Club Awesome

By Jason James
Photo by Daniel Upton

Beach balls and short shorts abound in the world that is Atlanta’s Club Awesome. As girls dance around clad scantily in bikinis, guys swill beer and nod along to the poppy sounds of four musicians who, before 2005, were slinging biscuits, running with crowds picking fights with future bandmates and attending school at Georgia State University.

Such scenes are bound to pop up again as summer comes into full bloom. Club Awesome began their beach parties last summer at the Drunken Unicorn, complete with an above-ground pool, the aforementioned bikini vixens and shirtless beach hipsters and the beginnings of great songs that are quickly filling the group’s canon.
The group, made up of vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Errol Crane, bassist Blair Gainous, guitarist Rick Kemp and drummer Lance Warner, bears an unusual name, but never steers the music off course. The strange moniker came out of drunken jokes at the band’s early practices. “We really drank a good bit at our first few practices,” remembers Kemp. “Errol and I had never been in bands before and were kind of apprehensive at first.”

“But the beers really helped after a bit,” chimes in Crane. The group often caught Warner telling people not to come to shows, possibly embarrassed about a name that lends itself to high expectations, to say the least. “The only awkward part was when we were not so awesome,” recalls Gainous. Warner remembers that sometimes it was more like Club Mediocre.

Now, however, Club Awesome has become a live group made up of better-than-mediocre songs and an instrumental tightness that suggests recent practices feature less imbibing and more playing, at least more than at earlier rehearsals. The band has recently wrapped up a recording session at Dreamboat Studios in Marietta, Georgia with Nev Walker. For the group, working with Walker was a breath of fresh air. Club Awesome had been approached by others to record, but were met with situations that were “sleazy and full of red flaggy kind of deals,” explains Crane. With Walker, they were set at ease and were able to work out problems in the studio rather than throwing temper tantrums.

Once the recording is mastered, the band hopes to self-release it by mid-summer. Aside from a 7-inch release on Passive Aggressive Records, this record will be the first full release for Club Awesome. After winning a recording session from a battle of the bands contest at Lenny’s, the group bailed out of the recording prize and opted to wait. The wait is looking to be worth it.

The group owes a lot of their musical maturity to the suggestion box they brought to many of their initial shows. They would leave the box at the front of the stage with a pen and notepad. “In the beginning, we just got a lot of tampons and slices of pizza,” recollects Warner. “Eventually we got a lot of good suggestions like ‘Stop standing around like corpses.’” Crane continues, “I think it was a good idea in the beginning because your friends aren’t always able to be openly critical to you, but with the anonymity of the suggestion box, people really gave us some good feedback.”
New stage antics, such as Crane’s tiger outfit created for the track “Whyte Tygre,” have added to the ever-more-confident live show. This summer, as the sun sets over the Atlanta skyline, Club Awesome will again be bringing the beach to the city.

www.myspace.com/clubawesome