The Nude Party

In the basement of a large house in Boone, a young band of self-proclaimed weirdos regularly draws an enthusiastic crowd. The musicians wail on their instruments. And disrobe. The band’s name — The Nude Party — reflects exactly what takes place in that basement.

But, in the last two months, the group has begun to play its first shows beyond the incubator of house parties. An Asheville debut is set for The Odditorium on Friday, Jan. 31. That transition requires changes. Specifically, for legal reasons if nothing else, a little less full-frontal.

A band that openly proclaims its love of performing in the buff runs the risk of being dismissed as gimmicky. But a shtick, by its very definition, implies planning. The boys of The Nude Party are a musical experiment with no plan. Most of the members have been friends since high school. It wasn’t until last summer, spent at a house on Lake Norman, that they picked up instruments and began playing together.

“We’d always incorporated nudity into our lives, mostly because we think it’s funny, but also because we like to keep an openness between us all,” says drummer Connor Mikita. “We’d throw these parties where everyone would end up naked, usually in a canoe off the dock of the lake house, and we called them the nude parties. It was a kind of experiment to see how far you could take people out of their comfort zones.”

He adds, “That’s how the music started too, as soundtrack to that summer.”

The music of The Nude Party lacks clear definition. Singer Patton Magee offers two words to describe the collective’s sound: groove music. With even more irreverence, the guys list their musical influences as PBR and Oak Leaf Wine.

For their recent EP, Naked Brunch, the musicians draw heavily on blues and ’60s-era rock. They’ve been busy creating a wide variety of new material, even dabbling in covers of hip-hop classics. When it comes to what they play at live shows, lead guitarist Shaun Couture says, “I don’t think we’ve ever made a set list, or if we did, we just forgot it. We choose what we play based on the crowd.”

The Nude Party strives to keep its music and style undefined, even by its own members. The one clear principle of the band is a lighthearted approach to life. “We don’t really take too much seriously,” says Mikita. “There’s a lot of pretentiousness in most music scenes. We just try to keep it easygoing and funny. And naked.”

Yes, The Nude Party has courageously ventured beyond the basement. What performances for public consumption will offer, and how much skin will be revealed, remains as in the breeze as the rest of the band’s future. “It’s not like we’re planning on not getting naked,” Couture says. “It’s that we’re not planning anything.”

who: The Nude Party with Timmy Tumble and The Shine Brothers
where: The Odditorium, ashevilleodditorium.com
when: Friday, Jan. 31, at 9 p.m. $5. - Mountain Xpress

By: Harrison Giza

Hailing from Boone, North Carolina, The Nude Party are a nakedly-psyched up band you didn’t know you’ve been looking for. In fact, they are one of the best bands I have heard this side of the states. From the washed-out baselines of “Mr. DoGood” to the bouncing riffs of “Jungle Jim,” The Nude Party could easily slide into garage rock heaven.

The guitar slithers with convergent grace, wafting out wah-wahs, delayed bends, and fiery solos. The Nude Party could have been your dad’s favorite band from years ago, but we’re lucky enough to see their present reign. Patton Magee’s voice is like Jim Morrison getting warmed up, ready to play as his almost-drunkest. The whole band sounds like possible Growlers’ cousins or maybe even a third nephew to The White Stripes psychotic-blues bliss.

The group just released a music video for their song “Coyote” today. I love the video and think that it completely shows the band’s potential for live shows, cripplingly fun songs, and naked shenanigans.



I talked to The Nude Party this week, chatting about their future, how they came together, and where in the world their “Coyote” video came from.

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HG: Where did the idea for the “Coyote” video come from? It’s one of the best videos I’ve seen in a while.
NP: (Connor) To be quite honest, there wasn’t much of an idea for the Wild Coyote video. We had decided to go to some of our favorite spots before hand, but we basically just had our talented friend Parker Worthington come up with a camera and we developed the “story” as we shot it. We tried dressing like cowboys but we ended up mostly looking like homeless pirates for the most part. The shots of us playing were at a show we played on a farm where we decided that fire and pineapples should play a key role. Then we got naked and so did most of the people there. Planning hasn’t ever been a big strong point of our band. Things just unravel most of the time but that seems to work.
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HG: What influences you? Any particular artists come to mind?
NP: (Connor) That’s always a difficult question but we all live together and have been friends for quite a while and I think that has a role in how we interact musically. Most of us are usually into similar artists around similar times. There’s been many occasions where I pause the music in my room and hear the same song coming from another. The Animals, The Doors, and Creedence are a good place to start for some of our older influences. Individually I think we all come different musical interest but as a whole they fit together. Some newer bands we really enjoy are The Growlers, The Night Beats, Jack White, and the Allah-Las. They’re doing it right.
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HG: Describe your perfect breakfast.

NP: (Zach) We’re all quite fond of fruit. A smoothie would definitely be a part of it. Our drummer Connor makes some scrambled eggs called The Bitches Brew. Some ingredient include ranch, honey mustard, beer, ketchup, and whatever else is in the fridge. He likes them but everyone else thinks they’re shit.

