Nope, not the country, but the *band*. Yep, in 1967 a psychedelic rock band called “The United States of America” was formed and recorded one album released in 1968 to sate the growing thirst for underground experimental rock n roll that was being fed by early Velvet Underground, Franz Zappa and Love. The album was a commentary on the country (The United States of America commenting on The United States of America!) but what drew us in when we first heard it was the mix of old song styles (some music hall, vaudeville) with some hard core fuzzed out ROCK with crazy jabs of sonic experimentalism (sounds like a lot of early Moog in there, too). The female lead vocals (by Dorothy Moskowitz) could be winsome or badass with shades of Grace Slick. Here’s my favorite example, with the groovy title “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Indeed!

New Chamber of Sounds

Jamie and I bought a house. Which means we moved out of the bunker-cum-recording studio with the funky staircase. Which luckily was immortalized by Rocky Yosek’s portrait of us here:

The old Chamber of Sounds saw the evolution of The Modeens from LA to Tucson and was the birthplace of Jamie’s extremely cool and funky optical synthesizers. It was the spark of new projects (including Rockin’ Gourmet) and many a good time was had within its concrete walls. But it just wasn’t the right place for us to LIVE. The layout was great for hanging but not so much for two (loudly) creative people working from home. But it wasn’t until we found our new home that we finally got off the fence and moved again, hopefully the last time in a while!

One of the many things we love about our new place, aside from the ancient olive tree and two stone turtles in the backyard, is Jamie’s new studio, the new and improved Chamber of Sounds.

It’s painted orange and brown, with some funky modular dividers forming a boundary between the workshop/office where Jamie solders and drills his synth pedals and the band space. Now we have a dedicated music space that doesn’t share mojo with the kitchen, living room and dining room. Some new jams are birthing as we speak and we’ll have to see how this affects our recordings. It sounds great, so we’re looking forward to many more new sonic adventures! Here we are breakin’ her in (photo courtesy of Dani Hawley):

Next Show @ PLUSH May 26th

We took some time off to get settled – but we’ll be back with guitars a’blazin at PLUSH on Saturday May 26th! More details soon. If you’re worried about downtown construction – just get to 6th street and use the large PLUSH parking lot.

Til next time!

xo

Cristina

 Night of the Dogstar Benefit at PLUSH Fri April 20th

If you love animals, rock music and scantily clad ladies, have we got the event for you! Tempest Broog – the KXCI DJ who brings you tripped out psychedelic music on Sunday nights – has put together a special event benefitting Tucson Cares Animal Rescue, a nonprofit and no-kill, no-cage organization saving animals’ lives in the Tucson Community. For the suggested donation of $6, you get:

• 8:30 ”The Taste of Tease” Burlesque Mini-Review! Featuring Pisa Cake!
• 9:30 Pork Torta
• 10:15 Fish Karma
• 11:00 The Modeens
• 11:45 Ensphere

Crazy Cool Stage at Barrio Brewing Company

Back in March, we had the pleasure of playing for a fabulous friend’s birthday party (thanks, Tana!) – in a little-known new room at Barrio Brewing Company called “Barrio East”. It’s new and only open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. But I hope it goes into full-time production soon because it’s simply one of the coolest, most beautiful spaces I’ve seen in a while.

Unfortunately I used my usually adequate iPhone to take pictures – but iPhone pictures indoors are iffy at best. The band you see below is Buckeye Knoll, a lovely group of fellows from Seattle who play super catchy americana pop. Our friend Tana had made friends with one of the members and when they were coming through town on their way to SXSW around the time of her birthday, she thought it would be a great excuse to throw a party. And it WAS! Great night, great atmosphere and friggin great group of people (and dear friends) rockin out with us. Obviously, I couldn’t take pictures of the Modeens while we were playing and (of course) I forgot to ask anybody else to. But whew, what a great fun show. Thanks Tana, for making it happen and inviting us along!

Beautiful lights above in an iron tree!

An amazing East Indian door over the stage

Cozy yet fabulous yet industrial bar. Only in Tucson.

Cool crowd

Buckeye Knoll on their to SXSW in Austin

And these lovely people were out on a Monday night!

See you out and about this fine spring season!

