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Even the police enjoy a good Firework Show

By KEITH RYAN CARTWRIGHT

PROVIDED

Charleston band Firework Show headlines a showcase of music at The Music Farm on Friday night in support of the group’s new EP.

No, it's not the Fourth of July, but, yes, there's going to be a Firework Show anyway.

This isn't actually some sort of display of fireworks, per se, celebrating the birth of a nation. But rather, this event is a celebration featuring local indie rock outfit Firework Show.

The Charleston group — Zach Bodtorf, Braxton Brown, Casey Atwater and Brandon Gallagher — headline the Music Farm on Friday night, the same day it can be heard on local radio station The Bridge (radio station 105.5 FM) at 4 p.m., and a limited number of free tickets are available for a show at 52.5 Records on King Street.

The show will feature material from the recently released four-song EP, which the band recorded over a five-week period in the living room of a house it rented, including the latest single, "Porch."

Bodtorf recently chatted with The Post and Courier about Friday night's show, the trials and tribulations of recording the EP and the hopes and dreams for the future.

Q: How long have you guys been together?

A: It's been a long haul. Brandon and I started playing together back when we were kids in high school, so we've probably been playing together for eight or nine years. We just played in different bands in high school and then ended up going to the same college. We've just been pursuing this, and we have this general idea of where we want to take music, and we've rotated through so many bass players. Brandon and I have been together the longest, and this particular incarnation got together in about 2004.

Q: You said you have a fairly good idea of where you want this to go. Where is that?

A: Well, I don't know. We have a very diverse interest in music. Some of it is heavily rooted, at least for me, in jazz.

Even though we're playing pretty much a straight-up, moderately experimental rock band, a lot of the things I hear in music comes from Miles Davis. The whole band, we listen to a lot of music. We're just going for a big sound and we want people to have fun, but we also want to experiment with sound. We're an indie band, but by indie I don't mean I'm classifying ourselves into that particular genre, but in terms of doing everything ourselves.

Q: So you mean indie in the true sense of what it used to mean as opposed to being a genre?

A: Yeah, because I don't like it as a genre and most people don't.

Q: Talk about that big sound. You have a new EP available.

A: We decided that on our own we were going to record an EP. ... We just decided to do it on our own, and none of us really knew how to use recording software, so we just went out and bought it and flipped through the manuals. We probably lost a lot because of that, but what we gained was the ability to experiment with layers and get a bigger sound. That was something we wouldn't be able to do in a studio because we're broke. Every musician, for the most part, in Charleston is broke and can't afford to spend any entire day working on an introductory sound clip. We had the liberty to do that. It turned out to be so much better than we imagined it. I heard it played on (local radio station) The Bridge the other day, and I couldn't believe it was stuck right in between a Tom Petty song and a newer (Bob) Dylan song. I just laughed. It's hard for bands to get their home recordings played on the radio, and it was just exciting. We must have done an all right job of producing it because it didn't sound tinny on the radio. It was kind of nice. It sounded big.

Q: Anything else you want to add?

A: This is crunch week for us. The only time our band can practice is from about midnight to 2 or 3 a.m. because of our schedule. We were actually out at the practice space last night, and we were wrapping up at about 3:30 in the morning. Apparently there had been some break-ins in the area so there were some cops, and they thought we were breaking into the practice space so they handcuffed us and ran all of our ID's. I guess they thought we were hooligans. We were sitting out there until about 4 in the morning.

Q: That's bad, but obviously everything worked out.

A: Yeah, it worked out.

Q: No one was taken to the pokey?

A: We were fine. We were just sitting out there handcuffed, moderately uncomfortable, but 4 o'clock rolled around and they said, "So are you guys going to play a song for us?"

Q: You're kidding?

A: I swear to you; so we played just the loudest rip-roaring song with the amps turned up as loud as they would go. We had the garage door open and four cops stood outside and listened to us play. It was ridiculous. They ripped up our bass player's ticket. He was from Michigan, so they were going to charge him a $170 for not having a South Carolina state license, but after that, they ripped the ticket up and told us to have a good night. I guess they must have enjoyed it.

Keith Ryan Cartwright is a Colorado-based freelance entertainment journalist.