Bang Camaro Prove That If One Metal Singer Is Awesome, 20 Are Awesomer
There's plenty that's awesome about metal: the bold-faced braggadocio, the unapologetic pursuit of party and pleasure, Mötley Crüe. But it took two closeted headbangers from Boston to realize that all that awesomeness would only be, well, more awesome when multiplied by 20.
Meet Bryn Bennett and Alex Necochea, two of the three lead guitarists for theatrical Beantown shredders Bang Camaro, a band for whom the term "band" is an understatement of epic proportions. Because while your standard group might employ somewhere in the range of four to six musicians, BC count among their fold 25 members, 20 of whom are lead singers.
It was an over-the-top idea that stemmed from Bennett and Necochea's secret love of white-hot solos and tight leather pants (two things frowned upon in the professional circles in which they've traveled) and their dreams of sounding -- and partying -- like true metal professionals.
"We wanted to try and get that Skid Row-sounding vocal, like when they yell, 'We're the youth gone wild!' " Bennett explained. "On the album, you heard 20, 50 guys screaming, and we wanted to be able to pull that off live. And we had a lot of friends who were singers in local bands, so we, uh, brought 'em all in."
"A couple of other buddies would come down, we'd plow them with a whole bunch of beer, and we'd give them a couple phrases here and there, and we had the greatest time doing it," Necochea added. "It was really easy, ya know? Once we did it once, we brought them in again and they just kept coming. And a year, two years later, they still keep showing up."
From their relatively beery beginnings, Bang Camaro have grown to become perhaps the premier party act in America: a full-blown metal assault dedicated to transplanting the fun back into rock through a series of kegger-iffic live shows and a repertoire of songs with titles like "Rock of Mages," "Nightlife Commando" and "Pleasure (Pleasure)." The concept -- three guitarists, a bassist and a drummer, plus 15 to 20 sweaty dudes screaming at the top of their lungs -- seems complex in theory. But in actuality, it's quite the opposite. Bang Camaro are all about keeping it simple. And stupid.
"I've heard it said that 'bang' and 'Camaro' are two of the sexiest words you can put together," Necochea laughed. "You couple that with 20 guys, it just seems to say something. But we're not sure what. [Basically] all our songs are about girls and power."
"Or power and girls," Bennett added. "Either/or."
Still, there were bound to be logistical issues. Bang Camaro had no problem finding an army of singers to join them onstage in Boston, but for an unsigned band, the costs of packing 25 dudes into a fleet of vans and sending them off to play Peoria, Illinois, didn't make much sense. The issue was clear: How were Bang Camaro supposed to take their show on the road?
Well, they didn't. They let the show come to them.
"We hit a point where we knew we weren't going to make enough money yet to bring everyone with us. And we thought the best way to handle that was to meet vocalists around the country and pull them in," Bennett said. "So we put out a call on our MySpace page asking for people to audition to be in our choirs. And people started sending us YouTube clips of them rocking out to our tunes." (Watch one of the totally excellent MySpace auditions.)
The idea worked. Culling from a series of awe-inspiring -- and downright weird -- audition tapes ("One guy didn't have a video camera. So, uh, he just sent us a bunch of pictures of himself drinking 40s," Bennett laughed), the Camaro now have the beginnings of choirs stationed in cities like Chicago; Los Angeles; Nashville; and Austin, giving them a series of outposts throughout the U.S. from which to launch their rock assaults.
If Bang Camaro's mission is to wage war on humdrum, shoulder-shrugging rock, then they're winning the battle already. One of their tunes -- "Push Push (Lady Lightning)" -- was featured in "Guitar Hero II," and they've been tapped to open a string of shows for Slaughter, Jackyl and, uh, Puddle of Mudd throughout the Midwest.
While Bang Camaro have spent the past few months breaking down barriers, there's still one they're not yet ready to bust through: the inclusion of female voices into their so-called "dude choir."
"We've had a number of female singers get a little angry that we haven't had any female vocalists yet," Bennett said. "It's not something we really talked about, it just kind of happened. We're like the Citadel of rock. Circa 1985."
