SOUTH BEND – February 17th, 2011
When The Basics released "Private Drive" in 2006, the band said it was done.
And it almost was.

Just after the album's release, illnesses and injuries sidelined two of the band's three members, guitarist and lead singer Doug Cowen and bass player Charley Neises, for more than a year.

"I thought, 'This is it. We've had a good run since 1982, off and on,' " Cowen says. "I thought, 'I'm done.'" 

He'd said it before and should have known better.

One day in 2007, drummer Ben Hahaj told Cowen he was looking at buying a new drum set.

"I said, 'Are you going to join a band?' " Cowen says. "He said, 'Yeah, Doug Cowen & the Basics.' ... I felt I owed it to Ben because I've always pulled him into my projects."

Cowen formed The Basics in 1982 so that he would have a band to record the songs he was writing.

"In 1982, when we were young punks, I was headstrong that we would get a record deal," he says. "After a year and a half, Ben and Charley said, 'Whoa, we've got to put the brakes on this.' " 

That headstrong approach might have made for a tight band with its four practices per week and regular gigs where it would play Cowen's originals, but it also made for a pressurized atmosphere.

"We were so serious that if we would make one mistake onstage, you could feel the tension," Cowen says. "But the reality is that nobody heard it out there. If you made a mistake, you could feel the anger."

After the band broke up in 1983, Cowen continued to record and had a regional hit with his recording of the song "Easy Love" in 1988, and former Monkee Davy Jones covered Cowen's "Girls Come Out" in his concerts in the early '90s.

In 1993, Cowen released "This Is My Life, This Is My Home" and, at 33, thought he'd retire from music, but WNIT Public Television picked up on the album and invited him to perform on its "Across the Dial" program.

Cowen's lifelong friend Tommy Thompson then invited him to join his new band, The Benders, and in 1999, the original Basics reformed — guitarist Randy Simpson left the band in 2001 — and began gigging and recording again. 

"It's just more fun now," Cowen says about the band today. "We're relaxed and we're not trying to be the next Beatles or the next big thing."

But the band does continue to evolve.

Although the songs on its new album, "Rockin' Town," still have The Basics' identifiable power-pop and rock 'n' roll foundation, Cowen's guitar has a deeper and thicker tone and more of the songs contain layered harmony vocals than on 2003's "Bitter/Sweet" or "Private Drive."

"Do Ya Love Me?" opens with an extended, stinging guitar solo on top of a heavy bass line, for example. "This Place That Has Me Now" features shimmering picked guitars and layered vocals, while "I Can't Wait (to Rock 'n' Roll Tonite)" has the desperate urgency of early Cheap Trick, and "Sustain" has an angry, bruising power to it.

For some of The Basics' signature sound, "Keep on Rockin' " vacillates between a '60s garage band groove laid on top of a '50s rock 'n' roll piano and a Beach Boys-style harmony break, while only "Great Big Sky" has a breezy pop sound to it. 

"I would say the title speaks for itself," Cowen says about the album. "It's more of a rockin' album. There are a couple of slower songs on there, but even the slower songs have a rock feel to them. In the '80s, I was known for doing ballads, and I wanted to do a rock album."

Cowen wrote five of the album's 14 songs in the last few years, while the rest come from throughout his career, songs he'd never finished and revisited for "Rockin' Town," including the title track, a song from 1993 whose lyrics got rewritten for the album.

"I thought of 'Rockin' Town' as a fantasy place where I can get away from what I consider crap," he says. "One of our slogans is we grab traditional rock 'n' roll by the roots and we like to prove that the great old formulas can still make great new music. That's where I'm coming from on this record."

But Hahaj, the band's drummer and recording engineer and mixer, had reservations about the deeper and thicker sound Cowen wanted for the album.

"He wasn't thrilled by it, but once he started hearing it, he got into it," Cowen says. "His only concern was whether we could play these songs as a three-piece." 

