For this week’s 5 Questions, Dive assistant editor Linnie Greene spoke with Shane Hartman, bassist for local rock trio Dynamite Brothers who celebrates the release of new album Again at The Cave on Friday. With the brand new record about to hit shelves and a musical career that spans more genres than a record store, Hartman divulged some of his band’s unexpected, ultra-funky influences and explained why, when Hollywood came calling, The Dynamite Brothers answered.
Diversions: Again evokes numerous sounds and comparisons. Who are some of your influences?
Shane Hartman: Too many to list. The three of us are the core of the band, but all three of us have a wide range of influences, pretty much any and everything. As far as stylistically where we try to go with it is kind of a rock ‘n’ roll thing, but heavily influenced by 60s and 70s soul music, — Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, The Chambers Brothers, I could go on and on, but definitely a heavy dose of '60s and '70s soul and funk. Also a little jazz thrown in. We are a rock band, so we like rock ‘n’ roll of course—anything from The Beatles to Captain Beefheart. All of us have played several kinds of music, anything from jazz to reggae and ska. Actually Mitch and I used to play with a kind of Reggae funk band called the Platinum Heavyweights. Duke Ellington says there’s two kinds of music: “Good music and bad music.” We like the good stuff.
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Dive: How did the group form?
SH: Actually the group formed as a duo. Scott and Mitch started playing together quite some time back, you know, kind of doing the blues rock duo sort of thing in the vein of The White Stripes, but this was before they got huge. They were kind of doing that sort of thing, a blues duo with just drums and guitar, and then they had a bass player who is a friend of ours, Alex Livingston, who now lives in Austin. He started sitting in with them when he could, and obviously being in Austin made it kind of hard for him to join the band. I had played with Mitch previously, we went to college together, and they asked me to start playing with them, and that’s when the band solidified. That’s when it changed from kind of a blues thing to a mix of garage rock and soul and all sorts of other things.
Dive: Dynamite Brothers have been featured on a few soundtracks. How did those collaborations come about?
SH: We’ve done quite a bit of soundtrack work at this point. We have some friends from Charlotte — both Scott and Mitch are from Charlotte and I’m from right outside of Charlotte — and we have a group of friends there who have started to make it big. “Eastbound and Down” on HBO, it’s a new comedy series, the first season just aired last year. Our friends actually created that show, so it’s all in the family, just kind of sharing. And they like our music and they’ve asked us to do some music and luckily some of that got used in “Eastbound and Down.” The same guys did a film called “Foot Fist Way” which was discovered by Will Ferrell and company, and that’s how they got pulled into this Hollywood thing. And we did a lot of music for that one. I’ve done some solo work for director David Green, and we’ve had some music in his movies. Probably the one that you would’ve heard of is “All the Real Girls.”
Dive: I caught your set at Troika. Was that the first time you played the festival? How did you like it?
SH: We loved it. It had been awhile since we played around here. We had a record that came out back a few years, and we did the touring thing, toured all over and tried to make bigger things happen. And we only got so far with that. We’d kind of settled down from playing around here, and it was nice to be back and play around some folks we haven’t seen in awhile. Especially The Loners, those guys are old friends of ours. The Dynamite Brothers when they started were kind of in that vein, but it was nice to be back. That was our first time playing the festival, and I hope they’ll have us back. We were excited to get up there and do our thing, and I think it’s a good thing for local music. And I think it’ll continue to get bigger hopefully.
Dive: It’s obvious that you guys go way back and have experience playing several styles. How does that influence your music?
SH: Like I was saying, we’ve played a lot of different styles and even as The Dynamite Brothers we’ve backed a lot of different people. We’ve played weddings as a jazz trio, so we try to pull all of that into our sound, which can be a little befuddling for people I think, since we jump all over the place. It makes it kind of difficult. I think playing in other bands and playing different styles, it lends to the variety of the music, but it also makes us more adaptable with each other. We’ve been playing together for so long now it’s kind of second nature. Sometimes we don’t even have to count songs off, we just kind of know when to start. I think playing the different styles and having a variety of experiences is kind of important as far as musicianship. When Scott (Nurkin, drummer) started playing with Birds of Avalon, things started to slow down for us, and we took some time off to regroup and get a new group of songs. Now we’re kind of coming back full force. I think it’s a good thing playing with other people, stretching out and playing different styles.
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