Snug Harbor is known for its excellent month-long Wednesday residencies featuring mostly local acts, and this month's residency is no exception. Well, aside from the fact that the Oddboy Collective is not a band, per se.
The collective — Jarrod Hayslette, 28, Mike Rice, 27, and Michael Kuhn, 24 — initially formed to launch a 'zine, but it turned into much more. Rice and Kuhn both are musicians who have played in several local bands including one together, Oddczar. Hayslette has followed numerous groups on the road and gone out on cross-country excursions with the Warped Tour. The trio's blog (theoddboycollective.com) eventually turned into house parties in Plaza Midwood, and finally the first Oddboys residency last December at Snug Harbor.
- Funeral Chic's 'Hatred Swarm' cover.
This month, the Oddboy Collective is doing a second residency, and it's a winner. The first night, which occurred Wednesday, Sept. 6*, featured Mineral Girls and other artists on the local indie lable Self Aware Records. The September 13 event features a roster of heavier bands, including Funeral Chic, Suit City and the more straightforward raw punk of Hungry Girl. The third night (Sept. 20) will feature TKO Faith Healer, ET Anderson, Vacation State and Ernie. And the final one (Sept. 27), will include an Oddczar reunion.
I phoned up Oddboy Mike Rice last week to talk with him about the collective.
Creative Loafing: What is the Oddboy Collective?
Mike Rice: That's kind of a thing we struggle with a little bit. [laughs] Basically, we're just three old friends with weird ideas who came together over music and mutual friends who were in the same bands. We initially had the idea of doing a DIY magazine and we started getting the ball rolling on that. But deadlines are hard to meet, so we had all these articles that were finished and needed to get out, but we didn't have enough to put together a full issue. So we decided to translate it to a blog, which we've had for about three years now. Our first story was an interview with our friends in Junior Astronomers.
Can you talk about your house shows?
Yeah, we started booking shows under the same name. The first show we did was a band called Xerxes, which put out a really great post-hardcore record a couple of years ago. And then, our friends in Frameworks, from Florida, came and played a couple of times. And then our friends in Riot Stares, from Charleston, played. Our last show as with [Charlotte's] Deep 6 Division, which was Rapper Shane and Mike Astrea's group. They played the night before Shane moved out to the West Coast, and it was great.
- Rapper Shane
What made you decide to do house shows?
Our home base is this converted duplex in Plaza Midwood. I used to live there, then Jared and Michael and a couple more of our friends were the second wave of our homies who have lived there. It's a perfect house for shows. Because it was once a duplex, it's set up where there's a door cut in the middle of a hallway, so you get exactly the same house on both sides. But nobody needs two living rooms, so we decided to use one as a stage. It came about because Jared, who's made a lot of connections on the road, was getting hit up from bands who needed help with shows in Charlotte. We were like, 'Let's just have them play in the living room.'
How did the first Oddboy residency at Snug come about last year?
For that one, we collaborated with some friends of ours who had a now-defunct promotion company called Know Good Entertainment. It was Rapper Shane and his fiancé Brandy [Towery] and our buddy Alex Shaw, who I worked for at the Neighborhood Theater. We went under the model where each night we'd have a certain theme — one night would be electronic, one night would be a bunch of heavy bands, stuff like that. It worked out well. So Michael reached out to the people at Snug again, and September was open, so we thought we'd give it another go. And the line-up has shaped up pretty much the same way this time. It's going to be great.
* The original wording about the show dates was misleading. It has been corrected, and we apologize for the confusion.
Listen to Funeral Chic's Hatred Swarm: