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ISSUE 10
Analog Comic
Full Interview with Analog
Venus Opens Its Stage to Live Music Featuring Black Square
Embracing the Whiskey S#!@$
You Were There First - Linus the Band
Analog Comic with Full Interview Below
FULL INTERVIEW WITH ANALOG
Interview by Katie Whitman TOP
When did analog begin?
Daniel: We were initially formed to go on tour with the USO or the military. That was the whole initial project when Selwyn Valdez, who’s the guitar player, put the band together. At that time, we had a different bass player. That was March of 2005.
Beginning of April, we had our first gig at Detox. We were with him for 7 or 8months, then we switched out.
Rylyn: You were with him for 7 or 8 months?
Daniel: Yeah, but we didn’t actually start gigging until 2 or 3 months [after we formed]. Then Rylyn came in in June 2005. You had our first gig with us in July.
You were supposed to tour…
Daniel: It was supposed to be for south-east Asia. The military bases.
Rylyn: Hence the strong cover background.
Daniel: That was the whole purpose when we started off as a cover band. Once Rylyn came along, we really started focusing on our originals.
Rylyn: Yeah, I wasn’t going to stick around if they were gonna stay a cover band.
Daniel: But the scene was... well just about the whole scene in Hawaii supported, and still does support cover bands.
Rylyn: Yeah, there is always a party for cover bands. For working class musicians, it’s always the most intelligent thing you can do because then you can make money, pay for your own album, studio time, be in practice, not like a band that plays every other month and sucks ass.
So Rylyn came in – is Rylyn the one who basically writes?
Rylyn: They had originals, music-wise.
Daniel: We actually had a lot of originals.
Rylyn: From the other bass player.
Daniel: So we dropped a lot of music he had written. We did keep a couple of the songs because we had written those between the existing member of the band.
So what’s your music background as far as experience or education?
Daniel: drumsticks and headphones.
Did you learn by yourself.
Rylyn: You were in the school band weren’t you?
Daniel: I idd play, but it initially started off that they needed a drum set player. But it was do my own thing. That sparked an interest in me to start learning. So the next year I focused on that, but I dind’t take lessons or anything like that. On and off when I was a kid. I played with a blues band, I played with a church for a while, too.
Drew, the singer, has been with other bands before. Selwyn is from the Phillipines, so I’m not sure of the structure of what he was doing over there.
Rylyn: He’s into classics – Jimi Hendrix, all the men that are guitar gods.
Daniel: When he moved to Hawaii, he got involved in a radio production company and they did radio commercials. They also played private parties, things like that.
As far as Rylyn, I’ll let him tell about that.
Rylyn: I don’t want to be here all night. I started as a drummer in the jazz band, concert band, orchestra. I did marching band for a couple years.
It’s hard to be the ablack sheep bad kid when you’re in the band, so I quit and started a punk band called Creosote. I was the drummer for that band.
Were you learning bass then, too?
Rylyn: My dad had a bass. My dad was a musician, a blues musician. There were instruments around all the time.
Did you start writing music as soon as you started playing with instruments?
Rylyn: Yeah, actually. The friends in the band Creosote were actually from a jazz band I had in 5th grade.
Daniel: Drew has a background in music, too, in his family. His dad is still a singer in Nashville – he won some Gilette sing off for country music.
Rylyn: You know they have American Idol for country singers. His dad won that.
Daniel: Yeah, had to fly all the way out here to compete for finals. So his whole family – his brother plays for another band – they’re all musically related in the family.
Two of you come from families with working musicians.
Rylyn: Yeah. They make money doing it. My dad has two CDs out.
So how do you think Analog is different from other bands in the scene? You have a step up in that you’ve lived with musicians that do it for business, so you already have sort of an idea of how the music business works.
Rylyn: TO an extent.
Daniel; I mean, they live on the other side of the world, so we don’t get direct assistance or anything.
Rylyn: Getting people organized is like the worst problem in the world in Hawaii. There’s a huge laziness and procrastination factor with everyone in our scene. I think 90%.
Daniel: Well, there’s no standard as to what’s expected. So how are we different?
Rylyn: One way is that I think we play about 80% more. We play way more than many of these other bands, except for maybe Missing Dave, but they’ve been given up a lot of gigs, too.
Daniel: H2O does a lot, too, in the hotel circuit. In the past, they were more in the scene, did a lot of battle of the bands, but in this past year have sort of shifted over. Resistor could be working a lot more.
