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Oklahoma rock band Hinder will perform at the Brady Theater Wednesday following a year in which the band sold more than 1.8 million records.
'Extreme' touring
Associated Press
By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
2/25/2007
'Lips of an Angel' launches Hinder onto national stage
When it comes to rock, Hinder keeps its music simple. The band's members stick to what they know, which ends up being a fair amount of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, said band bassist and native Tulsan Mike Rodden.
But there's a line the Oklahoma City-based band won't cross. It toed that line last year while on tour with Girls Gone Wild.
That tour came before Hinder's single, "Lips of an Angel," from the band's major label debut cornered radio.
Girls Gone Wild is an organization that produces a DVD series featuring young, next door-type girls taking their clothes off and behaving in unseemly ways.
"We went into that thing really open-minded. We were like, 'Hell yeah, this is going to be a rad tour," Rodden said.
"But, at the end of the day, it's just a really sleazy deal ... There was some shady (expletive) that went down and we had to end that tour a little bit early."
Although he wouldn't say what happened or who was involved, Rodden said it was "criminal."
"We're not big fans of those people anymore,"he said. "We didn't want our female fans to come to the shows and . . . feel uncomfortable and get, you know, harassed by those people."
Hinder's 2005 album "Extreme Behavior" sold more than 1.8 million copies last year, making these Oklahoma rockers the 10th biggest-selling band for that year, Nielsen SoundScan reported.
Featuring a big rock bluster-and-ballad sound, Hinder didn't explode into the national spotlight until the single "Lips of an Angel" garnered massive radioplay.
"I would say we're a little surprised with how well it's doing," Rodden said.
The album's first single was a soft-verse and big-chorus number called "Get Stoned," that became a moderate hit. But it was "Lips of an Angel," a song about a late-night phone call from a former girlfriend, that took Hinder to the top spot on Billboard's Rock and Modern Rock charts[ 173]redundant with earlier graph, two up.
The band, featuring Guymon product Mark King on guitar and Cody Hanson on drums, formed in 2001 after singer Austin Winkler and Hanson met at an Oklahoma City party. The band recorded one independent album and began touring relentlessly, winding up a regional draw.
In 2004, the band took a chance, pulled together some new songs and borrowed $45,000 to produce a slick demo, which they pushed over the Internet and at their shows. Universal Records picked them up after an A&R man heard the demo on the Internet, the band's bio states.
Ironically, Rodden said, the national media acts as if the band just got together two years ago.
Hinder's hedonistic road antics have been well-documented, including in a November Rolling Stone article about the band's tour that included descriptions of tour-bus [ 173]this seems euphemistic what about "sexual conquests?" or something liasons, all-night parties with strippers[ 173]the story didn't say that and a now-notorious incident during which Hanson set fire to a particularly sensitive part of guitarist Joe "Blower" Garvey's anatomy.
"There's no business side to us at all," said Rodden. "We usually roll out of bed, start drinking and, you know, just kick our day off like that, have a good time. And then once the end of the night comes . . . it's sick," said Rodden.
The night before his interview with the Tulsa World, Rodden said the band's tour bus was stopped and searched by Border Patrol guards when Hinder attempted to return to the United States after some Canadian shows.
"Our bus smelled like pot so bad that the Border Patrol just went crazy. They were pissed. And we're kind of pissed now, too, because they tore our bus apart, you know. We're like, 'Yeah, we had a big sack of weed when we were in Canada and we smoked the (expletive) out of it and then we threw it out.' It's not like we're stupid enough to bring . . . that stuff across the border.
"But they tend to not believe you very much, and so they ripped our bus apart. It was a great start to the day," Rodden said. "They just ripped our mattresses apart, dumped all our (expletive) out of our bags, you know, all that good stuff. So, yeah, we appreciate them a lot."
The band has been compared to popular rock acts Puddle of Mudd and Nickelback, a comparison that stings Nickelback's producer, Joey Moi, who co-wrote some of the songs on Hinder's album.
"The Nickelback comparison kind of gets under our skin. Actually we just don't understand it, because, I mean, we really don't have anything to do with them," said Rodden, of the Canadian modern rock balladeers.
"And I don't actually think that we sound anything like Nickelback. I think the fact that we toured with them and that we're a straight-forward rock band, they kind of lump us in there. We're not one of those artsy East Coast bands that're trying to do the British thing."
In the end, Hinder's musicians want only to write their Motley Crue-inspired rock, drink, smoke, perform and chase women. In fact, the band is stoked about playing Tulsa, where there are some nice bars and one of the band's favorite strip clubs, Night Trips.
"I like Tulsa a lot," Rodden said. "I really dig it up there, I mean, the fact that you have trees."
Matt Elliott 581-8366
matt.elliott@tulsaworld.com
Rock concert
HINDER When:
6:30 p.m., Wednesday, with openers Finger Eleven and Black Stone Cherry
Where:
The Brady Theater, 105 W. Brady St.
Tickets:
Sold out.
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