Sun Jul 12, 2015 @ 7:00 pm

Gin Blossoms with very special guests Fastball and The Rembrandts

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A night of 90s pop music headlined by Gin Blossoms (“Hey Jealousy,” “Follow You Down,” “Til I Hear It From You”), and featuring Fastball (“The Way,” “Out of My Head”) and The Rembrandts (“I’ll Be There for You,” “Just the Way It Is, Baby”).

Background

Gin Blossoms:
For more than two decades, Gin Blossoms have defined the sound of jangle pop. From their late 80s start as Arizona’s top indie rock outfit, the Tempe-based combo has drawn critical applause and massive popular success for their trademark brand of chiming guitars, introspective lyricism, and irresistible melodies. Gin Blossoms soon unfurled a chain of crossover favorites spanning five different formats, from “Hey Jealousy” and “Until I Fall Away” to “Follow You Down” and the GRAMMY®-nominated “As Long As It Matters,” earning the band sales in excess of 10 million in the US alone.

“It’s a really rare thing,” singer/guitarist Robin Wilson says of Gin Blossoms’ continuing saga. “So many chapters in this long story.”

Wilson, guitarist Jesse Valenzuela, and bassist Bill Leen co-founded Gin Blossoms in 1987 and quickly became the toast of the Grand Canyon State’s local scene. Blending an array of influences – from The Beatles and The Byrds to The Band and The Buckaroos – with pure pop songwriting and their own post-adolescent energy, the band hit upon a truly thrilling sonic approach that instantly set them at the forefront of the always-adventurous American underground.

“A lot of it was really folk based,” Valenzuela says. “Some of it English, some American. Then we’d just play it too fast and too loud.”

“We were on a course,” Wilson says, “inspired by our influences. The bands that unified us were our forefathers like Cheap Trick and R.E.M, The Replacements and The Plimsouls. Those were bands that all of us as Gin Blossoms had in common. When people ask me, what kinda band are you in, I say, ‘We’re a classic rock band.’”

Having taken the local scene by storm with their magnetic live show, Gin Blossoms made their recorded debut in 1989 with Dusted. The album – released on the influential Arizona indie label, San Jacinto Records – highlighted Valenzuela and Wilson’s nascent knack for preternaturally catchy hooks and vigorous musicianship. It wasn’t long before the majors came a-callin’, with A&M Records ultimately the lucky label to get Gin Blossoms’ signature on a contract.

“They really believed in us,” Valenzuela says. “They showed the support that made us a better band.”

Gin Blossoms immediately released 1991’s self-recorded Up and Crumbling EP and got right to work on their major label debut proper. The band hit Memphis’ legendary Ardent Studio to record with equally famed producer/engineer John Hampton (The Replacements, Alex Chilton, The Cramps), armed with such now-classic tunes as “Until I Fall Away,” “Allison Road” “Hey Jealousy,” and “Found Out About You,” the latter two penned by founding member Doug Hopkins. Sadly, Hopkins was asked to leave the band before the album’s completion and later took his own life. Lead guitar duties were then taken up by Scott “Scotty” Johnson who promptly put his own indelible six-string imprint on the band’s guitar-driven sound.

Justly regarded as one of the era’s milestone works, New Miserable Experience earned critical acclaim upon its 1992 arrival before exploding into the popular consciousness. “Hey Jealousy” was one of 1993’s essential singles, ruling the top 5 at Mainstream Rock radio before ascending to the top 25 on Billboard’s “Hot 100.” The following year saw “Found Out About You” reach equivalent height on the “Hot 100,” while also eclipsing its predecessor by reaching the #1 spot on Billboard’s “Modern Rock Tracks” tally.

Gin Blossoms toured hard as they wrote their next album, scoring still another smash in the meantime with “Til I Hear It From You,” the first single from A&M’s Empire Records: The Soundtrack. The unforgettable track – written by Valenzuela, Wilson, and the great singer/songwriter Marshall Crenshaw – was hailed by Billboard as “the closest thing to a perfect pop song to hit radio in recent memory,” and as such, duly rose all the way to the top 10 on Billboard’s “Hot 100.”

