20 years ago Bonerama founders Mark Mullins and Craig Klein bumped into Mark Samuels, co-founder of Basin Street Records, in a Kinko’sin the middle of the night. Two decades later, and Bonerama has signed to the label and is releasing its first album thereon, Hot Like Fire – the group’s first in four years and seventh over its 20-year history. It released today.
“We’ve never been really looking for a record label,” Mullins tells OffBeat. “We’ve just always grown on our own. It’s working well for us. A record label deal is something that never attracted us but now it seemed like it was time to knock on his door and see if he had room for another group.”
Bonerama Signs With Basin Street Records, Announces New Album
“I’m excited to get new music out there,” Greg Hicks, trombone and vocals, says. “I think we’ve been, over this four years, still doing this new music. We have more new music than we have room on three albums.”
The band’s arrival on its new frontier began even before the group’s founding in 1998. In 1990, Klein was in New York and heard he needed to go see a trombone section in a latin band that was playing. “I went down and heard it and I thought ‘wow this is really great.’ Just the wall of the sound from the horns,” he remembers. “As a trombone player you’re always pushed to the back. It gave me an idea that we should start a New Orleans band that features the trombone as the main voice. We just ran from there.”
Hicks echoes the sentiment, saying “It’s been great. To be a trombone player up front. You’re the lead guy. You’re not just in the horn section. It’s a gig that any horn player would want.”
Bonerama’s first show featured a large crowd, with “every trombone player in the city” showing up, according to Klein.
“This is 1998. This is a time when Trombone Shorty was still short,” says Mullins. “He was just a kid. He didn’t come that night.”
“He was too young,” Klein recalls.
“There wasn’t really, at that time, a whole lot of trombone activity going on at that time except for traditional jazz and rock horn sections in town,” explains Mullins. “There wasn’t really anything like this in town that featured the trombone like Craig envisioned. It was fun for us. It was the lead instrument now.”
Hicks joined the band back when he was in college. “I have two degrees and my degree of ‘musician in the street’ learning from these guys. If you have a piece of paper in school that’s great, but there’s so much more to being a musician than you’ll ever learn in school,” he says.
At the group’s onset, Bonerama put a spin on rock classics, a characteristic that remains integral to performance and recording today. As Mullins says, “When we were putting this together 20 years ago, we were just looking for material to pull together. We didn’t set any rules.” After Klein brought Edgar Winters’s “Frankenstein” and the Eagles’ “Long Run” to the table as tableaus, Mullins says an organic process began to take shape.
“We really didn’t do anything too inventive with the arrangements. We’re just playing it on trombones. When you hear it come in on trombones, it’s different. People seem to be really attracted to that. Rock stuff is so much fun to play on trombone.”
Hot Like Fire is currently available. As Klein says, the nine-track project is notably “short,” but for good reason. “You might think you get more for your money if you have 80 minutes of music but how much does it really serve you a listener? Do you sit down and listen to 80 minutes?” he asks. “I don’t think anybody does. It takes time to listen to one side. You hardly ever flip it over. I think 46 minutes is just the perfect amount.”
Asks Mullins, “How much trombone can you take?”
