You should come to this…It’s an all ages show!

Beastie Boys

Black Sabbath

Metallica

Guns n’ Roses

Pearl Jam

Nirvana

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Nine Inch Nails

Radiohead

Weezer

Foo Fighters

The White Stripes

In any order over my formative years as a music enthusiast, I’ve listened to/been shaped by these bands.  To a lesser degree you can still throw in – Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Soundgarden, Faith No More, Alice in Chains, Led Zepplin, The Doors, Tom Waits, R.E.M., Van Halen. (Some I’m not as proud of now as I was back then, but that’s how it goes with all of us.) The list could go on, but it won’t.

When pressed to address my musical lineage, these are bands/artists that come to mind. It started when all you could do was buy cassette tapes in a shopping mall with your left over lunch money or allowance. Buying something, then getting it home and listening to it from beginning to end with the lyrics resting in your hands to read along.  Of course this all evolved to Cd’s & Mp3’s as time went on, but those experiences sitting in front of the stereo w/ some liner notes never left me.

It was those moments that allowed me, and so many others like me the moment to be locked in all across the world as music fans. One moment in time where we all could just sit and listen and drown out everything else in the world. All there was was music.

This was me…insert a set of liner notes…

So maybe I’ve gotten old. Or at least older. On any different day I can define it as either or both. (Age is something I’ve never had control over. I do however, control what I do with it.) I can remember where listening to music was a privilege. It was earned. You had to find it. You had to buy it with cash. Your cash. You had to take it home. You had to save up the scratch to get out to the concerts and beg for the car or a ride to get there the one time they came to town.

Now music is everywhere. Some of it is good, some of it is amazing. How do you split up your time? Music being so portable now, you almost don’t have to. Except when it comes down to seeing live shows.

In the plethora of music venues and never-ending weeks of performance nights, there must be thousands of bands of all sorts of genres here in New Orleans. If you stretch your legs outside of Uptown & the Bywater, the number of rock bands alone can number several hundred. Growing up as I did, this seems like a huge and impressive number. Every day as I read through barryfest, myspiltmilk, noladefender, etc, etc, etc (what seems like a number of blogs equalling the number of bands). I see new bands, hear better demos, see more awesome. Makes me feel great that in an age of distancing yourself through a screen of some sort, that there are musicians and fans out there aching to get that tactile human connection through the good ol’ fashioned live show.

I’m part of one of those aforementioned rock entities vying for your rock n’ roll buck. Trying to make that connection. Trying to reach out. Hi there. I’m in City Zoo.

From 10/26/12

After a little shuffling of our line-up in 2012, we’ve been working on songs that connect more and have a more visceral impact on our (or what we hope to be) our audience. YOU.

We’ve begun this new journey with the release of our demo: Pieces.

You can buy it. You can come to the show and get it, too. We had a ton of fun making this and we hope you have just as much listening to it. I bet it’ll even be more fun if you come down to a show and hear it live!

The songs? Mr. Ed’son, Stuck, Fill My Car, & Liberty. Each song a new piece in a puzzle of how situations can paralyze: Being in awe of your awesomeness, Lost in brutal relationships, road rage, and not knowing what to do with a stretch of new freedom. There’s more ideas at play here in these songs, but those are at the core. They’re all a blast to play and a joy to perform in front of you guys.

We’ve decided to release some small picture/montage – type videos for everyone to check out. Here’s the first two:

Stuck

This one’s an homage to the HULK! – Mr. Ed’son

We hope to put out two more vids to support the other songs on the demo. Look for them soon, subscribe to our youtube page or facebook page to find out more.

But that’s not all.

We’ve developed several originals over the past year:

Never Feels the Same

Sonofabitch

No One Gets a Break

Good Times

Old Infatuation

We still play some tunes from our earlier moments too:

Personal

Most of the Time

Fingernails

Not Me

In recent weeks, we’ve been putting together new originals as well as a cover or two that you definitely haven’t heard. You should come to some shows, have some beers & check them out.

Where might you ask?

Well you can simply click here for all of our live show listings. Or you can just look below at this first poster.

2.15.13

You can click on it for more details if you like, or you can just put that address into your gps & let the lady voice do all the work. Come say hi, come have a beer, come shoot some pool. It’s going to be memorable.

As of right now, we have two shows lined up in March.

March 16th at Banks St. Bar w/ Harvey Castle & Idlewild String Confederation

&

March 24th at The Cypress in Metairie. It’s a Battle of the Bands. If you’ve never been to one of these, I highly recommend, especially since we want you to yell for us!

We’ll be getting more details out on these shows once we’ve made your ears & heart swell at The Dive Bar!

So what have we learned?

1. Scott’s been listening to music for a long time.

2. You may or may not like some of it.

3. You’ll definitely love City Zoo.

4. They have music available to you!

5. City Zoo plays live music shows!

6. You should come to all of them!

Thanks for the read, thanks for all the support over the past few years. Hope to see each and every one of you at our shows.