Rylyn: Looking at the music that we don’t have recorded yet, that’s not on our myspace, we’re actually going to have a pretty eclectic sound. Everything from punk rock to a harder grinding distorted sound. I don’t know how that fits in. I think we’re a little bit more experimental in completely opposite genres.
Daniel: We aim not to duplicate. We aim to try to go in as many different directions as we can.
Rylyn: I use a bass guitar tuned in slack key – in Hawaiian tuning.
So in your year and 4 months with Rylyn, you’ve accomplished a lot. So what do you attribute to that success?
Daniel: A lot of it is persistence.
Rylyn: Like the Craterfest thing – we talked to the promotional company before they even started looking for bands.
Daniel: A year before the show. Like as soon as they had thought about it, we had already contacted them.
How do you know about these things then? You have to be so plugged in.
Daniel: It’s just communicating with people within the industry. There are gigs that we don’t get because we don’t know the person. It’s just that we happen to know these guys, or know of them. But there’s luck of the draw.
Rylyn: I don’t know how many gigs we’ve gotten because of our affluence in knowing somebody. I think it’s less than people just actually hearing about us because we play out so often… and not having a better option. We’ve never cancelled a gig ever. We always show up and do exactly what we say we’ll do. I hate to say that it’s rare. It shouldn’t be rare. A lot of the pubs we play at – they’re sort of surprised.
Daniel: Mainly just channeling the networks. Some gigs we get because people come to us. Other we go out and track them down.
In the beginning…
Daniel: L* Productions started us out with the USO tour.
Rylyn: She got us paid for the international gig. Who got us the opening for Building a Better Spaceship?
Daniel: That was through The Wave.
Rylyn: So that was Flash. And opening for the Hollywood Allstars, that was also Flash.
Daniel: All The Wave ones were through Flash.
Rylyn: It was putting in our time over there… at The Wave. Everything has been done just by sheer determination and working.
So you see opportunities and you jump on them.
Daniel: Yeah, we try to. But there are places, venues where do we make a good fit for them? It’s the worst when you show up to a place and they are expecting Jawaiian…
Did that happen?
Daniel: Yeah, it happened. One good thing that does make us stand out – a good example is that we play this one establishment at Wahiawa. It’s a bar, but we were playing for a birthday party. The owner was there and ever since, he’s always booked us on three day weekends. He never has a band. He’ll get a slack key guitar and they’ll do karaoke, but I’m the first drummer to pay there. But loves us – it’s just a matter of us to get our foot in the door. At that party, they were expecting Jawaiian, but by the end of the night everyone was having fun, the drinks were flowing, and everybody’s into it.
Rylyn: Well you know, early on in the evening, around 5-8 or whatever the happy hour is, there’s always an older crowd and they all want the classic rock. So we have a whole set of classic rock. Then middle of the night, people aren’t quite drunk yet. They’re getting there, they’re excited. They’re more in tune with talking to each other, so we have lighter music for that. We have surf music to get them involved with popular Sublime songs that we play. By the end of the night, we can pretty much throw whatever the hell we want at them, all the hard rock.
Daniel: There’s kind of the crowd control where you’ve got to get them up out of their seats. That’s our main task when we go out every night. That’s all that we can focus on. We know our music well enough that we can play it. Mainly it’s a matter of what songs we play when to get them up. Once we’ve got them up, then you hit ‘em.
Rylyn: We still play the same songs we’ve been playing for a year, but we don’t write a set list. We play what works. We fish around and if it works, yeah, we’re gonna play the stuff that people have been playing for 20 years because it’s working.
Daniel: We really let the crowd’s mood delegate what we play. Mainly, the focus of this interview is more about our original music, because that is the direction we are headed. The main thing, too, with the music scene as I’ve noticed, is when we first started out, it wasn’t really supporting full on original bands. They get them every now and then. Amplified is a great, great example of that, but you didn’t see them playing more than once a month. Now you can play once a week because there are venues that are supporting that. On the flip-side though, a lot of venues are into multiple bands playing in the same night. That’s changed since we first started playing, too. It was just one or two bands. But now it’s working out because a lot of these venues are smaller in size or looking for more turnover. Where do we fit in on that? Right now it’s just a matter of time. We’re in a phase where we’re transferring more towards our originals and out of our covers.
What are you doing to get your originals out there?