Cristina

We’ll be playing a very cool confluence of two cool festivals this Sunday: Solar Rock and Cyclovia! Solar Rock is a fundraiser for the local food co-op, Food Conspiracy, and will be 100% solar powered. Cyclovia is a bike-centric event where many downtown streets are closed to traffic and everyone brings out their various modes of people-powered transportation – it’s quite a sight!

We’ll be at Armory Park (Downtown 6th Ave, across the street from the Children’s Museum) playing with sunlight at around 1pm. Here’s the lineup and make sure to check out the websites for all the groovy related events!

Sunday, Armory Park, Tucson

• 11 AM-11:40 Adam Nixon
• Noon-12:50 The Tryst
• 1:10-2:10 The Modeens
• 2:30-3:20 Shrimp Chaperone
• 3:30-4 The Water Festival

http://www.solarrocktucson.com/

http://www.cycloviatucson.org/

Peace out,

Cristina, Jamie, Jeff and Dave

• First 3 Tracks of “Music from the Edge of Town”
• Oh Davy
• GIG-O-RAMA: 3/12 Barrio Brewing + 3/18 Solar Rock + 3/24 Sky Bar

Music From The Edge of Town

Here it is at last! The first three songs we’ve recorded this year! And the album-in-progress has a name (and a cover) courtesy of a family friend, Miles Stryker, who put it together while listening to the tunes on Bandcamp.  It’s a weird but awesome image (a spaceship is included, which makes us think it might be time for another song about aliens, right?)

Click the link and check out our new stuff:

http://themodeens.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-the-edge-of-town-part-1

If you like it, please share it, tweet it, facebook it, every little bit helps!

Oh, Davy

I’m not sure how many of you are or were ever Monkees fans. One of the first things Jamie and I bonded over in our early courtship was the television band panned by the critics but that actually had talent and songs. Lots of people diss The Monkees because they were “fabricated”. Well, hate to break it to you, but most bands of that caliber were fabricated. And if you don’t know much about the Monkees, mosey on over to a blog post I wrote dedicated to the shortest Monkee with the biggest heart:

http://www.cristinawilliams.com/oh-davy

Gig-O-Rama

March filled up fast! We have some new venues and then a standby Sky Bar rock show. But they’re cheap or free, so c’mon and hang!

March 12
Barrio Brewing
9pm (night starts at 7pm)
$3 cover
Help us celebrate Tana Kelch’s birthday! W/ Hans Hutchinson

March 18
6th Annual Solar Rock Festival @ Armory Park
11am-4pm (we’re still waiting to find out our time slot)
No cover
Check out this solar-powered festival in the heart of Downtown Tucson!

March 24
Sky Bar
11pm
No cover
Back at this fabulous astronomy themed drinking hole on 4th Ave

Catch you on the flip side!

Cristina Modeena

• OK Go Does It Again
• Behind the scenes of our latest recording
• Feb 18th @ Dry River Pizza

OK Go Does It Again

OK Go wowed us a few years ago with their all-in-one-shot low-fi strangely choreographed videos. Well, they’ve topped themselves with something decidedly higher-tech and still amazing:

It’s easy when you’re older (ie than 22) to lament that kids aren’t as creative or whatever as in our day. And in many ways it’s true. In previous generations, people had to make do with much less and with fewer references (preexisting material) for inspiration. But now that so much great stuff has already been done people wonder if it’s possible to make anything new anymore. Well this video and the band OK Go, among others, are evidence that creativity is still alive and well in the 21st century – just morphing into FAR different media and mixtures and hybrids than any of us thought possible.

Behind the scenes

Jamie is finishing up final mixes for three tracks we laid down at the end of March. And I thought you’d like a peek behind the curtain so to speak. I mentioned before that we were really influenced by a recent acoustic show we did (The Wooden Ball). We happened to have some acoustic friendly songs we hadn’t recorded yet and – since we record at home – we scheduled a Friday night to lay down basic tracks live. So “basic tracks live” in recording lingo means the rhythm section (drums and bass) and main instruments (in our case guitar and keyboards) are recorded at the same time, just like any other time we play music, but without vocals. Vocals and any other sounds are recorded later, also known as overdubbing.