Love you animals,

ST from CZ

PS. Come talk to us! We like talking to people who love music! Hang out, watch the other bands w/ us! See you soon, animals!

Listen. Then hear it live!

Merry Christmas! – CZ

Still working out something to celebrate this, but ’til then, have fun, animals!

ST from CZ

I sing for City Zoo.

We get to play again.

I am excited.

Very excited.

Before we get into that, I’ll start with something else.

This is, in part, the post I should have written nine months ago.

I didn’t because I was too pissed & hurt at the time. At times I can be a bit of a whiny bitch (hmph…singers…) Here we go:

On September 1st, 2011, City Zoo played it’s last show w/ Rory.

You remember this guy….

Before I start off on this tangent, I want to make it clear that these are my opinions alone, and I in no way can speak for the rest of the guys in the band on this subject. I think we all dealt with it in our own personal ways.

I will say that I believe I took it the hardest.

Rory, Nick, & I started this band together back in 2009. Those of you who’ve known us all personally know that I was living with Nick at the time and became friends with Rory as a result.  Rory was already in The Green Genes at the time and I felt like it was something of a coup to convince them to play in a band with me (being older, it’s hard to gauge how those younger than you perceive you at times – Generation gap?).

If I remember it right, I don’t think Rory had any idea of what was going to happen that night at Nick’s when we just got together to hang out and play. I think 3 songs came out of it. Within about a month, we had  ten songs and began playing: looking back, how cool is this for a first gig?

I’m watching this and thinking about how important this night was to me on a number of levels:

1.) I socially snubbed my eventual wife because I was too hopped up on adrenaline from the show to recognize her. (Stupid on my part I know, almost a disaster, and she’s so wonderful she rarely brings it up.) We had only met twice up until that point and had never been on a date. To this day, I barely remember anything that happened after the show. I maintain I was sober the whole evening.

2.) WE PLAYED ON A ROOFTOP IN DOWNTOWN NEW ORLEANS!!!

3.) T-Rex hands became a staple of mockery for me of me.

4.) I got to get up and perform music with my friends. And we were friends (and some relatives!) before we were bandmates. Hell, we kept joking for a while that we needed to marry Rory off to someone in our family just so we’d be related.

Spending two years playing in one group is more than what a lot of bands do. And even with the plethora of musical acts available to watch on a given night in this town, all those bands still sit comfortably in the minority. For every one that gets up on a stage, there’s dozens that are over before they begin. We were fortunate. If you were there and remember these nights feel free to comment.

But in that time, I was singing and playing with guys that made me feel comfortable as a songwriter, as a singer and lyricist, and simply as a performer. I never even actively wrote music for a band until we started this one. Example:

Wish I had a later vid of this, the song evolved in waves of awesomeness I cannot describe.

When Rory left, I felt like that confidence had left as well. Granted, he totally left in the right way and for the right reasons. This is NOT AN ATTACK or a complaint. He has definitely gone on to bigger and better things:

See them NOW they are AWESOME!

Not to mention being a super star grad student at the same time. Congratulations.

One of the complicated things about a band is trying to get 4, 5, even 9 guys in the same room at the same time long enough for your songs to sound not good, but great. Sometimes we did that, sometimes we didn’t. But those times that you’re in rehearsal is also hang out time, friend time, social hour, in addition to rockin’ your ass off. So when a member moves on, there’s not just a void in the band. There’s a void in your friendships. I’ve never been the best at maintaining anything emotional or friendly with anyone. People that I’ve known long enough know this. So yes, I took Rory’s departure hard because it felt like losing a friend way more than losing a musician.

There’s lots of things I want to gush about. There’s lots of gchat conversations I can site that point to all this coming or how awesome it is being friends with someone that shares your musical interests. But there it is. I hurt. Not playing music with my friend anymore is hard.

I’ll say this for the band: It was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted, Ro. Thank you.

So…Now What?

These last 9 months have been a pretty big journey. I’ve had a chance to grow up a little more: enjoy my marriage, purchase a house, remodel a house, work, travel, direct a play, act in one. All of these experiences have aided in developing who I am in my adult life.

Almost the entire time though, what we now know as City Zoo kept getting together, kept playing together (Anyone in Westwego can probably attest to various noise ordinance violations on Tuesday nights). It’s been a drastically different process this time around. Yes, one that is harder, and at times even more frustrating, but one that is no less rewarding.

If there’s one thing that really made a leap since Rory’s departure, it’s Nick’s level of production. Since we started getting back together, Nick has been the source of all our music. Sure, lyrically it’s still me up there, and shaping some of the structures have gone into the hands of the entire band – but damn near everything you’re going to hear from us has thus far come from Nick’s brain to your ears. I couldn’t be more proud of him right now. I watched him play some of his first chords, and to be around and sing over some of this is astonishing.

Pete and Jeff have now become significant voices in the band. They develop stops, changes and direct the pacing of the new songs like never before. Things start to feel more like a collaborative process when they both get involved. Each new song we develop eventually(get it) has a part or moment with their own unique stamp on it.