Daniel: Any good cover band that is doing originals knows to slide them in. Get the crowd involved, then make the appearance of your originals. Lately, we’ve been having a following that continues to show and are getting to know the originals and singing along, so we can play a whole block of them. Versus just squeezing one in. But by all mean, depending on the venue and the show – if we’re going to open up for a big act, then you know, it’s all original. Unfortunately, in the past we’ve met some speed bumps in the way – switching our bass player or had a sub sitting in. Unfortunately, there was a time when we were opening up for some pretty big bands and we were stuck playing covers. It worked because we were just an opening band. We did our job entertaining people before the main band went on, but now we’re in a better position where we can go in and do a whole set of originals.
How many originals do you have?
Daniel: Right now, well, we’ve got a bunch in the works. What we play out on our shows, we have about nine songs that we play out. It’s a tourist state, so by the time you go through what you’re expected to play plus your originals, sometimes we don’t get to squeeze all our originals in.
What’s the craziest thing that you ever experienced while playing a show?
Daniel: Either this one chick-fight that was really good. Two girls got into it. They were fighting over this one guy. It started off in the bar then moved out to the parking lot, so it was pretty bad. Hair being pulled out.
The most surreal experience, I would have to say, was playing Diamond Head (Craterfest). Steve Miller, Linda Rhonstadt. We got to play out there with them which was just an amazing experience. So for us to get in there and play with all those guys was really great. I grew up in the South, so I grew up listening to Steve Miller Band. To go there and actually – I got to sit behind my drum set the whole time – watching these guys perform. It was just like a dream. That has to be the highlight for me as far as musical performances go.
What about you Rylyn?
Rylyn: I had a girl rip my pants off. I had a guy jump on stage and bust my chops with the microphone. I had a chip in my bass because I nailed him with the bass. The guy tried to jump on stage, and he did it right in front of the mic stand and I was singing. He hit the mic stand and my mouth met with the microphone.
What happened with the girl who ripped your pants off?
Rylyn: She tried to jump up on the stage but then went [makes arms waving motion as if falling backwards] and I tried to catch here and she grabbed the front of my jeans here. She grabbed my jeans and pulled them down. She pantsed me. It was funny though so I kept on playing and just left it.
In your final words, what do you want the world to know about Analog?
Rylyn: We’ve got a new CD coming up.
Oh yeah? When?
Rylyn: Probably by February at the latest. We also have a trip to mainland in the works.
To where?
Daniel: That’s what we’re trying to get together.
Rylyn: I want to do a three to six month tour. But it has to pay for this house.
Daniel: We already have some exposure at the University of Colorado. We’ve had some radio play. It seems to be getting a good response, so that’s definitely a place we’re looking. We’ve also got some contacts in the West Hollywood area.
Rylyn: We didn’t try for that. It just happened. We just mentioned it to this girl who worked on a radio station and she played some of our songs.
Daniel: Yeah. Though we work in Waikiki where there’s a lot of tourists, people carry it back home. We’re playing to a lot of military guys, which gets spread out all the way to Iraq. We really appreciate those guys.
Rylyn: Our song Quicksand is dedicated to the troops. It’s going to be on a video shot in Iraq for the families of the soldiers.
Daniel: Mainly West Coast is where we’re looking right now. Just baby stuff – we’re trying to get off the island for now.
Rylyn: We need a CD first. And a stellar press kit.
Daniel: If anything, we want people to walk away with exposure of us. Just get to know us.
Rylyn: I mean, we have a purpose. It’s to play politically charged lyrics. Not every song is about a relationship.
Daniel: If anything, especially with all the shenanigans going on in the national politics, we’ve had a lot of fuel for the fire right there.
Rylyn: We have a song called the Truthiness, which is one of Stephen Colbert’s Word of the Days.
Daniel: www.analogband.com – PLUG
Rylyn: What is this? A Comic book? You have to make sound effects? - "PLUG!"
We’ve got a CD coming up. We’ve got 6 new songs that we’ve been playing live. Drew is single again. New shirt designs. If you sign up for our newsletter at Analogband.com, you’ll be the first to receive our giftpack. We have and online store at cafepress.com. You can buy Analog g-strings, calendars, mousepads, mugs.
Venus Opens Its Stage to Live Music Featuring Black Square
article by Katie "Nails" Neligh
Thanks to Kekoa and Keoni with Threat Options and Kasey from Static Integrated Networks (S.I.N), live bands now play Venus every Thursday. Bands such as Bubble and RastaVibe have played, and for the first time, on November 9th Black Square took Venus‘ stage. Kekoa and Keoni are local boys that use to own a skate shop in Kailua, but their love of music lead them to start promoting local bands. Once they met up with friends from S.I.N, the group just took off, promoting night clubs and parties as well.
