Anyone heard of this music group?

[TrinityScrimshaw]

I have always liked Santana, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Stevie Ray Vaugan (SRV), Eric Clapton, Hendrix, while growing up, but most are gone now. lately I have been listening to a group called "Los Lonely Boys", and if you like great guitar playing like I do you will enjoy them too. Check them out...

Trinity +++

[Crpdeth]

Trinity, I see we share some common tastes in music...although its been awhile, Santana, Stevie Ray, Hendrix and Clapton are some old favorites of mine too....I still listen to Skynard and Seger quite a bit, but as I get older I just dont feel the need to have something in my ear 24/7 like I did 10 years ago, you know what I mean? You do have me wanting to go browse the music dept tho I'll take a look at the Los Lonely Boys when I do.


~Crpdeth

[groundhogdevastation]

TS, Haven't heard of them but will check it out next time at B&N. If the guitar players are better than Mark Knophler of Dire Straits then he's pretty good! I grew up with the ones you mentioned but ventured away to the likes of Doc Watson, Charlie Waller, Tony Rice, Norman Blake, Dan Tyminski(he lives just over the hill and records just over the other hill!!! with Allison Krauss she shows up at the store now and then)......took a little turn toward the Bluegrass! Been playing that stuff for going on 40 years and just can't quit! Did pick up a pretty good ax at the pawn shop the other week and had to go to the neighbors and plug it in!! The mountains were ringing for a while with ZZTOP stuff!!! GHD PS: We did do the required "Sweet Home Alabama" while we were plugged up!!

[TrinityScrimshaw]

While a teenager my favorite group was Skynard & the Allman Brothers. Back in the early 70's while in high school, some friends and I would go to a night club in Galveston Texas to watch a local band play. They called themselves ZZTop, and they were fairly good even back then. I too have slowed down a bit, and I find myself listening to more country than anything else. In fact George Straight is my standard now. I enjoy Blue Grass, Allison Krauss & Union Station are some of my favorites. I really enjoy anything instrumental (Lot's of strings) works for me. That's why this new group attracted my attention. They will be appearing with the Allman Brothers at the NY state fair on the 27th of August. I am trying to talk my wife into going to see them. Wish me luck, because the tickets are $36 each.

Trinity +++

[LIKTOSHOOT]

TS, is that the group from one of the southern States(can`t remember) Also can`t remember the guitar players name either---wrote it down and lost it. If it`s the one I saw/heard.....he`s very young AND very talented blues player. Already receiving great reviews. This kid (if the same) is smokin hot.


LTS

[IShootBack]

they got a video on CMT that's kewl.

isb

[TrinityScrimshaw]

This is the BIO I found on them.

They are three brothers from Snyder Texas.

Trinity +++

Official Biography - >Español
Los Lonely Boys are a family tradition.

The family band is a great rock’n’roll institution - from the Everly Brothers and the Beach Boys to the Black Crowes and Hanson. There's something about the unstudied perfection of sibling vocal harmonies that creates a distinctive, irresistible style. Los Lonely Boys, three brothers, aged 21-25, from a tiny town in West Texas, are about to write a new chapter in this compelling saga of America's musical families. They began as their father’s backing band. Now, Los Lonely Boys will make their own mark.

Los Lonely Boys are the three Garza brothers: Henry on guitar, Jojo on bass, and Ringo on drums. This remarkable trio of brothers has been making music together since they were small children and now has a decade of professional experience under their belts as well. Los Lonely Boys write, sing, and play music drawn from diverse sources, blending their influences into a seamless style. Weaned on Tex-Mex, country, blues, and rock pioneers like Richie Valens, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, and such pop music giants as The Beatles, Los Lonely Boys augment those solid basics with red-hot guitar playing, percolating rock and Latin rhythms, and dynamic interplay and luscious vocal harmonies -- all three brothers also sing -- to produce songs rife with engaging hooks, expressive lyrics, and melodic sumptuousness.

