Hooked On Sonics - Freaky Good Time

Super Excited - going to Mexico

We are super excited about playing at a destination wedding in Cabo San Lucas in June.  The logistics have been stressful but things are coming together nicely.  

We have the passports, PA system, and villas rented.  Now it is just airline tickets and flight cases for our guitars (which my brother has and will thankfully lend us)!

If you need a band for your event and are in the states surrounding IL, or are having your wedding at some other far away place, we would love to hear from you!  

This was so cool to see on Dave and Raquel's wedding website!  She has been so great to work with and we are so looking forward to having a great night with them on June 22!

Live. Love. Life. Round 2 August 18th

We are so excited to be part of this worthwhile cause being totally put together by radio and TV personality Jane Monzures! Read on:

Gear up for Live. Love. Life.
Round 2: Where Grit Meets Glam 
Saturday, August 18, 2012 from 8pm-12am
Chicago Cultural Center, Yates Room

Buy your tickets today! Tickets available online atwww.live-love-life.org

 

It's a night of fashion and philanthropy where true American style hits the runway while boxers meet in the ultimate showdown.  The entertainment will excite Chicago’s most elite and fashion-forward crowd. Expect high-energy, knockout performances by fusion contemporary dancers and live musical acts plus more surprises to come.

Get down for the count and up for the cause. This year's Live. Love. Life. benefits the Northwestern Memorial Foundation and the Department of Neurology for research of degenerative brain diseases.

 

Follow us on Twitter @L3Chi
Like our Facebook Page Live. Love. Life. 

Favorite albums: Fair Warning

I was perusing through a couple of my favorite sites at our band practice the other night (spotify and grooveshark), which we use to listen to the original versions of the songs that we are learning. I got the idea to pull up Fair Warning which my bandmates were not too familiar with, even though they do like Van Halen. And it is typical of this album - it is overlooked and under-rated. People that like Van Halen sometimes aren't too familiar with it or don't regard it as highly as they should. That is absolutely a shame too because it their best album, in my opinion. 


 It is a band totally at their peak, and is pleasantly devoid of any of the obvious commercialism of their later work and darker and more powerful than their earlier albums. The cover itself is strange and dark. Pictures of people pummeling each other and ramming their head against the wall, are but a few of brutal scenes pictured.
You could read about the artwork used for the cover here.


Listening to it again, took me back to the nights in 1981, when my brother and I slept in the basement and would fall asleep to this record almost every night.  There were only 9 songs on it and one was a weird instrumental (Sunday Afternoon in the Park) featuring synthesizers that lead in to a punk-ish type tune called One Foot Out the Door.  It still had that fat synth going through the following song, which kind of tied the two tunes together.  It was just straight up atmospheric, inventive and tough sounding - everything you hoped a band with such high caliber musicians could be.  Confident in their expression, regardless of if it was commercially appealing.  Even Roth sounds mean and not as cheesy.


What is really awesome about this album for me, is how grooving it is.  The feel is funky, and swinging and Michael Anthony's bass is mixed better than previous albums.  Alex and him are totally locking it down and Eddie is laying over the top of it with impressionistic type genius.  He is taking his totally unique vocabulary to another level, and is doing things he didn't even do on the first three albums.  This is right before the band jumped the shark with Diver Down, which is full of keyboards and cover material.  Granted, Diver was recorded in 12 days, and is fun to listen to, but this is the band at their total artistic zenith.


I could give a blow-by-blow of the songs but hopefully you'll just check it out for yourself.  The opening guitar riff in the opening song, Mean Streets should be more than enough to suck you right in.  It's fierce! Enjoy!

Great Gig Requests

We get a lot of requests to play through our website (www.hookedonsonicsband.com), but this one sounded like a lot of fun!

Message from Hooked On Sonics website: It will be my 32nd high school reunion. I am the chailrman. I was set back two yearsin high shool. I will be the only one attending my reunion, since everone in my class graduated two years before me. My question is this. Do you play high school reunions for a party of one? I don't have much money. Do you charge by the hour? Maybe I can save a couple of bucks if you only play for 10 mlinutes. Please play songs appropriate for a 32nd high school reunion. Let me know. I have to rent a tuxedo. (Do you know anyone who rents tuxedoes by the hour?) Let me know. I am a 34 short.
Event Date: whenever you can play at a discounted price
Event Location: I don't have much room, so can we have it at your house. I will bring the six pack.
Event Type: 32nd high school reunion

Favorite albums: Paul's Boutique (Beastie Boys)

When this first came out in the summer of 1989, it absolutely blew me and all of my friends away. It was as pungent as our weed and as dense as the way we became after we smoked it. We would drive around in the car like fools, singing every word, and loving every stolen sample and crazy lyrical reference. This album must have been released before you needed to clear the usage of samples with the original artist, because they were like Bernie Madoff with other people's music! It re-contextualized all of these elements and made them new though, much the way the Beatles did in their work. As a matter of fact, it is very Abbey Road-ish in the fact that the record even ends with like a 9 song medley. They even overtly sample the Beatle's "The End" from Abbey Road on "The Sounds of Science". When you hear that, you realize how damn funky the Beatles are!

The cover art was mind blowing too. My brother bought the vinyl version and if I remember correctly, it had like three or four folds instead of two. And when you wrapped it around to let the left and right side touch, it was a 360 degree view of some street corner in Brooklyn with a store whose sign reads, "Paul's Boutique". Here is the cover:


But back to the music. "Shake Your Rump", "Hey Ladies", "Shadrach", and "A Year and a Day" are just a few examples of the ridiculously grooving beats and insane layering going on with this album. "A Year and a Day" had that crazy "That Lady" (Isley Brothers) guitar wailing away over an obnoxious hard-hitting beat, topped off by stream-of-conscious, nonsensical and heavily distorted raps that became just another rhythm element, instead of something to be comprehended. It was a total noise fest and I loved all 48 seconds of it.

We loved their first album, which was simple frat boy lyrics over the sparest of beats. Talk about changing direction! They sure didn't hit the sophomore slump with this one, although I don't think it was nearly the commercial success that the first was. They've never topped this in my opinion, and really, not many other rap records come close to this, regardless of the artist. I'm sure this is on many people's list of guilty musical pleasures, but if you've never heard it, give it a listen. You'll be glad you did. And "Ask for Janice"!