i
Photo by Bill Hughes
The Hollow Men
The other band members
laugh.
John moved to College
Station from Colorado Springs
in 1975.
“I married a hometown girl
who’s never been away from
Bryan,” Ward says, “and I can’t
see me leaving anytime soon. ”
John Gibbs, bass and vocals,
is an assistant manager for a
department store. He gets a
kick out of being in the public
eye.
“I just like playing in public, ”
Gibbs says. “That’s it mainly. If
I can be in a band and get the
audience to enjoy what we do,
that’s really what I’m after.
“I was in bands in Athens,
Georgia, for three or four years.
The crowd here (College
Station) is real good for our
kind of music. We get a pretty
good crowd.”
Coming from all over the
United States as they do, the
band is surprisingly riveted to
College Station.
“We’re strictly local,” Sneak
says. “None of us have time to
travel. We play a lot of private
parties. We do have a hard time
getting together to practice
because one of us is always tied
up.”
Sneak says the band likes to
play at the Sunset Grill because
of the atmosphere.
“It’s small but we like the
people who go there, ” he says.
“We like the students because
they have a lot of energy.
“The students call our music
‘dance music’ — the ’60s and
’60s music,” he adds.
“We’ll sneak in a few ’70s
and ’80s but we don’t do
anything from the ’20s and
’30s.”
You might wonder if a local
band is really making any
money entertaining the College
Station masses. Probably not.
“We’re not in it for the
money,” Ward says, “because
if we were, we wouldn’t be
doing our professional jobs.
We’d be going at this. ”
What people should expect
from a Sneaky Pete and the
Neon Madmen performance is
simple.
“They’re going to have fun,”
Ward says.
“For the older people,”
Sneak says, “it’s nostalgia and
that’s why I got the band
together in the first place. ”
—by Tony Cornett
The Hollow Men
The Hollow Men is the
newest offering from the list of
“For a good time call...”
bands. With an eclectic mix of
’60s and neo-’60s tunes, the
trio has been putting some life
in weeknights at Northgate,
packing Sunset Grill’s tiny
dance floor.
Lead vocal and guitarist
Richard Ardoin, a freshman
pre-med major from Clear Lake
says the band got together just
to have some fun. The band
members soon discovered that
the neighbors at each of their
houses wanted them to go have
some fun someplace else.
Rehearsals are now held in a
rented storage warehouse in
College Station.
Ardoin and bassist Mark
Daniel, a freshman physics
major who is also from Clear
Lake, have been playing
together since high school. It
was only two months ago that
drummer Todd Nelson, a
sophomore general studies
major from Houston, joined
them to form The Hollow Men,
a name inspired by a T.S. Eliot
poem. Nelson says the name
was going to be
Gobachofapredidaine
(pronounced something like
“Gorbachev for President”).
Another early choice was “The
Pharoahs Heads of the
Museum of the Sacred Two
Percent”.
However, Daniel says, “That
was reevaluated. ”
In addition to a few orginal
songs, the band’s diverse
repertoire includes songs by the
Beatles, the Violent Femmes,
Bauhaus, Jimi Hendrix, the
Smiths and REM.
They plan to integrate more
of their own music.
“For about every three or
four songs we leam, we write
one,” Ardoin says.
He says the recent popularity
of ’60s-influenced music is
good news for The Hollow Men
because it’s well-suited to their
limited equipment.