Following the band’s summer tour, which includes an August 9 show at Batavia Downs, they will be headed back into the studio to put together a double CD “legacy” package including greatest hits and new songs. The disc is due out next spring.
“We (the band) are firing on all cylinders,” said Barnes, .38 Special’s longtime lead vocalist and guitar player.
The new songs will sound familiar to fans of the band - and that’s by design, Barnes insists.
“It is a throwback to our style,” Barnes said.
.38 Special came of age in the 1980s following a musical path carved out by such bands as the Outlaws and Marshall Tucker Band, among others. That translates to a healthy mix of old school rock with a southern bent.
“It’s great that we are still vibrant and relevant,” Barnes said. “When we started this, nobody knew how long it was going to last, or if would last, but it did.”
The band’s musical formula has worked and worked well.
.38 Special has made 15 studio albums and sold more than 20 million records. The hits and radio-friendly songs were plenty.
There’s “Hold on Loosely,” “Rocking into the Night” and “Caught Up in You,” among them. Yes, all will be part of .38 Special’s setlist at Batavia Downs.
“To us, it’s about having a good time on stage and taking our fans on a fun ride,” Barnes said. “It has to be fun for the fans and fun for us.”
Besides Barnes, fellow .38 Special band members include Bobby Capps on keyboards, Gary Moffatt on drums, bass player Barry Dunaway, and Jerry Riggs on guitar.
The band plays - on average - 100 shows a year.
"It doesn’t get stale," Barnes said.
Anything but.
“This is the greatest job in the world,” Barnes said. “We love bringing joy to people.”
Batavia Downs Gaming & Hotel has announced that as part of OTB’s 50th Anniversary Celebration, the corporation will be making the Tommy DeCarlo, Jason Sheff, and August Zadra concert, taking place on August 16, a show with free General Admission Tickets.
Those wishing to attend the concert can pick up their free GA ticket upon arrival at Batavia Downs inside of Park Place on Friday, August 16.
A fireworks show will also take place following the concert that evening.
Tommy DeCarlo became the lead singer of Boston in 2008 and has performed with them for 2 decades. Jason Scheff joined the band Chicago in 1985 as lead singer/songwriter/bass player and went on to perform thousands of live concerts worldwide spanning four decades during a non-stop touring and recording career with the multi-platinum band. Longtime Dennis DeYoung Band lead guitarist and singer, August Zadra, will be doing a mini set of Styx classics.
For those who already purchased tickets prior to today’s announcement, an upgrade table located outside of the Park Place room on Friday, August 16 will allow attendees to upgrade their tickets to the next section closer to the stage.
Photo of the Bacon Brothers, by Jacob Blinkenstaff.
Next year will mark 30 years since Kevin and Michael Bacon first performed as the Bacon Brothers. And as they approach that milestone, with a new album, “Ballad of the Brothers,” having been released and a tour cycle just starting, the brothers admit they never envisioned this musical venture would last three decades or produce as much music as it has.
“For me I don't know, I didn't really have a grand plan in the same way that I did for my acting, you know what I mean?” said Kevin Bacon -- yes, the A-list actor known for roles in such hit movies as “Footloose,” “Mystic River” and “A Few Good Men -- in a late-June phone interview.
“It was kind of like, well, let's do this show and then that show turned into another show. Of course, I would love to have success and a hit record and that would be really fun,” he said. “But it's really been more kind of driven by oh, we wrote this song. You want to play it for somebody. Oh yeah, we want go in the studio. We played it for somebody. It feels like it's getting good. Let's go in. Let's record it, you know, and put out the record. Getting something played widely has always been sort of elusive, you know. So it's hard to say is it where I envisioned it because I didn't really have that much of a wider vision for it.”
Kevin Bacon’s answer makes sense considering the idea of being the Bacon Brothers literally did start in the most modest of ways. The brothers had played music together since childhood without ever planning to do music together professionally. That began to change in 1995 when a long-time friend in the brothers’ hometown of Philadelphia who heard Kevin and Michael play offered to book them for a one-off gig at the local venue.
The show went well and word got out about the brothers -- who each had successful careers underway, with Kevin, of course, as an actor, and Michael as a songwriter, solo artist, and Emmy-winning writer of scores for film and other projects. More offers to play shows came in and eventually the bothers decided to continue writing music and performing as the Bacon Brothers.
Their first album, “Forosoco,” arrived in 1997, its title an acronym for the styles of music their songs encompassed -- folk, rock, soul and country. They’ve gone on to release nine more albums since then, while building an audience that now enables them to play large clubs and theaters across America.