This time around, Jamie was also the engineer and experimented with the simplest recording set up we’ve used yet: five microphones for everything including drums and room sound! He used some basic microphones from Shure, Sennheiser, Audio-Technica and Beyer with zero plugins – we were playing in a large concrete room with 30 foot ceilings and long theatre-style curtains so the sound was naturally great. On top of that, with Jamie’s setup we didn’t need headphones, so it really felt like we were playing a live show. Headphones are cool because you technically hear things in more detail – but they’re also a bit isolating so this method seemed to capture a better overall vibe. So the only weird thing is getting through the song without the normal vocal cues (though we looked at each other and the person who usually sang would usually mouth the lyrics, which helped.)

We did three songs and usually used the first or second take so all in all it just took a few hours from set up to Miller time! The following weekends were spent on overdubs. We’ve listened back over and over and over again – especially Jamie! There’s still some sonic stuff to take care of inhouse (Jamie also does the mastering) but we’ll be posting these in the digital realm soon. Here are some pics of us that first night. Of course there’s none of me because I was the one taking the pics and absolutely forgot. But rest assured I was there!

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150649929306171.452211.108637171170

February 18th @ Dry River Pizza

After all the studio work, we’re back in the saddle. This Saturday, we’re heading to the Eastside of town and doing two sets at Dry River Pizza. They got great beers on tap, impressive thin-crust pizza and even some yummy coffee in a cool cozy atmosphere. So if you live east of Downtown, you can save some gas and still go out and see some original rock n roll on a Saturday night.

Saturday, Feb 18th

Dry River Pizza

Kolb south of Speedway

8:30 to 11:30pm

No cover!

So stay tuned we’ll be giving you some new stuff to check out soon!

Love and rock,

Cristina

Hope all is well in your corner of the world. Enjoying smore mild winter weather here in Tucson. For a year that may or may not include an Apocalypse, things are starting off nice and easy for us. But remember, this is our reward for dealing with summer heat that’ll melt your fingers into your steering wheel, so there’s that. We’re gonna start up some recording soon so there won’t be any new shows until Feb 18th on the EASTSIDE of town – our first venture out there gig-wise – at Dry River Pizza which is a very cool yummy funky spot. But there’ll be more on that another time. Right now got some booty for ya from our recent adventures. Aaaar!!

LIVE SONG FROM THE WOODEN BALL

The Wooden Ball was a blast last Saturday – not only because we got to switch things up and play familiar songs with different instruments, but we introduced some new tunes, and some new “old” tunes, too. There was Jamie’s ode to overindulging called “Drinkin’ Is A Full Time Job (And I’m Working Overtime)” that he wrote a while back in his NYC days. We also added a new sad country song of mine (where I channel Jeff Bridge’s character in Crazy Heart) called “Hard Work”. Here’s a lil’ fuzzy phone photo (from Bob Lee)

Jamie’s playing my Taylor and I’m playing my ’68 Crown bass (ain’t she sweet?) We recorded the set and it sounded great – but the one I wanted to share with you was the last one – another new/old song of Jamie’s that some of you have heard us do before. But I just loved its ending and double-attack of Dave Prival’s harmonica and keyboards, so you can check it out in the widget at the top of the page or streaming here:

http://www.reverbnation.com/c./poni/82805890

BONUS: If you *subscribe* to us (just look in the right sidebar there –>) you get the mp3 fo’ FREE (yes, membership has its privileges). And if you already subscribed and want YOUR free mp3, just reply and lemme know “I Want My MP3!”.

ROCKIN’ GOURMET LIVE FROM TUCSON

Back in late November, after our Thanksgiving meal, Jamie and I were chatting and digesting with our good friends Laura Kepner-Adney and Tom Moore and the idea came up of doing a music video party in our living room (which is a pretty unique setting, as you’ll see in a minute). Unlike most chatting-while-digesting sessions, this one had legs and, long story short, it’s become the first episode of a unique music and food show we’re calling “Rockin’ Gourmet”, directed and edited by Tom. This first episode features two side projects of ours: Nightgrilling with The Cleavers and Cocktails with The Cordials. It was a blast to do and we hope to do another one soon. Okay, enough jibber jabber, here it is. If you like it, please pass it around. This ain’t no Rachel Ray show!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m4ilVOUEL0

That’s all for now kids. Be cool, stay in school!

