now of Superhumanoids), Austen Lee (now label manager at Hit City U.S.A.) and Ryan Rabin (now of Grouplove). Actually, they still are. The quartet, still close friends, are reuniting to play at show Jan. 9 at the Troubadour [tickets]. The show comes almost 10 years after The Outline had what they thought at the time was their gone-to-heaven moment, headlining the Key Cub with Lemon Sun, Vedera, the White Noise and Fielding.

Fink says the quartet is treating the reunion show as “just a fun thing to do for family and friends.” I caught up with him so we could flash back to 2006.

So what is your fondest memory of 2006?

Other than having just turned 21 and being able to legally drink alcohol, it’s that everything was just happening for the first time. We were still kids putting out our first album, not the jaded almost-thirtysomethings making music in Silver Lake for a decade.

Playing shows like Warped Tour was a huge deal. It wasn’t some kind of sarcastic punchline; it was the be-all, end-all of what we looked forward to when we were kids. We were on the verge of doing national tours, we were going to tour Europe, had an actual real-life record label … It all felt really exciting. Not that it doesn’t feel exciting now, but that was the first time.

Do you remember writing the record?

It got written over a span of time — songs like “Shotgun” were written when we were 17 in a garage on the Westside. But things like our rock “opus” “Broadway and Hurst” were written when Max and I were at college in San Diego, on a rainy day in our shitty little condo in a senior citizen community in La Jolla. There weren’t limitations — we were just kids living together making what we thought was interesting and weird rock music. The album grew out of high school songs and the ones we wrote at the beginning of college.

How do you feel when you go back and listen to it now?

Nostalgic. Lyrically, those songs are a window, for better or worse, into the aspiring literary mind of a 17- to 20-year-old. It’s pretty cool to have that documented on an album. And, of course, embarrassing at certain moments. But, fuck it, that’s what I wanted to say at the time. It’s valuable to have.

The record came out on Fearless via your deal with Capitol. What do you remember about getting signed?

Louie Bandak, who’s still a great friend, was courting us. We were doing the whole, we’re-20-and-putting-out-our-first-album dance. At the end of it, Louie and Capitol were the most serious offer. It was a small deal, to put out an indie record with Fearless. We never made it to that big Capitol deal that was supposed to be around the bend. We got dropped the same day about 150 other people got dropped from Capitol.

When people who don’t know the Outline ask you, “What were you guys like?,” what do you tell them?

Usually it’s in contrast to Milo Greene, so the answer I give varies. I dunno, I think we were a pretty good rock band that was onto something that we let slip away from us.

Let slip away? Or was it bad timing?

A little bit of both maybe.

I always thought the album had a degree of sophistication that was maybe beyond what your business people thought was the target demographic. I mean, I could see you guys bombing on Warped Tour with those songs.

We didn’t bomb, but we didn’t exactly kill it either. We played early slots on small stages and probably made a few hundred fans. It wasn’t the pinnacle moment we thought it would be. The label saw “Shotgun” as a big rock song, and that was the plan of attack. We got spins on Indie 103.1, but there was no momentum beyond that.

Then we did the naive young band thing by taking two years to make an even more experimental record than the last one, and by the time it came out three years later we were putting it out ourselves and nobody gave a shit. We pressed a 1,000 CDs and probably sold 150 of them. You think the market is still going to be there, but … You know, they say time heals all wounds. Well, it also dissipates all fan bases.

“They say time heals all wounds. Well, it also dissipates all fan bases.”

You still have boxes of physical copies laying around? Or T-shirts?

[Laughing] Oh, yeah, we’ll have CDs at the show. But I gave most of the Outline T-shirts away when I had a company called Meaningful Merch where I petitioned people to give they extra stuff away to shelters. I would have felt like an asshole to not do what I was trying to get other people to do.

Who hatched the idea to do a reunion show?

We’ve been talking about it forever. The four of us are still really good friends … and every time we’d get together we’d talk about the reality of coming up on 10 years of putting out our first album together. I mentioned it to Alex (Maxwell, the Troubadour talent buyer) at SXSW and she said, “You have to do it at the Troubadour.” Honestly, the Troubadour is perfect. We’re Westside kids. During high school I would go see the Get Up Kids, the Weakerthans, the Ataris, the Mars Volta, the Anniversary, Dashboard Confessional … I still have all these ticket stubs lying around. The Troubadour scene of 2002 to 2005 was my backyard.

At the very least it’s going to be a fun night for our friends and family.

Was your most memorable show the album-release gig then?

That was the moment. Our album-release show in July 2006. It was a sea of friends and family with some fans sprinkled in there for good measure. There are some videos and I have to admit I still get chills when I watch them, being 20 years old and headlining that venue and looking out into a sea of people who were singing along to every song. We ended up touring Europe with Say Anything, the Rocket Summer and Powderfinger. Our first ever show in Europe was at Hammersmith Apollo, where they shot “Ziggy Stardust,” and it was my 23rd birthday. … But that’s what our arc was like: Austen and I started when we were 16 in a garage on the Westside, we got to the point we were playing the Hammersmith Apollo and then returned to the point where we were playing to 25 people in Silver Lake. That ran the gamut.

How did it end then? I see that the Wiki page says the band “dispersed.”

That’s accurate. I think it was 2010. Superhumanoids were doing things then, Grouplove was getting going, the first Milo Greene songs were being written. The Outline were playing, like, the Cat Cub for the Sunset Strip Music Festival. I think there was the realization we had plateaued. The general slope of the band was downhill, so we moved on.

But pretty amiably, though. I don’t detect that there was much drama. Heck, there was no drug abuse, no arrests …

[Laughing] We had our bouts of creative differences, but for the most part we were just dudes in a rock band. The happiest takeaway for me is that we’re all still close friends. That’s a pretty happy ending for a band that was together that long.

The Outline, way back when (Photo courtesy of Graham Fink)