Tony Sarno And The Screamin' Blue Demons

Tony Sarno And The Screamin' Blue Demons - It's A Blues Thing - 1995 - Icehouse Records

Good modern electric blues rock from the experienced guitarist, Tony Sarno and his band. Tony wrote or co-wrote four of the twelve album tracks. He also does a few great covers of songs by Willie Dixon, Warren Haynes, John Hiatt, Robert Johnson, and others. Tony is a smokin' guitarist, and this album will "rock your little cotton socks off" !. Tony is a guy worth checking out. He's an excellent guitarist, and needs your support. Promote the guy, and buy his great s/t 1998 "Tony Sarno" album. Great earthy blues rock

TRACKS / COMPOSERS

I Ain't Superstitious - Willie Dixon
Blue Shadows - Larry Glenn/Lloyd Glenn
Who To Believe - Warren Haynes/John Jaworowicz
Lady And My Dog - Tony Sarno
Alone In The Dark - John Hiatt
Talk To My Baby - Robert Emmett Dolan/Champion Jack Dupree
Gambler's Blues - B.B. King/Johnny Pate
Nellie Fetch The Hosepipe - Tony Sarno
Cry Baby Blues - Tony Sarno
Money On The Side - Dan Daley
Walking Blues - Robert Johnson
Screamin' Blue Demon (It's A Blues Thing) - Mark Maynard/Tony Sarno

MUSICIANS

Tony Sarno (vocals, guitar)
Keith Christopher (bass, background vocals)
Paul Provost (Hammond B-3 organ)
Greg Morrow (drums)
With :-
Greg Redding (Hammond b-3 organ)
Rusty McFarland (bass instrument)

BIO

Tony Sarno is a recording artist, guitarist, singer, bandleader, and composer whose heart, soul, and passion is apparent from the first note. As a recording artist Tony has toured the United States, Europe, Australia, and Argentina. As a songwriter he has over 20 published songs and has co-written with Keith Christopher ("Over the top"-Ray Charles), Eddy Shaver ("Live forever" -Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings & Kris Kristofferson) and Fred Koller ( "Angel eyes"-Jeff Healy). As a guitarist he has played with David Clayton Thomas' Blood Sweat and Tears, and Peter Tork. As a record producer, Tony produced international releases Thunderhawks, his Tony Sarno and Silent night records, and co-produced Dee Archer Band's "Sooner or later" and Tony Sarno & the screamin' blue demons "It's a blues thing". He has shared numerous concert bills with B.B. King, as well as bills with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Hall & Oates, Johnny Winter, and Little Feat. Tony has recorded for CBS/Holland, Icehouse/Priority, Marconi, and Bandwidth Records. His music appeared in Craig Brewer’s (Hustle & Flow) movie Poor & Hungry and on the Masters of Blues cd compilation with Albert King, Buddy Guy, and the Allman Brothers Band.

the rest of the story......

