Santa Cruz rockers The Chop Tops have been tearing up local and international stages for nearly two decades now, taking traditional rockabilly and chucking out the owner’s manual, boosting the power, streamlining the chassis, and hot rodding it into something that’s all their own.
Featuring vocalist/drummer Gary “Sinner” Marsh, Shelby Legnon on guitar, and Brett Black on bass, the hard-working trio has toured across the United States multiple times and performed as far away as Australia—all while continuing to live in Santa Cruz, where they got their start in the punk scene back in the mid-90s.
“Every member of this band grew up listening to punk rock,” says Marsh, who sees punk not merely as one particular type of music, but an overall attitude.
Taking the fierce spirit of independence gleaned from the Santa Cruz underground, Marsh applied it to his first musical love—rockabilly—and formed The Chop Tops, who are today are a well oiled, high performance machine, playing more than 200 shows a year, and logging tens of thousands of miles on the road annually.
“We started a band for fun in a friend’s garage, we never intended do anything but just have fun and play shows and parties and that was it—and out of that came a career. This is our day job, this is what we do,” says Marsh.
The Chop Tops haven’t gotten where they are by taking the easy road or getting by on luck, however; Marsh and Legnon, who came on board in the early days, have endured several lineup changes and other obstacles over the years in addition to putting in countless hours of writing and rehearsing and paying their dues.
“You really respect the people who have done this for a long time, bands like AC/DC, the Ramones, and the bands in this genre, like the Reverend Horton Heat. You understand what it is to be out on the road, how hard it is, all the hard work that goes into it,” says Marsh.
“We didn’t get into this because we wanted to be rock stars, we just liked playing music,” says Legnon. “Hell, in the old days, we didn’t make any money, and we played four sets a night and went to our day jobs in the morning. We did it because we liked what we did. This went on for years—it just happened to turn into a career.”
The Chop Tops’ mixture of classic and contemporary sounds combined with an unwavering work ethic has won the respect and admiration of fans around the globe, including Australia, where the band played several shows in May of last year.
“We had to leave from Santa Cruz, drive for eight hours to L.A., get on a plane, fly for 15 hours, arrived in Melbourne, and then played almost right away,” says Legnon. “But it was really cool, the people were really receptive—I was kind of surprised, a lot of them knew our stuff!”
“It went really well, we left with as much merchandise as we could carry, and came back with none—we sold it all,” says Marsh.
Since they’ve been back, the group has re-released their album “Evil Six,” which originally came out back in 2001. The band was never happy with the first release, and decided to re-record the bass parts with Black, who joined in 2008, and re-mixed and mastered the record to meet their increasingly heightened standards.
“It was rushed, we didn’t have the budget,” says Marsh. “We wound up going back to revisit it because we knew we’d have a kick-ass album with the right guy on bass, and if we put in the right time for production.”
With the band already booked for a return visit to the land down under this summer, The Chop Tops have been busy working on material for a new album, and are gearing up for another U.S. tour later in the year.
“Hey,” says Legnon. “Time flies when you’re having fun.”
The Chop Tops play April 13 at Moe’s Alley.
