Chuck Hopkins played lead guitar in the early 80's midwest touring band LICK before helping to form BANSHEE in the late 80's. BANSHEE was signed on Metalblade and later Atlantic Records and had various videos on MTV in those days. Both bands toured extensivly building up a loyal following.
"Fait Accompli" is a collection of instrumental material written by Chuck since leaving BANSHEE and consists of loads of guitar work i.e. heavy 80's style metal rythyms & lots of soloing.
It is getting great reviews coast to coast. www.chuckhopkins.net
Hi there, as most of you know, I played bass in BANSHEE which was based in Kansas City, MO mostly because I needed a gig at the time and Tommy & I had (and still have) a bond/friendship/loyalty thing which couldn't be broken---so I ended up moving with him to KC. Tommy & I came from the LICK band which was absoulutely huge in the Midwest in which I played guitar. We had half a million touring miles on us before BANSHEE was even formed.
Anyway.....they already had a guitar player that was supposed to be the next Randy Rhodes or something so I ended up playing bass for several years and eventually decided that not only was bass too difficult for my hands because of the larger strings and fret spacing, we were clearly not dealing with the next prodigy as thought. Therefore, I moved to L.A. to pursue alternate endeavors and later to Phoenix to finish my degree in Electro-Mechanical Engineering. Leaving BANSHEE was absolutely a business decision and not personal. Tommy elected to keep BANSHEE going.
Long story short----After not touching a guitar in literally 15 years as anyone who knows me will attest to since all I know are other musicians who have repeatedly asked me to play with them (mostly "where are they now?" rockstars) ------I recently started playing guitar again between rounds of golf----mostly during commercials while watching TV---pretty much subconsiously. No amp. Just an old Floyd Rose Strat that was lying around. (side note: freaking Floyd Roses!!---I pull the thing out of a flight case after 1.5 decades and the damn thing was still in tune!!!) If the average TV commercial is 15 to 45 seconds I figured I'd had at least several hours of cumulative practice and surely enough to record a few compostions. The result was the Fait Accompli album. Thanks, Chuck
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