well folks . This is the band I love to see and dance to they are wonderfull and so much fun to be around their web site is [url]http://www.gashousegarillas.com[/url] SWINGING WITH ANIMATION
File Rick Fink and His Gas House Gorillas under swing.
No, wait, make it jump blues.
Rhythm-and-blues?
Roots rock?
Americana?
Novelty?
On second thought, don't file Rick Fink and His Gas House Gorillas at all -- they won't fit neatly in any drawer.
Leave 'em out and let 'em rip.
"I wanted this band to be really eclectic," Fink says. "I wasn't looking to put together a swing band or a scene band, where you have to do the right kind of dance to show up at our gigs. I just wanted to do something that everybody could latch onto and have a good time."
In practice, that means "Seven Nights to Rock" and "Last Chance Motor Ride" cheek-by-jowl with "A Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid" and a virtuoso rendition of "Minnie the Moocher" that has frontman Fink ambling off the stage, microphone in hand, to direct the "hi-de-ho" call-and-response from the audience.
That's just the beginning. You might also hear Fink launch into the quintessential blues heart-tugger "Please Send Me Someone to Love," shortly after his crack band (Joe Geary, drums; Jimmy Prav, guitar; Chris "Crusher" Carmean, bass; "Handsome" Dan Alvaro, sax and accordion) have rocked the joint with "Powerhouse," the Raymond Scott jam familiar from innumerable Bugs Bunny cartoons.
And if Fink gets drunken hecklers, he always can nudge them offstage with a chorus of Groucho's "Hello, I Must Be Going."
"I'm a big Marx Brothers fan and a fan of old Warner Bros. cartoons, Tex Avery cartoons," he says. "There's a lot, musically, you can get from those cartoons. It's all the pop music of its day."
Those cartoons gave Fink something else: a band name. As Bugs Bunny fans may recall, the Gas House Gorillas were the team of Brooklyn mugs the wascally wabbit was up against in the 1946 classic "Baseball Bugs."
Launched three years ago, Fink's lively combo might seem at first like a delayed hangover from the swing revival that briefly flared up in the mid-'90s with bands like the Brian Setzer Orchestra and the Squirrel Nut Zippers. But from the outset, Fink had something else in mind.
True, he does make a concession to the swing crowd with his attire: pork pie rakishly down over the face, bowling shirts and so on.
And true, bass player Carmean does play the obligatory upright bass -- in his case a wild, all-metal instrument he built himself. "You have to be a weight lifter to lift it up," Fink says.
But swing is only one dish in the buffet. In Fink's smorgasbord, you'll sample the entire range of American pop music as it evolved in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
"I'd been a fan of this music for years, but I'd always been a rock singer before," says Fink, who also plays acoustic guitar.
The Irvington native (he's lived in Brooklyn for more than a decade) spent most of his career in hard rock bands like Boomwhack, which had brief -- very brief -- major-label action with Sony in the early 1990s. "It was so quick, we got whiplash," Fink says.
But always, in the back of his mind, was the Louis Jordan, Louis Prima, Cab Calloway brand of rhythm-and-blues he grew up with. "I always had this dream that when I got older, I would front this big band," he says.
When he finally decided to go retro, he did it with a will.
"I completely gutted my CD collection and went for nothing but vintage recordings," he says. "I started to download music. I really did my homework before I started the band."
As a result, you're liable to hear things a little less obvious than the typical "Jump, Jive an' Wail" of the average lounge band.
"Some of the guys in my band are surprised when they hear me throw out some names," he says. "Like, I'll throw in a song and I'll say it was originally done by Slim and Slam [Slim Galliard and Slam Stewart], and the band members will be surprised. I really threw myself into this."
At any rate, the audience never seems to question the mix-and-match of Fink's set list. Though it might pain some hard-line swing purists, Fink concedes.
"We did a private party once, in a penthouse, and they wanted to do a swing party," he says. "They got a dance instructor who gave lessons at the beginning of the night, for a half-hour. What's great is that after that, we came on -- and everybody went out and completely forgot the lesson. They just started shaking it and having a great time, dancing any way they wanted. Meanwhile, the instructor was up there looking completely distressed."
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