The Skinny On Cortes & The Fat Amigos
Stephanie Cortes, lead vocals / rhythm guitar
In a sleepy suburban ghetto on the south side of San Francisco, a pretty Latin girl waits by the window. She smiles cheerfully out into the late afternoon sun as she waits for her band members to arrive. She walks back across the orange carpet and sits down on the silky vintage green flower couch and strums her guitar. Soon she hears the patter of feet clonking up the marble steps to her home.
“Dave,” she shouts as she opens the door and lets her band mate in. He walks in with his large guitar and they sit across from each other in her living room. Standing next to the computer of the tiny pink and orange room is Charley Gerritsen, vocalist and pianist. Next to him stands Stuart Braddock, bassist. Dave begins to strum his guitar and Charley, Stuart and Steph follow suit. The beats of music begin to come together as Steph catches onto Dave’s timing and Charley and Stuart join in. A melodic voice fills the room and somehow brings the lyrics and notes together.
Stephanie Cortes is the vocalist for San Francisco based rock band, “Cortes and the Fat Amigos.” “I just thought it was a funny name,” says band founder and leading amigo, Dave Hart. He began the band because he loves to play guitar and write songs.
Before Cortes joined the band they classified themselves as rock-a-billy, or rock with a bit of a country twang. Cortes noted that most of the songs were about real life and thus more “rock” than “a- billy.” Currently on the band’s Myspace page they describe their sound as ” A happy mash of Elliott Smith, My Bloody Valentine, Beatles and Johnny Cash…. or just some folky type rock stuff. Fast at time, slower when it needs to be.” Cortes began to embrace her love for music and the Beatles when she was 19-yearsold and found a guitar with in her grasp.
Steph even handed down her love of music to her younger sister.
Steph handed her sister, Sarah, who had just turned 17, a giant wrapped box.
“What is it,” her sister asked looking up at her with wide brown eyes.
“Open it!” Sarah sighed and pulled the box open. Inside she found a sleek black guitar. Steph looked at her sister longingly as she watched her hold the guitar and strum the chords. She remembered looking at the guitar on the shelf in Gelb music store and longing to play it.
“I looked at it, sitting there in the room, and it was calling to me,” Steph says nostalgically about the guitar. “I went to go make sure Sarah was gone and then I picked it up for the first time. I got the Beatles cover book and I tried to put my fingers on the chords and strum along, it didn’t really sound too good at first,” she says with a laugh. Cortes says that she grew up surrounded by music, first with her mom signing around the house and later at her parent’s music at their Saturday night ‘Canasta and Lasagna’ parties. She taught herself to play the guitar when she was 19-years-old and then began to write songs to express emotions.
“I love the Beatles, but at that time I had a boyfriend who hated the Beatles and he wouldn’t let me play the guitar, so I went one year without Beatles music until I couldn’t stand him anymore and we broke up. Then I played the guitar everyday after that,” she says. From Cortes’ broken relationship she developed the song, “flaws” and also began to embrace her singing talent. A few years later she met her band mate, Charley, and sang for the first time in public.
Her memory of her first performance starts with a tall blond man waiting for his singing partner to enter the chapel at the San Francisco Mormon church. She walks in and they practice the hymn, they are supposed to sing together, “Nearer my god to thee.” A few people walk in and watch them for a few minutes. They both nervously glance at each other.
“You ready for this Steph,” the man asks her. “I guess so, Charley.” The chapel begins to fill with hundreds of people. Steph can feel her heart begin to race as she looks down at the podium, then back to Charley as the music begins. She closes her eyes, pulls the Mic towards her and begins to sing. The notes of the hymn are powered by her angelic voice and the crowd is silent as they watch her and her band mate sing. A piano solo comes along and she glances at her hands, knowing that she will choke if she looks into the crowd. She closes her eye lids yet again and finds the courage to finish the song. A round of applause is accompanied by a rush of cool relief all over her body. She quickly walks off the stage and sits next to a friend whispering, “I can’t believe I just did that.”
Cortes and the Fat Amigos plan their debut to be sometime late this year, but for now they are content in their pursuit to sound like Belle and Sebastian, who happen to be the best band ever according to Cortes and Hart.
Echo Of Bullets
Near the gritty, broken sidewalk of San Francisco’s 8th and Brannan Streets, a tiny theater with colorful blue mural stands in a rickety wooden building under an interstate overpass.