Joining his brother for the interview, Michael Bacon said a few factors have helped give the Bacon Brothers the longevity they have enjoyed, including contrasting their genre-evading sound, contrasts in their writing style (he said Kevin Bacon is more groove driven, while he’s melody focused) and a shared focus on writing good songs, as opposed to emphasizing solos or other elements of the music.
“Both of us are always in pursuit of writing a great song,” he said. “We're not in pursuit of shredding (on guitar), you know. or of more octave range or whatever that happens to be…We have different ideas about music, but we both love songs yeah well that's kind of the thing you've always kept at the core.”
Like their previous releases, the new album is plenty diverse. Its range spans stripped-back folk-centric material (“Dreams of the San Joaquin,”), cello-laced pop balladry (“Airport Bar”), a country-flecked examination of aging (“Old Bronco”), a bouncy pop tune (“Put Your Hand Up”), a full-bodied mid-tempo tune that splits the difference between rock and folk (“Losing The Night”) and the bluesy standout (“Live With The Lie”). And that’s not mentioning the album’s boldest song, “Take Off This Tattoo,” which gets some EDM touches via the production from Kevin Bacon’s son Travis, while a stinging violin solo that further energizes the song. Overall “Ballad of the Brothers” isn’t soft, and in fact is a bit more robust than the brothers’ other albums.
With the Bacon Brothers starting to tour in support of their new album, fans will see the brothers front what they feel is a first-rate band with three additional musicians. They plan to include a healthy number of new songs in the show.
“We like to interject new stuff,” Michael Bacon said. “After a while, you play a song for so long it's just sort of, it's rote. Whereas if we throw a new song in, you know, we don't have a ton of time to practice and the guys in our band are just, you can throw something at them at sound check and they'll play it perfectly that night. So that's a big advantage. And it's fun to put new songs in. You don't really understand how to do a song until you play it live. You learn an awful lot from the audience by doing that.”
The Bacon Brothers will be performing at Batavia Downs on Friday, July 26.
Two events helped lay the foundation that led to Anthony Fernandez creating “Peace Frog,” a Doors tribute band.
And, both happened when Fernandez was 11 years old.
First came his viewing of “Apocalypse Now,” the Francis Ford Coppola-directed Vietnam-era movie that used the Doors “The End” in key scenes. The song became a lifelong hook for Fernandez, now 56.
Then he read Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins’ best-selling Jim Morrison biography “No One Here Gets Out Alive’ about the life and times of the Doors’ lead singer.
Taken together, they became a seminal moment for Fernandez.
"It was the first book (‘No One Here Gets Out Alive’) that I read cover-to-cover,” Fernandez said.
Since 1998, Fernandez has led Peace Frog, a Doors tribute band, that will be playing July 19 at Batavia Downs as part of its summer concert series. Fernandez, like Morrison, is the lead singer.
“It is just part of my personal relationship I’ve had with Jim Morrison and the Doors since I was 11,” Fernandez said.
Peace Frog is considered one of the top Doors’ tribute bands. Like the Doors, the four-piece band includes Fernandez on vocals, Brad Watson on keyboards, Tyler Thigpen on guitar and Adam Thompson on drums.
The band has a deep following, having played in 30 states plus Mexico, Australia, Canada and Greece.
The set list, which varies from show to show, includes hits and well-known songs as well as lesser played Doors’ tunes.
Yes, “Riders on the Storm” and “Light My Fire” will be played but so will others like the “Alabama Song” or “Tell All the People.”
“On stage, I channel what I call the intellectual Jim Morrison, not the destructive one,” Fernandez said. “I’ve done every song by the Doors that’s out there."
As for Fernandez himself, he has played and sung with former Doors members guitarist Robbie Krieger and the late keyboardist Ray Manzarek
Fernandez began his singing career with attending the University of Hawaii, where he started out singing in cover bands. When he returned to Los Angeles - his hometown - in 1996, Fernandez continued singing in local bands before a friend said he sounded like Morrison and maybe he should front a Doors cover band. Thus, Peace Frog was born.
A key moment came with a weekly booking at the Venice (Beach) Bistro that turned into a 12-year gig every Sunday night. Their run began in 1998.
“That’s what really cemented the band,” Fernandez said.
From there, out-of-town and out-of-country bookings followed.
The bookings are sandwiched between Fernandez’ “day job”, serving as political science and Chicano studies professor at Pierce College in Los Angeles.
“It does keep me busy and current,” Fernandez said.
Tickets are on sale through www.bataviaconcerts.com.
Peace Frog performs Friday, July 19 at Batavia Downs.
