Midwest BEAT Magazine

The bastion of Texas blues - Austin - apparently has an underbelly of angst and aggression. For it's from there that Universal recording act, Dynamite Hack has sprung.

    "I guess it's cool that Austin has so many bands to see," said Hack's guitarist/vocalist Mark Morris, "but we can't help but feel a little bitter about the way people there dismiss anything that isn't blues. There's always a handful of great rock bands there, underground type bands that no one ever went to see and the press didn't write about.

   "We were part of that little sub-culture, that little scene," said Morris. "Here these watered-down blues bands who fail miserably in their attempts to capture some of Stevie Ray Vaughan's magic draw 800 or 900 people to their shows and we slam away in one of the city's few clubs where rock bands are even welcome, to a 'crowd' of like 50 people."

While there are dozens of live music venues in Austin, Morris bemoaned the "elitist attitude" of his hometown scene and could list only four clubs in the entire city where bands like his would ever be allowed to step on stage.

   "Dynamite Hack started at a place called The Bates Motel," recalled Morris. "It was the dingiest and nastiest punk bar you can imagine, but it was the best place to play and every band that we loved would play there. It had attitude and atmosphere. It's closed down since then, but it was kinda like the CBGB's of Austin."

   Morris declares his band as being "extremely lucky" to have broken out of that stifling environment. "I hope that with us getting to this (national) level, maybe people will look at Austin a little differently and check out the city's rock side," he said.

    If being an aggressive rock band in a town ensconced in the blues is a tough situation, then Dynamite Hack seems to have jumped from the frying pan and into the fire with the release of their radio hit, "Boyz In The Hood."

    The band's lily-white, acousti-pop take on the violent ghetto anthem written by the late Eazy-E and immortalized by N.W.A. in the film of the same name, is something of a novelty song and not indicative of the actual Dynamite Hack sound.

     "I was messin' around with a melody I had for a song," explained Morris on how the group came to record "Boyz In The Hood." "I was playing this song idea on my acoustic guitar and I just started singing the words to 'Boyz' over the melody since the song didn't have lyrics. It really came about unintentionally, but everyone thought it would be cool to record it so we did."

     The song was put on a local CD and an advance copy was mailed to a DJ at Austin's 101X radio station. He picked up on the 'Boyz' cut and aired it as
part of the station's listener call-in show - "Like It or Spike It." The song soon became the station's most requested track.

    "We started getting calls from stores and from other deejays wanting copies of the CD," laughed Morris. "We hadn't even gotten the CDs back from the printer yet and all hell was breakin' loose. We had to call in and order more copies pressed up."

     On the strength of the local airplay, Hack's local CD, released on their own vanity imprint (Woppitzer Records) sold over 8,000 copies in the Austin and Dallas markets alone. Those impressive figures quickly caught the attention of several major labels. When the dust from the bidding wars had settled, the band was on the talent roster of Universal Records.

    "Superfast is pretty much that same CD which created all the hub-bub in Texas. The band's hometown tapes were remixed and remastered before being released to the nation in June. The scenario they had experienced in Austin was repeated on a much larger scale.

    "Boyz In The Hood" became a runaway hit single and the album from which it sprang sold briskly. While the public is buying Superfast for that twirly little dittie, they are soon discovering that Dynamite Hack is anything but the mellow and quirky band they had perceived them to be.

    Given the punk-pop aggressiveness which permeates the 11 original tracks on Superfast, Dynamite Hack comes off as being not too unlike Pavement or Greenday.

     Radio may have been good to the 'Boyz' single, but many of the stations have not been as fast to add the band's follow up single, "Anyway," to their playlists.

   Dynamite Hack's upcoming headline performance at The Metro on October 21 will mark the band's fourth visit to Chicago in recent weeks. They headlined at Lincoln Park Zoo over July Fourth weekend, opened for Weezer at the Metro on September 3 and jammed at the House of Blues late last month with Goldfinger.

   "I'm glad that we've been able to play here as much as we have," said Morris. " It's been by accident, or maybe a better word is fate, that we've been able to play here in Chicago so much. See, right now we're trying to hook up on shows with bands who have large followings, so that we can get on stage and show people that there's a lot more to our band than just the 'Boyz In The Hood' song.

    "It's just been our good fortune that we happen to hook up with bands just as they are heading to Chicago," he continued. "Unfortunately, I've been sick as a dog the last few times we've played in Chicago, so I hope I can stay healthy so that this time, I can finally give Chicago 100 percent of myself."