Giant Princess is, Collin Hedrick, Brett Taylor, Diego Arcienega and Jaime Nava

Collin Hedrick, frontman for local indie rockers Giant Princess, says that the thought of making a career out of music is the furthest thing from his mind, if for no other reason than sheer practicality.

“We don’t make no money. I mean, we will take money. It’s not that we don’t accept it. But we never get paid to do this. And we never do this to get paid.”

Giant Princess does not do what a rock band is supposed to do, and the members certainly don’t look like what a rock band is supposed to look like. Slim, lanky Hedrick comes across like a 1950s gas station attendant or minor league relief pitcher, baseball cap and all. Keyboardist Diego P. Arcienega’s loafers, khaki shorts, mustache and thick glasses make him look more than anything like an accountant relaxing on a weekend. Only drummer Jaime Nava’s shoulder-length black hair signifies something clearly rock ’n’ roll, and even that’s a bit of a grunge-y anachronism for an indie-rocker in 2010. Looking at the core members of Giant Princess standing together, it’s not clear how they would even know each other, let alone that they play in one of Houston’s most buzzed-about underground bands.

Grass-roots success
Since forming a couple of years ago, Giant Princess has become one of the centerpieces of Houston’s DIY indie scene. Their debut album, Zip Zop Wow, previously available at select live shows on homemade CD-Rs and sporadically via download on their MySpace, has just been pressed to vinyl; to celebrate the “official” release, the band headlines a show this Saturday at Fitzgerald’s as part of IndieHouston.org’s two-year anniversary celebration (Darwin’s Finches, B L A C K I E, Young Girls and a “live magician” are also on the bill).

“I really fell for (that album),” says Robert De Los Santos, who co-founded Indie Houston with a group of former and current University of Houston students looking to get involved in local music. “It became my favorite thing to play in the car. I like the energy. ... It’s not easy to explain, but it feels old and new at the same time.”

Defiantly weird, lo-fi by virtue of aesthetic as much as circumstance, willfully obtuse but still undeniably rock, Zip Zop Wow recalls everything from late-’70s New Zealand home recording pioneers such as the Clean to modern-day weirdo punks No Age to ’60s Texas garage rockers the Seeds. The group completed the album quickly and spontaneously in late 2007.

Growing up in refinery towns
Hedrick grew up in La Porte, meeting Pasadena natives Nava and Arcienega while attending San Jacinto College. If the members of Giant Princess don’t fit the traditional mold of how a rock band is expected to look and act, they were even more atypical as creative outsider kids growing up in Texas refinery towns.

“There are a lot of cliques in high schools,” says Hedrick, “but there it was guys who were like, ‘We’re gonna be plant workers.’ They’d wear the jumpsuits and hang out together and act all tough. They didn’t have driver’s licenses yet. Thirteen-year-old kids all excited about working at the plant someday.”

Though they all speak highly of their hometowns (particular praise is reserved for Pasadena’s City Cafe restaurant), Nava says that music provided a vital means of escape. “You feel smothered. You feel like you’re never going to get out. There’s a lot of aggression. Growing up listening to music, being into music, meant a lot.”

“All our dads work at plants,” Arcienega says. “And we’re in a band called Giant Princess.”

A proper release
A legitimate album release is something new for a band with no discernible goal other than to make music and let someone else sort out the particulars. For Zip Zop Wow’s initial CD-R “release,” Hedrick says the group “went to a paper company and bought sleeves, and all our friends drew different things. That’s why a lot of our songs have different titles, and why the album had a lot of different titles, because we’d just get bored.

“KTRU played one of our songs once, and the DJ said “OK, that was Giant Princess from their first release Gigantic Leopard. And I thought, huh, that one’s new to me.”

De Los Santos says that he was more than happy to give Giant Princess the chance to release the album on a more “legitimate” format, pointing to Indie Houston’s hand in local indie-poppers the McKenzies’ CD release as inspiring them to “help more local bands release records ... . We want to do something for local bands that we really believe in.”

Giant Princess, for their part, are characteristically nonchalant about the whole affair (during our interview they tended to be more enthusiastic about the songs they released on last Summer’s Mexican Easter cassette EP) but nevertheless are happy to see Zip Zop Wow pressed onto wax. Hedrick admits “I honestly don’t have a copy of those songs anymore, except what I can get off the Internet.”

If the impossibility of a career was a foregone conclusion, it never prevented the band from playing music. All that’s left is a love of playing. Nava, a multi-instrumentalist who plays in nearly a half-dozen groups, says he always wanted to be in a band growing up, and that’s all that matters to him. As for when he might give music up?

“Probably when I’m dead, or in a wheelchair. No ... I guess I can still play a guitar in a wheelchair.”

Giant Princess plays with B L A C K I E, Darwin's Finches, Young Girls and a magic show, 8 p.m., Saturday at Fitzgerald's They've also just been added to the Ghoulsfest lineup.

A note on the author:
As someone who writes about local music and also plays it, I feel compelled to bring up a couple of things. I’ve been a musician in Houston for years, and am proud to be such. By virtue of the music I like, the music I make and the venues I’ve played, I operate in the same circles as Giant Princess and Indie Houston, the band and organization I wrote about. At one point I think I’ve played in a band with nearly every current member of Giant Princess. And I’ve worked with Indie Houston before and plan to do so again. When I spoke with my editor about possible conflicts of interest, she told me “if you refused to write about a band you knew, you couldn’t write about half the bands in town.”

Which made me feel kind of like a scenester, but in a more meaningful way underscores the richness of Houston’s music community. Over the years I have had the pleasure of becoming acquaintances, friends and collaborators with many artists and bands of which I was previously a fan. In many ways Houston is a big city but a small town, and if you love music enough and you’re friendly, it’s fairly easy to surround yourself with it.

Robert De Los Santos and his friends started Indie Houston primarily as a blog to write about the local bands he enjoyed, and eventually expanded into other areas like promoting, publicity and the occasional album release. If he played an instrument I probably would’ve ended up playing in a band with him.

There’s nothing exceptionally, remarkably, hype-tastically new or unique about what’s going on in the Houston indie rock community right now, as opposed to other scenes in other cities. And it’s not like there haven’t been similarly tight-knit music scenes in town before now, either. A part of me can’t wait for the next generation of kids to wonder what’s so special about the music that’s getting noticed right now, and come along to make something even bigger and better. For me, that’s the best thing about this town — if you feel like making your own thing, there’s precious little stopping you. --Joe Mathlete