!!!: Local Band Gone International Returns for Sacramento 'Launch' Festival

Sacramento's fast-growing music and arts festival, Launch, is in full swing, and !!! (pronounced "Chk Chk Chk") , a band whose founding members hail from the Orangevale, Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova areas, is helping boost the festival's prominence with local and international appeal.

!!! hasn't been back to Sacramento for a few years. In its time away, the band released its fourth album, Strange Weather, Isn't It in 2010 and is nearing completion on its next album due out soon. Founding member, guitarist and Orangevale native Mario Andreoni credits the town he grew up in as a major influencer in the band's sound, which weaves electric disco funk and punk grooves with rapturous, at times bombastic, beats. 

The band's return to Sacramento couldn't have come at a more crucial time, said Launch creator Michael Hargis. Sacramento's evolving and emerging music and art scene has had to time to blossom, he explained. Bringing !!! back to Sacramento, a band that has toured the world with acclaimed bands like LCD Soundsystem and Rapture, only helps increase exposure to the event and to the city's increasingly talented creative pool. 

"The energy that has been behind the event is awesome, and I think people this year get what we're trying to do not just as an event for the city, and when people start to understand that, they start to rally behind it," Hargis said. "To me it's so much more than an event, it's really about the city of Sacramento."

Launch, the brainchild of Hargis, began Monday, July 23 and extends through the weekend, culminating in an all-day music and art festival in Cesar Chavez Park. Along with other major headliners like Canadian electro pop duo Chromeo and Sacramento native instrumental hip-hop pioneer DJ Shadow, !!! will help rocket Launch to levels Sacramento's music scene seldom sees. Hargis explained it really takes the people of a city to make an event speak to its zeitgeist and having bands that have their roots in Sacramento and continue to support its causes will hopefully continue to help Launch evolve with its community.

"When we were looking at the lineup for this year and trying to take it to another level, we want to book our favorite bands, so !!! is one of those - and they just happen to be from Sacramento, so it's a perfect fit," Hargis said.

Andreoni took time out of his busy schedule to sit down for a conversation about Launch, Sacramento and what keeps the band coming back to the area.

What was it about Launch that got you guys interested in playing it?

We’ve been fortunate to tour all over the world, including Russia, Australia, Japan and some other parts of Asia over the years. That’s been great. Our friend Clay Nutting has been putting on shows for us in Sacramento. We hit a dry spell (in Sacramento) a few years ago where I don’t think our shows were being very well promoted. My daughter actually had a friend who knew Clay and he had been bugging her about doing a show for us for a while and so we did a show with Clay and it went really well. That show was at Harlow's a few years back and then he’s done a few of our other shows. He asked us to do Launch and said they were trying to make it into a definitive Sacramento festival, so we were interested. We like working with Clay.

Travelling the world, how has it impacted your view of Sacramento?

I definitely like coming home. It’s been good to get out and see things. I’m born and raised in Sacramento and lived in other parts of the suburbs and some of the guys are from Rancho Cordova. I lived in Orangevale, Citrus Heights; I’ve even spent time in Rocklin, Roseville. After high school I moved around quite a bit. Ultimately settling downtown for a while. Sacramento keeps growing and there are other places to get food and other places to get coffee and things like that. It’s nice to get away from it and come back. I’m so used to how it’s laid out, the pace and lifestyle of everything. It’s definitely more laid back and I tend to prefer it that way.

Do you ever get allergies when you come back?

God, yes. They’re horrible here.

What about Sacramento? You guys have talked in the past about the parties you threw in Sacramento, how the disco scene was relegated to one type of sound, how you’d like to see more of a club seen here; how do you think that’s changed in the last four or five years?

Because most of our success has been outside (of Sacramento), and again we’ve been fortunate to tour a lot, I haven’t really kept up too much on what is the “underground.” I certainly still have friends who are still playing music around here, who still play various house shows at Luigi’s or places like the Press Club and Townhouse and things like that. I still associate with people who we grew up with and follow their bands, but I don’t really know a lot about the underground. In terms of how the scene goes here I don’t think any of us are really that up on what the scene is. We kind of made our own scene with the people we knew and I just assume that continues. I feel like for any music to move forward that’s what needs to happen.

