September 24, 2015

Center Stage - Duke City Riots

Meet our latest Center Stage band, Duke City Riots

The Duke City Riots began as a hang out session and then quickly morphed into something far more than it was ever intended to be. C.S. Parker and Shannon Haworth were introduced in a very pedestrian fashion. “My wife introduced us,” says Parker. “We hit it off right away.” There was an immediate rapport between the two, infused with the holy trinity of conversation: football, politics, and music. After a few months it was casually decided that the two would try messing around with some tunes just for fun.

Learn more about the band that has got our listeners asking for more in the Q&A below! 

Describe your sound in one ramble-on sentence..
If the Black Keys met up with Pink Floyd at Johnny Cash's house to jam, you'd probably get something that sounds like us! I refer to our sound as Alt Rock Cow Punk...everybody else has their own description of it!

What inspires you to make music?
A chance to make our own statement about the crazy world we live in. The music business has never been more wide open, which benefits an odd do it yourself band like ourselves.

What aspect of making music excites you the most right now?
The fact that we can do whatever we want without someone telling us how we should sound, and that we can do it all right out of our little corner of the world.

What are the biggest challenges you face as a musician?  
Creating awareness for our band. Since we're not on commercial radio, not many people have heard of us yet. Not having big promotional dollars behind us makes this challenging but uniquely rewarding.

What's one of your all-time favorite recordings?
Sublime's 40 Ounces To Freedom-a totally great and unique record put together exactly how they wanted it...totally do it yourself!

Name three people who have influenced your music, and tell us why- Living or dead.
First off, Hank Williams III...when Chuck heard Hank's first record, he was inspired to branch out from his Alt Rock roots and he wrote most of the songs from our debut EP Ok To Burn, shortly thereafter.  
Second, Stevie Ray Vaughan. His music has so much emotion in it, still blows me away. Finally, as a drummer, Ringo Starr and the Beatles. He has such a knack for simplistic yet unique fills, he makes the tough stuff look easy.

Do you have any recent or upcoming projects you'd like to share with us? Tell us about it.
We are about to release our first full-length record, Land Of Entrapment. It should be out in about three weeks. Same for the first video for the record for a song called US. We can't wait to share it!

What is your ideal or target audience?
Ideally, the college radio crowd, but our music is for anybody that's open minded and tired of the usual mainstream commercial radio crap.

Do you write/compose your own songs? Briefly describe your songwriting process.
We do indeed write and compose all of our songs. Chuck will bring a melody to rehearsal, we'll jam it out as a band and usually have an arrangement very quickly. After that, Chuck adds the lyrics and we have a new song.

What do you like the most about Radio Airplay?
That we can be heard alongside some of the best new bands out there, and that our music is being heard worldwide. Without Radio Airplay we'd have a lot less fans. We actually have more fans from Israel than we do from our entire home state!

Monogability (Women On The Beach) from our EP Ok To Burn