Love,

Cristina Modeena

• Beach Boys Blast
• Our holidaze
• Getting ready to record
• Next gig: The Wooden Ball Jan 14th @ Plush

BEACH BOYS FOREVER

Wow, we worked our butts off figuring out the harmonies to various Beach Boys tunes for the Great Cover Up and it was such a (short) blast! But one of my favorite parts was when Jamie, Fen, Courtney and I snuck downstairs to the Green Room with Courtney’s guitar and did an a capella warm up. We were smiling, no, GRINNING, and hugging each other at the sheer sound of our voices. Brian Wilson is a genius.

And my brother and sister-in-law were in town and front row, cheering us on. There was a nice crowd by 11pm and we basked in the glory of the Rialto sound system. There’s just something about performing in a big proscenium theater – on like a REAL STAGE – with a balcony and huge curtains and backstage and everything. Anyway, we made it through to the other side – 20 minutes later – and it was over. Afterwards as Fen passed me on the stairway he said “So we’re doing this again tomorrow, right?” Sigh. BB will be missed but there are a few videos. Um, just so we’re clear, Jamie is dressed as Mike Love with the Hawaiian shirt and fancy baseball cap while Fen is dressed as Brian Wilson with the bathrobe and the extra shaggy hair:

good vibrations

in my room

wouldn’t it be nice

BACK FROM THE HOLIDAZE

So welcome to the new year, yall! Jamie and I had a sweet time having a Southwest Christmas at home including a Holiday BBQ on Christmas Eve. Because one of the awesome things about living in Tucson is the ability to stand outside comfortably in December without a parka! It really was cozy (and filling) as we snarfed up brisket, potato latkes, sausages and delectable fish (and tons of cookies!), washing it all down with mulled wine or pumpkin beer. Lil’ River DiDay looked awwwwful cute in his tiny Santa suit. And I think Jeff’s forgiven me for calling him “Lil’ River Band” on more than one occasion. I just found some photos from my phone. But for some reason I only took pictures of the aftermath when everyone else had left. I seem to only ever take pictures after the pretty is gone. But here you go:

Then for New Year’s Eve we headed down to Bisbee with a bunch of friends and drank and danced our way into 2012. I did a lil blog about it oer on this other website: http://www.cristinawilliams.com/hello-2012

But now the hangover’s dissipated and it’s time to hunker down and get some new music happening. Which is just what we’re gonna do - we’re priming the pump to create some new Modeens tunes for your apocalyptic pleasure!

GUITARS TO THE GRINDSTONE

Normally I keep things hush-hush until we have concrete dates to announce – but a lot of you are curious just how a record comes into the world. Well, there are endless ways this can go down but for The Modeens, we’ve had a sort of rhythm going the past couple of years: we start off the year finishing up some songs we’ve been batting around, churn out some new ones, practice-practice-practice and then schedule a day to lay ‘em down at Chamber of Sounds (aka our living room). What happens afterwards depends on how far we get that one day – we usually take our time doing the overdubs and then Jamie mixes and masters. So we’ll probably go the same route for the third time around. And don’t hold me to this, coz artistic temperament can change on a dime – but we’re looking to include some more bluesy, acoustic-y numbers for the next album.

THE WOODEN BALL @ Plush Jan 14th 11pm $5

We were inspired to add more americana to our rockitude by some acoustic gigs we did last year AND an acoustic set we’re working on for The Wooden Ball next week. The Wooden Ball is a Tucson tradition that started in 1987 where local bands are asked to perform their songs acoustically. It’s a short set and here’s how it’s panning out: Jamie on the Taylor acoustic guitar, me on my Crown 60′s hollow-body bass, Dave on harp and the occasional piano sound (from his keyboard) and Jeff, well, Jeff’s still using his same drum kit, just kickin back a bit. We’ll do some of the usual tunes and then an old song of Jamie’s that you are gonna LOVE! It’s a sweet lineup, too. The festival actually starts the night before at Club Congress and if you’re in town, here are the deets:

Sat Jan 14th lineup: http://www.plushtucson.com/shows.html?band_id=58

Fri Jan 13th lineup: http://www.hotelcongress.com/2011/12/07/the-wooden-ball/ 

Have a rowdy rockin’ new year!

Love,

Cristina Modeena

http://themodeens.bandcamp.com
http://www.facebook.com/themodeens

We miss rocking with you oh so much. Please come down, drink and boogie with us!

Saturday, December 10th.
Sky Bar on 4th Ave and 5th St, Tucson
Cover is FREE!