Brian Maes Band pushing Collateral Damage CD; hitting Lynn & Londonderry this month

Brian Maes recently went through a soul searching experience. His new Brian Maes Band CD Collateral Damage was inspired by a major disappointment in his music career. His other project, Ernie And The Automatics, was put on hiatus so that band could put out a new product before carrying on as a road act. Maes received an unexpected phone call from Automatics business leader Ernie Boch Jr. that the next several months of gig were cancelled. This was a shocking let down after the Automatics had just came off the road with Deep Purple.

“When we went out with Deep Purple we didn’t have a new product to sell,” Maes said. “Ernie felt that it was time to retool and come back out again at some point with a new product. He was apologetic because he had taken away six months or so of really good gigs with no warning, and he knew that playing music is the way I make my living. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I apologize. This decision has nothing to do with you. In a way you’re collateral damage.’ So it was kind of hard to take, but I knew he didn’t mean it to be mean, and we both kind of laughed about it. We’ve remained close and we talk a lot.”

Maes decided to make lemonade out of the basket of lemons he had just inherited. So, he went to work on a Brian Maes Band album that’s now called Collateral Damage.

“It was inspired by how the music has always been the main thing for me to keep it going, what I’ve done my whole life,” Maes said. “So I called up my guys that have played with me for many years and who have always been there when I come back from various tours. They were all very excited, and I enlisted my wife. I thought this would be a good opportunity to bring everything we could to the table, and she’s such a great lead vocalist.” Marybeth Maes usually plays out with her own band under her own name.

Maes also enlisted his Automatics band mates Tim Archibald on bass and Michael “Tunes” Antunes on saxophone as they too were put in limbo when Boch pulled the plug. The other members of the CD’s band have also been working with Maes for several years. They include Kook Lawry on guitar and “Old” Tony DePietro on drums.

“When you find the right guys that click together and play well together and are able to be together on a personal level too,” Maes said. “When you find someone you can really get along with and are like-mined, it’s a special thing.”

Maes described Tim Archibald as a virtuoso bass player and Tommy DePietro as solid in his ability to groove and hit the drums hard enough.

The 60 plus minutes of new original material was not inspired only by the Automatics experience. Similar life experiences came into play. “The whole message was making the best of bad situations,” Maes said. One song, “Sudden Stop,” was inspired by the sad news that Clarence Clemons had passed away. Maes was on a tour bus with Antunes, a close friend of Clemons, when they received word that the big man was gone.

“I didn’t set out to write a song right then and there. I didn’t really think of it that way,” Maes said. “I hung out with Michael and helped him get through a tough time. When we got home and we got the news about the band being placed on hiatus, the floodgates opened up creatively.”

Maes’s “Sudden Stop” was also inspired by his boyhood experiences gathering at his grandfather’s house. The older relative was a World War I veteran who, after having a full day of family fun, might fall over, and he used to say “it’s not the fall, it’s the sudden stop.”

Maes put the two experiences together to describe the feeling of when something is over. “The hardest times is when things are over. When Clarence passed, I kind of used my experiences with my grandfather as a metaphor to get that point across. When Clarence was gone, it left a huge void because I’m such a Clarence fan.”

After Maes told Antunes he had written this song, Antunes drove all the way up from Rhode Island to Maes’s studio in Lynn, Massachusetts to hear it. “He only listened to it for about 30 seconds, and he said, ‘I want to play on it.’ What you hear on the record is his first take. I was crying when I was recording it because the way he expressed himself melodically and stylistically was just such a nod to Clarence. It was like he was crying through his saxophone.” “Sudden Stop” was released as the albums first single, and it’s been getting favorable responses.

The Collateral Damage CD closes with a 14 minute track of music honoring the band’s influences in one classic rock suite. Numerous elements of styles come through in the song. “At our CD release party, people were saying that it sounded like 30 years of rock and roll in 14 minutes,” Maes said. “We’re really proud of that one.”

The current tour for Collateral Damage has been bringing Maes to local venues where he’s been known for years. Maes had taken himself out of the local scene when he was touring with the Automatics. “It’s been great,” Maes said. “We went down to Chan’s in Rhode Island, had a great gig down there. We did Scoreboard in Woburn.”

On the current tour, Maes and his band mates throw in some well known classic rock covers that they have some connection to. Maes and Archibald toured with Peter Wolf, John Cafferty And The Beaver Brown Band, and RTZ. “It’s been very exciting to have people come out and play our originals, and then play something from the past that we have a connection to,” Maes said.

On Friday, April 13^th Brian Maes Band will headline a fundraiser for Cystic Fibrosis at Knights Of Columbus in Lynn, Massachusetts. On Saturday April 28^th BMB will also play at Whippersnappers in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

Maes enjoys seeing familiar faces coming out to his local shows after touring with the Automatics. “I think we’re going get a really good showing at Whippersnappers. We have a lot of fans in that area. I can’t wait to see some of those faces as well. RTZ did well up in southern New Hampshire.’ Maes was also a member of the Lisa Guyer Band, giving him another connection to the area. Maes will have guitarist Jon Finn and saxophonist Andrew Clark in his band for the Londonderry gig.

Maes in more recent years became a studio producer after other artists liked his recordings so much that they asked him to produce their material too. In the 1990s Maes worked with a company called Zemo Records where he started learning about producing and recording. When the label owner folded the label, Maes opened up his own label, Briola Records and bought all the old gear from his old boss.

“Suddenly I had lots of work with young bands,” Maes said. “That’s the thing I like the most. I like working with kids who still don’t have any interest or setbacks based on the music business experience. It’s all about the passion and the music. I like being involved with their development and adding my production ideas and even arranging and playing and singing on their records and writing. It was very rewarding for me to go through the whole experience with the Jessica Prouty Band, having met Jessica when she was only11 years old. Now, two of them are at Berklee.”

In closing, Maes defended his Automatics boss Ernie Boch Jr. from perceptions that he is merely a hobbyist trying to pass himself off as a player. “He is a Berklee grad and anybody who’s a Berklee grad has had to put in a tremendous amount of work and time and effort and passion, cause why would you do it. But his father always wanted him to be in the car business. His father didn’t want him to be a musician. When Ernie got out of Berklee, there was a lot of pressure on him to go into the business.”

Maes said Boch paid his dues playing on the street and trying to stand on his own. But that his dream of making it in the music business was overshadowed by the success he could gain inheriting his father’s car business. Then, the car business grew immensely under his stewardship.

“If it wasn’t for his business savvy and his resources, the Automatics never would have went where we went,” Maes said. “He put a lot of time and effort into his playing. He held his own. He punched his weight. His rhythm guitar parts on the record are his own, and he did a great job on them. He is an accomplished guitarist and he is someone who is passionate about it. I really respect that about him. I think it’s only natural that the public eye would sell him short and think that this was just a guy with a vanity project, but it wasn’t that way at all. He never made us feel that way at all.”

www.brianmaesmusic.com

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