MUSIC REVIEW GREG CAMP Blogcritics.com - Check out the most recent review for the album "DEFEKTOR".

Music Review @ Fire Drills

All Music album review - DEFEKTOR released, Sept. 2008

YOUR LOCAL STATIONS:

1. KUPD-Meza Arizona www.98kupd.com (602)260-9800

2. KITS-SF,CA www.live105.com (800)696-1053

3. KDLD-LA,CA www.indie103.1fm.com (877)900-1031

4. KTMQ-Riverside,CA www.q103.3.com (951)296-9050

5. KYSR-LA,CA www.star987.com (1-800)782-7987

6. XM/Ethel ch47 (1-866)785-4747 (if you have XM and there isn't a local station in your area)

7. WPBZ- W PalmBeach,FL www.buzz103.com (561)550-9103

8. KFMG-Des Moines,IA www.kfmg991.org (515)333-5495

9. KIWR-Omaha,NE www.987theriver.com (712)328-9870

10. WKQX-Chicago,IL www.q101.com (312)591-8300

11. WTFX-Louisville,KY www.foxrocks.com (502)571-1005

12.WFNX-Boston,MA www.fnxradio.com (781)595-wfnx
1.KUPD-Meza Arizona www.98kupd.com (602)260-9800

2.KITS-SF,CA www.live105.com (800) 696-1053

3.KDLD-LA,CA www.indie103.1fm.com (877) 900-1031

4.KTMQ-Riverside,CA www.q103.3.com (951) 296-9050

5.KYSR-LA,CA www.star987.com (1-800) 782-7987

6.XM/Ethel ch47 (1-866)785-4747

7.WPBZ- W PalmBeach,FL www.buzz103.com (561) 550-9103

8.KFMG-Des Moines,IA www.kfmg991.org (515) 333-5495

9.KIWR-Omaha,NE www.987theriver.com (712) 328-9870

10.WKQX-Chicago,IL www.q101.com (312) 591-8300

11.WTFX-Louisville,KY www.foxrocks.com (502) 571-1005

12.WFNX-Boston,MA www.fnxradio.com (781) 595-wfnx

13. WKLQ/94.5fm-Grand Rapids MI www.wklq.com (800)785-1073

14. KPNT/105.7fm-St Louis,MO www.kpnt.com (314)969-3833

15. WAITT/Syndicated USA (402)952-7600

16. KINK/101.9fm-Portland,OR www.kinkfm.com (1-877)567-5465

17. KNRK/94.7fm-Portland,OR www.knrk.com (800)777-0947

18. WQXA/105.7fm-York,PA www.wxdx.com (800)332-1057

19. WXDX/105.9fm-Pitts,PA www.wxdx.com (412)333-9939

20. WBRU/95.5fm-Prov,RI www.wbru.com (866)382-9555

21. KACV/90fm-Amarillo,TX www.kacvfm.org (806)371-5222

22. KROX/101.5fm-Austin,TX www.101x.com (512)832-4000

23. KXRK/96.3fm-Salt Lake City,UT www.x96.com (877)602-9696

24. WBTZ/99.9fm-Burlington,VT www.999thebuzz.com (877)893-2899

25. WEQX/102.7-Manchester,NY www.weqx.com (802)362-1027

26. KNDD/107.7fm-Seattle,WA www.1077theend.com (800)423-1077

I don't know much about in store purchases in any specific area, however here are a few of the places you can get the CD online.

iTunes

AMAZON.COM

BESTBUY.COM

BILLBOARD.COM

http://www.mercurynews.com/shayquillen/ci_10190752?source=rss

Smash Mouth's Camp goes it alone
By Shay Quillen Mercury News / Article Launched: 08/13/2008 12:01:33 PM PDT

With hits like "All-Star" and "Walking on the Sun" in his songbook, Greg Camp could easily rest on his laurels. But Friday at the Blank Club, the longtime guitarist for Smash Mouth will be back in a club, starting from square one with a new band, a new role and a new set of songs.

"I feel like someone just hit the big reset button on everything," says Camp, who left Smash Mouth in June to focus on his first solo album, "Defektor," in stores Sept. 9.

Camp, 41, has been a fixture on the South Bay and Santa Cruz music scenes since the 1980s. Bassist Eddie Sedano met Camp when the guitarist was still a student at San Jose's Lynbrook High, and the two performed together in the cover band the Gents to pay the bills until Smash Mouth signed a record deal in 1997. (The Gents will perform a reunion show Sept. 27 at Boswell's in Campbell.)

"I don't think he ever really counted on quite the success that he got, but I don't think it would have mattered," Sedano says. "He would still be playing and writing music regardless.''

After scoring out of the box with "Walking on the Sun," Smash Mouth roared back with Camp-penned hits such as "Then the Morning Comes" and "All-Star," which brought the band's music to a younger crowd when it was used in the 2001 animated film "Shrek." Since then, Smash Mouth has struggled to match its early sales and radio success, but it remains a potent live attraction.

"That's the thing I miss, is going out and
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playing," Camp says. "It was one of the best things in the world to do."