Tony Sarno was born on the road... His father being a US Navy officer, the family moved frequently, and San Juan Puerto Rico was Tony's first stop. The family soon moved to Tarrytown New York, then to Riverside and Cos Cob Connecticut, where they settled through his High School years. Guitar instruction commenced at age 8 with Mr. Petrone’s group music lessons (in the same class were 8 or 9 other children learning everything from accordion to saxophone). After two months, Tony decided to quit the guitar. Piano lessons began at age 10, but these didn’t last much longer. Deciding to go back to guitar, this time with a private guitar teacher Bill Frenz, Tony learned quickly and won a talent show in the 4th grade, and played his first gig (going classroom to classroom at Cos Cob School with drummer David Caravella). In the 6th grade the orchestra needed a bass fiddle player, so Tony started lessons, but was shortly canned for knowing only Louie Louie. So the guitar became his main focus and he was ready for his first paying gig at age 14. At age 15, the seedy bars in the neighboring town of Port Chester NY provided gainful employment, and a fast education in the entertainment business. It was around this time that Tony first saw B.B. King (with Muddy Waters as opening act) and Sly & The Family Stone in concert, and those experiences were a major influence on the developing guitarist/singer's style. After graduating from Ithaca College in upstate New York, where he studied guitar with Steve Brown and voice with Jim Porterfield, Tony became a full-time musician. Accepting a 6-month tour as guitarist with Carol & Carl's Soul Revue, Tony and the group traveled to the Altoona PA Holiday Inn; only to be sent packing, polyester suits in hand, after only one night. Returning to Stamford CT, Tony studied guitar with Linc Chamberland, voice with Joan Brainerd, played solo gigs, and painted houses. He then started a 7-piece progressive rock band called DBFM. The short-lived band performed and showcased constantly in the New York Metropolitan area, but failed to attract Record company attention and split up. He then started All-American, a Rock, Soul, Blues……Variety band (keyboardist Conrad Andrianni used to describe it like this; “Tonight we’re gonna play some Cars and Aretha”). It was in this group that Tony says he learned how to sing. “I had the amazing Cookie Watkins standing next to me night after night singing like Tina Turner, then backing me up on songs that I wanted to sing. All the voice lessons in the world aren’t gonna get you close to singing like Cookie, and I knew that I’d better be good if I was to share the vocal duties with her, so I just went for it and developed my style kind of “trial by fire”. During the day Tony had a gig teaching 40 guitar students a week at a music store in Fairfield CT. It was the spring of 1979 that he decided to move to the infamous Bretton Hall on the upper West Side of Manhattan (a funky, Single Room Occupancy hotel, which housed hundreds of other struggling musicians, actors and artists). Tony quickly discovered Kenny's Castaways on Bleeker Sreet in Greenwich Village, a testing ground for aspiring musicians. He soon became a fixture there, taking over the Monday night jam after guitarist Jack Sonni tired of it. Tony got hired as lead guitarist with The Peter Tork Band, a hard-rock rave-up of Monkees music, which led to a gig with New York Rock singer Dee Archer, who had a development deal with the brand-new Geffen records. Opening for Joe Cocker and B.B. King, the powerhouse group won over the audiences but not David Geffen. The group splintered and Tony moved to Europe, landing a gig with the Dutch group Hollander. He recorded one single and toured Holland with the group. Since the band was already signed to CBS Holland Records when he joined, Tony had the dubious distinction of being dropped from the label without him ever being signed. Returning to NYC, Tony was hired as lead guitarist for David Clayton Thomas' Blood Sweat & Tears, and toured the US. When that tour was over, Tony re-formed his All American band and toured extensively in the Northeast, sharing concert bills with B.B.King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Hall & Oates, James Cotton, and N.R.B.Q. Between gigs, Tony did whatever jobs he could to pay the rent, including van messenger, limo driver, and telephone/alarm installer. Running a band in New York City was quite a challenge (loading Marshall half-stacks, drums, bass amps etc. into checker cabs), and sideman road gigs were pretty scarce, so in early 1986 he was ready for another change. The American South being the birthplace of the music he played and loved, Tony decided to try Atlanta, to “see what’s in the water down there”. He formed The Atlanta Underground with Wet Willie bass-player Jack Hall and Georgia Satellite Randy Delay. Recording demos with legendary producer Rodney Mills (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Atlanta Rhythm Section, Gregg Allman, .38 Special), constantly playing the clubs and performing in concert with B.B.King, Johnny Winter, Little Feat, Leon Russell, and Edgar Winter, there were no record deals forthcoming (Cindy Lauper manager David Wolff got close to a singles deal at Epic with the bands’ version of the Four Seasons’ Rag Doll), so after five years the group went their separate ways. Upon hearing the genius of bassist and