IF YOU’RE on board, don’t expect to be dressing like the B-52’s.” That’s what Angeline King told the dozens of girls who auditioned to sing in the Bang, the girl group she put together a year and a half ago with her boyfriend, Careless Hearts guitarist Derek See.
Backed by See, along with On the Corner Music co-owner Jeff Evans and bassist Jafar Green, King needed two other frontwomen besides herself to carry the harmonies, trade vocals and perform the dance moves that ’60s acts like the Supremes, the Ronettes, the Shirelles and Martha and the Vandellas made famous.
“I put an ad on Craigslist saying I was looking for people who were interested in trying something different,” King says. “You know, ‘If you like go-go boots, love this music and want to try something new, give me a call.’ I had tryouts and was basically just looking for people who respected the music and had the same vision. The chemistry had to be right. … I wanted people who would have fun. I said, ‘This is not just a job, I want you to love what you’re doing. ‘Cause I love doing it, too.”
Through those auditions, the group found Hanna Rifkin. But their other pick couldn’t handle the harmonies, and then her replacement moved away. “By that time, people started hearing about us, so we had tons and tons of girls try out. They were all amazing, we didn’t have one bad one in the bunch.”
They didn’t know how they’d decide, until Mindi Green approached them at a gig. “After we played, Mindi came up to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Mindy. I’m going to be your next singer,” remembers See. “I was so impressed with that. I thought, ‘Boy, I hope she can sing well.’ Luckily, it turned out that she sang well and fit in chemistrywise with them.”
Rifkin and Green choose their own songs to sing from among hundreds of girl group tracks collected by See and others and filtered through King, who also picks her own material. The trio choreograph their moves based on the actual dances groups did in the heyday of the genre.
“Mindy and Hanna both have a jazz background,” says King. “They wanted to do something different. And they’ve been doing a great job.”
King’s background was a little more on point. “My mom used to be a go-go dancer on this show called Kitty a Go Go. It was a show in the ’60s, and she was a little girl. It was all kids, and you’d have these 9- and 10-year-olds twisting and doing the pony.”
Not only did her mom teach her moves in the living room, she also turned King on to the music, which would come in handy when King played in her first girl group, the Deccas, in Chicago.
“Mom would play the 45s when I was a kid. She loved soul and Motown,” she says. “But Tina Turner was really the turning point. I wanted to know everything about this woman. She embodied sexiness and strength. She wasn’t like Madonna or Cyndi Lauper, she was different.”
When she moved to California to be with See, she missed performing. Since See has been collecting music from that era since he was 9 years old, he was more than happy to put a band together, drafting his good friend Evans (“He understands the music really well,” says See) and Green.
Thus far, the Bang does only covers, from obscure personal favorites like Barbara Lynn’s “I’m a Good Woman” to better-known pop classics. The songs are often far more complex than most people give them credit for, which presents the band with some challenges—especially when they run up against Phil Spector’s famous “wall of sound.”
“‘Be My Baby,’ for example, I turn up the reverb on the guitar and play a lot differently,” says See. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how I’m going to fill up the space and play relevant parts. Like if there’s a horn line that I think has a really great hook, I try to incorporate that into what I’m playing on guitar, in addition to keeping the rhythm going.”
With thousands of songs to choose from, the Bang are particularly careful about what they put in their set. “It has to have a driving beat or something about it that catches my attention,” says King. “And it has to be within that first 10 seconds. There has to be something that takes a hold of me and makes me what to take that ride for three minutes, or however long the song is. Songs in the ’60s were like, boom! They wanted to get your attention. Which is why I like that our name is the Bang. We’re getting your attention.”
And she’s thankful she has a backing band with the musical chops to handle the material.
“I don’t want the band to be kitschy, that’s why I’m so happy we have a driving force in our sound. It’s a rockin’ sound,” she says. “I don’t want it to be that we have beehives. We’re respecting the decade, we’re not making fun of it.”
THE BANG performs at 9pm on Friday (Jan. 29) at the Blank Club, 44 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose, opening for Magic Christian, featuring Clem Burke from Blondie. Also performing: Careless Hearts. Tickets are $10. (408.29.BLANK)
