Listen Up: Crimson Time Bomb
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Crimson Time Bomb had its beginnings at Memphis Music Store at Poplar and White Station.
Josh Siegel, 17, saw Chase Bushnell, 16, playing guitar. “He was sitting there playing the ‘Free Bird’ solo note for note,” he said. “My jaw dropped. I was like, ‘I have to talk to this guy.’ ”
Bushnell was playing lead and Chris Borgelt, 19, was playing rhythm. “We started jamming and then it pretty much developed,” Siegel said. “That followed with us getting almost kicked out of the store. We’d go in there and jam almost every day.”
“Sometimes they would just say, ‘Hey, can you turn it down?,’ ” Bushnell said. “They’d keep telling us to turn it down ’till we couldn’t hear ourselves. It was a polite way of cutting us off. Other times they’d say, ‘You can’t play that in here.’ ”
Finally, said Siegel, “They broke down the drum set. That’s no lie.”
The store posted a sign, “No More Southern Rock,” Borgelt said.
Undaunted, the group, including Nathan Ball, 19, lead singer, continued practicing at another location and played their first gig at the New Daisy. They originally were Primavera, then Equinox and, finally, Crimson Time Bomb.
“Something that stands out, but it’s not too crazy like ‘My Left Shoe,’ ‘My Morning Jacket,’ ‘My Chemical Romance,’” Bushnell said.
Their originals include “Delirium,” which, according to Bushnell, is “about this guy just tired of society. He locks himself away from everyone. It originally was really slow, acoustic, but it’s almost got an early metal feel to it. Black Sabbath. But we keep it rock. All our songs in general are rock, but we dance around a lot of different genres.”
Describing “Moving On,” Ball said, “Life goes by so fast. It just changes. And you have to change with it.”
Their song, “Crimson Time Bomb,” is “very Rolling Stones-esque, but I think it has a lot more power,” Ball said. “It’s about a tease. Just trying to get through a girl’s head when she’s just crazy.
“The other part of the song is you’re trying to get through to her and you’re mad at her, but at the same time you’re hypnotized by the fact that she’s so good looking. You’re distracted by the fact that you can’t look past that.”
The band recently completed a demo, The Fuse is Lit, which includes seven songs.
Crimson Time Bomb performs at 9 p.m. Friday at South Park Bar-B-Q, 887 South Highland. Cover: $5.
Listen Up spotlights area performers. Michael Donahue can be reached at 529-2797.

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