Kickin’ it with the Boom Booms

February 1st, 2012 | Published in Music Style

Interview and photos by Joyce Quach.

You know that scene in the original 1987 Dirty Dancing where Baby stumbles into the entertainment staff’s after-hours party, eyes wide? Discovering a Boom Booms show is just like that—the music is sexy, people are dancing, and you know you’re about to have the time of your life.

This six-man band consisting of Aaron Ross (pictured above, right), Geordie Hart (pictured above, left), Tom Van Deursen, Theo Vincent, Richard Brinkman and Sean Ross has had quite the explosive year. Not only have they been playing shows up and down B.C., they snagged second place in The Peak Performance Project leaving them with a cool $75,000 in the bank.

Fun-spirited and community-minded, this band makes you feel like we’re all part of the Boom Boom family.

“We grew up blocks apart”

Aaron: We really do like to think of ourselves as an all-ages band. That comes from being tight with our families. Growing up and having parties at my grandpa’s house, singing songs and getting drunk. We always get the young guys and the old ones. I think that has had a huge influence on our sound and our music.

The Boom Booms feature Geordie: Four of us are from East Vancouver. We grew up blocks apart. The other two guys came from this tree-planting family that we’ve been doing [music with] for the last seven years. That community too spills over. The tree-planting community has a lot of the same elements. It’s very all-ages, campfires, everyone gets into singing songs.

“You have a vague idea of what they do, but you’re not sure exactly”

Aaron: The [Peak Performance Project] Boot Camp was amazing because we got to see from the inside, what each job in the music industry entailed. So for us it was great because we were just getting to the point as an independent band, getting involved with publicists and managers and booking agents. You have a vague idea of what they do, but you’re not sure exactly. And so for me it was great because then you had high profile professionals telling you how they go about doing their job. Now all of a sudden you have this really well painted picture of how everything goes down.

Geordie: There’s a bunch of shit that we did in a sense, but really kind of poorly. There’s certain things we did do and it was like, I think that was the right thing to do, so you keep doing it, but it could have been wrong or people could have seen it, on an industry standpoint, actually that’s not how you email a booking agent for a gig.

“We made a plan a long time ago”

Aaron: We just had a list of shit we wanted to do. We made a plan a long time ago to get motorbikes and go down to Argentina when we were 24. That rolled around, by that time we had the band. The band was going good so maybe the band wants to go. Why break up the band to do this trip? We pitched the idea and people were down. Instead of going on motorbikes and go with each other in an organized way, we brought the band down there and made it a tour.

“Hey, we’re the Boom Booms. We want to play here tonight”

Aaron: The basic process [of booking gigs] was like, pick a town on the map, drive there, drive around downtown, find the bars, walk in, introduce ourselves, say, “Hey, we’re the Boom Booms. We want to play here tonight”. We’ll promote it and see what happens. And that’s how we did it. We played sixty, seventy shows [in Latin America].

Geordie: We were making enough money to do all the things we needed to do—eat, have a bed and drink—so we were thinking why leave? It’s hot down here. But Vancouver is home, so it’s hard to leave that for too long.

Aaron: As fun as that is, it’s also exciting to be doing things in a more professional way, I guess, like moving forward and growing something. When you’re doing that, you’re just doing it for the adventure.

The BOOM BOOMS from Green Couch on Vimeo.

“Most of dancing is actually in the eyebrow”

Aaron: We learned how to Salsa dance [down South], or at least fake enough that the white girls think it’s legit.

Geordie: The Latino Eye. Most of the dancing is actually in the eyebrow. So if you actually got the right eyebrow motion, they buy it.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s like a snake charmer.

“We just happen to be the guys that play the music”

Aaron: One thing about live shows is that we always look at it like partying with the audience. We just happen to be the guys that play the music. I feel like that’s how we got into it. We used to do shows at the End Cafe—somewhere for all our friends to go and we happen to be able to play music that people liked a reasonable amount. We make sure to light the audience because when it’s all black, it’s lame.

“Doing dance moves on stage, it creates a way more happening audience”

Geordie: Dance moves. All about the dance moves and the eyes. Snake charming eyes and throwing high kicks. I actually honestly think, though, that by doing dance moves on stage, it creates a way more happening audience participation thing because a lot of the times people don’t know how to dance. It’s like you kind of have a couple of stock moves and you throw them out in a big circle, but people generally are more self-conscious about dancing in the “Western” part of the world. And so they don’t want to throw down, but if they have visual things in front of them like, “oh, it’s cool to do this move”, they can mimic. It is cool to do this move. You help them feel the music too.

“Crazy album, tour a lot, huge in Brazil”

Geordie: [For 2012] we want to get huge in Brazil, record and promote another album and go across the country Canada and do some hanging on the East Coast. We’ve got some friends over there and we haven’t paid our dues on that side of this country.

Aaron: Record a crazy album, tour a lot, huge in Brazil. Yeah that sounds pretty good.

Boom Booms – Delivered from Point Blank Creative on Vimeo.