Just Announced: 12 Hour Shift at SOUTHPAW!!
Ladies and gentlemen we have booked a show at the one and only Southpaw for Sunday August 24th! Stay tuned for more details. Peace!!
-Chris
12 Hour Shift
Summer Send Off At Bar 4!!
Category: Music
What's up people? As you may or may not know we're packing our s*t, filling the van with $5 a gallon gas and hitting the road this summer. But before we go we just had to perform once more in BK. We'll be at Bar 4 in the mean streets of Park Slope on Saturday the 31st. There is no cover. There will be alcohol available. Come out and have a good time. Hope to see everyone there. Peace.
-Chris
12 Hour Shift
Saturday May 31st @
Bar 4
444 7th Ave
Brooklyn, NY
10pm
No cover
April 4th At Vox Pop!!!
We’re back at Vox Pop on friday April 4th. This one is gonna be the show of all Vox Pop shows. Our boy Jake Gold will be opening the night with his blues band The Miners.
Also we’re frotunate enough to be joined thta night by Mental NOtes and The Readnex Poetry Squad. I’m looking foward to this show more than any we’ve done before.
Hopefully I’ll be saying that a lot in the upcoming months.
Don’t miss out, this is gonna be the shiiiiit!
Vox Pop
1022 Cortelyou Rd
8pm- Jake Gold and The Miners
9pm- 12 Hour Shift
10pm- Mental Notes
11pm- Readnex
See you there. Peace.
-Chris, and all of us here at 12 Hour Shift
LIVE on the Radio baby!!
Thanks so much to Radman up at Vassar Radio. We had a great time. If anyone wants to give a listen you can hear the hour-long interview/performance at
http://www.radioactivelunch.com
Also, Paddy's Day weekend we'll be in Philly at the Dawson St Pb(http://www.myspace.com/dawsonstreetpub) anyone that wants to ride along is more than welcome. Peace.
-Chris
12 Hour Shift
Something old something new
Current mood: 
restless
Category: Automotive
Things have been going on in the world of 12 Hour and I don't want you to feel left out so here's what we've been up to.
We played in Philly at the Dawson Street Pup a few weeks ago and I have to say it really is the city of brotherly love. I can't rember the last time an audience was as cool as that one and overall good times to be had. If your down there go to Ishkabibbles on South St and gluttonize on some amazing cheesesteaks. We'll be coming back in the Spring so spread the news Philly, we miss you.
Our new home has been found in Brooklyn at a little coffee shop/bar/center for progressive thinking called Vox Pop, www.voxpop.net. We'll be doing a monthly residency there the last sat of every month until they kick us out (which wont be any time soon thanks to all of you who have been packing the place for us and showing your bar tenderness). It's been a place for us to showcase our new music and feature some of our friends bands. If you know of some talented Brooklyn bands you'd like to see with us (or are one) drop a line and we'll try to get them/you on the next show.
Lastly big props to the online magazine The Brooklyn Voice for coming out to Vox Pop, filming, and interviewing the band. You can check out a review they did of our first show there at http://www.brooklynvoice.com/voxpop21album2.html. Thanks to them we have some new videos to youtube for your internetting pleasure.
We have two shows coming up this month so if you awaken from your hibernation early this winter come out and get drunk with us.
Scott
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Currently
reading
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The Winter of Our Discontent (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) By John Steinbeck Release date: 01 April, 1996 
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The Rock Star Fantasy
So I'm going to sound a little bit like an old lady right now, but then again isn't the point of blogs to indulge semi-senile rantings and ravings? The good thing about this one is that it doesn't involve a creaky voice and the subtle stench of slow death breathing into your ear. Not that I have anything against old people, in fact I have another rant prepared about how no one respects their elders enough anymore. However, I digress. The topic at hand is an ad I saw while watching Sponge Bob Square Pants (I was babysitting mutherfuckers). It was for some stupid Nickelodeon show about a band of 8 year-old "rockers" (i.e. interpreters of carefully scripted cheese-pop inspired by what was formerly known as music) who have crowds of adoring pint-sized female fans (suffice it to say all band members were boys. In 2007! Gender and music rant coming soon...) and do TV interviews about before they were famous while wearing sunglasses and "cool clothes".
And there, right before my eyes dear friends, was the seed of the rock star fantasy that has taken over the music industry in our country and, I regret to report, much of the "independant" musical activity in this city. People want to play music to fullfill some fantasy about being this sort of demi-god character that we have termed a "rock star" (although the term applies to many genres. "hip-hop star" just doesn't have the same ring). I bet they had similar programs on TV when we were little, which would explain these dudes I saw playing the other night wearing skin tight pants and halfway unbuttoned shirts playing nicely palatable music to unintelligible nonsense lyrics and then stepping off the stage with a "Where are the girls?" attitude.
Even when it's not so obvious, I feel that many of our fellow musicians have forsaken their insane obsession with music itself in favor of the less heart-wrenching quest for a tight, marketable sound and a hot look, with the hope of becoming better than all the regular people. Of course, their shit will always smell as bad as mine or Joe Shmoe's, so that's why they end up doing drugs and acting like assholes. I'm not sure why we're supposed to play music or what role music should play in a less fucked up society, but it sure as hell should not be one more tool to commodify sex and make young people feel inadequate.
Moral of the story: Yeah, get your kids a drum set. Just don't let them watch TV. Peace, Shayna (and I think the rest of 12 Hour Shift is with me on this one)
12th Hour Blog 12/3/07 If Life’s A Journey...
...skip the Fast Food Rest Stops.
