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There is a Hanson mention in this article about why Ugly Phil left his popular Hot 30 Countdown-
“It became all-consuming. I was tired of doing the Hot30. I was like, ‘Hey, I’m 37 years old and I’m mates with the guys from Hanson who are 15. I’m too old for this’.”
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Jimmy LaFave. Photo provided
From red dirt music trailblazers to a platinum-selling sibling trio, the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame will induct seven diverse acts in its 2017 class.
This year’s inductees include red dirt music pioneer and recent recipient of theinaugural Restless Spirit Award Jimmy LaFave (who recently revealed that he has terminal cancer); the late country music singer and songwriter Carl Belew; “Hee Haw” musician and actor Rodney Lay; red dirt music torchbearers the Red Dirt Rangers; Grammy Award-winning musician David Teegarden Sr.; singer and harmonica player Jimmy “Junior” Markham; and pop-rock trio Hanson.
The Muskogee-based Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame will host a celebratory concert and induction ceremony in June at Hatbox Field prior to the second annual G Fest Muskogee music festival. The event will feature performances by many of the honored artists.
The induction will be at the Hangar at Hatbox Field at 7 p.m. June 14. The ceremonial video bios will begin at 8 p.m. An after-party with the Tulsa Playboys is set for 10 p.m.
The induction is a separate, ticketed event from the festival; however, all G Fest three-day ticketholders and volunteers are invited to the after-party.
VIP tickets are $75 and include seating for the induction ceremony, hors d’oeuvres and after-party admission. VIP tables with seating for eight are $500. For tickets and information, go to omhof.com.
The celebration comes in advance of the second annual G Fest Muskogee music festival, which takes over Hatbox Field on multiple stages June 15-17. As previously reported, NEEDTOBREATHE, Blackberry Smoke, Creedence Clearwater Revisited, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Kentucky Headhunters, The Mavericks, California Honeydrops, The Swon Brothers, John Fullbright, Leon: The Tribute (Leon Russell Tribute Show) and more are scheduled to play the festival.
While the rest of the 2017 class will be honored at the June 14 Muskogee event, Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame Executive Director Jim Paul Blair tells me that Hanson will be inducted in a separate ceremony Sunday during the band’s fourth annual Hop Jam craft beer and music festival in the historic Brady Arts District of their hometown of Tulsa. For more information on Hop Jam, go to www.thehopjam.com.
In the past, the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame has similarly honored Kings of Leon and Journey rocker Neal Schon during their state tour dates. Blair says the separate ceremony Sunday will allow the hall to recognize the busy Hanson brothers – Isaac, Taylor and Zac – during their 25th anniversary year.
As previously reported, Hanson will launch its extensive “Middle Of Everywhere 25th Anniversary World Tour” at Hop Jam and spend much of June touring Europe and the U.K. before returning to play through the United States in the fall.
-BAM
The words “full circle” were spoken often during a group interview with the brothers from Hanson.
Let’s get some business out of the way before explaining.
Near the end of a lengthy chat session, Isaac, Taylor and Zac Hanson were asked what message they most wanted to communicate to the public.
Without hesitation, Taylor said, “The Hop Jam is here to stay, and it’s here because we feel like it’s part of the future of Tulsa and what Tulsa is trying to be.”
The Hop Jam is a fourth-year beer and music festival that will take place Sunday, May 21, in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District. The festival was created in 2014 by the brothers, co-founders of pop-rock trio Hanson and Hanson Brothers Beer Co.
Hanson will headline the 2017 Hop Jam and, in doing so, will christen a 25th anniversary tour that will take the Tulsa-based trio around the world. More than 25 foreign and U.S. tour stops are sold out, according to hanson.net.
Prior to globetrotting will come The Hop Jam, a free-music, all-ages festival featuring performances by Hanson and other bands. The festival is divided into two areas — a 21-and-older craft beer area and the all-ages area. Purchase of a beer ticket or designated driver ticket are required for entrance to the beer festival. Beer and music VIP tickets are available at thehopjam.com.