Camp realizes that — despite his central contributions to a popular band — as he embarks on a solo career he is largely unknown.

"There is a little bit of a built-in household name with Smash Mouth," he says, "but usually when people think of Smash Mouth, they think of Steve."

Camp says tensions between the guitarist and lead singer Steve Harwell came to a head a few months ago, fueled by Camp's decision to hold back some of his songs to fulfill his long-held dream of making a solo record.

"It was just one of those things where either me or one of the other people in the band had to leave, and if that person left, then that band wouldn't be together anymore," he says. "My friends are in that band, so I didn't want everyone to lose their jobs just because two of us didn't really get along."

Although Camp provided the new guitarist, LeRoy, with a crash course in the Smash Mouth repertoire to ease the transition, the relationship among the old friends remains strained. Camp says bassist Paul DeLisle, whose musical partnership with Camp predates Smash Mouth, wouldn't even return his call recently to talk about a gig scheduled for their side project, Maids of Honor.

"It was just hard," he says. "It just sucks 'cause those guys won't talk to me anymore."

Smash Mouth manager Robert Hayes says Harwell and DeLisle are probably just being cautious until all the legal details are hammered out. "Greg was a member of the group since Day One, and he's a very talented songwriter and musician," Hayes says. "He just needed to go explore other things, so I don't see there being any ill will."

"Defektor," recorded at Camp's Sea Volt Studio in Santa Cruz, gives Camp a chance to try a few new wrinkles — the "spaghetti western"-style instrumental introduction probably wouldn't have flown on a Smash Mouth CD — but the album won't shock anyone familiar with Smash Mouth's blend of pop, rock, surf and ska.

With Camp on lead vocals and every instrument but drums and horns, the new album bounces charmingly and skillfully among genres and eras. First single "Cat's Game" sounds like a lost classic of '80s synth-pop, and "Baby, Please Don't Go" is a polished take on '60s garage rock. "Rot With You" manages to channel both "Off the Wall" era Michael Jackson and "Look Sharp!" era Joe Jackson, no small feat.

Lyrically, it's a touch darker and more personal than most post-"Shrek" Smash Mouth, but this is hardly Camp's "Plastic Ono Band." Still, he says he enjoys not having the expectations of a brand name weighing on him.

"Smash Mouth was supposed to be this fun-in-the-sun thing," he says, "and after a while you just get kind of tired of trying to write about happy stuff."

One song that would sound odd coming out of anyone else's mouth is "Gina Marie," which Camp wrote for actress-singer Gina Marie Young.

The two met in 2003 when Smash Mouth was performing on the TV show "Charmed." That initial meeting sparked a long-distance phone friendship. One night, Young mentioned that no one had ever written a song called "Gina Marie." Camp repaired to his studio and sent her an MP3 of the completed song in the morning.

"I think she was kind of freaked out," Camp recalls. Fortunately, she got over the initial shock, and today the two are married, making music together and expecting their first child (Camp has a daughter from a previous marriage).

To promote the new record, Camp has assembled a band consisting of two old friends from the San Jose scene, guitarist Andrew Fleig and bassist Kelly Castro, plus 21-year-old drummer Eduardo Torres. But the shy songwriter is still a bit uneasy about standing at center stage.

"People always told me, 'You sound like a little kid, you should get a lead singer,'"‰" he says of his early days in bands. "Honestly, I'm not very comfortable with it right now, and I don't really know what to do about it. Gina says I should take some acting classes to get my self-confidence up, but I don't even know if I could do that.

"But I'm getting used to it."

Contact Shay Quillen at squillen@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2741.

Greg Camp
Where: The Blank Club, 44 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose
When: 9 p.m. Friday.
Tickets: $10. For more information, (408) 292-5265 or theblankclub.com. Tickets available at ticketweb.com.

Happy Camper: Smash Mouth guitarist Greg Camp wants to turn his Westside Santa Cruz studio into an incubator for up-and-coming bands.
Greg Camp of Smash Mouth

The guitarist responsible for all those catchy tunes opens a new Westside Santa Cruz studio.

By Don O. Marino

It's like a kids' game of tag: You're minding your own business—maybe doing your grocery shopping, maybe channel surfing, maybe waiting for the guy at customer service to take you off hold—when without warning, a maddeningly catchy pop song takes hold of you. Tag! You're It. You're screwed now, sonny. Get ready to spend your day with this melody playing on endless loop on your mind's iPod, dominating your consciousness, causing you to inadvertently "tag" countless other people by humming the tune.Somewhere along the line, you've probably been tagged with a song written or co-written by local musician Greg Camp, guitarist for the multiplatinum-selling pop rock band Smash Mouth. At the tail end of the 20th century, hits like "Walkin' on the Sun" and "All Star" were enthusiastically pumped into millions of minds via America's movie theaters, TV sets and sports arenas, making Smash Mouth as easy to avoid as a mullet at a tractor pull. Most everyone will acknowledge that Camp's songs are infectious, but not everyone appreciates that it takes actual talent to make bubblegum this sticky. Whether or not you like commercial rock, you've really gotta wonder how he keeps coming up with the stuff.

