The Burning Dirty Band
"So what kind of music do you play?" goes the inevitable question, leaked from seemingly every mouth once informed that you are in a band. "Rock and roll" goes the inevitable answer.
Well?
What does "rock and roll" mean in 2007? Does that same kind of parent-confounding, liberating, visceral revolution that defined the term in the Fifties and Sixties still ring true? Is it merely a matter amplification and attitude? Is the term an irrelevant relic in the age of iPods, mash-ups, and the genre-swapping Internet music underground? Perhaps more importantly- what are we adding to rock and roll to help the artform evolve or at least detour into an interesting place worth visiting?
Question: What is the Burning Dirty Band doing with rock and roll here in Winchester, Virginia, USA in 2007?
Answer: We are frustrated. We are evolving. The abrasive and the abstract are filtering over top of rock and roll's hallowed two-sided structures of verse & chorus, drums & bass, rhythm & lead. There are rougher, darker corners of our sound, ripe with rawness and enthusiastic sloppiness demanding some time to be explored and perhaps tidied up a bit and made presentable.
We crave honesty. We couldn't care less about slotting ourselves neatly into a scene. We spend too much time drinking under huge, star-pricked country skies to be urban. We spend too much time stuck in traffic to be rural.
We're squeezing some new life out of the blues and inescapable old influences- Beatles, Bowie, the Band. We like gritty and weird. We like iconoclasts. We want to keep things moving forward. We like soul, dammit, something that shakes and bounces and makes the girls get up. We are "indie" in the original sense of the word. Not shackled by anyone's expectations, free to plug in, freak out, come back down, make it snarl or make it sweet, and hopefully tell a few stories and rock a few heads. We are dirty. We are just getting started.
The Burning Dirty Band is:
Cory Garman - guitar, vocals
Jereme Steele - keyboards, vocals, accordion
Ryan Steele - drums, percussion
Ben Whitlock - bass, synthesizer