These new live shows at Venus open up a whole new place for people to hear the bands we all love. Venus has plenty of room to dance, comfortable places to sit, excellent acoustics, and an atmosphere that promotes not only dancing but also socializing.
I had the pleasure of talking with Black Square band member, T.R (Alto and Baritone Sax, back up vocals, you can also hear his show on KTUH). Black Square has been heavily influenced by such bands as Against All Authority, Choking Victim, Bad Brains, and Propagandi. The band has been labeled Political Punk Ska. They talk about some very strong issues in their lyrics and promote public awareness in current events. Black Square is soon releasing their second CD One Glass Of Water and will be doing a west coast tour in hope of promoting it. When asked what fans have to look forward to, T.R responds “More great Ska tunes, more secrets and world domination.” Like Pinky and the Brain, they are kind of secretly hoping for a spot on the next American Idol. How far would they like to see themselves go as a band, other the American Idol and World Domination? They just want to remain true to their political roots and help break the paralysis from the main stream that is so mass produced nowadays.
A Black Square show is always a great time. I’ve been to many of their shows and not once have I ever been disappointed. The band exults great energy and leaves the crowd not only dancing, but well informed and reeling in thought. Its refreshing to hear a band with great ska beats and something worthwhile to say. I’m looking forward to the release of One Glass Of Water, and of course more Black Square shows.
Embracing the Whiskey S#!@$
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article by Team Traffic, photos from myspace.com/thewhiskeyshits
Fans of Ska, Punk, Reggae, and funk gather around a get ready for a treat now playing at venues through out the island is a band that has found a way to combine these elements. Who is this mysterious band…The Whiskey S#!@$. I know that their name may be a bit crude, but, name aside, this band out of Ewa Beach knows what it is doing.
There are few bands that have the ability to take you for a musical rollercoaster ride like this band can. They will have you shaking your ass to songs like Della, skanking to the mellow beats of Cane Fire, and throwing elbows along with their song Rapist Gloves.
The band is comprised of five members, four out of five who sing at various times. Kumu, a tall, luminous Hawaiian, spits his fire into the mic with such passion you would think he would tear down the house. Shawn S#!@$ lets his punk rock inspired rhymes flow like none other in Hawaii. David “Boy” Garvin shreds the guitar and Terror Nick blasts away at the drums. He often plays his drums so loud that the rest of the band is forced to turn up their amps, giving their sound a pleasant defining feel to it. The fifth and final member is Josh “C-Cup” Simpliciano, a madman on bass and hilarious on the mic.
If you are looking for a good band that will also make you laugh, The Whiskey Sh#!@$ is a band that you do not want to look over. They have been together for over a year and a half and play venues all over the island - Detox, Anna Bananas, and Pink Cadillac to name a few. Don’t miss this band; they are one of Hawaii’s greats. www.myspace.com/thewhiskyshits
You Were There First - Linus the Band
For those who like to claim bragging rights fbecause they were fans first!
Article by Katie Whitman, photo by Richard Walker
For the second installment of You Were There First (see Issue 7, September for the 1st), the zine hereby nominates LINUS the BAND as the next band that we think will make it to stardom and notoriety!
If you’ve ever seen Linus live, you know it’s nearly impossible to listen to their catchy tunes without bopping your head or tapping your foot. Their style and image is one of indie-cool, recently made wildly popular by bands like The Strokes and Hot Hot Heat. Linus’ pleasantly poppy music is often ironically coupled with lyrics of heartbreak and indifference, giving their songs a smart quality that rock listeners of today gravitate towards.
The songs, Arrivals and Departures and Sad to Say, off of Linus’ CD, The Construction, are sweeping Hawaii as the closest things to music singles that we get in this rock scene. Both songs have had well over 5000 plays on their myspace site – www.myspace.com/linusthebanddotcom. At every performance, there’s always a crowd singing along with every single word. Linus’ fan base is strong and constantly growing. After catching our designated next big thing opening up for Motion City Soundtrack, a group of enthusiastic new fans actually started a “Linus the Fan Base” myspace site!
So they’ve got the sound, the look, and the fans, but will Linus the Band stay the course? Sure they will if you can judge from their first six years. Still going strong, Linus is back in the recording studio, presumably preparing for their next album. They also shot a professional music video, though you’ll have to ask them about the details on that. Keep up with Linus at LinustheBand.com by reading their regularly updated blogs filled with Linus news, videos, and random musings. You’ll be happy you did when everyone’s a fan of Linus the Band. You’ll truly be able to say that you were there first.
Buy their CD at LinustheBand.com or in the online store at MusicMatchBox.net.
