time 2 hooliganize!

things have been pumpin’ along swimmingly for Those Handsome Hooligans. 2 weeks ago, we rocked the house at Skipapalooza and this past week, we wrapped up a sweet set in Barrie for a 911 charity fundraiser. also, we’ve managed to score 13 gigs between April 14th and Sept. 8th which is quite the feat for a band made up of day jobbers with fams. we are nearing 50 songs on the setlist and a run of tees are on the horizon. we were already pretty tight with the weekly practices but now that we have so many shows, the tip of the rock iceberg remains to be seen. goin’ to be a lot of rockin’ out these next few months. lets hope the body can handle it and we’ll see how high it can soar!

here’s a few posters for our upcoming shows in Barrie this Spring/Summer. hope to see you there!

bossome defined

skipapalooza2 this Saturday will be “bossome!”. here’s a quick definition: Bossome is a Bruce Springsteen related emotion comparable to wonder but less joyous & more fearful or respectful. Bossome is defined in Skip’s Wheel of Emotions as a combination of Rosalita -inspired delight, surprise & fear. One dictionary definition is “an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by Rosalita which is grand, sublime, & extremely powerful”. Another dictionary definition is a “mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, & wonder inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might reproduced by Rosalita: “We felt Bossome when contemplating the works of Bruce Springsteen.” “The observers were witness to the Bossome sounds of the Rosalita.”

return of the bloodskin

if u can recall, we recently found blood on the rental drumkit at the rehearsal factory. so we even more recently returned (a full 2 weeks later) to the exact same room to not only find the same old blood on the snare but even more blood than before!

good thing we had anticipated this & had brought our own snare for the rosalita jam!

speaking of the rosas, we did our last pre skipapalooza prep show at an open mic at grossmans tavern this week. each member got to choose a song for our mini set which was way cool. also the stage setup at grossmans is now improved and makes a massive difference.

whoa! lights even! a riser too! better soundboard! the grossmans we knew has changed for the better! we played decently on the kit. but once we were done, we were once again told we were too loud on the drums. struggling with the combo of keeping the BIG drum sound of springsteen alive while not being too loud for patrons. its tough lesson to learn & even a harder one to put into practice & use!

skipapalooza 2!

its gonna be BIG!

so excited & honoured once to be able to do skipapalooza a 2nd time!

more deats to follow!

catching up with tone

its been a busy few weeks on the bass.  after this coming weekend, it will add up to 7 shows in 5 weeks.  slightly more than the one every other week we thought we’d have when we started this whole learnin’ the bass business.  we’re not complaining though.  every show has been so memorable and for various reasons.  for instance, we played our first “dry” cafe event this past weekend and by the sounds of it, you’d have thunk ppl we’re getting sloshed.  the small but vocal and energetic crowd blew away many a bar crowd with their level of intensity. great times!

skipapalooza was also a great event.  we packed the joint with a crowd to see the debut of “Those Handsome Hooligans” and the return to the area of “TooNice“.  the 5th/last set is still a blur and we managed to keep the energy level up throughout. 3 regrets from the THH debut though:

1. not happy with how we played “come together“.  it was ok, but we would have liked to have played it better (more on this later).  maybe it was just too early in the set for our “A” game.  this has happened b4 to us on other songs.

2. having a blank out moment in the middle of one song.  too funny!  we still don’t know what the heck distracted us or what our mind changed to, but it sure wasn’t about the song!

3. not being able to share a drink with the other Hooigans post set as we had to get back onstage asap for TooNice.  ah well, thats what we get for booking both our bands on the same night!

Hooligans are busy on adding to our 30+ songlist and making promo material.  follow us now on twitter and also here’s a slice from our recent photoshoot.

Those Handsome Hooligans Promo Pic!

in our “spare” time, we’ve been attempting to bring our bass playing up a notch.  a lot of the songs we do in both bands we can either “get by” or is what we consider “sufficient“.  we’ve really been trying to improve on those songs in particular.  we’ve been noticing that the songs we do improve upon bring more enjoyment the next time we play them live.  perhaps it might have to do with the fact that by the end we’re not thinking that “geez, wish we could play that better” and instead the new thought is “thank goodness we learnt that song properly. it sounds so much better now!”

another issue we are dealing with this week is our reggae bass tone.  its slowly slipped into a murky mess in the past 2 shows and its gotten to the point that it needed to be rethought out from scratch.  it used to sound ok but somewhere along the way it changed.  all part of the learning process we gather.  so we took advantage of some free time the other night and just worked on tone until our ears couldn’t take it anymore.  we tried a slew of different settings on the bass, on the amp, on the pedals and mixed and matched til’ we couldn’t any more.  we think we’ve got it nailed down now though. we’ll see how it goes this weekend and likely that will be next week’s post.

last but not least, thanks to clashblog for posting our last post on the strummer nights on their website.  that was fantastic and much appreciated!

da waitin’ ends this weekend!

as we wrote in an email to a friend this past weekend “in regards to skipapalooza, we’ve gone from being excited to play it and lets just get this over with already about a 100 times.“

skipapalooza is of course the meeting of yours truly’s 2 bands in one night.  the reggae outfit, TooNice ends the evening and we’ve done numerous shows together.  BUT its the debut of our cover band, Those Handsome Hooligans that night. hence the excitment level and “lets just get this done already” line of thinking.

as was remarked during our last jam session, the guitarist and i have been trying to get this band off the ground for a year now.  its been a process that has had its numerous ups and downs and we’ve learnt a lot about ppl and ourselves during that time period.  and looking back, we wouldn’t trade a single experience to get to this launch point sooner.  it just took this long and sometimes ya just gotta be patient… and the patience pays off in spades this weekend!

here’s some rough vizness from a recent open mike test drive of the Hooligans in action.

 

xpect more pics/viz after this weekend!  let the face melting begin!