The band's self-titled debut album is packed so tightly, it's hard to believe all of this music was created by a trio. Though Henry, the oldest of the brothers, has been hailed as the inheritor of the great Texas guitar tradition epitomized by Freddie King, Johnny Winter and the Vaughan Brothers, he is also the greatest young player in the burgeoning Latino rock guitar style pioneered by Carlos Santana. Backed by tight, intense rhythmic support from his brothers, Henry’s playing makes Los Lonely Boys one of the most exciting new bands to emerge in the new millennium. Ask no less an authority than Willie Nelson, who has called Los Lonely Boys his favorite band and invited them to record this album at his own Pedernales studio.

"Everybody seems to be digging us, which is great," Henry says. A fast and affable talker, he has a colloquial conversational style reminiscent of another Texas musical hero, Doug Sahm. Henry relates how their father, Ringo Garza, Sr. taught the boys how to play music family style, by his own example. Garza played with his seven brothers in a family conjunto group, The Falcones. "Our dad had five brothers and a sister and they had a great conjunto band in the '70s and '80s," Henry explains. “They did a mixture of stuff that nobody was playing back then, a mixture of conjunto with country music and Spanglish. They were really popular in South and West Texas; they had a top 10 song once. They basically just fell apart after the tragedy of one of the brothers dying, the drummer.”

" My dad was always into rock and country apart from playing conjunto music. He wanted to be like Elvis and the Beatles. He started playing when he was eight. We learned from him at home at first. He would let us come to gigs and watch him, then when we got older he let us come up and sing a song with him. We listened to our dad more than the radio. [He] was our biggest influence… We looked forward to the chance to get up with his brothers and sing 'La Bamba.' We were into oldies like Richie Valens, Chuck Berry, none of the stuff that was being played on the radio. I just wanted to write my own songs, man, I wrote my first song when I was four years old. He brought this little guitar home to me and put it in my hands and I knew I thought 'I'm never gonna let this thing go, man.' I went into my room when I first got it and put a couple of notes together just by ear, found a way to play it, wrote some lyrics, then I showed it to my dad. My influence was totally my dad. I would hear him singing about girls leaving, just from listening to him sing I got this idea and I wrote a song called 'She Left Me.' It's just got a few lines in it.”

Henry's middle brother Joey aka Jojo also began playing guitar before switching to piano and then, finally, bass. The family band became complete when younger brother Ringo picked up playing the drums. "When Ringo was nine my dad gave him a drum set," Henry recalls. "I taught him to play it and he learned in like 30 minutes man, it was like it was meant to be. And since Ringo is his real name, that’s freaky, right?!! He's been playing ever since.”

The boys had soon percolated into a musical unit of their own. After the breakup of their father’s band, the boys began backing him at his solo shows. The band played their first show with their father while still pre-teens. "We were backing my dad, because after he left his brothers he started playing in country bands and stuff with other guys, emulating the music of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and the outlaw gang. My dad’s got kind of that image."

The music they made with their father was a mixture of classic rock'n'roll, country and Tex-Mex. Recognizing that his sons possessed prodigious talent, Garza relocated the group to Nashville. Although Los Lonely Boys flew under the radar of the record industry along Music Row, their time in Music City did benefit the three brothers greatly.

" We were in Nashville back and forth through the 1990s," Henry explains. “When we first went to Nashville we were still playing with my dad, but we started growing as individuals and writing for ourselves and I guess we just kind of outgrew him in a sense. We needed to get away from dad, not in a bad way, but we started working on our own and all of a sudden we were playing our first gig in Atlanta, without him. Things weren’t going so well in Nashville, so we came back to Texas and started doing our thing here.”

Solidified as a trio, the band developed a reputation as one of the most exciting live acts on the extremely competitive Texas and Southeast circuit, but the years of studying the classics allowed Los Lonely Boys to develop their superior vocal and songwriting skills as well. "We got our harmonies from listening to our dad's brothers' band," Henry says. "He taught us and we learned by listening to him, just by ear, we never took lessons or anything, he just told us the sky was the limit so we would just listen and listen and listen and kept playin' and learnin' and practicin' through our whole childhood, never stopping."

