Post by Kari on Jan 20, 2006 9:12:31 GMT -5
Inside Bay Area
Marty Casey: Runner-up comes away with a pretty good deal
By Tom Lanham, CONTRIBUTOR
Article Last Updated: 01/20/2006 05:44:00 AM
HANGING OUT with his chum in a Hollywood pub recently, Marty Casey was feeling on top of the world. While new bar buddies bought him drink after drink, he savored the moment, then stepped outside for a cigarette. One puff later, all hell broke loose and his cloak of cool disappeared.
As Casey recalls the moment, it felt like a full-tilt SWAT team had descended on the joint. "They nabbed us," he admits. "And it was a very black evening. They gave us hell. They were like, 'You've got this exciting opportunity. Why would you want to screw it up?'"
"They" are reality-TV impresario Mark Burnett and the dozens of staffers he'd sent out searching for Casey and J.D. Fortune, two singers who'd gone AWOL from last year's "Rock Star: INXS" tapings.
"Mark was so angry, and the producers were furious and wanted to throw J.D. and Marty off the show," says INXS guitarist Tim Farriss, who'd conceived the series to find a replacement for late frontman Michael Hutchence. "But how we secretly felt was 'Excellent! This is what we're looking for!' Right then, it became clear that these were our two guys."
True enough — the 15 contestants were whittled down to the prison-break duo. And although Casey lost the battle to Fortune, he won another: Not only were he and his Chicago combo Lovehammers offered a deal with INXS's label Epic afterwards ("Marty Casey and Lovehammers" hits stores Tuesday), they were also invited to open the band's current world tour.
Why did Casey and cohort break the "Rock Star" directive to stay sequested on a multi-million-dollar mansion in the Hollywood hills?
"Me and J.D. figured that it was something we kind of wanted to prove to INXS," says. "We wanted
to do it, just to say we did it, and we actually thought that they'd think it was funny."
How did Casey make his escape? It wasn't easy. "We had to jump the wall, and it probably took us 45 minutes to get out. Then we just ran down the big old hill and eventually found a bar and just hung out. Hung out for as long as it took them to find us. And they had over a hundred people scouting for us, looking everywhere in the neighborhood just to find our asses. But we couldn't believe we were actually out. It was the only second we weren't under someone's thumb."
Getting into the competition proved almost as difficult. Casey — a thin blond with a rowdy shouter's rasp — dutifully showed up at Chicago "Rock Star" auditions last year, strumming his acoustic and snarling Lovehammers anthems like "Trees" (first premiered on the show, now his album's kickoff single).
Sorry, shrugged the judges. INXS needed a singer, not a guitarist. Undaunted, he returned the next day, snuck onto the set, and warbled an a cappella version of INXS's "Listen Like Thieves," he says. "And I went ballistic on it, just kind of showed them what I had."
That was just round one. He also had to enroll via DVD, then jet out to Santa Monica for a grueling nine-day trial for Burnett, the band and host Dave Navarro.
It wasn't a heavenly matchup. The kid started slow, with the band and Navarro repeatedly reprimanding him for his gale-force belting. But gradually, he won them over.
His most difficult assignment was not, as you'd expect, his delicate take on Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," which finally tipped the scales in his favor. No, Casey grumbles, "It was the Britney Spears song, '... Baby One More Time.' I knew if I f—ed up the Britney song on a reality show, it would've destroyed any hope for a career afterwards. Because that would've been my calling card. So I didn't let my guard down on that. I went really moody with it and it worked."
What did Casey learn from old pros INXS? Restraint, for one thing. He used to equate a good song performance with "going crazy onstage." He now knows differently.
"You can have the same range of emotions by just a vocal delivery, and that was a big moment for me," he says. "Trust that your voice is going to connect with people, don't rely on tricks and lights and pyrotechnics. Trust that your voice is compelling enough to move people. You really don't need anything else."
Casey's crooning is smartly reined, but rippling with fire on "Lovehammers," in Bic-flicking ballads like "Clouds" and "Casualty," and the arena-rawk rumblers "Tunnel," "Straight as an Arrow" and a playfully singalong "Trees."
"So I think everything turned out quite perfectly," he says, adding, "J.D. loves that band, I mean loves them. And that's not necessarily the way I feel about the band. I mean, it's in his blood, whereas I've been in a band, I write my own music, and I have a whole different trajectory."
A trajectory that led Casey to the same Los Angeles pub as Fortune on that fateful night. Farriss has some fitting final words on that escapade. "Rock Star" entrants were kept in a bubble, he says, with no TV, radio, newspapers or Internet. No one had any idea how their performances were being received: "So Marty and J.D. get to this bar, and all these guys are going 'Hey, man, can I buy you a drink?' And they were both thinking 'Wow! We're already famous from the show!' Turns out, it was a gay bar, but they didn't know that. They just wanted to go to a bar, and they couldn't figure out why all these men kept coming up with compliments!"