Attendees will be a witness to Hanson coming — here come those words — full circle.
Hanson was formed in 1992. The band’s first “proper” gig was at Mayfest, which was held in the Brady Arts District in ’92. Isaac said there were about 10 people at the debut performance. Half of the 10 were family members, chimed in one of his brothers.
“Here we are in the same neighborhood literally a block and a half — actually not even a block and a half — from where we did our first show 25 years ago,” Isaac said.
But this time, the crowd will be in the thousands.
“So here you are, you are looking out at a great crowd of people who are there to have a good time, and you are able to be the person giving them that good time and giving them encouragement and so on,” Isaac said. “It feels extra cool to have that full-circle element of 25 years ago there were 10 people. And, now, look at this.”
The full-circle journey will include a special honor. It was announced Monday that Hanson is being inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame. Jim Blair, Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame executive director, will be present to induct Hanson at The Hop Jam. An on-stage ceremony will take place before Hanson performs.
Hanson didn’t just venture forth into the world to share Tulsa-born music (“Mmmbop” and the album “Middle of Nowhere” exploded onto the scene 20 years ago). Hanson invested in downtown Tulsa by setting up a headquarters down the street from Cain’s Ballroom and by creating The Hop Jam.
“Tulsa is part of our story,” Taylor said. “And about 10 years ago, we really decided to double down on being in this neighborhood and saying if we are going to be here, we want to be a part of it.”
The Hop Jam was launched with the intent of cultivating the city’s future. Perhaps the craft beer movement can be a part of that future. Zac, noting that Hanson’s HQ has a Main Street address, said, “Beer is Main Street, right?”
Zac said he has noticed something different about The Hop Jam this year. In years past, he would see people in the community and they would ask “So are you guys doing The Hop Jam this year?” Now what he hears is, “I’m coming to The Hop Jam.”
“I think it’s cool to see the festival has made a transition where people are not only expecting it, they are planning to be there and they are identifying with it,” Zac said.
And that’s what you hope for, according to Taylor. He wants Tulsans to take ownership in The Hop Jam. He wants Tulsans to feel like the festival celebrates them. There’s a reason why the stage is set up with the downtown skyline as a backdrop.
“It’s a lot cheaper to go to a field somewhere and set up a bunch of tents and put on an event,” he said. “But the long-term (aim) of The Hop Jam is we want to create a picture of the future. We want to create a postcard that allows people to say, ‘Live from Tulsa, live from downtown, this is happening.’
“It’s a little more complex to do that, but it’s so much more fun when, at the end of the weekend, we know that we haven’t just had a great event that we feel really proud of, that brought people to Tulsa. But we also feel like we can look around the neighborhood and people are going, ‘I had the best weekend. I had a great time. … This is a great thing for Tulsa.’ ”
Mike Cameron said his band, Count Tutu, plays politically charged funk music.
“Probably the best way to describe it is James Brown meets Rage Against the Machine,” he said.
That’s not a combination you hear every day, but it’s a combination that will greet attendees to The Hop Jam, a craft beer and music festival that will take place Sunday, May 21, in the Brady Arts District.
Hanson will headline the fourth annual Hop Jam. Count Tutu will christen the fourth-year festival because the Tulsa-based band won the Awesome Music Opening Band Contest, co-presented by the Tulsa World, the Woody Guthrie Center and OKPOP.
A great selection of wide-ranging artists entered the contest, but Taylor Hanson said he loves that Count Tutu will open Hop Jam because the band is incredibly eclectic, incredibly energetic and has a diverse sound.
“I really love their sound and I think it’s a great reflection of the event itself to kick off with such a high energy and original Tulsa band,” he said.
“There is a lot of great stuff in this town, and these guys are a great example of what you’ve got brewing in the city,” Isaac Hanson said.