“I liken it to a chair,” Wilson says. “A big gothic throne or a mid-century antique is different from what you can get for $15 from Target, even though they work exactly the same way. It’s the same with songs – every song has the same parts, a chorus, solo, all of that, but there’s something that separates something of quality from something that’s not. In our case, I’d say we’ve got a full set of pretty decent chairs.”

“Til I Hear It From You” confirmed Gin Blossoms as surefire soundtrack favorites and their songs were soon featured on the RIAA gold and/or platinum certified companion albums to such blockbusters as Speed, Wayne’s World 2, and several others. The band were also inescapable presences on TV, dominating MTV and performing on such prestigious shows as Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Saturday Night Live.

Congratulations I’m Sorry arrived at last in 1996 and immediately ascended to the top 10 on the Billboard 200, fueled in part by the top 5 single, “Follow You Down.” Moreover, the album’s next single, “As Long As It Matters,” earned Gin Blossoms a prestigious GRAMMY® nomination for “Best Performance by a Duo or Group.” Alas, the band was denied the prize as an up-and-coming young Liverpudlian combo took home the trophy in their stead.

“It was pretty cool to lose a GRAMMY® to The Beatles,” Valenzuela says. “Who else would you want to lose out to?”

Having dominated radio and MTV playlists for most of the 90s, Gin Blossoms took a brief turn of the century hiatus, a provisional parting of the ways that Wilson chalks up to “personal dissatisfaction and the mistaken impression that we could perform at that same level with another group.” The brief break allowed Valenzuela and Wilson to reenergize via solo recordings, new combos, and production credits for an array of local Arizona acts. However, Gin Blossoms’ idiosyncratic magic proved impossible to ignore for long and on New Years Eve 2001 in their hometown of Tempe the band reconvened and never looked back.

“There’s a certain civility among us now,” Valenzuela says. “None of us are as brusque as we once were. We’re too old to have shouting matches.”

The revivified band hit the road hard, earning a well-deserved reputation as one of the busiest touring acts in the world, playing close to 150 shows a year. Those chops were readily apparent on 2006’s Major Lodge Victory – Gin Blossoms’ long awaited fourth album and first new recording in almost a decade. Rave reviews followed, as did a top 10 Triple A smash in the album’s lead single, “Learning The Hard Way.”

As ever, Gin Blossoms traveled the globe in support of Major Lodge Victory and beyond, their singular onstage power captured for posterity on 2009’s Gin Blossoms Live In Concert. No Chocolate Cake, the band’s fifth studio collection and 429 Records debut, proved another popular success upon its 2010 arrival, reaching #1 on the Amazon.com sales chart while also earning yet another Hot AC hit with “Miss Disarray.”

Gin Blossoms’ non-stop itinerary carried on, with highlights including a five-city tour of Iraq and Kuwait in 2010. In addition to innumerable headline dates, the band – now featuring drummer Scott Hessell performing alongside Wilson, Valenzuela, Leen, and Johnson – have shared the top of the bill on a pair of successful summer tours featuring an array of chart topping stars from the 90s. Summerland in 2012 was followed by 2013’s Under The Sun Tour, a traveling summer festival co-headlined by Gin Blossoms alongside fellow alternative icons Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth. In 2014 Gin Blossoms headlined their own tour as well as performed a mixture of shows with Artists from classic rock to modern alternative. “This Summer when we hit the road we’ll have our friends The Rembrandts and Fastball with us. It’s a great time because we’ve been good pals for a long time and we have a lot of laughs, the audience picks up on it too. Imagine if we could all go to work with our friends everyday….. it’s pretty neat” says Valenzuela. “It’s a good time and the vibe is pretty loving. There are fans from the old days and fans from today. It blows my mind to see these 20-year-old kids – I’m like, ‘Dude, what are you doing here?’ But somebody hipped them to this music and they’re there to enjoy it like anybody else.”

