The Acceleratii are a four-piece group from Duluth, Minnesota that
specializes in 50's/60's rock, country, rockabilly & psychobilly
music. The group formed in the fall of 2005, its early shows taking
place mostly in and around downtown Duluth- home to the only sizeable
music scene Minnesota can offer north of the Twin Cities.
The band is fronted by singer Chad "Bo Bandit" Lyons, who first
proposed assembling this kind of group after spending many, many long
hours surrounded by psychopaths and firearms in his Duluth pawn shop.
Quick to sign up were friends Steve "Gomez" Mahlberg and Ben Marsen,
two guitarists who years before had founded another Duluth group with
similar revivalist tendencies called the Black Labels. Marsen opted to
handle the bass playing for this new band in order to highlight the
amazing chicken-pickin' capabilities of his guitar mentor, the north
woods' uncanny one-of-a-kind rockabilly savant himself- Gomez.
Lyons looked up an old friend from the school days, Wally Wedan, to play drums. At last the band hit the ground running with a fierce selection of hard-drinking, fully customized, lightning-tempo drag-strip/hog-pen anthems.
The band soon began to exhaust some of its regular haunts within the city limits (all too common in a town where you can count the decent
music venues on one finger) and began to branch out with many more
gigs around the region. From the little chicken-shack bars up in the
woods to the Twin Cities, the Apostle Islands, the cornfields of Iowa, tourist traps and keg parties, the Acceleratii have honed their show with the help of many thousands of beers and inspiration from their rock & roll idols which they try, however sloppily, to honor in their repertoire.
2008 has seen the Acceleratii’s first fruitful efforts at recording, with their first real CD release expected this fall. With Wally being busied by holy matrimony and something called a "job," the group's buddy, Chris "Dubs" Warne, has been recruited to cover the drums. Among the many examples of early electric rock, jump blues, country, swing, classic punk and psychobilly are many of the group’s new original tunes, which should appeal to all fans of these genres- especially if you’re six years old.