Playing the Main Stage at Hop Jam will introduce Count Tutu to a big audience. The big moment was 10 years in the making.
Count Tutu wasn’t formed until July 2015, but the seed to create a band like this was planted in 2007. That’s when Cameron got his first exposure to afrobeat music (“which is our main influence”) while visiting Paris.
“I went to a pretty small club and there was this huge band,” he said. “There were probably 10 to 13 people on stage. And they were singing in French and English and every song was politically charged.”
Cameron, a saxophone player, was accustomed to just operating his instrument while performing. But he was impressed that everyone in the band, even the horn players, were being vocal in that little Paris club.
“Everybody was singing on stage and everyone was just like dripping with sweat and it was really the coolest performance I had ever seen, and they were singing in French and English, which was so awesome,” he said.
Cameron said he has wanted to form a band like Count Tutu ever since he moved back to Tulsa from Chicago in 2008. The pieces, and there are a lot of them, fell into place two years ago.
Count Tutu has 11 members. Make it an even dozen. A guest singer, Delaney Z of the band Smoochie Wallus, will join Count Tutu on stage at Hop Jam.
Cameron said the gig will be a little bit intimidating but said he doesn’t feel too uncomfortable because he is confident in the musicians in the band.
“They are all people I have been playing with for a number of years,” he said.
The band owes its name to a mash-up of Count Basie, a jazz legend, and Desmond Tutu, the South African social rights activist. Get ready for music with a message. Count Tutu songs tackle issues like gun control and the exploitation of people by health insurance companies.
Cameron said Rage Against the Machine was one of his favorite bands of the 1990s. Rage Against the Machine had something to say about events of that era. Cameron respected that and still listens to the band.
Cameron said Count Tutu is trying to get involved in more local happenings to raise awareness about issues that are important to the band.
Voters chose Count Tutu as Hop Jam’s opening band. Oklahoma artists had until April 17 to register for the contest by posting video of a live performance. The Hop Jam team selected 12 finalists before voting was opened to the public.
“We can’t wait,” Cameron said. “We’re really humbled that enough of our fans have voted for us.”
Isaac said that Ed’s chords don’t change, his melodies do.
During the Inside the Album panel, what toy did Mark Hudson say Zac was playing with during the making of Middle of Nowhere?
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The Tulsa-based pop-rock trio Hanson, which is celebrating a 25th anniversary this year, has something new to celebrate: Hanson will be inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame during The Hop Jam.
The Hop Jam is a beer and music festival scheduled May 21 in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District. Hanson is headlining the festival. The induction will take place on stage prior to Hanson’s performance.
Jim Blair, the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame’s executive director, will present brothers Isaac, Taylor and Zac Hanson with their award after a video is shown to the audience.
Last week, Hanson’s debut album, Middle of Nowhere, turned 20, which is easily the most important birthday of 2017.
That’s because, despite their current ties to wayback playbacks and old-school DJ nights, Hanson have been consistently creating music since the mid-’90s. Lest we forget that the brothers dropped Boomerang in 1995, delivered a compilation album at the end of last year, and palled around with Tegan and Sara last week (on top of releasing live, original, and compilation records every few years). Ultimately, Hanson have transcended the idea of boy bands as we know them. Even though they don’t (and didn’t) have to, because boy bands aren’t a bad thing.
“Boy band” has been used as a pejorative since pop music birthed the first one as fans were painted with the same tired and boring brush. To outsiders of a particular subculture, fans couldn’t just enjoy music or bask in the excitement of seeing an act they loved. So, as a means of dismissing that experience, they were quickly looked down on and judged by adults who’d lost touch with their own ability to sincerely love a group or act.
