Zoiks! Online Podcast

My favorite new album right now if Fozzy’s “Do You Wanna Start a War.” I’ve probably heard the whole album 30 or 40 times and it’s only been out a couple of weeks. Normally I wait for the bands to come to me but you have an album this good I needed to talk to somebody about it so I reached out to them. I got to chat with Fozzy frontman, WWE Superstar, podcaster, “Dancing with the Stars” alum, actor Chris Jericho. For the most part we talk about the new Fozzy record, but we do talk a little bit about wrestling and podcasting as well.

On the latest episode of the Zoiks! Online Podcast Bob and Jason talk to Sevendust frontman Lajon Witherspoon. Bob is a big Sevendust fan. He owns every album and had just recently caught “An Evening with Sevendust” in Joliet, IL supporting their most recent album “Time Travelers and Bonfires.”

It’s always great to see a couple local kids do good. Quad Cities natives Danika Holmes and Jeb Hart have done just that. Currently they live in Nashville, Tennessee and have made a living as professional musicians. We hate to see them leave our area, but lets be real there is not a whole lot of opportunity for them here.

Danika and Jeb just released their most recent album “Balance” which is an acoustic album full of originals, reworked originals, and covers. It’s a great album. Recently Danika and Jeb stopped by our “studio” to guest on our podcast.

Everybody knows who Lisa Loeb is. She became a household name back in the early nineties with her hit single “Stay.” That may have been the peak of her popularity but she hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s still making music and going on tour, but now she’s doing so much more than that. She’s got her own coffee, her own charity, her own eye glass where and she’s a mother.

Lisa’s newest album is called “No Fairy Tale” and I’ve listened to this album beginning to end and I’m in love. I’ve always been more of a hard rock heavy metal but “No Fairy Tale” believe it or not has kind of a punk influence to it and lyrically I fell for it. It was real exciting to have Lisa Loeb on the podcast. She’s doing a small Midwest tour starting in Davenport, IA, I will be there and I hope you are too.

This Friday Night/Saturday morning at Midnight Eastern Dave Attell’s new special “Road Work” will air…uncensored followed by the premiere of the new Comedy Central show “Comedy Underground” hosted by Dave Attell. It’s the first uncensored show on Comedy Central.

If you ask just about any comic out there from Amy Schumer to Jay Mohr to Chris Hardwick to our friend BT they’ll tell you that Dave Attell is the best working comic out there right now. He of course won’t accept that. Dave joins our podcast to talk about his special and new show and talk about the future of comedy, which doesn’t excited him, and old porn.

I like a wide variety of music. Let me rephrase that, I like a wide variety of rock music. Whether it’s simple punk, classic rock, or heavy metal, I like just about all of it. I can’t help but prefer the classic rock though. The problem with classic rock is the word classic. Classic means old. There are great bands that operate within the classic rock genre that are new, fresh and relevant, but their music hasn’t gotten national attention it deserves.

Heaven and Earth is one of these bands. You’ve got a guitar god in Stuart Smith, whom none of you have heard of, a keyboard player that you can hold up with Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson and a front man that sounds like a combination of Paul Rodgers and Chris Cornell. This band is amazing and should be playing arenas, but none of you have heard of them. Whose fault is that? What can they do about that?

On the newest episode Jason and I sit down with guitarist Stuart Smith from Heaven and Earth and try to answer those questions. It is one of our best and most fascinating interviews to date. Please be sure to check it out. Subscribe to our podcast here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/zoiks!-online-podcast/id482837310?mt=2

Quad City natives Three Years Hollow have a brand new record out called “The Cracks” produced by Clint Lowery of Sevendust. Their hit single is called “Hungry” and each and every one of you should call your local radio stations and request that song, even if you own the album. They just got off the road with Saving Abel and are about to head right back out into the fire with Saliva.

Luckily for Jason and I front man Jose Urquiza and guitarist Tony Reeves made time to stop over for an in studio interview/podcast. We’ve known these guys since they were nothing more than a local band. We’ve got to watch them grow and to see them as basically equals to some of our favorite bands is pretty exciting for us, for them and for all their fans.

You can argue forever who the best stand up comic is, what the best style is. Are improv comics as funny as stand up comics, do prop comics count etc etc etc. One thing that you can’t argue is that live comedy is so much better any comedy album or special. There’s something about the energy in the room that can’t be duplicated.

I’ve seen several comics live including Jerry Seinfeld, Norm MacDonald amongst several others, but hands down my best experience was when BT came to town several years ago. He came out to Motley Crue’s “Live Wire” ran up on to the stage, sang a verse and then said, ‘that’s why I got kicked out of the hood.’ Then he stop dead in his tracks stared at me in the front row and gave a white power salute and said, ‘white power.’

I’m a 6 foot 2 250 plus pound white dude with my head shaved. Jason as you know from the Esther Ku podcast last week, is Asian, he’s also friends with BT (hence the front row). He looks at Jason and said, ‘why’d you bring him here, he’s going to kill me then kill you.’ The rest of the night he just picked on me, which was always my biggest fear when going to see live comedy, but for whatever reason I ended up having the time of my life. I’ve seen him a couple of times since then and each time he’s been equally as good.

Please check out BT at http://BTROX.COM/ and on twitter @funnyman6869

Esther Ku is a comedian, actress and musician.

(Photo credit: Sam Oh)

Ku can be seen as a series regular on MTV’s new female-driven comedy series “Girlcode” on Tuesday nights at 10:30/9:30c. “GirlCode” is the sister show of MTV2’s hit show “Guycode.” Ku will also be making guest appearances on Nick Cannon’s “Wild’n Out” Season Six on MTV2. Ku was selected as a finalist in NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” Season 6. She was also selected by Howard Stern as a finalist in the Hottest Funniest Chick Contest on Sirius Satellite Radio. She has performed in the hit comedy “Shear Madness,” the longest-running non-musical play in American theatre history.

Black Map. A clean slate, an open-ended set of directions with no boundaries or guidelines tying you to any predetermined path? Or a bleak, morbid symbol of nothing-good-to-come, no matter which journey you choose? Maybe a little bit of both? Dystopian themes and dark lyrical images sit atop bombastic, surging rhythms and melodies–suggesting all paths are possible, but you may lose a few things along the way. This is Black Map (guitarist Mark Engles, singer/bassist Ben Flanagan and drummer Chris Robyn).

Hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, Black Map is a perfect sonic intersection of its members’ pasts. In 2010, Ben Flanagan found his anthem-heavy pop band The Trophy Fire taking some time off from the road, and simultaneously found himself becoming fast friends with Mark Engles of the internationally popular experimental art rock band, dredg. It wasn’t long before Flanagan was touring the world with dredg as a side guitarist/vocalist. The two friends became inseparable, sharing their affinity for ‘90s rock bands that melded the heavy and the beautiful, such as Northern California cult icons, Far (which just so happened to be the former band of their friend, Chris Robyn). With Far as a major influence, Engles and Flanagan began writing the heaviest, most powerful music they could muster, while still keeping the strong sense of melody their other projects are known for. The duo took some of their early ideas to Robyn and when the three men began playing music together in the same room, the synergy and spark was instantaneous.

With the touring schedule for dredg not nearly as busy as in the past, and with Robyn stepping down as a touring member of Crosses (side project of Deftones’ Chino Moreno and Far’s Shaun Lopez), Black Map was able to find time to record their forthcoming DRIVER EP (out February 25), and will hit the road in 2014. The group unceremoniously released their debut single “I’m Just The Driver” on YouTube in November to overwhelming response, and were soon featured on BBC Radio 1’s “Rock Show” as one of their “best tracks of 2013.”