Past parking lots filled with piles of scrap metal and recyclables is a small entrance into a snazzy artist’s spot. Inside, red walls filled with art lead into a darker space. All that can be seen under the dim lights are shadows of fans watching and softly cheering as a long electric-guitar chord wanes in the distance. The outline of a brown-hat brim appears, followed by a flash of a cherry-red drum set as the music begins to blare and a screaming voice shouts, ‘taus puso…’ Tagalog for, “from the heart.”
Echo of Bullets is a heavy-metal, punk-rock band with a message to spread about political killings going on in the Philippines. The band formed out of a mutual love for heavy-metal music between friends — Vallejo natives, vocalist, Rupert Estanisloa and, guitarist, Joshua Castro.
” When I was a 15-year-old, able to go to shows, I went with my friend Rupert. He came from the Philippines and was exposed to a life that was kind of rough. We reconnected some years later and decided that we should start a band and that it would be kind of cool to merge some of the elements about the music that we kind of like with heavy metal and to infuse it with very leftist revolutionary leftist politics,” says Castro, a tall medium toned Filipino American with dark eyes.
A small, tanned man with black hair and round eyes stands bundled up in a blue hoodie and jeans. He looks anxiously up Castro Street as he waits for bus number 24. He sniffles as he turns back and looks at the store behind him, Ritz Camera. He works there making more money than he could ever hope to make in the Philippines.
“I couldn’t get a job. Like the only job I could get was when I was 13 years old making yo-yos. They paid you 200 pesos a week and my meth dealer was also my boss so sometimes my paychecks would turn into drugs,” says Estanisloa, reflecting on his life in the Philippines, “I wish the Philippines was a place where you could get a job. But it’s just not like that.”
A crowded bus stops in front of Estanisloa. He sighs as the bus makes a hissing, decompressing noise and opens up its doors. He inches past the crowd of commuters spilling out of the bus and grabs hold of a metal pole as it begins to jerk down Castro Street.
He gets off at a nearby high school and walks across a puddle-splattered parking lot into a warm school building.
Sitting down he flips through the pages of a text book on unions.
Originally from the Philippines, Estanisloa saw violence and abject poverty first hand. He remembers playing on dirty streets with no sidewalks and watching rats make their way down canals filled with milky fluids. Out of those times of hardship, however, he also remembers the excitement he felt when going to see his favorite Filipino punk rock bands perform live. He now carries his passion for music along with his memories.
“A lot of the songs are influenced by what I have seen in the Philippines and how I grew up there. The rampant abuse of power, police brutality,” he says.
Echo of Bullets, along with a long list of progressive Filipino artists, is saying through their music that it is time to stop the political killings in the Philippines. The tour is called “Stop the Killings” and features live music along with clips and images of graphic brutality from the documentary and the band’s name sake, “Echo of Bullets.”
“Stop the killings is important because not only does it raise awarness on the crimes being committed but it also shows people that, dude, this is Filipino art in 2007,” Estanisloa said. “This is Filipino music in 2007.”
Eightfourseven: Kings Of The Road
The first thing I notice about the four members of the band Eightfourseven as they climbed out of bass player Anthony Sarti’s truck is all smiles and rough housing with these guys. That means after seven years as a band, three albums under their belts, countless shows and tours they booked themselves, these guys still love each other. Trust me, that’s a major accomplishment. We greet each other with warm handshakes against the backdrop of a very wet, gloomy and softly darkening Saturday evening. The windows of Café Roma in Davis are tented with condensation from hot steam and coffee brewing.
As Sarti and guitarist Sean Bivins order some of Café Roma’s delicious smelling brew. Vocalist/guitarist Lance Jackman and drummer Ben Conger plop down on a comfy-looking couch under Roma’s largest window.
“Dude, I don’t think I can get up!” Ben says laughing.
From the way Lance grins and nods, I can tell the couch doesn’t feel as ugly as it looks.
I’m at one of my favorite cafes, interviewing one of my favorite bands, in one of my favorite places in the world.
Tony and Sean return with their coffees. Lance and Ben pull themselves off the big, ugly-but-comfy couch and we start to talk around the two tables the guy playing PSP behind the counter should have cleaned off hours ago.
FRINGE: The first thing I have to say is that I’m a big fan of Eightforseven’s music. Your marriage of rock and electronica sounds very organic, while still being very powerful.
SEAN: That’s kinda what we were going for. We all grew up listening to bands with a lot of electronica in them. You want to be doing it, but the idea is you don’t want it to be so obvious that people go, “Hey… that was THAT,” while still making it good headphone music.