“This is equal to anything we’ve done in our career,” Wilson says. “I look back on the big tours we did in our heyday – playing sheds with Neil Young and The Goo Goo Dolls, touring Europe with Bryan Adams, things like that – and it was easy to take it all for granted. I’m really glad we’ve been able to earn our way back into that realm.”

The road has also proven exceedingly fertile ground for both Valenzuela and Wilson, with each talented tunesmith promising the inevitable arrival of new Gin Blossoms material. As they approach their third decade, Gin Blossoms remain a rare breed – rock ‘n’ roll lifers, destined to continue creating, crafting, and performing for audiences ever rapt by their glorious catalog of material.

“David Anderle was a legendary producer and A&R guy,” Valenzuela says. “He worked with everybody from Frank Zappa and the Doors to Kris Kristofferson and the Circle Jerks and he signed us at A&M. He told me once, “Y’know, you’re lucky – you’ve created a scenario for yourself where you can go play music for the rest of your life. Isn’t that what you wanted when you started?’ As up and down as this might be sometimes, I’m still comforted by that.”

“We’re entertaining and we have chops,” says Wilson, “but it really comes down to the songs. The reason we’re still here is that we have good songs. When young musicians ask me for advice, what’s the best thing to do to further my career, I always say, ‘Write good songs.’ It always comes down to that.”

The Rembrandts:
ilde & Phil Solem, who had previously been in the band Great Buildings, teamed up to record some demos in Wilde’s Southern California garage/studio. Atco Records was so impressed that the demos were released ‘as is’ as The Rembrandts. It featured the smash hit Just The Way It Is, Baby. The top 20 hit and subsequent singles garnered critical acclaim and propelled the debut album into the Billboard Hot 100. Two years later, the duo followed with their second album, Untitled, featuring the Top 40 hit Johnny Have You Seen Her. 

Two albums in, The Rembrandts had gained popularity not only for their hit songs, but for their signature harmonies and catchy hooks that filled their albums from start to finish.
By 1995, Solem & Wilde had completed a third album. But before its release, the duo agreed to record the theme song to a forthcoming television series. The band asked to do it anonymously, but when ‘Friends’ became a worldwide hit, the record label demanded that Phil & Danny record a full length version and add it to the album.  I’ll Be There For You was the #1 song on radio, their album, LP, went multi-platinum, and The Rembrandts became household names.

After a couple years of touring endlessly behind a song that didn’t really reflect The Rembrandts sound, the duo split up in 1997. But by 2000 they had reunited and in 2001 released another critically acclaimed album, Lost Together. In 2005, they released a collection of re-recorded hits called Choice Picks. The following year, Rhino released a 20 song collection, The Rembrandts Greatest Hits. The Rembrandts continue to tour and record while also finding time for solo projects.

Fastball:
With nearly 20 years of musical explorations and milestones under its belt, Fastball remains one of the most consistent and continuously celebrated rock bands on the road these days. After rising to prominence in 1996 with the debut disc Make Your Mama Proud, the Austin, Texas-based trio exploded into a household name come 1998’s breakthrough project All the Pain Money Can Buy, joining the likes of fellow artfully spun acts like The Wallflowers, Matthew Sweet, The Jayhawks, Cracker and the Ryan Adams-fronted Whiskeytown on the charts.

“At first the success felt weird because it happened so fast,” shares drummer Joey Shuffield. “We were playing constantly, sometimes multiple shows per day, but the big game changer for me was when we pulled up at a festival in Atlanta in our little van and parked alongside the Foo Fighters’ bus. We couldn’t really see the audience from backstage, but when we walked to the stage, there were about 20,000 people out there ready to hear all the day’s music. All of a sudden I realized it was going to be way bigger than I ever thought it was going to be and it was a huge lifting of the veil.”
Thanks in part to the chart-topping hit “The Way,” the top five tune “Out Of My Head” and the top twenty favorite “Fire Escape,” the record skyrocketed to platinum-plus sales in a mere six months, sending the guys on a whirlwind tour of the world. Along the way, Fastball scored a pair of coveted Grammy nominations, an MTV Music Award nomination and regular rotation on the late night talk show circuit (Conan, Letterman and Leno to name a few).