All the bands you’ve played with, all the places you guys have been, having grown up in that Orangevale/Citrus Heights area, did you ever think you guys would be playing the way you are now having been the places you’ve been?

We were pretty driven to break out. I don’t necessarily mean we had some master plan drawn out to be this super huge band. We just had from the get-go the desire to – at first – see the rest of the states. Within a couple of months we went and got a van and set up a tour and played basements and kitchens and all over the country. I think that’s what really helped us the most. Instead of just trying to play as often as we could around our hometown area and get big that way, we just decided to throw ourselves out there and see where that got us. Fortunately, aside from us working on music and working on trying to create something we had in our heads, we’ve just always had this ethic of wanting to get out and play. That’s what has kept us alive too.

Do you guys have a vision, a trajectory for the path you see your band following?

Maybe my personal preference and this is probably by me saying this is my personal preference that I tend to think that I would love to stay with smaller venues. Like I tend to like to feel the people in front of you or as close to you as possible. At the same time, it really is fun to play in big spaces and we’ve done a lot, I mean, we’ve done our fair share of big spaces. I feel like whether it be through the music or through the sheer amount of people in the band - I guess there’s six of us now but there has been anywhere up to eight of us - it feels pretty comfortable everywhere. We haven’t really ever thought after we played a big stage, ‘Oh my god, we got to get back to a smaller club.’ It’s just that you really like the differences. It’s like going through a new job everyday. It can be really exciting.

A lot has been said about the organic sound you guys have. A lot has been said about (lead singer and Jesuit alum) Nic (Offer) and how he dances on stage. Is that just a bi-product of growing as a band together?

The more room he has to run around – I mean we’re lucky he manages to stay out of everyone else’s way. He’s just always been someone who likes to touch the boundaries of where he can go and get in people’s faces. That’s always been a part of how he’s been as a performer even in other bands we’ve come from. I think his energy helps drive us a lot of what we do and vice-versa.

Growing up in Sacramento, if you had a free weekend in July, where would you be in Sacramento?

I had a practice space downtown; I’d probably be down around that area.

Has Sacramento at all influenced your music? Are any of your songs a tribute to or even remind you of Sacramento?

Because it was small town, what we would do is listen to records, share records. Growing up in a small town we were able to buy a lot of dollar records. There were a lot of dollar record bands all over the scene. I would say that we were shaped by a lot of the records that we could afford which was going to a lot of second hand shops and thrift stores and things like that – wherever we’d be able find records. The same records we could pick up in Sacramento would probably go for a lot more in San Francisco or in New York. I would say that’s sort of what shaped us. It was just an easy access to an enormous amount of disco and soul records.

What would you do in Fair Oaks?

We’d always go to Sunflower. We loved that vegetarian restaurant. I think it’s still there right?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, that area we’re pretty familiar with.

The 2005 fatal accident in Fair Oaks involving original drummer Mikel Gius, can you talk about that?

Mike and I were pretty close growing up. I’d known him since we were teenagers. He was a spectacular drummer. We pushed each other to make music. We ended up having mutual friends and he was playing with Nic in The Yah Mos and playing with me in a band called Popesmashers and we were all friends who decided we wanted to make music like the dollar bin records we were listening to. He was such an amazing drummer and such a natural talent. He was one of the guys who helped set it off.

Does his impact still help influence your music in any way?

I think somebody that you grow up playing music with, stylistically you just inherit … a lot of those things never go away, you know? I never consciously think about it that much but he constantly comes up in conversations like, ‘Mike would love this part or Mike would hate this part…’ You know, it’s just anything. I think we all had a pretty strong impression on each other. Over the years, it wanes, but it’s just like a family member. It’s part of your DNA.

Did you ever expect to see a festival like Launch happening in Sacramento?

I’m not necessarily wondering why something like this has never happened before; I think cities of this size generally have a fairly good mix of travelling bands that play together that hopefully draw people together, so it’s good to see. Hopefully they’ll be able to keep it interesting and keep it relatively low-cost for people to come and discover things anywhere from art and fashion and music like they’re doing, so hopefully they’ll just keep it open and keep it to what keeps them excited.

Like on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Get Free Newsletter