Ernie And The Automatics

The members of Ernie and the Automatics hold a unique place in Boston rock annals. Not only are they perpetuating the city's rich musical history, they're an integral part of it. At once fresh and familiar, the sextet's blues-powered, R&B-infused brand of rock & roll brings a bracing double shot of vitality and immediacy to Beantown's proud tradition, as EATA forcefully shove classic rock into the 21st century.

Guitarist Barry Goudreau and drummer Sib Hashian were former members of the multi-platinum selling band Boston. Goudreau left the group after its first two mega-selling albums and formed RTZ with keyboardist/vocalist/harmonica player Brian Maes, bassist Tim Archibald and Boston frontman Brad Delp.?Subsequently, Maes and Archibald spent six years in Peter Wolf's House Party Five, plying Wolf originals and material made famous by the J. Geils Band. Saxophonist Michael ?Tunes? Antunes spent most of his career playing with John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, best known for their hit ?On the Dark Side? and their work on the soundtrack to the cult classic rock film Eddie and the Cruisers. Collectively, these five veterans have sold north of 32 million records. The?band?is rounded out by guitarist and Berklee graduate Ernie Boch, a fixture of Boston's modern-day rock & roll community.

Formed piece by piece in 2006, the band sprang out of the friendship between Boch and Hashian, who kept suggesting to the younger musician that they hook up and play some music. Once Boch had fought back a case of nerves at the prospect of transitioning from playing in a series of ?shitty local bands? to jamming with the onetime anchor of what was once the biggest band in the world, he accepted Sib's invitation and wound up having the time of his life. Hashian was equally jazzed, so much so that he gave a shout to his former bandmate Goudreau, and the three played live for the first time on the air at the local rock station. From there, the nascent band grew organically, adding Archibald, then Maes and finally Antunes. The chemistry of this unit was palpable?and no one could deny what a blast they were having making music together. Soon thereafter, while working up their version of the blues chestnut ?Spoonful? at a band rehearsal, they realized that they'd be better served channeling their massed creativity into original material rather than limiting themselves to covers. So it was that they began cranking out originals inspired by and mirroring the sounds of their roots in classic rock and electric blues.

The lineup made its debut opening for B.B. King at the Boston Opera House, getting such a delirious reception from the packed house that any doubts that they may have harbored about the viability of the band were instantly eradicated. ?Right after the show, I called a friend of mine who's in the music business to tell him we'd just gotten a standing ovation after our very first set,? Boch recalls. ?He said, ?Ernie, you know what you guys have going for yourselves? You've got low expectations.' So I told the guys the story, and I said, ?We've gotta write a tune called ?Low Expectations.' And we did.? Naturally, that early original became the title song of EATA's first LP.

Though they were flying under the radar outside of their rabid hometown base, the band's self-produced 2009 indie debut Low Expectations debuted at #7 on Billboard's blues chart and remained in the Top 10 for six weeks.

Nearly 400 shows later, EATA have expanded their geographic base, working their way up and down the East Coast and making forays into the Midwest, introducing their life-affirming, roof-rattling brand of rock & roll to an ever-growing audience. Juxtaposing original songs with classic material identified with the band members' former units, their electrifying live performances draw sellout crowds and standing ovations practically every night. There's something deeply satisfying about this seamless meshing of past and present. ?You're gonna get energy, excitement, quality, fun and a lasting good feeling from the whole experience,? Hashian says of the can't-miss EATA musical recipe.
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?Every song on our first record is drawn from real life,? Ernie points out. ?There's a tune called ?If I'd a Let You,' which is about a girl who came to one of our gigs and wanted to go home with me. Brian was listening to our whole conversation, and he went home and wrote the song basing it on, ?What would happen if Ernie said yes to this girl?' The title of ?Fly in the Milk' came directly from Tunes' mother. At the end of our last day of working on the first record, Tunes told us this story about the summer of '84, when the Eddie and the Cruisers movie, which Tunes co-starred in, was playing constantly on HBO. His mom told him, ?Now, Michael, I see you on TV, and I'm very happy for you, but you gotta remember one thing??You're the only fly in the milk'?meaning he was the only black dude in the band. I wrote the instrumental ?Hong Kong Shuffle' while I was at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong?I woke up at three in the morning with the tune fiully formed in my head. With ?The Best Is Up Ahead,' Barry was feeling really down one day and worked up a song about all the crap he'd encountered on his musical journey, and Brian came up with the ?best is up ahead' line, which gave the song a positive spin. So every tune is very personal.?

?The Best Is Up Ahead? can be seen as the band's credo?little wonder they frequently close their sets with this anthem of resilience, perseverance and abiding self-belief. Indeed, these cats have never sounded more committed, more alive, than they do right now.

EATA have worked up the material for the follow-up and are poised to go back into the studio, with a potentially enormous core audience now in their sights. The notion that this could actually turn out to be the best band any of these seasoned players has ever been a part of is no longer a pipe dream?it's within a split hair of becoming a reality. Look for an album sometime in 2011, as Ernie and the Automatics set out to write a new chapter in the band members' storied histories.