The brothers never even bother to arrange their spectacular vocal harmonies. " We just fall into place automatically," Henry says. "When we're writing a song, if I'm writing Ringo will just automatically sing the harmony and Jojo will come in with his. It just comes out. It's kind of freaky cause it's kind of magical, man, we're all three brothers and we all have a deep passion for music. When we play together it's spontaneous, it's so natural."

The album's opening cut, "Senorita," sung in Spanish and English, is a perfect example of the group's approach. "My brother Jojo was writing music and I was thinking of some lyrics to rhyme to it," Henry recalls. "I rhymed 'bonita' with 'senorita' and we came up with these chords and just made it into a song, man. We speak Spanish slang all the time in Texas, it's not really proper Spanish, it's more of a street slang. The rhyme was kind of catchy. We've known the traditional Chicano music or conjunto music, tropicale, Latin music. When we grew up our father and all them did that, so we sort of went the other way. It wasn't easy, because people would say 'you don't sound like a Mexican band' and we can do that too but we wanted to do something that was us, something new. That's what me and my brothers did, and now we're bringing it around to where we're recording it and people will be able to hear the way we do it in today's world. I think it's going to go over real well, even in the Hispanic community, because I don't hear anything like that other than Santana."

Though the brothers know how good they are as a live band, they are amazed at how well the recordings worked out in the studio. "We tried to record before and I was never really happy with the way it came out," Henry admits. "But on this album I can honestly say I'm happy with the whole thing, the guitar tone, the guitar parts, vocal parts, the way the whole vibe of the record … I'm really proud of it."

" It's kinda crazy, we're like the Mexican Beatles," Henry concludes. "People always ask us what kind of style we play. I tell 'em it's a cross between Stevie Ray meets Santana, Jimi Hendrix meets Richie Valens, or the Beatles meet Ronnie Milsap. I call it my music burrito theory. What we've done is made like our own tortilla, right, with all the knowledge of all the greats that are out there, I can't even think of 'em all right now, but we put 'em inside the tortilla, fold it up in there, we make our own burrito and we're sellin' it to the world, y'know?”

[potato_sniper]

I've only heard them on the radio and on MTV and all I can say is "And.....?"

I don't really hear anything special about them. Based on the limited amount that I've heard, they're really just like any other mediocre pop band.

I've got a few friends that could mop the floor with thier "great guitar playing."

I personally think that if they hadn't been a trendy looking set of Spanish Brothers, they never would have gotten off the ground. Just another by-product of the ever increasing influence of our society becoming a bunch of pussed-out PC wankers.

Listen if you want, but I'd rather keep listening to GOOD classics than SO-SO new stuff.

Maybe I'm just pissed because the radio sucks and drives any halfway tolerable song into the ground by playing it 24 hrs a day for the about three months and then you never hear it again.

Oh, and while I'm ranting about the radio, have any of you heard a single Rage Against the Machine song since 9/11? Yeah, I didn't think so. That kind of "You either support us or the terrorists" attitude is exactly why we need bands like that around.

Later.

[270 Deer Slayer]

Trinity, I think they have been playing there music on the county channels. They have real long hair I think. Personally I dont think they should be playing them on the country station, because there not country.

[TrinityScrimshaw]

270,

I agree, it’s not country, but MTV wouldn’t play this type of music. There is no classic rock video channel to speak of since MTV was hijacked by new wave in your face junk rock music. I don't think Tim McGraw, or Kenny Chess-nuts should be on CMT ether. Their both about as much country as Jimmy Buffet is. But, at least Jimmy dosen't wear a cowboy hat to try and fit in.

Potato Sniper,

It’s your opinion (like mine stated above), and you’re entitled to it. However, I have to question if you have heard their entire CD? The video that is being played on CMT is fairly tame, and if your judging them based on this alone you’re not doing them justice. Listen to the entire CD, and if you still feel this way it is clear you wouldn’t know “great guitar playing” unless it smacked you upside the spud! Think how good they will be when they are in their 40's?

Trinity +++

[corpis66]

LTS...? it could be Kenny Wayne Shepard..? kinna sounds like a young SRV