Surf’s Up For Renegade Lounge

Tim Goselin of Renegade Lounge thanked the audience for ​“staying out late on a school night” to see his surf band play the last set of a three-act bill that included longtime local favorites The Tommys and Happy Ending.

“We’re Renegade Lounge, and we’re gonna play some rock ​‘n’ roll for you.”

Playing rock ​‘n’ roll — as Renegade Lounge did on Thursday at Cafe Nine — is pretty much all Goselin has wanted to do for most of his life, though his musical life began with him singing in the church choir ​“before I could read,” he said. ​“I just always wanted to be around music.”

After receiving the bass guitar he asked for on his 13th birthday his instrumental journey began. He picked up the guitar not long after that.

“Each was a very expressive instrument in its own way for me,” he said, ​“and I really loved playing both. I think that I have a good fluidity between the two and that’s why I’ve had a chance to play a lot of different kinds of music on a lot of different instruments.”

He started a band immediately ​“because that’s what it was all about,” noting that throughout most of junior high and high schools he was a ​“metal head” but ​“stuck my toes in a lot of different things.”

One of those things happened to be surf music.

“My interest in surf music came shortly after playing guitar at about age 15,” Goselin said. ​“I had this cheap-ass guitar with a whammy bar on it. This would have been just around the time that the movie Pulp Fiction came out, and of course like everybody I was like, ​‘what the fuck is that song?’” — that song being the classic ​“Misirlou” by Dick Dale and His Del Tones, a surf-guitar take on an Eastern Mediterranean folk song that became even more iconic when linked with that film.

“It was amazing because it was heavy like all this metal that I liked, but it was also exotic at the same time, with these kind of weird exotic scales,” Goselin said. ​“It just had this amazing energy to it, and my dad really liked it too so he picked up a Dick Dale CD, one of his more contemporary ones at the time and I thought it was amazing. I didn’t have any clue to what the background of this music was. I thought ​‘this guy really tears,’ so I got to using the whammy bar right away. You could say it was almost by accident.”

It was no accident that Goselin became even more involved with performing and writing music in his 20s. He credits musician and music professor David Chevan, who Goselin studied with at SCSU. Chevan introduced Goselin to a lot of jazz and avant garde music during his years there.

“I worked with him for a few years and learned a lot about music. I thought I knew a lot about music, and I really didn’t know anything,” he said with a laugh. ​“He really turned me on to a lot of things, really looking a music in a different way all together and that is sort of the hopscotch into eventually doing the surf thing.”

Goselin began to write music in his 20s ​“that wasn’t really like conventional rock ​‘n’ roll. I had all of these different genres and textures of songs that didn’t really seem like they went together. They were jazzy but heavy, melodic but exotic, and all of these other things.”

In his late 20s a friend asked Goselin to join a surf band and ​“all of a sudden it clicked,” Goselin said. ​“All of these things that I had been writing seemed so disparate, but I realized that surf rock as a genre was so expansive and I could use that to cover a lot of ground. That’s why I have stuff that’s straight-up hot rod surf and some that’s a little on the punk side and stuff that’s jazzy and atmospheric. It’s just sort of where I found a home for all of those things. I almost thought of it as writing a soundtrack to a movie that didn’t really exist, that was sort of how I made sense of these seemingly disparate ideas.”

That band became the North Shore Troubadours, a band that played together for five years between 2008 and 2013, ​“and of course when NST finally put out a album several years later I stayed with the idea and used the album title Original Motion Picture Soundtrack because I heard it as this progression of scenes,” Goselin said. ​“That’s kind of what I love about it.”

That album and one other EP were produced before the band broke up in 2013. Goselin’s next project was a ​“kind of experiment’ called The Henchmen. ​“I didn’t want to be in another surf band right away. I didn’t think I was going to do that again, but I had an idea to do a rockabilly-‘50s rock ​‘n’ roll type of band that dabbled in surf but not really much.” That band did not stay together too long, but in the meantime Goselin continued to work on and off with Paul Belbusti and his project Mercy Choir.

“I first started playing with Paul around 2002 while we were both at Southern,” Goselin said. ​“He had an acoustic duo at the time and they wanted to form a band around it so I joined. That band broke up after a couple of years, but Paul started performing and recording as Mercy Choir pretty shortly after that, and on and off over the course of that 15 years or so I’ve played with him in various capacities including bass and guitar.” Goselin also co-produced the Mercy Choir album Sings in the Traditional Rock and Roll Style, ​“which was fun,” he said.

Another project developed over the past few years was Goselin’s band Telegram Scam. Its songs were birthed ​“when I was going through the worst part of my life ever, but I had this funny idea,” Goselin said. ​“I wanted to do something really noisy. Something about that felt really liberating right then. But I also wanted to do something very tuneful. I’m really in love with bands like The Ravonettes and The Jesus and Mary Chain, who have this element of ​‘50s and ​‘60s rock ​‘n’ roll mixed up with this super heavy kind of almost goth-type vibe — just drowned in reverb and totally fuzzed out — but with these really great melodies, and so that’s what I was going for there.”

Telegram Scam is presently on hiatus, ​“but we want it back” said Goselin. ​“We actually have a second EP almost done, but it will take us a while to finish it.” Though the band’s original singer and keyboardist are gone, Goselin notes that drummer Brett Harris is still a part of the project and eager to continue forward soon with their music.