“There was Japan, Italy, Mexico, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium and it was all a blast,” recalls co-vocalist/multi-instrumentalist/co-songwriter Tony Scalzo. “We went to Peru with Mike Peters from The Alarm and Cy Curnin from The Fixx for a concert on a mountain top that was 20,000 feet high and played on ‘Top of the Pops’ with Boy George and the reunited Culture Club. Afterwards he invited us to a bar where he was spinning records, and when we got there, we found Bjork, Liam Gallagher from Oasis and The Chemical Brothers hanging out- the whole thing you’d expect from a London night out in the rock n’ roll world!”
That momentum continued into the next decade, starting with 2000’s The Harsh Light of Day, which not only spawned the equally infectious single “You’re An Ocean,” but also a cavalcade of guest stars like the late great legend Billy Preston, Stray Cats singer Brian Setzer and former Wallflowers guitarist Michael Ward. Come 2002, Painting the Corners: The Best of Fastballsummed up the gang’s vast accomplishments until that point, while also turning the page towards an entirely new critically acclaimed chapter.

“I will say from what I read on our message boards, The Harsh Light of Day is one of the fans’ favorite albums, even though I think artistically we’ve gotten a lot better with time,” observes co-vocalist/guitarist/co-songwriter Miles Zuniga. “What’s really cool now is we’ll meet a 17 or 18-year-old kid who’ll say ‘do you realize you guys have a legacy?’ I never know how to answer that, but what I will say is we’ve gotten way better as songwriters. I now know how to tell a story in three minutes and how to really stick the knife in! Our records are just better with maturity, but we still know how to rock, so it’s all there.”
Come 2004’s Keep Your Wig On, which was produced by Spoon collaborator Mike McCarthy and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, Fastball hit a true stride. The album boasted influences as diverse as the British Invasion to the power pop and roots rock worlds, in turn, expanding upon its radio-ready identity for some of its most astute songwriting to date.
“There was a break between new Fastball albums when we were all working on other projects and some people might have assumed we broke up, but we were always playing shows in some format, whether they be full bands shows, acoustically or at conferences for songwriters,” explains Scalzo. “There’s never been a time when Fastball’s broken up and every year on the road attests to the fact we’ve been playing regularly since back in day.”

By 2009, the trio turned in Little White Lies entirely on its own terms, which didn’t just earn the veterans the best reviews of their career, but also multiple appearances at the annual tastemakers’ haven South By Southwest. Between those recent tunes and a celebrated catalogue chock full of timeless rock n’ roll that always exudes a clever pop sensibility, Fastball’s future on the road is certainly poised to provide yet another storied chapter.
“I think we’ve grown into a really good rock n’ roll band that’s way better than we’ve ever been,” reinforces Zuniga. “I think of myself as a lifer, a journeymen, who really enjoys the whole process. We have an audience that’s stuck with us the whole time and playing shows never feels like work because it’s a ton of fun. We know people want to hear the hits and we definitely have those in there, but we try to play something off every record, have some improvisational moments without turning into a jam band, and half the time, I start calling out the set list as we go. It all depends on the night and the barometric pressure of the audience.”
Adds Shuffield: “Our overall vibe depends on the room. If we’re playing a big festival, we like to rock out and make it as exciting as possible, but we’re also known to vibe a bit more if we’re in a smaller, more intimate setting. We always mix it up so things never get stale, plus these days we all communicate way better than before and there’s a greater musical depth as a group. Those are the things I really cherish and value after being in a band for 18 years.”

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