Marty Casey: Runner-up comes away with a pretty good deal
By Tom Lanham, CONTRIBUTOR
Article Last Updated: 01/20/2006 05:44:00 AM
HANGING OUT with his chum in a Hollywood pub recently, Marty Casey was feeling on top of the world. While new bar buddies bought him drink after drink, he savored the moment, then stepped outside for a cigarette. One puff later, all hell broke loose and his cloak of cool disappeared.
As Casey recalls the moment, it felt like a full-tilt SWAT team had descended on the joint. "They nabbed us," he admits. "And it was a very black evening. They gave us hell. They were like, 'You've got this exciting opportunity. Why would you want to screw it up?'"
"They" are reality-TV impresario Mark Burnett and the dozens of staffers he'd sent out searching for Casey and J.D. Fortune, two singers who'd gone AWOL from last year's "Rock Star: INXS" tapings.
"Mark was so angry, and the producers were furious and wanted to throw J.D. and Marty off the show," says INXS guitarist Tim Farriss, who'd conceived the series to find a replacement for late frontman Michael Hutchence. "But how we secretly felt was 'Excellent! This is what we're looking for!' Right then, it became clear that these were our two guys."
True enough — the 15 contestants were whittled down to the prison-break duo. And although Casey lost the battle to Fortune, he won another: Not only were he and his Chicago combo Lovehammers offered a deal with INXS's label Epic afterwards ("Marty Casey and Lovehammers" hits stores Tuesday), they were also invited to open the band's current world tour.
Why did Casey and cohort break the "Rock Star" directive to stay sequested on a multi-million-dollar mansion in the Hollywood hills?
"Me and J.D. figured that it was something we kind of wanted to prove to INXS," says. "We wanted
to do it, just to say we did it, and we actually thought that they'd think it was funny."
How did Casey make his escape? It wasn't easy. "We had to jump the wall, and it probably took us 45 minutes to get out. Then we just ran down the big old hill and eventually found a bar and just hung out. Hung out for as long as it took them to find us. And they had over a hundred people scouting for us, looking everywhere in the neighborhood just to find our asses. But we couldn't believe we were actually out. It was the only second we weren't under someone's thumb."
Getting into the competition proved almost as difficult. Casey — a thin blond with a rowdy shouter's rasp — dutifully showed up at Chicago "Rock Star" auditions last year, strumming his acoustic and snarling Lovehammers anthems like "Trees" (first premiered on the show, now his album's kickoff single).
Sorry, shrugged the judges. INXS needed a singer, not a guitarist. Undaunted, he returned the next day, snuck onto the set, and warbled an a cappella version of INXS's "Listen Like Thieves," he says. "And I went ballistic on it, just kind of showed them what I had."
That was just round one. He also had to enroll via DVD, then jet out to Santa Monica for a grueling nine-day trial for Burnett, the band and host Dave Navarro.
It wasn't a heavenly matchup. The kid started slow, with the band and Navarro repeatedly reprimanding him for his gale-force belting. But gradually, he won them over.
His most difficult assignment was not, as you'd expect, his delicate take on Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," which finally tipped the scales in his favor. No, Casey grumbles, "It was the Britney Spears song, '... Baby One More Time.' I knew if I f—ed up the Britney song on a reality show, it would've destroyed any hope for a career afterwards. Because that would've been my calling card. So I didn't let my guard down on that. I went really moody with it and it worked."
What did Casey learn from old pros INXS? Restraint, for one thing. He used to equate a good song performance with "going crazy onstage." He now knows differently.
"You can have the same range of emotions by just a vocal delivery, and that was a big moment for me," he says. "Trust that your voice is going to connect with people, don't rely on tricks and lights and pyrotechnics. Trust that your voice is compelling enough to move people. You really don't need anything else."
Casey's crooning is smartly reined, but rippling with fire on "Lovehammers," in Bic-flicking ballads like "Clouds" and "Casualty," and the arena-rawk rumblers "Tunnel," "Straight as an Arrow" and a playfully singalong "Trees."
"So I think everything turned out quite perfectly," he says, adding, "J.D. loves that band, I mean loves them. And that's not necessarily the way I feel about the band. I mean, it's in his blood, whereas I've been in a band, I write my own music, and I have a whole different trajectory."
A trajectory that led Casey to the same Los Angeles pub as Fortune on that fateful night. Farriss has some fitting final words on that escapade. "Rock Star" entrants were kept in a bubble, he says, with no TV, radio, newspapers or Internet. No one had any idea how their performances were being received: "So Marty and J.D. get to this bar, and all these guys are going 'Hey, man, can I buy you a drink?' And they were both thinking 'Wow! We're already famous from the show!' Turns out, it was a gay bar, but they didn't know that. They just wanted to go to a bar, and they couldn't figure out why all these men kept coming up with compliments!"
. It seems like there are more stories we have not heard before and of course, can't get enough of. ;D 
I have a feeling there was an 'in joke' somewhere in Marty's interviews.