Telegram Scam’s hiatus figures prominently in the birth of Goselin’s newest project, one that saw drummer Harris join in a much different capacity.

“Right at the end of last year Telegram Scam had more or less broken up at that point, and I was bored and frustrated and wanted to be out playing more,” said Goselin. ​“I was also playing with Mercy Choir, but I wanted something that was more me.”

Goselin happened to catch the band Ninth Wave at Cafe Nine at the end of 2017 for the first time in five years ​“because I had been out of the surf scene for that long,” he said, noting that Ninth Wave was the band ​“that took the North Shore Troubadours under their wing and introduced us to club owners and promoters and other bands, and really helped us get off the ground. Seeing them again, not just as a band but as people, for some reason made something click in me and I thought ​‘I miss this … I need to do this.’ So I said, ​‘this is the closest I’ll get to a New Year’s resolution: this year I’ve decided to do a surf project. I’m gonna cast a line and see if a few people want to come and play. If they don’t I’ll just make a record by myself. I’ll record a surf album, and it will be for me.’ But then to my great surprise all three of the guys I first called all said yes.”

Those three guys included the aforementioned Harris, drummer for Telegram Scam.

“I found out at a practice that he’s an amazing bass player and said to him, ​‘I’m going to need to find another drummer because you’re exactly the kind of bass player I want for this band.”

The drummer he reached out to was Aaron Nobel, ​“a drummer that I had been been wanting to play with for a while,” Goselin said. He also reached out to Chris Fasanella, who he worked with in another project he began five years ago called Teenagers from Mars, a Misfits cover band that plays annually near Halloween.

“Five years ago I got a request two weeks before Halloween asking if The Henchmen could play a show, but we weren’t really together at that point so I said, ​‘I have an idea, let me call you back.’ Then I called Fasanella and said, ​‘Hey you want to learn 30 Misfits songs in the next two weeks?’ And he said yes. I had been looking for an excuse to play with him for a long time, so we put it together and had tons of fun.”

Fasanella plays guitar in that project, but plays keyboards and guitar in Renegade Lounge along with designing the logo and merchandise. (FYI: Harris also plays drums in Teenagers from Mars).

Goselin smiled when he spoke of how Renegade Lounge came together and the three musicians involved in it. ​“It came together very organically, and it almost never does,” said Goselin. ​“It didn’t feel forced. It felt very natural. Everybody is nice to each other. We all actually like each other and enjoy playing. It’s actually an extremely low pressure situation, which is strange for me, because everything is high pressure for me,” he added, laughing.

The ongoing draw of surf music is a natural one for Goselin.

“I love that era of early rock ​‘n’ roll, the 50s and early 60s, Johnny Cash and Elvis, rockabilly,” Goselin said. ​“I just look at surf as being a part of that thing, it just kind of came out a different way but it’s still part of that youth culture of the time. I can kind of switch off a part of my brain and put myself at that period of time when rock ​‘n’ roll was really scandalous. There is a part of me that understands that. I think it’s the part of me that grew up a Catholic,” he added with a laugh.

“Link Wray had a song banned from the radio because it had a distorted guitar in it,” Goselin continued. ​“It didn’t even have any lyrics. It just had a distorted guitar, and it was called ​‘Rumble’ and parents freaked out about it and said, ​‘that’s going to incite violence — you can’t play it on the radio.’ That’s one of the things I like about that whole thing — the rockabilly and surf collective — it’s all part of the same thing to me and it sort of makes sense. All the projects I’ve gone off and done have made sense, kind of referenced back to that. Telegram Scam had that ​‘50s vibe to it, that slow-motion rockabilly, and the guitars still had scads of reverb and were echoey, and the stuff I did with Mercy Choir was maybe a little bit closer to a country vibe at times than rockabilly, but they’re kind of all related.”

Renegade Lounge played its first gig this past summer at Otto’s Shrunken Head in NYC opening for Ninth Wave and a couple of gigs since in the state. Thursday was the band’s first gig in New Haven playing a few originals and a few covers, and having more than a few laughs and loads of fun. Goselin even joined Happy Ending on guitar for their final number — the apropos ​“Surfing on Mars” — while Richard Brown of Happy Ending joined Renegade Lounge on saxophone for four numbers. Covers paid tribute to Goselin’s heroes, including the Link Wray song ​“Rawhide” and the Dick Dale song ​“Esperanza,” with Goselin adding about Dale that ​“he’s the reason we’re all doing this.”

Originals included the song ​“Cooper” ​“for all you Twin Peaks fans,” Goselin told the crowd, which responded with cheers even before hearing it. The band, especially Goselin, looked to be having as much fun as the audience, who answered each tune, cover or new to them, with appreciation and applause. Goselin smiled often throughout the set, not only at the audience, but at his band members, who effortlessly conveyed a type of rock ​‘n’ roll that, although no longer considered scandalous, still felt seductive and freeing in a way that allowed one’s mind to let go of the tensions of the day and feel what was happening in the moment.

“Music is my favorite thing in the world. It’s everything,” said Goselin with a smile. ​“If you want to have a band you have to get along with people. Human relationships are complicated things, and the really wonderful thing about this band is they’re just super guys. It’s really effortless and it doesn’t make me insane,” he said. He smiled again.

Info about Renegade Lounge’s future gigs can be found on the band’s Facebook page. Teenagers from Mars plays its annual Halloween gig this coming Friday, Oct. 26, at 33 Golden St. in New London. More info for that show can be found here.