Since I started this site, bands have been telling me to go and interview Keaton. Being pretty good about knowing the music scene my first reaction was “Who the hell is Keaton?” My curiosity got the best of me so I hunted down the band and met them in their practice spot the “Keaton Cave”.

This spotlight is the result of that. Enjoy.

 How did Keaton get started?

Joey Bones: I’ve had to deal with Aaron my entire life, I met him in preschool.  We both had been in different bands, never played with each other then we reconnected and ended up starting our band. It actually started out that he was going to give me drum lessons; now neither of us plays drums.

Aaron: Actually it was only two or three years ago, but we still met in preschool. We were there picking up chicks.  I asked one drunken night at the bar if he would come home with me and start a band. Unfortunately, he only said yes to the band.

Joey Bones: Well, I did both that night anyway.  We slowly gained members, Steve has been our on and off drummer, along with Jay. Dave was my old roommate and after awhile he joined the band. We found Spencer.

Dave: Basically this whole band got started like a bad night at the bar. You wake up and have no idea what happened. Only this time, instead of waking up with a STD and love child, we woke up with a band.

So you say your bringing punk back, what’s that about?

 Aaron: We want to get rid of the “too punk for you” people. We have played with a bunch of different punk bands. They say they didn’t like our style but they had been tapping their foot the whole time. We want to get rid of the divide.

Dave: There is a difference between reviving punk rock and type casting yourself into a genre.  Punk rock is limitless that is the point of punk rock.

Joey Bones: We have all come from listening to different bands, some of them punk some of them not. The main premise of the band is just to write music that other people can enjoy while drinking beer.

 Spencer: We don’t have enough anger to be a heavy punk band. Life is a joke, laugh about it.

 Joey Bones: No one wants to go to a show and listen to somebody whine. The audience is not my shrink. I just want to write music that people will like, and that people will like.

What do you think of the current music scene?

Aaron: I love the direction the Rochester scene is going, because it makes us stand out. I don’t mean to sound like a dick but everyone in the headlines is doing the exact same thing. It makes the bands in the fringe seem that much more important.

Jay: There is defiantly something to say about the talent that is in this city. We have met some incredibly intelligent and talent people. Some are down to business and some are incredibly arrogant and it comes down to how you present yourself and the band.

Dave: I’ve been in the scene for eight or nine years. It’s been the norm where someone only listens to one style of music. It makes the scene real cliquey, and that just makes competition, instead of all of the musicians coming together and creating music.

So where have you played so far?

 Joey Bones: We have done 16 shows this year just playing around Rochester. We didn’t promote too much we just played to those who wanted to hear us play.

 Spencer: We have a great turn out at the bars; they seem to like us there. They usually sell quite a bit of booze when we come to play. We ran two bars to only two types of beer when we played.

 Aaron: And that was before anyone had gotten there.

Do you have a favorite place to play?

 Joey Bones: Montage is cool because we play with bigger bands and the Brew Haus is cool because they treat us like the bigger band.

Aaron: We like a lot of different spots. It gets boring playing at the same spot.

Any projects in the works?

 Joey Bones: We are in the writing process. We are looking to finish up the shows this year. We just put out a four track EP and we are looking to piggy back a full album off of that.