About Me
One night in December of 1979, Bill and Alex Zander brought their newborn son, Gabriel, to a bar on US Hwy 206 on their way home from the hospital.The result would be some damn fine Outlaw Country Music.Call Gabe Zander a "musician" or an "artist", and he'll correct you, and possibly get annoyed. "Music isn't anything if there's nothing backing it up," he says. "People who make music just for the sake of making music are like windbags who babble on and on just to hear themselves talk, with nothing to say at all, because they don't do jack."
Known as "The Punk Rock Redneck", Gabe practices what he preaches. His Country Music, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, is not the result of a trendy newfound love of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, but of a childhood spent wandering around the Appalacian Mountains and fishing for bass. His Punk ethic is not the result of thinking imitating the Sex Pistols will plunge him into success through shock value, but of years of injuries sustained in mosh pits and brutal streetfights with everybody from Nazi Skinheads, to inner-city Gangsters, to the police, to his own kind turned against him.
However, music is something he seems to do naturally, his father an old Beatnik Country-Blues songwriter and his mother a leftover Folkie from the 60's. "It's just something that I do," he'll snap. "I happen to play guitar alright and guess I can carry a tune and write songs, so everything else in my life gets stuffed into music and comes out good to some folks, absolutely horrible to others. Lots of people do that; I don't see what the big deal is." Whether or not he's right is in the eye of the beholder, but we'll have to accept that music is certainly "what he does", and much of it comes from music itself. His first concert, at the age of three, was a Bluegrass festival featuring Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, the Osborne Brothers, Jimmy Martin, the Lewis Family, and many others. After discovering rock music a litle later, he would lock himself in his room and listen to Heavy Metal for hours on end. In his teen years, he would pile up in a car with several other troublemakers from his rural home area and ride an hour and a half into New York City to get themselves bruised and battered in the pits of CBGB's, Coney Island High, and many other extinct Punk Temples.
As for his own music, he began playing around on guitars, acoustic and electric, as early as he could remember. "I was just trying to see what noises I could make," he says. His early dreams were that of an aspiring bluegrass picker and later a Metal guitarist, but realizing his own technical limitations, joined a Grunge band, Uremia, during Junior High (Grunge being "all the rage" during those years of 1992-94), and later a Punk Band, the Oi! Scouts, which would achieve international underground popularity (post-mortem, of course). After their breakup and during stints with other Northeastern Punk Bands (Squiggy, The Outsiders, The Hate Trash Disasters), he rediscovered his childhood love of old country, particularly Johnny Cash ("Protest songs and broken heart ballads are all I need").
During a brief stint living in Newark, NJ (not exactly the Country capitol of the world but hey...), he began writing song after song ("Wild And Free", "Bobby Lee", "Newton", and "Down The Line" were some of the earliest favorites) and upon returning to the boonies, performing them at open mics at coffee shops and redneck bars. He decided to work and save for a move to Nashville to try his hand at pitching his music there, then one day in 2002 said "Screw it" and hitch hiked to Music City.
He's been there since, performing at Punk shows, dive bars, and even on the streets for tips, working in everything from concrete, to roofing, to landscaping, to furniture repair to support his project (as he calls it, his "war"). He tours and performs anywhere he's wanted, either by himself with a guitar, or with his great band, The Mountain Punk All-Stars, who are available amplified or as an acoustic/bluegrass-style setup. A full-length album, "Punk Rock Redneck", is finished and ready for release, by whoever wants to put it out.
