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May 2006 -
No Strings
Attached wins a WAMI for Best Wisconsin Acoustic Act
at the 26th Annual WAMI Awards Show! |
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 Here's
what Milwaukee's 97.3 FM, The Brew, has to say about Bad Boy
on their web site home page:
"97.3 THE BREW & THE BAND
THAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS"
"No other band that we play
has generated more e-mails and phone calls than
Milwaukee's own Bad Boy.
The legendary Brew City rockers are alive and well and
heard only here on The Brew! We have gotten thousands
of requests for their songs and info on where you can
find their music. Check out the
Bad Boy website to get all their album releases
plus stay tuned to the Brew for upcoming Bad Boy tour
stop information."
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In 2004, No
Strings Attached was WAMI award nominated for New
Group/Artist of the Year. |
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In 2003, the Bad Boy album "We Should've Been Dead
by Now" was WAMI award nominated for Best Album of the
Year. |
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Bad Boy has
been inducted into the Wisconsin Area Music Industry
(WAMI) Hall of Fame. |
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 "Reputation
is a Fragile Thing" "The story of Cheap Trick" by Mike
Hayes with Ken Sharp. A great book that includes a
section that talks all about Xeno's time with Cheap Trick
along with some pics. Amongst other things, you can
learn how Xeno inspired the bands name and why he decided
to leave Cheap Trick to front the trend setting
Minneapolis group "Straight Up".
From the Book:
"We rehearsed in the garage over at
Rick's parents' home. We had some really long, intensive
rehearsals. I remember Rick standing next to me
playing this Mark Farner kind of diddly diddly guitar riff,
old Grand Funk Railroad. I turned to him and said,
"Hey, that's a cheap trick." And he turns to me and
said, "Hey, that's a great name for a band." He said
to me that very same day "we're going to call you Xeno and
spell it with an x", and I went "fine", now I have a stage
name."
...."Rick and Bun E. had been to Europe and they were very
familiar with hit songs in England which were not well
known here", added Xeno. "We did a lot of those kind of
songs, stuff like "Sour Milk Sea" by Jackie Lomax....One
of our promo photos which shows me wearing a black hat,
and Bun E. dressed in a kind of mink coat, was taken in
Bun E.'s parents' back yard. At that time, we were
going for a kind of glam look. We recorded some
original songs. One track was "Hot Tomato".
Bits and pieces of everything we did in those days is on
an album somewhere. Rick used it later."
...Xeno remembered some of the more obscure material
featured in the Cheap Trick sets of the early
seventies:.... "The original songs came later. But
funny enough, a lot of what we played people thought were
original songs. For instance, we did "Do Ya" which nobody
had heard yet. We did "Do You Feel Like We Do" by
Frampton's Camel. I played mellotron on that,
believe it or not. ... You've got to remember, this is '73,
'74. I was a rock and roll singer in those days, a
lot of high notes, very soulful, gritty, bluesy, very
influenced by Steve Marriott, Robert Plant, Bob Trench.
...."I very much wanted to do a theatrical thing. I
moved to Minneapolis and joined a band there called
Straight Up. This was 1974. We did live video,
recorded video, costume changes, all these special
effects, we did quite a live show." "Xeno left
voluntarily," confirmed Nielsen. "He got an
opportunity to play with a band making two hundred and
fifty bucks a week, and we were never near there. |
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City Pages
VOL 19 #935
. PUBLISHED
11/4/98
FROM FLANNEL TO GLITTER
by
Peter S. Scholtes
...
But many fans of the current glam crop don't know that the
Twin Cities produced its own bona fide glam band well
before the music's mid-'80s hair-metal revival or Prince's
purple reign. In fact, Minnesota's glam roots can be
traced to 1973, when Cheap Trick's first singer, Xeno,
left the Illinois-based power-pop group to join a
Minneapolis theater-rock outfit called Straight Up.
Speaking
via telephone from
Milwaukee,
the singer remembers playing First Avenue with Cheap Trick
in '73, when the club was still called Uncle Sam's.
"That's where I first met Straight Up," he says. "They
showed up in a white limo and offered me $250 a week if I
joined their band, which was a lot for a 21-year-old
single guy." ..."We were all dressed up like sluts,"
laughs Xeno. "You'd wear your glittery clothes, some
makeup, some scarves, and that's how you went onstage."
But
Straight Up took its Bowie-inspired theatrics far more
seriously, and when Xeno joined, he found himself
rehearsing and choreographing carny-style skits and stunts
that would make even Kiss blush. With the help of
production manager Paul Stark, who went on to co-found
Twin/Tone Records, the band learned to make artificial
snow for a song called "Freezin' Slowly." They also added
video backdrops, smoke bombs, and shooting flames to their
show, which toured to sold-out clubs and ballrooms
throughout the region.
Local rock
fans remember other stunts: For one outdoor show, Xeno was
lowered onto the stage from a helicopter.
"There
were times when I would be raised on a swing to the
ceiling and scream, 'Oh, no!' and let loose a mannequin
that looked like me," he says. "It would fall down and
bombs would go off and that would be the end of the show.
I miss doing that sort of thing."
Straight
Up did have a lasting impact on the music landscape.
Besides catapulting Xeno into a life of rock 'n' roll--he
enjoyed a long run as front man for Milwaukee's legendary
Bad Boy--it also gave an artist soon to be known as Yanni
his first keyboard gig in a band. |
This page was last updated on
06/08/06
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