In a city of non-stop festivals celebrating the area’s music, food and culture, one band has played almost all of them at one time or another—Bonerama, with its heavy, trombone-laden, funk rock sound.
Bonerama has filled music halls and festival stages with its big brass and rock fusion sound for 15 years, becoming something of an institution. During that time, a dozen or so of the area’s finest musicians have played on stage and in the studio with Bonerama, but band members Mark Mullins and Craig Klein have always been the group’s heart and soul.
Mullins grew up in Metairie, but he and his family have called Mandeville home for a decade now. In between gigs, he makes time to spend with his boys, Michael and Eli, enjoying everything the area has to offer, like fishing on the lakefront. Mullins recalls living in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans before moving to Mandeville and observes with a bit of a smile: “Being a musician who travels and tours in a funk rock brass band, I don’t necessarily have a lot in common with my neighbors in Mandeville—but I never did in Lakeview, either. As a musician or an artist, you understand that you’re going to stick out a little bit. I always feel fortunate; it’s an honor to do what we do.”
The road to being a successful artist is usually fraught with danger and a high chance of not being able to make a living. Luck helps, but without very, very hard work, it won’t happen. Mullins has had his share of luck, but a common thread throughout his story is that he’s been in the right place at the right time—because he was always working at being a successful musician. His dedication started many years ago, with his education, both in the classroom and after hours, at Loyola University.
Mullins began at Loyola in 1985, majoring in education. He’d already started learning music earlier. “My two older brothers played trumpet and clarinet in the school band. They said I should play something else; my orthodontist said I should play something else, too—the saxophone was going to mess up my teeth. They said I should play trombone, that there would never be any competition for it, that there’s always a need for trombonists in the school band, and I’d be first chair right away. I thought that sounded pretty good—I’d play the trombone. That was almost 40 years ago, and here I am, still playing the trombone.”
After a couple of weeks at Loyola, he and a musician friend, Matt Lemmler, who was also an education major, got to talking. “We kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Are we doing the right thing? Is this what we should be doing? Will we make good teachers or should we be performing?’ We sort of changed each other’s mind right there on the steps of the new music building at Loyola. I went home and told my parents I was switching majors from education to performance. It was a bit of a shock, but I didn’t know what else to do.” It paid off for both of them, as Lemmler is an in-demand jazz musician, composer, arranger and teacher.
Looking back fondly on his days as a student, Mullins notes, “It was a good balance for a young musician. The daytime was education in theory, music history, composition and private lessons, and then there was the real-world experience of being immersed in New Orleans music and going to clubs to see the Neville Brothers or the Radiators at Tipitina’s.”
Being on top of things technically and being out-and-about on the New Orleans scene led to some pretty heady opportunities. “I remember being asked, ‘We need someone to write charts for George Porter, Jr.; are you available?’ ‘Yeah, I’m available.’ I’m 18 and thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but, yeah, I’m available.’”
Looking toward life after graduation, Mullins planned on taking a bite out of the Big Apple and grad school at the Manhattan School of Music. The music gods had something bigger in store. He’d have to wait several years before he’d have the time, and by then, he had the equivalent of a doctorate in performance—three solid years touring the world over as lead trombonist with Harry Connick Jr.’s Big Band.
“It was Craig Klein, Lucien Barbarin and me. We were talking in the days leading up to this call, because the word was out that Harry was putting a band together. We had just seen him on the Today Show; he had done the When Harry Met Sally soundtrack. It literally happened just as I graduated from Loyola—an incredible opportunity that you couldn’t plan or predict or calculate. It was just ‘how fortunate can you be?’ and it fell into our laps.”
Connick was leading a jazz revival, bringing New Orleans music to a new generation. Over the years, he had 10 number-one jazz albums and went on to have a great acting career as well. Mullins was there at the beginning, backing up the rising star and learning. A lot.
“It was a learning experience, watching Harry under the pressure of being anointed this new jazz crooner of the music world at a time when no one else was really doing that. How he handled it; how he handled the pressure; how he delivered every night. How he motivated and challenged us to deliver. It was an incredible lesson that I didn’t realize we were learning at the time. As I get older and look back on it, that was graduate school, right there.”
Mullins and Klein toured and recorded with Connick almost not-stop, seeing the world from first-class accommodations. “We went right from college to a rock ’n roll-style tour bus, with catering. We were staying at the Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton; it was just an unbelievable experience. We went overseas multiple times to Australia, Europe and Japan, and it was terrific. I’m a trombone player who’s playing my trombone in front of 30,000 people every night—getting paid for it. It was wonderful, and for most of us, it was pretty humbling.”
That whirlwind tour lasted from 1990 to 1994, when, Mullins says, Connick changed direction musically, from the big-band sound to a more funk-inspired style. Connick also began his acting career in earnest in the late 1990s. While tour dates decreased, Mullins and Klein continued to play off and on with the crooner until 2006.
