What do you want to know about Radio Nowhere?

Well, first off, I write all the songs and do the singing and guitar playing. My name's Mike. I put the band together after five or six years of playing strange house parties and stupid coffeehouses, and a few years after that in other bands, but there are some other things that probably have more to do with this music than the turn-of-the-century open mic scene in san francisco.

1) When I was growing up, my family would drive from the Bay Area to Idaho every summer. Back in the day, when you crossed the Nevada and Utah deserts, the only radio you could get was this classical AM station out of Salt Lake. In order to keep the kids from beating each other to death, my mom would make up stories to go along with the sonatas and fugues we were hearing. There was one I especially liked about the bloodthirsty Mouse King and his sworn enemy, the Baron d-Con. So I got imprinted with the whole combination of music, empty roads and stories early on.

2) I played saxophone in my high school jazz band. One class, after the bell rang but before the teacher showed up, our guitar player stopped running dom13b9 arpeggios, whipped out a Boss Metal Zone pedal and started playing Back in Black so loud that one of the clarinet players vomited. Before that, it had never occurred to me that you could actually learn songs that the radio played, and play them yourself (I hear that people who are actually cool had this same epiphany with the Sex Pistols--close enough).

3) When I was six, my dad borrowed my record player to listen to one of the 78s (!) that his band had cut back when he was in high school (The Vagabond Five, rockin' the Montpelier, ID metro area from '52 to '55, yo). When he was done, I trawled through his record collection looking for the shiniest, most colorful album cover and played the lp inside, which turned out to be Sgt. Pepper's. Psychedelicized at six--it's hard to recover.

Finally:
- I crank my amps louder than Tom Petty, but not as loud as Cannibal Corpse.
- I'm wordier than Jane's Addiction, but not as much as e.e. cummings.
- I have rocked crowds of several hundred people with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a well-timed Britney Spears cover (were they sober? No).

Comments                                                Add new Comment   View All