Georgia Satellite founder Keith Christopher, Tony made a few exploratory trips to Nashville and co-founded the Thunderhawks with Keith and guitarist Eddy Shaver. The three wrote songs in Christopher’s tiny kitchen, and together with drummer Rick Donley, the band recorded demos and played fraternity and club gigs. Keith and Eddy were members of Billy Joe Shaver’s group Shaver, and continued to tour and record, but the Thunderhawks demo resulted in Tony's signing by Mark Maynard to Memphis' Icehouse Records as a solo artist. The 1995 Icehouse/Priority release titled "It's a Blues Thing" was both well received and critically acclaimed. Recorded in seven days in May '95 in Memphis, the record was a very long-awaited triumph, and resulted in touring Australia in both '97 and '98 in support of the album. Returning to Nashville in late February of '98, Tony finished up work on his self-titled second album. As his first release consisted of original Modern-Electric-Blues and traditional Blues covers, the second album featured original material and classic Rock covers. There is also a tribute to Tony's late uncle and namesake, in the form of a blues rendition of America, the beautiful, the arrangement inspired by Ray Charles’. The album was released in late1998 on Marconi Records. Also that year Tony co-produced (with Craig Krampf) an album for Dee Archer. Dee had left the music industry in 1983, but returned with a vengeance with her appropriately named album "Sooner or Later". The album featured original members of her New York band, Kevin Jenkins and Atticus Finch, along with colleagues Dave Perkins (Chagall Quevara), Lee West, and session-ace Craig Krampf, and featured Dee's compositions and early works by Tony and Dave Perkins. The album was released on Marconi Records. The next year Tony continued to tour with both his band and Dee’s and released the Christmas single "Silent Night" on Marconi Records. The new millennium brought the completion of the long-awaited Thunderhawks CD. Recording for the Rock band's debut actually began as their 1992 Atlanta demos at Purple Dragon Studios with engineer Tom Cassell. The band resumed recording in May of 2000 at Tony's Record Camp Studios with engineer George Tutko. The band, along with drummer Craig Krampf and keyboardist Clayton Ivey, finished the album in July of that year. The album was to be released in the fall of 2000, but was postponed due to record company struggles. Tragically, guitarist Eddy Shaver's life ended on New Years Eve 2000 along with the future of a very promising band. A video documenting the history of the group will be released sometime in the future. The fall of 2001 brought a tour of Argentina. Playing clubs and concert Halls in Buenos Aries and surround cities, Tony was warmly received with his brand of Blues and Rock. There was a U.S.O. tour in the works for that fall, but due to budget and security issues following September 11, the tour unfortunately never materialized. In 2002 The Bose Corporation invited Tony as a guest artist to try their new product for musicians. This meeting led to another relocation, this time to the Boston area where he was enlisted as resident artist for the project. Fronting the soulful seven-piece band The Linemen, Tony toured The US and Europe to introduce and demonstrate the product, and acted as a consultant and “voice of the professional musician”. The band line-up; ex-Joe Cocker guitarist and music director Cliff Goodwin; the crack rhythm section of bassist Wolf Ginandes (James Cotton, Maceo Parker) and drummer Marty Richards (Taj Mahal, Peter Wolf, Pat Metheny, Gary Burton), the smokin' horn section of Bruce McGrath on saxes and “Professor” Doc Chanonhouse on trumpet, and the inventor of the new Bose technology, keyboardist Cliff Henricksen. 2003 and 2004 brought local Boston area gigs and performances at the Bose performance theatre, Folk Alliance festival, Martin guitar, Taylor Guitar, a Bose/Line 6 press conference, and a European tour with the Linemen. In 2005 the long wait ended for the commercial release of the Thunderhawks album. Released on March 29th on the Bandwidth record label, Thunderhawks is gaining recognition in Europe for it's "straight-ahead" style of Rock and Roll. In 2006 and 2007 Tony built a house for his family in the mountains of New Hampshire, while continuing to play locally. Finding "old New York City days" bass-player extraodinaire Al Hospers (Buddy Rich, Blood, Sweat, & Tears) living in Northern NH, the old bandmates played the ski resorts and bike rallies in the area. They recruited a great young drummer Jared Steer, who was conveniently Tony's neighbor. With the downturn in the recording industry, 2008 brought work writing background music for TV sports, in addition to local gigs. Itching to record more of his intense brand of Blues, Tony looks forward to recording a straight-ahead album of Modern Electric Blues; 100% analog, and "straight to LP". For those who haven't resurrected their old turntables or bought new ones, there will be dozens of digital download sites from which to buy the mp3s, and an "old-fashioned, easy to scratch, tiny album art, hard to read liner notes" cd included with every album. Tony is playing and singing the Illinois Delegation party for the historic presidential Inauguration, and is working on plans for summer tours of Argentina and Macedonia in the summer. © www.tonysarno.com/bio.htm