Bonerama is Born
When not on the road with Connick, Mullins and Klein played various gigs in New Orleans with a variety of acts, including their own bands, Mullins’ Mulebone and Klein’s The Nightcrawlers.
Mullins also had a continuing open gig on Wednesdays at Tipitina’s French Quarter venue. “It was called ‘Mark Mullins Presents.’ I could do anything I wanted, but the trick was that I had to do something different every week. I don’t know why they had me; they had Allen Toussaint doing one and Cyril Neville doing another night,” Mullins says, noting the heavyweight company he was keeping.
A conversation with Klein led to a legendary gig that would spawn Bonerama. “Craig was in New York and caught a Latin band with multiple trombones. Being so ‘Mr. New Orleans’ and brass-band oriented, he immediately thought it would be great to have a band from New Orleans that did something like that,” says Mullins. So one night in the summer of 1998 at Tipitina’s, he and Klein pulled the idea together. They called on some talented New Orleans trombonists from different circles: jazz men Freddie Lonzo and Lucien Barbarin; Steve Suter, who was with the LPO at the time; and Rick Trolsen, as well as a rhythm section.
Mullins was worried about pulling it off, with only one or two rehearsals and a divergence of styles and backgrounds among the musicians. “Some of the guys really didn’t read music. We had charts for some things that needed arrangements, and there were some other things that didn’t need arrangements, so we kept it kind of loose.”
His worries were for naught. “In the first three or four notes we played that night, there was something unique. It correlated from the stage to the audience and then back to us. You could almost feel everyone take a few steps forward, because the sound is so different when you put multiple instruments together, trombones specifically. There’s a special warmth and sonority. When the instruments are blended together, it’s almost like any other combination of instruments; it’s a unique sound.”
“I think by the end of the night, not just the seven trombone players we called up but almost every trombone player in town was at the gig, either just seeing what this thing was or to say ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ At the end, everybody was on stage just throwing down. There must have been 20 or so trombones—there was no place to stand—just those slides and spit flying everywhere!”
After the performance at Tipitina’s, the gang, so to speak, got together during breaks from touring. It evolved into a regular thing, and they called themselves The Bonerama Trombone Group. Deciding it sounded like a college group, Mullins says they shortened it to Bonerama. “But there’s no trombone-word associated with it, and some people are still like, ‘Whaaaat????’ The double-entendre part is certainly clear, but a lot of people don’t get the double part, they just see the dirty part. They don’t understand that the trombone is often referred to as the ‘bone.’”
Regular gigs at the Old Point Bar in Algiers cemented the group together, and they released their first album, Live at Old Point, in 2001. While the group’s lineup of trombonists, drummers and bass players (for many years there was no bassist, as Matt Perrine’s sousaphone provided the low end) has been somewhat fluid, Mullins and Klein remain at the core, with guitarist Bert Cotton also a long-time stalwart.
After Katrina, the band contributed to many efforts in helping the city to rebuild. One gave them a great amount of exposure nationally. Activist organizations reached out to Bonerama when they wanted to raise money for and awareness of displaced musicians by holding a series of musicians’ retreats at Tipitina’s. They asked Bonerama to be the house band, backing up the invited artists. “They had Mike Mills from R.E.M., Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Steve Earle, The Indigo Girls and Damian Kulash from O.K. Go—and that’s just scratching the surface,” Mullins says.
“It was great, meeting all those people. Later, when R.E.M was recording their last album, they came here and asked us to play.” Working in New Orleans with OK Go led to an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. Bonerama performs all over the country now. When they’re in the city, they play several gigs a week and at just about every festival you can name.
Bonerama is now known for covering, with a New Orleans brass-band twist, classic rock songs like Led Zeppelin’s The Ocean. Crowd favorite, the Edgar Winter Group’s Frankenstein, saw its trombone-drenched debut that first night at Tipitina’s. “I’m kind of a rocker at heart, even though I don’t play guitar. Maybe that’s why we’re doing so much of that stuff in Bonerama,” Mullins says.
Bonerama’s latest release is Shake it Baby. Mullins says of the record, which was five years in the making, “Everyone thinks their last record is the best record they ever made. But we really do think that about this record. It’s not just because of the people we have on it. I think there’s more strength in everything we’re doing as a craft, and it’s finally starting to show in the music.”
One thing is a fact about Bonerama shows: they’re fun—for the audience and obviously for the musicians. It’s something that’s part of their success, and they haven’t stopped thinking big. “We’re a mid-level band from New Orleans. We want to be the Rolling Stones, but we all play the trombone, and our songs aren’t as good. At day one, we only dreamed of surviving; to be here 15 years later is too amazing.”
Check for Bonerama tour dates at boneramamusic.com or facebook.com/BoneramaMusic. Shake it Baby is available through the band’s site and at most online retailers such as iTunes, Google Play and Spotify.
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