As the snow starts to fall on this brisk December night, that old cliche runs through my mind: :life is a journey". We say it. How many times a week, in our day-to-day lives do we really believe it? Better yet, how often do we practice it?
I read Kerouac when I was seventeen like every other seventeen year-old on the cusp of discovering life. To be honest he was never where it's at for me. I preferred Walt Whitman, the Brooklyn native, the man who stripped himself of all things wordly and wandered the United states looking for the center of it all.
Did you know Whitman toured the south during the Civil War? Neither did I until I saw the Civil War documntary on PBS. Thank you Ken Burns for keeping intact yet another gem of American history.
Yes he did. He visited the Union hospitals, weeping at the sufferring of those poor young men and reading them poetry. He didn't write a book about it, he didn't ask for adulation or recognition . He felt in his sould that he was bound there and he went.
We talk about all this life going on around us all the time. We watch other people on T.V living. We read in the newspapers and magazines about other people living. How much do we actually do? Would we fly to Iraq to comfort the soldiers forced into this unjust war? If we felt drawn to action would we tear ourselves away and go? Hell, there is a VA Hospital in The Bronx and not many of us find our way there for a visit.
What do Walt Whitman and war veterans have to do with your life? My life, the life of anyone? Maybe nothing. But maybe we live in the slow lane of life and make all the wrong stops.
I'm not suggesting anyone go join the Peace Corp or anything. I will suggest that if you ever had the notion, don't shy away from it. Especially if your vacillation is based on staying safe in the slow lane and not risking some good old fashion terrifying life experience.
Like Walt said: Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.
Or something like that. Come to think of it he was kind of a crazy mother fucker.
How does this tie into 12 Hour Shift??
Well stop by The Underscore(1st ave btwn 89th & 90th) this thursday at 9pm and find out.
Was that shameless self-promotion? I hope not. I really intended this whole thing to be sincere.
Until next time.
-Chris
12 Hour Shift
12th Hour Blog 11/18/07- What’s Right With Music??
Blogs are like assholes. Everyone has one, most of them stink and you only want to get into a select few. Well this one is ours and despite the unpleasant anal comparison I hope you visit regularly and enjoy. In this first of what will be a weekly installment I would like to begin with the question:
What's right with music these days?
I feel the need to ask this out of sheer neccessity after asking so many times 'what is wrong with music these days?' Where is the passion? Where is the creativity?
Appeal has always taken precedence over substance. Pop music, packaged and marketed like candy bars has always reached the masses. It certainly is nothing new.
One cannot make the argument for the good old days when black musicians stood by while white musicians in black-face performed their music in packed thatres. No one is nostalgic for the days of Ed Sullivan telling the band what lyrics the can or cannot sing, and shitting himself when Jim Morrison, defiant and high off his ass declared "girl we couldn't get much higher". We like to think of the 60's as the decade of Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles but it was also the decade of Herman's Hermits and the Monkeys.
The contrast I see today is not just the level that the pop music industry has reached but the level that fresh and creative music has fallen to. Where's the Bob Dylan to balance out the Britney Spears? Where's the Clash to balance out any goddamn rock band on the radio or on MTV?
What I think we've lost is the personal connection to music that was there when folk songs were passed on, when people would gather around an AM radio to hear a singer from two towns over. Music has lost it's roots. In the 60's recorded music was nothing new but it coexisted with the tradition of passing music down as a shared experience rather than a product.
Folk singers in the Greenwich Village used to learn each other's songs. Now they pass out their own flyers to each other and ask to be myspace buddies.
I'm not knocking it. I certainly wouldn't be so ironic as to bash myspace on myspace. I simply am concerned that we are all listening without hearing anything.
This gloirous double-edged sword called the internet has put us all out there to each other but at the same time has shut us up in our rooms away from each other. Anyone can be a star but who is saying anything worth hearing?
Not us goddamnit. This isn't that blog that is going to end with 'buy my album' for all the answers. We're in the trenches too, looking for our voice, looking for what we want to say to the world.
What I will say is this; let's make music for the right reasons. Let's be honest, play the music we truely want ot play. Let's play for each other, the people around us; real people, not consumers and numbers on pie-charts. Let's play venues where people can come and feel what we're doing, feel that they came to the right place that night. Let' support each other when we're down and borrow money from each other when we're up.
And then buy our album.
-Chris
12 Hour Shift
Lyrics....
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We're a band that put's importance on what we say not just how we say it. Be it fun-loving, self-reflecting or political we want all of you listening to get a good look at what we're saying. So here are the lyrics from 'Dirty Water Benedictions". As we post new songs we'll likewise post their lyrics.
Dirty Water Benedictions you hit me with that ol voodoo baby oh it worked on me you and uncle Vanya drinking vodka at the Grand Ole Opery you hit me with the headlights baby while I was wandering lost holding your roseary but I ain't one to be crossed
You talk a good one, you talk a good one you keep testing me You talk a good one, talk a good one but you won't get the best of me Lady Godiva's got her finest pearls draped across her big ol' chest drinking cocktails with the businessmen dressed in their sunday bests and here they come for me smoke pouring from their mouths walking up the vestibule while I'm walking out you're dirty water benedictions baby ain't saving no one soon you know where we're heading baby oh no, after you
You talk a good one, talk a good one you keep testing me You talk a good one, talk a good one but you won't get the best of me me and the drunken angels in ungoly hours on a laughing spree trying to get high as helll unerneath the lights of the factory it's raining in the city baby watch the puddles form you can swim all you want to babe but you ain't ducking this storm
You tlak a good one, talk a good one you keep testing me you talk a good one, talk a good one but you won't get the best of me |