Which was ironic, since, without fans, young male pop groups like Hanson or the Backstreet Boys or even One Direction would never have exploded. Without the screaming young women in the audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater, The Beatles’ impact on America would’ve been largely toned down. Without the fans who filled arenas to see New Kids on the Block in the ’80s, “The Right Stuff” would’ve been just the title of a (very good) 1983 film. And without Hanson’s existing fan base, Middle of Nowhere’s anniversary would be merely a reminder of how old we’ve all gotten—and not a testament to the fact that a career spanning decades is a massive feat. (Which is more massive still when you remember that they haven’t gone anywhere.)
The thing is, Hanson is a testament to how outdated the concept of a boy band is, and not just because Taylor, Zac, and Isaac are grown-ass men with children. Genre aside, they’re just three brothers who perform in the same act and write original music while playing their own instruments. Had they and their fan base been a little older (or come of age in 2017, when genre is a fair distance from demographic), the trio would’ve been categorized as a band, and that’s it. But thanks to their own ages and the ages of their fans, they were categorized among the acts who courted the same audiences, and that created the boy band umbrella of the ’90s.
Around the same time Middle of Nowhere was released, if you were a guy who made music that younger girls liked, you were in a boy band by default. And because the decade was unique in boasting so many male acts who aggressively sang about their feelings, any group associated with that time became forever rooted in nostalgia. And that’s why Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Boyzone, Take That, and O-Town (plus more—so many more) seem to celebrate their legacies with throwback photos, reunions, and Las Vegas residencies. Hanson, however—regardless of how many covers of “MMMBop” they deliver—never really have. Unlike their contemporaries, they’ve continued to release new music and to evolve as artists. Which further exempts them from the ’90s boy band norm.
But that said, it’s a disservice to dismiss any act under the guise of a being boy band or not. True, Hanson is arguably much more of a traditional band, but the differences between them and their choreographed brethren do not negate the lasting effects either had on their audiences. To millions of people, Hanson (and BSB and *NSYNC) made a huge impact. And while one group used instruments and the other used dance moves, it’s still unfair to infer that either is more important or less than.
Which is what the “boy band” label tends to do. When we call Hanson a boy band, we stunt them because “boy band” also connotes there’s a shelf life. Add to this the fact that boy bands are largely affiliated with younger female audiences (as if that’s a bad thing), and the group’s credibility is limited to being a flash in the pop pan. And that isn’t the case. Hanson’s survived more than 20 years in the industry, and that’s a big deal.
Just like boy bands. Because while it’s easy for grown-ups or critics without an imagination to sweep an act under the rug based on what they themselves don’t understand; namely that music would be bleak as hell without boy band pioneers like The Beatles, The Jackson 5, Wham!, Boyz II Men, and One Direction. Or, as I think we can just call them, “bands.”
Tulsa-based pop-rock trio Hanson, which is celebrating a 25th anniversary this year, has something new to celebrate: Hanson will be inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame during The Hop Jam.
The Hop Jam is a beer and music festival scheduled Sunday in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District. Hanson is headlining the festival. The induction will take place on stage prior to Hanson’s performance.
Jim Blair, Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame executive director, will present brothers Isaac, Taylor and Zac Hanson with their award after a video is shown to the audience.
“We’ve been wanting to get these guys inducted for some time now, and we thought how fitting it would be to happen on the band’s 25th anniversary, as well as The Hop Jam Beer and Music Festival established by Hanson in 2014,” Blair said.
Reacting to the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame news, Taylor Hanson said it’s a great milestone to be honored alongside many others who have made an impact musically from this state.
“We are so appreciative of that recognition,” he said. “It’s extra sweet to be here, 25 years in, to get recognized as having contributed to Oklahoma music. We are just really humbled by it and just really proud to be among so many great artists that have come before us.”
Founded in 1992, Hanson was launched when the brothers in the band were ages 11, 9 and 6, respectively.
Influenced by 1950s and ’60s music, Hanson cites some of its inspiration as coming from greats like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, The Beatles, Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. That contributed greatly in developing a signature sound that incorporated strong melodies and song craft, as well as a reverence for its musical forefathers.
