Sticky Fingers jam with Hue

This past Saturday, the 26th of June 2010, Not On Mars joined forces with Hue to bring the music of The Rolling Stones to Mr. Roberts. That evening they performed the Sticky Fingers album in it's entirety.


The collaboration is the second now between both bands, the first occurring last January when Greg Dalbey sat in on drums when Erik Larson had double-booked the evening and could not make the gig. The idea has been tossed around for a while with the underlying thought being to learn a classic album and bring it to the people, which is what happened last weekend.


The night was most auspicious night which featured a very attentive audience and a new bag of tricks from the band which found Chris playing percussion and trumpet, Greg trying his hand on slide guitar, and the whole band singing harmonies.


Ben looking uncannily similar to Keith Richards. Spooky, isn't it?




Damian did a killer job of doing Mic, bringing the Jagger Swagger to the table.




All in all it was a great show and the start of something really cool between our two bands.

Webstream tonight - 4/19/2010

Hey ev'rybody! We're streaming tonight!

Always something different

Always something different going on in this band it seems. I guess it's no different here than anywhere else in the Universe.


A lot going on regardless out here in the Not On Mars gang. We have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that our good friend and fellow musical adventurer, Aaron Hanusa, is the proud father of a little baby boy! That makes us happy. The bad news is that he is leaving Not On Mars to focus on being a father, which makes us happy - and a little sad. Aaron will be missed; he added a dimension to our music that really enabled us to get into those outer limits of spontaneous music that we adore so much. Aaron was always a positive dude and his attitude was always appreciated.


So, here we are again - the four of us. Now we are preparing for an upcoming gig with an old friend and acquaintance, Mr. "Fiddle" Dave Mullenthaller! I have played in many live situations with Dave, usually with my old friends from Stevens Point, Sloppy Joe.

Dave currently lives in San Francisco, CA and makes his living exclusively from "busking". He has lived in and around Chicago, Ashville, NC, Madison, WI, and San Fran, CA. He is on a mini-tour of his old stomping grounds, doing pick-up gigs along the way. Through the magic of the Internets, we have reconnected and through the magic of the Universe, it so turns out that he will be in town at the very same time that we are gigging at good old Mr. Roberts here in Madison on Aprill 22.

You can view Dave's really cool blog at zenofbusking.blogspot.com. Dave will be playing at The Up North with a bunch of great bluegrass pickers on April 20 (aka 420, dude).

So, interesting times. We have spent the last month or learning bluegrass and folk tunes (Old And In The Way kinda material) so that we can share the gig with Dave. This may be a good start to future collaboration depending on the cards we are all collectively dealt.


Other collaborations are in the works with our good friends from HUE. The idea is something along the lines of doing the Goats Head Soup album. Or putting together this kick-ass festival which I am dubbing as, "Fake-n-Bake" - it will consist solely of bands pretending to be other bands, particularly of the stoner variety. Who knows.

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 - Thoughts on the first webcast

Monday nights webcast practice worked out pretty good!  Especially considering that this was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment kinda thing and the logistics we're more or less slapped together.  There was a computer lock-up and a crash, and overall the video was crappy.  The audio seemed to print pretty well, though.  There we're 50 some-odd unique viewers and about 100 views in total.  At one time I saw about 25 concurrent viewers.  Pretty cool!

Next goal is to install the Flash Media Encoder and try broadcasting with that.  If I can't get it working in time, we'll fall back to what we did this first time.  Or maybe try another service at http://www.justin.tv.  Or something else! 

In the meantime, maybe we can simply juice up the environment a little bit ... 

Take the Chris out of Christmas= TMAS Taiwan Merchant Association Shenzhen

Wow! More has come together for the band in the last month than in the last 5 years! Thanks for getting us caught up in the information age Greg. I came as a pretty late facebook adopter and I don't really understand Twitter but I'll learn. I must be getting old. I picture a young mullet wearing version of myself telling my balder self how lame I am for not knowing all this shit. This combined with the first ever "ear hair trim" I got with clippers from my barber has got me feelin a bit over the hill. Thank god I have a wife that finds this sexy. Hey this isn't a blog about myself or the reflections there of, it's a Not On Mars blog! Hope to see you guys at our next show @ the High Noon Dec. 14th.

Also if you didn't know Aaron Hanusa (guitar) and his wife Catherine are expecting a baby on the 15th. We'll keep you posted on their updates.

Getting ready

We're about a week away from our next show at High Noon Saloon, this coming December 14th.  We are extremely excited because we get to open the evening for one of our favorite bands ever, Garaj Mahal.  

I took the opportunity this weekend to straighten up the practice area and prepare for getting the computer and webcam down there.  All tests so far prove that this will work.  I just have to prove that I can get connectivity down there, which should go pretty easy.  

Tomorrow we hook up the webcam and begin our series of broadcasted rehearsals.  You can reach our stream by going to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/notonmars on most Monday evenings.  We'll keep you updated if you sign up to our twitter account at http://twitter.com/notonmars and becoming a fan at our Facebook fan page.  Both ways will alert you to events that we will be broadcasting.

Stay tuned!