The band will find out Saturday night when it debuts the album — from start to finish — as the first set of a release party at the Waterford Estates Lodge.

The album's release and the band's return to performing last summer, however, both have a bittersweet underside.

When Hahaj first proposed reforming the band in late 2007, he and Cowen spent several months playing together in Cowen's basement as a duo because Neises was still recovering from shoulder surgery. Eventually, Thompson volunteered to play bass, which surprised Cowen because he had always been a guitarist and front man, but Thompson and fellow Benders guitarist Lee Madison soon joined Cowen and Hahaj for rehearsals with a projected return to gigging in spring 2008.

"You should have heard it," Cowen says. "It was just fantastic."

Then on Jan. 30, 2008, Thompson died suddenly of a heart attack. 

"He was scheduled to come by the next night," Cowen says. "I got the call and fell to the floor. I cried like a baby. It was so sudden and unbelievable. ... I thought, 'I'm definitely done now.' "

But several days later, Cowen went back into his music room, where he'd been when he received the call about Thompson.

"(I was) thinking it was all over, and I grabbed my guitar," he says. "It wasn't even deliberate. It was a reflex, and all of a sudden, I was playing this (riff) and singing 'I'm gonna miss you.' "

Within an hour, Cowen had finished "Gonna Miss You (Tommy)," whose lyrics reference memories Cowen has of Thompson, while the music contains a powerful guitar riff on the chorus and a tension-filled guitar solo that never quite finds release in its melodic theme to close it and the album.

"It's my tribute to a man who I dearly, dearly love and dearly, dearly miss," Cowen says. "I didn't intend to write a song. It just happened, and it wound up while I was doing it like therapy. I had tears coming down my face while I was writing this song. It was kind of like me sharing my feelings through my guitar. ... It was a very comforting feeling. It was a release for me, and that's when I knew I wasn't done playing music."
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Bloggerhythms has been a fan of Doug Cowen and The Basics ever since the release of their first CD, Bitter/Sweet, back in 2003 and I’m happy to report that one of the Midwest’s very best roots rock bands is still playing and going strong. Rockin’ Town, their latest independent, self-produced CD shows the veteran trio to be at the top of their game and that is because this collection of fourteen songs rocks harder than either their debut or it’s follow up, Private Drive (2006). While there are a few songs from those discs that are stronger than the fourteen tracks featured here, Rockin' Town is their best complete package because it's more consistent throughout the entire album.

This time around The Basics sound more like 70s hard rockers than a 60s garage band and they are at their very best when kicking butt. The group proved this earlier with the opening tracks from Bitter/Sweet. Both "Does the Bottle Burn," and "Bittersweet Road" should have been played on rock radio, and "In a Crowded Room" deserved to be a smash hit. All would have fit in well on Rockin’ Town.

The new disc offers the boisterous "Do Ya Love Me," a track with a long instrumental introduction that needs to be played loud. Without turning down the volume "Keep On Rockin" Cowen channels The Beach Boys well enough to make Brian Wilson proud. "Gonna Miss You (Tommy)" may be the most personal song Cowen has ever written. It's about his close friend and former member of The Basics, Tommy Thompson, who passed away last year. He obviously misses his friend and by motoring down a highway that hard rock hardly ever travels he makes the song quite heartfelt. Other highlights include "While You're Young," which would make a solid hit single. 

Once again, the liner notes advise the listener that there are no obscenities on the CD. That makes The Basics a rock band for mature listeners even though everyone else is free to enjoy it too.

Lead singer, guitarist, and producer Cowen wrote all of the songs and, as always, he is ably assisted by Charley Neises on bass and drummer Ben Hahaj who also engineered the recording. Together the latter two make up a rhythm section worthy of any major rock band. 

The trio almost broke up a couple years ago. However, both their friendship and their love of music prevented them from passing into musical history so Cowen and the guys continue to prove that they are one of Indiana's top unsigned bands. It’s a crying shame that The Basics have never broken nationally.
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