 |
The Shazam recently added Cincinnati’s own Greg
Reynolds on guitar to flesh out their addictive
Pop/Rock sound
|
To the uninitiated, labeling The Shazam a Nashville band would conjure up images of cowboy hats, earnest ballads about lost love and drunken melancholy, and Billy Garth Achy Breaky faux Country glop. Thankfully, there is a healthy and thriving Pop music scene in Nashville that has nothing in common with the city's more visible and audible heritage, and The Shazam is squarely in the middle of it all.
To date, the band's entire catalog -- three full-length albums and an eclectic EP -- has been produced by Nashville's Pop uberproducer Brad Jones and, since their second album, The Shazam has been signed to Not Lame, one of the most respected Power Pop labels in the world. Even a perfunctory listen to any of The Shazam's crystalline Pop albums will reveal a deep and abiding love of mid-'60s British Pop/Rock, primarily The Beatles and The Move, and not merely in a fashion that suggests that it's a good place to start ticking off influences.
To Hans Rotenberry, guitarist, lead vocalist and songwriter for The Shazam, Nashville is as good a place as any to ply his trade. He recognizes all too well the old adage that a prophet is rarely heeded in his home country, and in a town that has twisted Country into a syrupy shadow of its former glory, the brand of Power Pop that The Shazam espouses gets even shorter shrift.
"Nashville could have been any town," says Rotenberry from his east Tennessee hills home base. "The Nashville Rock scene is like any other medium-sized city. The Country thing is so far separated from the Rock scene. The Rock scene in Nashville is probably not that different from Cincinnati. Except for the fact that there's a lot of people that work at record label offices in town, so they can get your hopes up a lot quicker."
The Shazam got its start in 1994 as "a happy accident" when Rotenberry approached producer Brad Jones about doing some demos with him just prior to his plan to give up the music business. "When I first hooked up with Brad, he wasn't quite as famous as he is now, he was just a talented local guy," recalls Rotenberry. "I had already 'given up.' I had these tunes that were left over from bands that could never get their shit together, and I had never sung. I was always in bands with guys who wanted to be Paul Rodgers. So before I put the final nails in the coffin, I wanted to have one good demo of me singing, so I paid for some studio time and we did some stuff.
"So Brad said, 'What's next?' So I came up with a few more things, and we started piling up demos. Scott had been in a band with me previously, and after three or four demos, I asked Scott to start playing on them. Then Brad started getting real work, major label stuff, and he said, 'Hey, we can't record for about a year. Why don't you guys go out and play?' So we thought, 'Yeah, we'll go out and play.' So suddenly, we're ... what? The Hans Rotenberry Band? Nooo ... we came up with the name, and it's seven years later. Fourth album. Wow."
The band actually exposed its serious Pop roots by naming themselves after The Move's second album. The Shazam quickly found itself on the phone with legal types over the name; The Move certainly had no qualms (Rotenberry and The Shazam actually played a live BBC session last year with former Move members Carl Wayne and Bev Bevan where they performed "Beautiful Daughter" and "I Can Hear the Grass Grow."). No, the trouble came from Time Warner and their ownership of Captain Marvel and his famous catch phrase.
"We told them that we were 'The' Shazam, and they said, 'Oh, so you are,' " says Rotenberry with a laugh. "They said, 'Just don't use any lightning bolts and stay away from red and yellow.' "
Since starting to record seriously four years ago, The Shazam has always operated in distinctly different modes in the studio and onstage. When recording, The Shazam has always gone about its business as a trio, with Rotenberry handling all of the guitar duties. But when they've packed their bags for the road, the band has always taken along guitarist Jeremy Asbrock to fill in the gaps created by Rotenberry's studio overdubs.
The system worked well until this year, when Asbrock wanted to stay off the road and concentrate on his own band. When the time came to start thinking about hitting the road again, Rotenberry remembered an old fan of The Shazam, guitarist Greg Reynolds (formerly of Cincinnati's own Tigerlilies, among other bands), and contacted him to see if he wanted the gig.
"We talked to him about auditioning a long time ago, but we thought it was a long way off, and then we tried out some other people and they didn't quite work out," says Rotenberry. "I got back in touch with him and asked him, 'You still interested?' He said, 'Yeah!' and he came down, we rehearsed one time, and we were like, 'OK, you want to play with us next Saturday?' and that was on a Sunday. That was a little over a month ago. Great guy, a great guitar player."
Reynolds first came to Rotenberry's attention as a fan of the band, when Reynolds told the guitarist that he and his wife had used the Shazam's "Better World" as their wedding song. The pair struck up a friendship which ultimately led to the invitation for Reynolds to join as a touring member. As with Asbrock's situation, Rotenberry insists that there's always a chance that the role could expand into something more permanent, depending on what everyone wants and needs at that particular time. Given the way that Reynolds has meshed with his new bandmates, he might be involved in the recording of the Shazam's fifth album, whenever that happens, but that will have to wait as the band's fourth album is already in the can and awaiting only some final mixing.
It's been a long stretch between full releases for the band since 1998's Godspeed The Shazam, with only last year's trippy Rev 9 EP and contributions to tributes to Paul McCartney, Jeff Lynne, and The Shoes punctuating the gap. In the interim, Not Lame is reissuing The Shazam's debut album with a quartet of bonus tracks. It would have been a masterstroke of savvy marketing to put the long out-of-print first album back on the shelves before the tentative March release of the new album, but no one actually thought that far ahead.
"That would have been a good idea," says Rotenberry with a laugh. "The label that originally released it was out of business, and it was just the timing of it. We just happened to get the record back, and there was a demand for it because nobody had a copy of it. Plus, it made a nice buffer. Instead of going a year without releasing something, that gave us the period of time to re-release the first album and during that time was when we recorded the new one."
Rotenberry says that the new Shazam album is a throwback to the stripped down aesthetics of the band's first album, with less layering and more straightforward '60s-inspired guitar Pop. But even with the relative differences that distinguish the band's catalog, the stage is where all of the Shazam's elements come into play.
"We like to make records one way and then go out live another way," says Rotenberry. "The whole catalog has its own attitude live. I'm surprised that most people say we sound so much like the records when we play live. We don't really try to. There's really not much to it. On the records, there's a few little things we'll put in the mix. Overall, it's still just us. Live, it's a little louder. We always like to use The Who as reference. You hear those Who records with the acoustic guitars playing those big slashing rhythms, then you hear Live at Leeds and it's just ... brawr! I like that approach. To me it's the best of both worlds. Why go in and try to make it sound live, when you've got a studio and you can do some cool stuff?"
Rotenberry is aware of the evolutionary path The Shazam has taken over the past seven years, both as a live and a recording entity. Realizing that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, he's tried not to be too intrusive on his own creativity.
"All the real good bands always change or grow or something's a little different," says Rotenberry. "Unless you actually created the sound you have -- if you're AC/DC you don't have to change. The kind of thing we do gets called Power Pop, and I don't want to wave no flag or anything; whatever it is is whatever it is. Just the form itself can get real tedious.
"There's only so many things you can do with it. 'This time we'll do a little hard edge, this time we'll overproduce it, this time we'll underproduce it.' I don't just like all one thing, but we try to keep it within the parameters of what the band does without going way too far out. Some of the guys in the band don't dig some of the stuff I like to do as much as I do. I like some of the psychedelic things. Before we make a record, I like to think in terms of the whole record instead of just the songs I wrote. I don't just write a song every day, I like making records. It's what I always wanted to do."
THE SHAZAM perform Thursday at the Southgate House.
