Check Out Mickey Shorr & The RadioShacks’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mickey Shorr & The RadioShacks.

Hi Mickey Shorr, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Mickey Shorr & The RadioShacks started when Germs and I (Ian) met at a mutual friend’s destination wedding in New Orleans and immediately hit it off. When the two of us got back to Michigan we started hanging out at summer bonfires and spent late nights karaoke-ing at Speedboat Bar & Grill in Wyandotte. Even though both of us have our distinct preferences, we were still able to find enough common ground to bond over music. We learned that we both played guitar (Germs being world’s better than Ian), and started hanging out in Germs’ garage playing covers of Pixies, Marcy Playground, and Car Seat Headrest among others. Eventually, Germs mentioned he had a drummer friend who played in a few hardcore bands in the Detroit scene, and so Robbie was invited to come and jam. We got together fairly regularly, continuing to play covers for a while until Robbie asked if either of us had written any originals, and so I (Ian) offered up a song that he had written in college called Living Corpse. We immediately started working on it and the song came together relatively quickly. After that, we started working on more original songs with no plan to do anything with them. This went on until 2022 when I (Ian) started to really voice that I wanted to do something with our music like play a show, even though the group was lacking on the low end as the group consisted of two guitars, drums, and vocals.

I continued to bring up the idea of playing a show or recording a few songs just for the hell of it, but nothing happened in that until 2022 when Robbie reached out to his friend Tim who had recorded some of Robbie’s other bands including the hardcore project that he was also in at the time, Enemy of God. The three of us scheduled time to record seven songs we had written together in October 2022. A few weeks before that, I ran into an old college friend, Anthony, at another wedding. Anthony and I used to jam together in an apartment bedroom for a while in college, and I knew that Anthony was currently playing bass in another punk band, so I asked him if he wanted to come jam with the rest of us in the future. Anthony was down and wrote bass lines for all seven songs we were going to record in just a matter of weeks. So we had our full lineup and ended up with the seven songs that made up our first release which we named, Cowboy Mike Does Karaoke Night. Once the recording was finished, we posted the songs on some streaming services and I started emailing the link to some Metro Detroit venues trying to book a show. Eventually, The Sanctuary in Hamtramck said they had a show we could join the bill on in April 2023, and since then we’ve continued to play together recording a hand full of songs and playing shows on a fairly regular basis around the Detroit area and Greater Lansing.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s been a fairly smooth road. I mean it took us 4 years to build out the full lineup, but this is just something we all enjoy doing for one reason or another as an escape from the monotony of everyday life. I guess it was a struggle to find someone who wanted to play bass, but there haven’t been any issues since then. None of us have big egos or any delusions about what we are. I think we all approach it as a fun way to hang out and have something to do outside of our day jobs.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Mickey Shorr & The RadioShacks has been a hobby for all of us. Outside of the band, we all have careers. Ian plays the role of vocalist and rhythm guitarist, but he’s also the Director of Graduate Program Recruitment Marketing at Michigan State University’s Business College.

Germs is our lead guitarist and works as a skilled tradesman and union rep in the Detroit auto manufacturing industry.

Anthony adds driving bass lines to every song and spends his days programming satellites as a Software Developer at the Space Physics Research Laboratory (SPRL) and XTRM Labs.

Robbie is our drummer and he works as a nurse, but he also has a side hustle. He is very active in the Pokémon scene on the live marketplace app Whatnot. He has nearly 50K followers and over 30K sales. His auctions are pretty entertaining if you want to check him out, he goes by the name poppindaddio in that space.

How do you define success?
Our goal with Mickey Shorr & The RadioShacks is to have fun with it. We’ve always agreed that if it stopped being fun for any of us then it had run its course and we’d move on. That hasn’t happened yet, so we’re going to keep writing, recording, and gigging for now. And I’d say that sums up our definition of success, having fun and getting opportunities to share our music.

Pricing:

• All of our recorded music is available for free on all the big streaming platforms – YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc.
• We play shows around the Detroit area and Greater Lansing, usually cover runs somewhere between $5 and $10
• We do have merch available at our shows. We have free stickers, shirts for $15, and buttons for $1.
• We’ve even see one of our shirts pop up on eBay recently for the price of $29.90 OBO plus $8.55 shipping – https://www.ebay.com/itm/326416633189

Contact Info:

• Website: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6A0EMC7SaEG5Ns6t4wOQfa?si=v3MspfgFT3WAGQnMkRhr9A
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mickeyshorrandtheradioshacks/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MickeyShorrAndTheRadioShacks
• Other: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/mickey-shorr-the-radioshacks/1661845587