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| The Good Rats - "Most Famous Unknown Band" The Good Rats labeled by Rolling Stone magazine as "the world's most famous unknown band" will be performing live at Joey's Casa Italiana May 14, 2011. Rock stars like Kiss, Jon Bon Jovi and Billy Joel, along with celebrities like Alec Baldwin, Rosie O'Donnel and many others are among the many fans of The Good Rats. The band was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame along with Billy Joel, Kiss, The Ramones, Blue Oyster Cult, Pat Benetar, Barbra Streisand, Mariah Carey and more. Formed in 1964, the original group consisted of 5 students from St. John's University...Ted Haenlein, Frank Stapleton, Eric Crane, Denny Ryan and Peppi Marchello. While playing at a club in Queens, New York a record company executive heard them and eventually signed the band. The band continued to play top 40 covers while working on their own original music. Although The Good Rats changed their "lineup" a few times since1964 they released their first album in 1969, self-titled The Good Rats. In 1974, the Good Rats released their best-known and most popular album, Tasty. It featured a blend of hard rock and blues, highlighted by Marchello's raspy vocals. Various songs from this record, including "Injun Joe, " "Papa Poppa, " a rock ode about cults, the autobiographical numbers "Back to My Music, " and "The Songwriter, " and the blues title track, received airplay around the country on FM radio. "Tasty" was a pop song about the talented musicians who Peppi fired from the band. The Good Rats performed at venues such as Madison Square Garden, The Philadelphia Spectrum, The Nassau Coliseum, The Hammersmith Odeon in England, and New York's Central Park, as well as showcase rooms such as The Bottom Line in Manhattan, My Father's Place in Roslyn, NY, Whiskey a Go Go in Los Angeles and The Paradise Room in Boston. They headlined or opened for bands such as Rush, Journey, Kiss, Meat Loaf, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, and Styx. Live shows were famous for the band's stage antics, as Peppi would play air guitar on his baseball bat, throw rubber rats into the crowd, and beat the daylights out of a battered garbage can as he sang. Between 1976 and 1980, The Good Rats released a series of albums, including Ratcity in Blue, From Rats to Riches, Birth Comes to Us All, and Live At Last, all of which were well received by the band's fan base, and received some airplay on FM radio, without actually putting the band over the top. Throughout the 1980s, Peppi Marchello continued to write and produce recordings with his son Gene. They toured locally for a while under the name "Popzarocca" until the song "First Love" became a minor hit for the band (now renamed "Marchello"), with the music video receiving minor airplay on MTV's Headbanger's Ball. In the mid-1990s, Marchello and sons Gene Marchello and Stefan Marchello began playing out locally under "The Good Rats" name. They released three new studio CDs with this lineup, Tasty Seconds (1996), Let's Have Another Beer (2000), and Play Dum (2002). Marchello also released a live recording of a 1979 appearance on a Rochester radio show, Rats, The Way You Like 'Em. In 1998, Marchello wrote "A Tale of Two Balls, " the introduction to the book Conflicts of Disinterest (Aardwolf Publishing) by sometimes controversial author Clifford Meth. They were inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (www.limusichalloffame.org) in 2008. In July, 2009, Peppi Marchello cut a series of three commercials for the car donation organization Kars4Kids. Peppi Marchello is quoted prominently in the IDW Publishing graphic novel Snaked by Clifford Meth and has been the subject of other stories by the author. The band continues to play in local venues throughout New York, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as playing annually in their own summer weekend outdoor festival aptly named "Ratstock." They play regularly, every month, at Joey's Casa Italiana in Hewitt, NJ. Record labels include Kapp Records, Warner Bros. Records, Platinum Records, Passport Records, Radar Records, Mondo Records, Fireball Records, Uncle Rat Music and Atlantic Records.antic Records write your comments about the article :: © 2011 Jazz News :: home page |