Bamm Hollow

BAMM HOLLOW - Love Playing Live
by Bob Makin
East Coast Rocker, May 28, 2003

The following chat with Mike Massa, co-founding vocalist-guitarist of the funky Middletown-based improvisational pop band, is part of the prize for winning the The Great Bamboozle Jam Session, which also enables them to play with national acts on Saturday during the art and culture festival at The Stone Pony, Asbury Park. In addition to the Bamboozle gig, we chatted about the band’s evolution and plans.To find out more about Bamm Hollow—also guitarist Joe Magrino, bassist Frank Ulatowski and drummer Jerry Keating—visit www.bamm hollow.com

Bamm Hollow have been around quite a long time, since a very young age. Comment on how that experience helped to win the Bamboozle band contest.
We’ve played shows packed from the front door to the back bathrooms, and shows where it was the bartender and our girlfriends, and that’s it. So we’ve run the gamut of experiences, and it just makes us prepared for whatever that night is going to have in store. At the Bamboozle (Jam Session), I thought there were a few bands that were definitely going to take the prize that night and not us.We played a very straight set and threw in at the last minute a cover of The Allman Brothers’‘In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed,’ which no one really ever covers, and jammed the hell out of it. The audience really got into it, and I think that’s what put us out in front. But every band was great that night.

Comment on how The Great Bamboozle has given a great opportunity to Jersey bands with an extra stage dedicated to them.
It’s really given an opportunity to reach as wide of a local/regional audience as possible.You don’t normally get to play in front of a few thousand people. It’s a great challenge to have to win the crowd over.These are going to mostly be people who have never heard of us before, so it’s fun to get a little nervous about how they’re going to react.We are a live band and are really confident in our live shows, so it should be great.

Bamm Hollow take a creative, business-like approach to. Comment on how this has worked in your favor.
You have to love playing live.You have to earn people’s desire to hear what you’re doing. The only way you can do that is by playing shows anywhere and everywhere.That gave us the knowledge of how to perform for different audiences and how to get people into our music. The so-called brass ring, if it comes, would be the proverbial icing on the cake to what we have accomplished on our own. The business of running our band comes from the fact that some of our day jobs are in the corporate world, and keeping things in
order, with contacts and bookers and so on, is imperative to our collective efforts, which our day jobs have taught us.We have never had anyone help us.You have to rely on yourself to get things done and not wait on others to do it for you, which in the end made us a lot stronger and smarter as a band.

You’ve released several EPs in the wake of your 2000 full-length, Three Days? When will the next full-length be released and how does the potential material compare to the debut?
We are finishing up 20 new songs...we’ll work over at our shows. We’re looking into the early fall to go back into the studio...Hopefully the early winter we’ll have a new full-length ready.The new material is a lot more about vocal harmony and using all our assets as individual musicians to our own benefit.The new songs are more aggressive.We hate repeating ourselves.

Is Bamm Hollow a jam band?
We were never really considered a ‘jam band,’ more a band that improvised when playing live. If you listen to our album and EPs, you wouldn’t really find any jamming, except on our first album.We stopped caring about fitting into someone’s genre box.We all just love music in general, and if we feel like jamming, we jam. If we feel like rocking out ‘The Dukes Of Hazzard’ theme song, that’s what we do.We don’t pigeonhole ourselves.

How has the band’s sound evolved over the years?
It’s more concentrated on the song and the ‘less is more’ philosophy.We used to put the most intricate parts we could come up with in every song, trying to display as much ability as possible with each chorus or bridge. But we all learned that being flashy and pulling out your entire arsenal of techniques and so on was not as conducive to the greater whole. It’s always more about trying to do your part of the song as well as you can, to make it more musical as a song in its entirety, not showcasing yourself and saying, ‘I can solo, look at me!’ So we have grown up a lot as far as musicianship is concerned.

What inspired the band’s name?
It’s the name of the road in Middletown where I lived with my family when we started playing together in high school.We had gone over a bunch of names, and Joe had been looking at the sign in front of my house and offered it as an option.We agreed it was a great name, and since we began our lives in a band together in my parents’ garage, and wrote and recorded our first material there, we thought it was as good a name as we could get.

What other plans does Bamm Hollow have?
This summer we’re booking mostly festivals in and around the tri-state area like the Siren Festival in Coney Island and The Pop in the Park Festival in Bensalem, PA.We are finalizing our summer tour schedule and demoing new songs. Along with a re-launch of our website within the next few months, and some more promo stuff, like T-shirts, and stickers, we’ll be pretty busy.

You lost a band member to drugs. How did John’s death impact the band?
John’s loss was really hard to bear. He was the youngest of us, and was like our little brother. John was a very integral part of the way we used to sound. He was an open pipeline of musicality with everything he played. It would just pop out of him. So after he passed, and Frank came in, who was filling in for John in the months prior to his death, we had to change our whole way of doing things. Our song structure changed and our writing turned a different corner.We became a different band. If you hear our album and listen to our stuff now, you can hear the change.We are really excited about our new material and how far we’ve come from Three Days, but are still very proud of what we did with John.We are setting up a memorial page for John that will have some really great pics of him.
- Bob Makin