>>PREVIEW
THE BOSSHOSS
Monday, March 19
Broken City
No, a 10-gallon hat doesn’t make a cowboy, and the reality of ranching’s no more glamorous than tossing hay bales and wading through mud. Then again, when acting like drunken cowboy caricatures is an annual Calgary tradition, who’s to say who does and does not get to play pretend?
Sascha Vollmer’s real name isn’t Hoss Power, and despite the wife beater and cowboy hat, he’s not from the American West either. Along with Boss Burns (Alec Völkel), he’s one of the two front men for a seven-piece German rockabilly cover band with a penchant for pop, rap and pseudonyms like "Russ T. Nail" and "Hank Doodle." What’s more, he makes no bones about what he does – it’s a joke and he’s having fun with it.
Vollmer has been rocking out with German panache for the last 18 years, but at 35 years of age, his biggest success so far has been The BossHoss, a cowboy-clad, Texas twanged concept that began with a few scattered studio sessions just for fun and an escalating series of party gigs. Covering songs like OutKast’s "Hey Ya!," Aretha Franklin’s "Say a Little Prayer," and Cameo’s "Word Up," Vollmer freely admits that, aside from Johnny Cash and a few other popular names, The BossHoss aren’t really country fans, just a group of seasoned musicians who like to put their particular spin on familiar pop music.
The Stetsons, whisky and skin-tight T-shirts are expected accessories for any red-blooded cowboy – "the cliché things," Vollmer calls them. Even if the average American isn’t chain-smoking onstage with a bottle of whisky, he adds, "we thought it’s pretty cool."
That esthetic was enough to carry The BossHoss from the studio to international touring inside of three years, considerable success for a band based on the simple idea that country music looks almost as cool as it is ridiculous. Though he toured internationally with his previous band, Hot Boogie Chilin (an homage to "Boogie Chillin" by Johnny Lee Hooker), Vollmer isn’t at all bitter that his success finally came with a novelty act. He’s just amused to find that refusing to take the music seriously turned out to be the best career move he’d ever made.
"I’ve tried to send out demo tapes with other bands and I tried hard before, too," he says, "but with BossHoss we didn’t even send out one demo tape to a record company, never wanted to make a band out of it. Three years ago if you had told me we would make our living out of it, I never would have believed you."
With their third album scheduled for release in the spring, Vollmer’s hoping that the band’s gradual movement away from the straight camp of Internashville Urban Hymns will keep the band’s momentum going, even if the joke’s had three years to play out. Trying to create what he calls "rock ’n’ roll with a hat on," Vollmer is optimistic about the prospects of his posse of German cowboys.
"It doesn’t worry me," he says. "It’s good at the moment, but we also know that the same joke even for us isn’t funny anymore, or not as funny as it was, so it’s very important to develop."
"We don’t like Britney Spears or her music," he adds, alluding to the band’s cover of "Toxic" on their first album. "We picked the song because we thought that’s funny to do a version of a shit song in our style, but as I said the joke is done so we weren’t about to do another Britney Spears song on the second."
Even with the band’s transition, The BossHoss’s live shows are still driven by manic absurdity and seven Germans with fake American accents and the wardrobes to match. Their style, after all, is what carries the band, and even coming from across the Atlantic Ocean, they couldn’t have found a better place for it.
Break out the belt buckles and freshly purchased cowboy hats, Calgary. Let’s show these German boys how real fake cowboys roll. |
Copyright ©2007 FFWD. All rights reserved.