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HG: How did you all come together?
NP: (Connor) Well I’ve been friends with Alec our bass player since the first grade. Shaun and Zach are brothers who moved from Michigan and we all started high school together. We became a pretty close group of friends because we weren’t very cool and most people thought we were weird or disgusting. That’s also why we got along so well. I went to college in Boone, NC and they all stayed in Charlotte, NC. I met Patton our singer walking down main street one day and realized we both lived in the same dorm hall. Eventually we all became close and basically lived at my friends lake house last summer to play music every night.
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HG: Tell me about your early jam sessions. What were the first tracks you played together?
NP: (Shaun) Our first jam sessions were made up of almost total inexperience… I was the only one that had played in a band before. Connor and Alec bought a drum set and bass guitar off of Craigslist, and we set them up in Alec’s lake house. Patton, who would become our singer, had never sung before, and began by yelling over the band, since we had no microphones or PA system at the time. I had some experience playing blues guitar and alternative rock music… so that’s where we started. At the bottom, basically. The first songs we played were “Cisco Kid,” a rap song written by Connor and Patton in the dorms the previous school year, “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MG’s, and “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones–along with a few other simple riffs we’d jammed up. Basically, we’d learn any riff we liked and play the shit out of it for hours.
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HG: Why is it the NUDE party and not the NAKED party? Thoroughness necessary.
NP: (Patton) We actually get called things like, “The Naked Party,” or “The Naked Band,” or “faggots”, all of the time–so there’s clearly a synonym there. The reason we went with “The Nude Party,” though, is the classiness of the word “nudity”–compared to the crassness of a word like “naked.” Models and actresses get nude, while streakers and drunk people get naked. We like to think we put on a classy act, even if it does get dirty and wet sometimes… I guess you could ask the Rolling Stones why they didn’t go with “The Migrating Minerals” or something like that… so I guess the answer comes down to the inherent connotation of words, even words that seem to mean the same thing.
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HG: If you could describe your sound in one word… what would it be?
NP: (Alec) Bonerjamz’09
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HG: What was the best party that you have ever been to? What happened there?
NP: (Patton) The best party I’ve ever been to… Would have to be our guitarist Shaun’s girlfriend’s birthday party at our bassist (Alec)’s lakehouse in Mooresville, North Carolina. We all drank heavily into the evening, and at some point one of the girls there got drunk enough that her clothes just came off, and she started streaking towards the dock. So we all got naked and ran to the end of the dock, hopped in a canoe (all 15 of us), and began drunkenly rowing into the lake. Of course, the thing flipped almost immediately, leaving 15 hammered naked people swimming a canoe back to the shore, having a hilarious time. Even Shayna got naked, and Shayna never gets naked. The night ended with me electing to puke off the deck for hours, instead of engaging in a far more enjoyable act. But it was alright. In fact, it was a blast. That nude party may well have been the birth of The Nude Party’s name.
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HG: Tell what your shows are like? What are you like live?
NP: (Patton) Our live act is, in our collective opinion, our strongest point. We rarely create a set list, instead we usually try to feel out what the crowd is digging the most. Sometimes they are most into the hip hop vibe, so we’ll play some harder songs and hip hop covers, like “Can I Kick It?” by A Tribe Called Quest or “Roses” by Outkast. If we’re in the zone, or just drunk enough, we’ll sometimes adlib and create songs on the spot. That’s how one of our new songs, “Sweet Shops” came to exist. At a show in Wilmington, our guitarist began to play the Ray Charles song, “Hit the Road Jack,” even though the rest of us had never played it before. I didn’t know any of the lyrics past the chorus. It was fun, though, and we just made up what we didn’t know. I think we struggle to create recordings that match the energy and spontaneity of a live show. We’re just not a multitrack band, or a produced band, we really are a live band.
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HG: Where do you see The Nude Party going in the future?
NP: (Shaun) Hopefully, we’ll be playing music for as many people as possible. For anyone that wants to listen, really. We just want everyone to have as much fun as we have while we’re playing. At the moment, we’re working on a small tour through the southeast, which will hopefully accomplish two of our main desires: to have fun, and to get other people to have fun with us.

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HG: How did you all come to that name? Also, was that phrasing too sexual?
NP: (Shaun) It all started in a canoe…
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HG: Who wins in a fight… Batman or Barack Obama?
NP: (Patton) Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, while Obama is a politician. He not only beats Obama, he probably owns him. - Blue Harvest Beat

Boone-based psyche-rockers The Nude Party just released their first video, “Wild Coyote.” The song is the first single from the band’s forthcoming album, Forbidden Fruits. Interested in helping The Nude Party print that record? Donate here.

Note: The video contains some images that may be objectionable to some viewers and, as the band’s name suggests, there’s some nudity. - Mountain Xpress