Tuesday, February 26, 2013

S.O.S. (Too Bad)

S.O.S. was one of the band's favorite songs to cover live.  Off of Aerosmith's second album, Get Your Wings, this one might have taken a back seat to the more famous Same Old Song And Dance or Seasons Of Wither, but we always loved the energy of SOS.  A couple of us work out some (fuzzy) memories below:

ALEX DONALDSON: "We actually covered their version of Train Kept A' Rollin off of Get Your Wings at one point too and I've always really dug playing Seasons Of Wither on acoustic when we're all just hanging out."

SHAUN SOHO: "Being a hard blues rock band from Boston, we were pretty much obligated to draw heavy influence from Aerosmith, One night we were about to go on - if I tried to guess what venue, I'd be making it up - but we were gonna open with S.O.S. and I'd been sick earlier in the week so my throat was real sore.  I was talking to the guys saying I was a little worried about hitting that high vocal part at the end of the song that night and all of a sudden somebody's older uncle who was at the show shoves me this shot of brandy like, 'hey this is a little trick that will fix you right up.' That self-medicating shot was followed by like several more before we made it to the stage.  I can't remember if it helped, but I also can't really remember the show so I guess I don't remember it not working either."

BO: "We've been talking about what cover songs we'd want to throw into the mix when we go on tour to support the new album here and S.O.S keeps coming up in the conversation.  Maybe we'll give you guys a list sometime soon of the songs we're kicking around and let you guys help us decide."

--Stay tuned here every Tuesday we'll be pulling out some inside stories or telling you guys about what's going on in the Crash Midnight camp.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Crash Midnight Shares A Few Stories From Their First Tour



Doing an interview for an Australian music magazine this week. A lot of their questions for us centered around the early days of the band and brought up some great stories.  We wanted to share a few with you guys.

During our first tour there were so many crazy stories- from Shaun Soho and Bo getting in a fight with each other in the street after a show in New York City that was only broken up when Uma Thurman (who was filming on the next street over) walked by them and quickly scurried into her trailer – to the band spending the night after a show in New Jersey at a house that was so dirty that no one dared use the filthy shower at the place the next day. Bo went out back, grabbed a garden hose and a bar of soap and proceeded to hose each of the guys in the band off one by one while smoking a cigarette in the back yard …neighbors must have loved that one.

While staying over at an apartment in Philly, a young lady took a rather intoxicated Soho back to her dorm room and as a thank you for spending the night with her, was kind enough to leave him money to buy the rest of the band breakfast in the morning. This was also during the era when guitarist, Alex Donaldson, had an old-school neon-green Nokia cell phone that he would routinely spike on the floor or against the wall at parties and laugh as it blew apart into 3 pieces, then put it back together and spike it again.

These stories are jogging more memories than we can fit into this post so we’ll have to do a few more of these just to cover that first tour.  Stay tuned next Tuesday.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Singer, Shaun Soho, Talks About The Title Of Their Debut Album: LOST IN THE CITY

Shaun Soho Let's Us In On One Of The Band's Major Influences And The Story Behind The Title Of Crash Midnight's Debut Album: "LOST IN THE CITY"

Soho:
"The band, Hanoi Rocks, was really a huge influence on us from a songwriting standpoint and myself in particular as sort of the soundtrack to a particularly chaotic part of my life.

You can hear their influence all over our album from the guitar hook in 151 to the riff in Outta Control and the little harmonica part at the beginning of Long As It's Free just to name a few. When it came time to choose a title for the album, we decided to give Hanoi a shout out with one of our favorite songs off their debut album 'Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks' -their song: 'Lost In The City.' If you listen to the chorus of this song, you'll also hear where we got the inspiration for the title of our song 'City Girl' ...although I've always thought the actual music and lyrics, City Girl, sound like if Iggy Pop was hijacked by The Dead Boys.

While the album title, 'Lost In The City,' is very much a nod to one of our major influences, it also really encompasses the story behind this band - everything we went through to get to this point and to put this album together. We were making a lot of noise around clubs in Boston and the East Coast, getting nominated for some awards and stuff and pretty naively signing a few contracts that ended up putting us in a holding pattern here for a while. It felt like a real life Escape From New York or something, Boston-style. No matter how much everyone in the band and the fans and everybody were ready for this to break out, we were stuck until everything was sorted out with contracts and stuff. The title, 'Lost In The City,' really does get to the heart of us feeling swallowed up by this place and almost wandering through all these clubs especially here in Boston and New York, I guess doing the whole 'rockstar' thing or whatever that is, meeting all these people and club managers and everyone being real cool to us and everything but when you've worked so hard on this band and this record, all we wanted was for this album to just come out so we could give it to all our fans who have been so supportive and great to us over these years. I mean this band has been through hell and back and then decided to grab a booth in the back of a bar in purgatory for the last few years. We're ready to get on the road and show everyone what this has been all about."

Here's a YouTube Link to Lost In The City by Hanoi Rocks

Monday, February 11, 2013

The Band Talks About The Inspiration Behind Their New Single "151"





In this post, a few of the guys from Crash Midnight sound off about the inspiration and general story of how their latest single "151" came to be.


SHAUN: It’s funny, this song wasn’t really intended to be a real song. We were out partying and pouring through bottles of 151. That song Nightrain came on by Guns n’ Roses and we kind of were joking around like, “those guys were some of our biggest heroes and we’re drinking harder stuff than them.” We thought we were being really cool and so we started spoofing on that song, singing about 151. The song was originally kind of a joke on that and then so many people kept telling us how much they liked it, we decided to make it into an actual song.

BO: The stuff is jet-fuel!

SHAUN: Yeah and we’d be going out emptying a bottle of it every night.

ALEX: We started signing a bunch of empty bottles and giving them away to people.

SHAUN: Even though we gave a lot of them away, we still had stacks of those bottles in our apartment. We found a place that would sell it for like $16 bucks and we pretty much ran them out of stock each week.

ALEX: My uncle owns a bunch of bars in Columbus and when he heard about this song he said “You know that 151 is something you're only supposed to have a little of once every couple months or it destroys your body?” We probably went through a lifetime supply about every week, but I love this song, and I love this spirit. I remember being 18, in this band, and drinking nothing but 151 for a year. And that's about all I remember.

SHAUN: This was the stuff that was the root cause of a lot of stories for this band. Bo passing out in the Boston Commons comes to mind.

BO: I drank a lot of that