To be perfectly honest, so does he. "I don't know," the slick-haired musician says as he sinks into a couch in his 3,000-square-foot Westside recording studio. "There's just always stuff bouncing around in my head. Our bass player, Paul, is the same way. I think that most people who write a lot of songs are like that—they just can't get music out of their heads. It's pretty annoying when you have, like, some really super-cheesy song in your head when you wake up, like 'My Baby Takes the Morning Train' or something."

Yeah, Metro can relate—just the other day we woke up haunted by the idiotic intro to the Marcels' "Blue Moon": "Bom-b-b-bom, ba-bom-b-b-bom, ba-ba-bom-b-b-bom, Da-dang-a-dang-dang, da-ding-a-dong-ding..." Seeing as how Camp has just sent "Morning Train" chugging through the tunnels of our mind, it seems only fair that we tag him back by sharing this bit of information with him.

Amusement and agitation commingle in Camp's face. "By the way," he shoots back, "it's rude to tell someone else what stupid song is stuck in your head, 'cause then it gets stuck in their head."

Hey, you drew first blood, Greg, not me. "I know," he laughs. "I do that to [his new wife] Gina [Marie Young]: 'Do you want to know what song's in my head??' She's like, 'Don't tell me! Don't tell me!'"

Smash Hits
Camp, who's just returned from a honeymoon in Hawaii and Fiji, explains that he met Young on the set of the TV show Charmed when Smash Mouth was making a guest appearance: "That was in L.A., but it turned out she was from here." The common ground didn't stop there, though. "We're both into old music," Camp says. "I'm into old bossa nova and a lot of '60s stuff, and she likes swing music." Thus was born the lounge pop group the Gobax (www.myspace.com/thegobax), fronted by Young and featuring Camp's compositions and guitar work. "She's got such this cutesy little voice," Camp says, "and then we tried to make the lyrics a little dark, so it sounds kind of spooky with this cute little girl singing."While still cooking up pop confections with Smash Mouth (the group released its last album, Summer Girl, in September 2006), the prolific Mr. Camp is also putting together a solo album (samples can be heard at www.myspace.com/gregcamp; there's talk of a record deal with Warner Brothers) and playing in the rock band Maids of Honor (www.myspace.com/themaidsofhonor), known as much for the wrestling masks they wear onstage as for their feisty, pop-punk-tinged sound. Consisting of Camp, Survivor's Lex van den Berghe, Smash Mouth bassist Paul DeLisle and Kelly Castro of the band Skycycle, the Maids formed at Camp's old studio in Scotts Valley, where friends would converge once a month for a musical gathering they called the Man Jam.

"All the guys who wanted to play music all their lives but ended up having day jobs, getting married and going through a normal, nine-to-five life would get together and play," Camp recalls. "There would just be this room full of 20 guys banging on stuff, a couple of drum sets set up, and the Maids of Honor basically came of that."

Apparently something of a workaholic, Camp also composes music for other bands (he mentions Nickel Creek as a group for which he's recently submitted a song) as well as for television and film. The composer explains that he recently created the entire score for the independent film Valley of the Sun, about a porn star living in an old folks' home after spending time in a mental hospital. "[The filmmakers] will say, 'He's walking down the street, and he's having these delusions that old people watering their plants in their front yards are dressed up in bondage [gear],'" he says. "So I'm kind of making [the music] hip-hop funky, but it's got this Lawrence Welk vibe about it, too. The beats are kind of Dr. Dre, but then it's got strings going over it."

Send a Kid to Camp
Somehow, in the midst of creating his own copious works, Camp has found the time to record local bands like the Formaldebrides, Nobody's Own and Luxury Sweets at his own Seavolt Studios. The guitarist explains that it's a win-win: The band walks away with a demo, and he and engineer Chris Chase work out the kinks in the studio.

Having tested the waters to his satisfaction, Camp, who has been creating music at Seavolt Studios for the past year and a half, is now opening his studio's doors to the public. Interested parties are invited to check out the space, mingle, and hear some live music at an open house this Saturday. Camp mentions Nobody's Own, the Formaldebrides and Maids of Honor as bands that may play at the event. Camp says that along with being a recording studio, Seavolt will be a publishing and production company by way of which he plans to help develop bands and use his industry connections to try to get them signed. "We want to start a musicians' collective where people can come, and this will be home," he offers. "They can record and hopefully feel artistic here. ... It's just going to be an all-inclusive, in-house—hopefully—hit factory."Thus, the man who's tagged millions of listeners takes the next generation of tunesmiths under his wing, seeing to it that the game continues long into the future.

Hadn't updated this joint in a while... so here are some new songs.

Right Side, Wrong Bed - the original demo of the acoustic song on the new Smash Mouth CD "Summer Girl" with full instrumentation. Plus two others that have never been heard before.
Hope you like 'em.

new cd released 9/19/06 check it out on itunes, your favorite record store or go to smashmouth.com.

Not much of a blogger, just check out the tunes...