TONY: Basically, we don’t record anything we can’t pull off live. We try to make it (the programming) more of an instrument so you don’t end up with a dance record. And you don’t want to see a band live and they’re doing a terrible job of it, or you’re not hearing any of it. At the same time, our roots are heavy rock, so we bring that out, too.
FRINGE: The band’s music, lyrics and vocal melodies are great. Is writing something where you all come together around a big chalkboard and write things out? Or, do you build off of one person in the group?
SEAN: Each record we’ve done is a different experience. Our fi rst record “Everlasting” was like, “Here it is. Here’s the songs. Okay… cut. Paste.” As far as the vocals and everything, it was like each of us did our own separate thing and in the end just recorded. It was very much like going down a checklist and checking things off. The second album “Allegiance” was more experimental and the third one “Silent Raid” was a completely different process. It was more of an “everyone” idea.
BEN: It’s kind of a mixture of both. We started off basic. Someone would bring an element to the table, and then we’d feed off each other. We try not to dwell on things to long if it’s not coming together. Lance writes the lyrics himself, Tony will help with the melodies What’s cool is everyone is open to the ideas of everyone else. If Sean has idea for the bass, Tony will try it.
LANCE: With the last CD, we wrote all the music and then the vocals came last. Vocals are such a personal thing that you don’t want to show anyone until they’re done and fi t in the song. With playing guitar, if a note’s out of key, you just tune it. With vocals there’s no way of telling if it works until the songs done. You don’t want to look stupid. Even though I’ve known these guys for years, there is still a bit of insecurity, so you kind of want to do it on your own. With this last CD, I was being kind of neurotic about the vocals in that I wanted to do them on my own but I would run out of ideas and go to the guys and ask them what their ideas were. By the end, we were all working together. It worked really well that way.
FRINGE: Your new song, “Phantom Limb,” is going to be on the sound track of the upcoming movie “Pranksters.” How did you end up contributing a song to a movie?
TONY: I have a friend named Howard Gibson who was the lead actor in “Pranksters.” He told us the story line of the movie and we wrote a song for it using the mood of the story as a template. Howard gave it to the director and he liked it. I’m guessing if the song wasn’t good it wouldn’t be on the sound track, so we got lucky.
FRINGE: You guys are starting a tour of Southern California on Feb. 15 at The Prospector in Long Beach, continuing at least though Apr. 12 at the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth. As an indie band, with no label support, one would think an undertaking like a tour, even a small one, would be next to impossible. Is it? Do you ever end up playing the wrong type of club to the wrong type of crowd?
LANCE: We haven’t run into that for a while. For a long time we would play anywhere and everywhere. Now we are more focused and know where we want to go and what we trying to do.
FRINGE: In hindsight, do you wish you did the first shows differently? Or, would you say that you have to do your first few shows anywhere you can, a trial by fire that all bands must go though?
BEN: I think it’s crucial for any band to do that, if only for the fact that you have test the waters everywhere. You’ll never know how people are going to respond until you try it on them. Some places, the response was negative, and some places it was positive. The most important thing is to strengthen the bond of the band by going though both of those things. If you’re having fun with it no matter what, you know you’re going to stick with it. It happens to even the best bands: Horrible shows, shows where no one’s there, it’s just you and the other band. Whatever. You have to go out of town sooner or later, and every band has to go though it.
SEAN: And you’re not going to know if it’s a good show until you’ve done some bad ones, a slew of them.
BEN: Yeah. You can play a bunch of good shows and then play one that you think is horribly bad, until you play one that’s even worse. Then, in hindsight, you realize that the “horribly bad” show wasn’t really all that bad. That’s all part of being in a band. If you pick the wrong town, or the wrong club, you still have to do your best and try to make connections.
At least one person in the crowd is going to like you and tell you about a club you’d fit in better at.
SEAN: The advice we get from every band we know — the ones who’ve made it, didn’t make it, whatever — is you have to go out there and play. You have to look at this as a business if you want to be heard. To sell your CD’s you have to market them, and the only marketing platform you have is playing shows. That’s the only way to get experience, to meet people and make connections, to raise your band visibility. You can’t think of it as playing to the wrong crowds or playing bad shows. You have to think of it as you’re doing what you love and your doing it the best you can. As long as your doing that, doing what you find to be honest and not trying to copy someone else, that’s the best thing you can do.
You can check out Eightfourseven out on the Web at www.eightfourseven.com or www.myspace.com/eightfourseven. You can also find them at eightfourseven. com/itunes for your MP3 player.
