March 7, 2008

These Cougars rock at Battle of the Bands

Special to the Times

The Randy Haas Experience made it to the finals of San Jose Public Libraries Battle of the Bands Contest, held at the Almaden Library last Saturday.

The band consists of five Evergreen residents, all juniors at Evergreen Valley High School. Guitar virtuoso Randy Haas and drummer extraordinaire Kevin Coleman have been playing together for about a year. The band recently added bassist Shawn Ladao, keyboardist Megan Simpson and vocalist Jason Sanchez to round out the group. Sixteen bands entered the contest and the top five were selected to compete in the finals based on online voting. The top three bands were given prizes with the grand prize being 10 hours of studio recording time.

Randy Haas and company played second and immediately got the house rocking and the judges' feet tapping as they cranked out Strangle Hold by Ted Nugent. Randy displayed his guitar antics by playing both behind his back and with his teeth, a la Jimi Hendrix. From the opening tune they went into a tasty version of Santana’s Black Magic Woman and finished the set with Santana’s Soul Sacrifice, where the band really heated up as the crowd clapped to the beat and were brought to their feet with Kevin Coleman’s amazing drum solo. After all five bands played the judges conferred and announced the top three bands. The Randy Haas Experience took third place, with the Swing Kids of Santa Teresa High in second and Tracing Hearts of Pioneer and Lincoln High taking top honors.

The EVHS students met and were able to start playing music together with the help and guidance of English teacher Mike Brennan. Brennan, a musician himself, keeps a variety of instruments in his classroom and has an open room at lunch, where students can come and jam with each other. Kevin Coleman, a new student to EVHS last year was discovered by Brennan as Kevin sat down at the drum set and began to play. He was invited to come at lunchtime to jam where he met Randy Haas and the band began to form.