The elephant in the room as we began this part of the journey was of course, who was going to step in? Believe it or not, I picked up a guitar for a while and jammed with the guys as we tried to flesh out these new songs. However, my lyric writing has always began organically in rehearsal. I hear a melody in the song or a phrase pops into my head, a subject, I can write it down. At least this is exactly what happens when I haven’t written the music. Instead, I was memorizing chord structures and following changes and being a guitarist first and not writing anything. (For a guitarist, I make a great singer…is this thing on???) Imagine a TERRIBLE case of writer’s block.

So to remedy this situation, and in sort of keeping it “in the family,” we have a new member to introduce:

Nick has been with Rachel nearly a decade, Rachel has a brother, who Nick kind of got started on playing guitar. It just so happens after several years and a band or two, he got REALLY good. Now he plays with us.

Meet Ryan Borel.

For the past few months, Ryan has been working with us on all this new material. Our rehearsals have grown back into the consistent rockfests we’re used to and laughter peals from Pete’s house between riffs like it used to. Its funny – to me anyway – but for the last 3 years, we all stand in the same spots when we practice. When I was trying to follow along on guitar, I’d stand in the “guitarist spot” but somehow that never felt right. Once Ryan stood in that part of the room and I resumed my place in the corner near the cat-box, it began to feel familiar again. Not that I’m comfortable there, I’m allergic to cats, but it’s always felt more like “my spot”. A story for another day.

The show (yes there’s a show!) we’re playing at Banks Street Bar on May 26th is our first one back in front of a public audience since that September 1st night. We’re going to rip the cover off at leas 6 pieces of brand spanking new material. We’ll also be reviving a couple of familiar City Zoo songs.

If you’ve been hanging out with us for these past 3 years, then its going to feel like a fresh start with some old friends. If you’ve never seen us play before, then you’ll have just found your new favorite band and you’ll ask every bar you frequent to book us.  And if you’re in a band and watching us, you’re definitely going to want us opening for you ALL THE TIME!!!

The only question I have now is: Who’s going to jump up and down like madmen with me at the show?

To put it mildly,

WE’RE BACK.

Get used to it. And get to rockin’.

See you May 26th, Animals (FB Invite! Pass it on!),

ST from CZ

Maybe 2012???

We love you, animals…

CZ

ClickItOrTicketForShowAd!

2ndVerseSameAsThe1st!

HELLO ANIMALS!!!

WE’RE BACK! (this isn’t becoming a habit is it?)

We promise not to do this...well...unless you really want us to...maybe...

The real answers for why we haven’t been around much lately (besides working on our album) can fall squarely on my shoulders. And don’t worry, animals, it’s reasons of the good, great, and awesome variety: In June, I was married to the most wonderful woman in the world!

The rings of the newlyweds on the honeymoon

Now what’s everyone else been doing these days instead of playing shows???

Nick & Rory have been getting foot burn & school on respectively:

Exactly like this...

Pete has steadily been working in his laboratory:

...keeps the awesome from leaking out...

And Jeff??? What about our drummer? The Sentinel of Shirtlessness:

We'd like to think he's saving up for this...

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHEN IS CITY ZOO PLAYING AGAIN!!!

Woah, woah, woah, there! Easy lightnin'...

CITY ZOO

ROARSHARK

GRENADE MAN

SATURDAY JULY 23RD @ BANKS STREET BAR!

4401 BANKS STREET

10PM FREE!!!

So now that there’s no excuse, it’s Saturday…Come help us freshen up our chops as we push to the finish line for our as yet to be titled album!!! Come hear old songs, come here a new one! Rebel against society! Stay up late!!! Enjoy one hell of a night of awesome music!!!

See you Saturday Night, Animals!!!

ST from CZ

]]> http://cityzooband.com/2011/07/19/one-day-thisll-be-a-regular-thing/feed/ 0 cityzooband kiss DSCF2185 book burn labsuit beer drum Madnesstheband http://cityzooband.com/2011/06/01/ifudidntknow/ http://cityzooband.com/2011/06/01/ifudidntknow/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:13:33 +0000 cityzooband http://cityzooband.com/?p=541 ]]>

Proof

WE’VE GOT AN ALBUM TO FINISH!!!

We’re not saying this is our last show for a while (you never know who might ask us to do (insert show/comment here). But our focus will be on finishing this project (Which still has not been named). But guess what??? We’re definitely not leaving you guys hanging though!!! We’ll be haulin’ all our gear up the mighty, mighty Maison staircase to blast out your ear canals THIS THURSDAY NIGHT!!!!

So around 10pm Thursday night, you’ll be blessed not only with your friendly neighborhood ear-bleeders, but the wonderfully badass sounds of Never Ever & the Family Band and TOAST BEARDS!!!!

This is how we roll...

So get your cameras, video recording devices, stone and chisel – whatever the hell you document stuff with – and get all your asses to THE MAISON THURSDAY NIGHT!!!!

See you there, Animals

ST from CZ