If you want to laugh and have fun, the Spazmatics have the night for you
When four guys take the stage dressed like they’re out of an ’80s comedy right down to the skinny ties, flood pants, hornrimmed glasses and Brylcreemed hair, you know you’re in for a fun night.
The Spazmatics kick off the long Thanksgiving weekend with a new wave ’80s party, performing a 9 p.m. show Nov. 24 at the Hard Rock Casino Northern Indiana in Gary. You’ll hear songs like “Blinded Me with Science,” “Whip It,” “Tainted Love” and many, many more hits from the Me Decade.
The Spazmatics were created in 1997 by Perfect World Entertainment, a group responsible for other acts such as Boogie Knights, Anthem, Doublewide, The Stonez, Metalshop and Dope MC’s. There are about 15 Spazmatics casts nationwide.
Drummer Peter Drefs, or Eugene as he’s known on stage, has been with Perfect World Entertainment since 2003. Perfect World Entertainment started in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he said.
“It started with our president (Jamie Brown). He had a band. They were, and still are, an original band. But they also put together a disco band called the Boogie Knights. The Boogie Knights got very big very fast.”
That success led to the creation of more disco bands with names like Disco Inferno and Bootiequake.
“He had friends around the country, and eventually there were bands in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Cleveland, Chicago and Tampa and they were all doing these disco shows. Here in Chicago, we were and still are called The Afrodisiacs.”
In the early 2000s, the ’80s started becoming popular again — music, fashion and culture. Perfect World Entertainment tried a few different types of ’80s groups and the one that did the best with audiences was The Spazmatics, Drefs said.
“They reached out to all these people in the different markets who were doing the disco show and said, ‘Hey, we have this new concept if you guys are interested,’ ” he said. “Some markets, the same four guys did the disco show and the Spazmatics show. Fast forward to today and we still have bands in all those markets. We have a band in Austin that does fantastic. We have a band in the Carolinas now. We’re all over the country.”
The band members are all real musicians and in the Chicago Spazmatics case, with more than 140 combined years of experience in the music business, he said.
“We’ve all been doing this since high school,” Drefs said.
He got into music growing up in
Delevan, Wisconsin; listening to his older brothers’ records.
“I have two older brothers that play drums. We had one very old, beat-up drum set in the house and one day I just went down and started making noise on it,” he said. “After about two weeks of that, my brother came down and said, ‘OK, I can’t take this anymore.’ And he showed me the most basic, simple drum beat. And that was it. I haven’t stopped playing from that moment on. That was 1983.”
He went to the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles after high school. It was there that he auditioned for the Perfect World Entertainment and then didn’t hear from them for five years, he said, by which time he had moved back to Chicago.
“The band was active in Chicago and doing well and they didn’t need me at the time,” he said. “Thankfully, he kept my number.”
He officially joined in 2003. He’s the only member still in the band from when he joined.
“When I joined it was still disco. We did disco for another two or three years (before) we started doing The Spazmatics,” he said. “We still do The Afrodisiacs. We’re one of those bands that do multiple shows. We also do a yacht rock show called The Windbreakers. You could take any one of us in the band and if we really had to, I think we could easily play for 10 hours straight without repeating a song and without ever looking at a chart.”
Drefs doesn’t sing, but he does rap on one song. He’s even been known to crowd surf.
“We are unique in that we have what we consider three lead singers in the band,” he said. “Our lead singer is one of the best in Chicagoland. He’s also a phenomenal guitar player, a fantastic bass player, he plays keyboards, he plays drums.”
The other guys all take turns on lead vocals, which lends another dynamic to the group.
The members are: singer Andrew Blake (Lewis), guitarist C.J. Szuter (Clarke) and bassist Brian Calhoun (Gilbert). They do so much work for Perfect World Entertainment they don’t have to have day jobs; music is what they do for a living.
“We like playing all the shows that we play. We look forward to all of them. We’ve played everywhere from Salt Lake City to San Diego and Boca Raton and Washington, D.C. We’ve played bowling alleys all the way up to Ford Field in Detroit and every type of venue in between. It’s what we do. We look forward to getting up onstage and performing and entertaining.”
Audiences should expect to have a good time at a Spazmatics show, he said.
“I don’t mean to be cliché, but it’s often unlike anything you’ve seen before,” he said. “If you’ve never seen the show before and you’ve never seen a picture of us, quite often the reaction when we walk out is, ‘What is this? This is ridiculous.’
“But once we start playing and we’re able to prove our musicianship and we then start being The Spazmatics with the choreography and the shtick and the dance steps, very quickly we’ve changed their perception of what this is going to be.”
If you’ve ever been put off by a band that walks onstage looking too cool for school, that won’t be an issue at a Spazmatics show.
“When you come out as The Spazmatics, right away it allows people to let their guard down,” he said. “They can see it and say, ‘Oh this is going to be different. This is going to be fun.’ A lot of times when we walk out, people start laughing. And what’s better than laughing and having a good time?”