Without Paris

About Without Paris

Without Paris: We’re often asked, “How’d you get the name?”

Well, contrary to outward appearances, the boys in the band are actually freedom-loving history junkies. It occurred to them that the very essence of rock and roll is freedom – freedom of thought, ideas, and expression. Tyranny and rock and roll simply cannot coexist. And it’s no coincidence that the greatest rock and roll and the greatest democracy in history were both created right here. But not by accident! We got to thinking where we would be had there not been a war for independence. And while the revolutionary war ended with Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, things really ended, and in fact the new nation began, with the Treaty of Paris. Well, since the road to rock really began with that treaty, and since “Without Yorktown” isn’t a very cool name, we decided on “Without Paris”!

According to another source it has something to do with the time the band was on their tour bus – well OK – not really a tour bus but a 1972 Cadillac – on their way to a radio interview on WLZK The Lake - when they descended on a small town west of Nashville, Tennessee – and found that Hank Williams Jr once lived there – and what an inspiration to them he was!!! Something about keeping your hands to yourself? Anyhow – rather than continue on to Nashville in search of a lucrative recording career – the boys stayed a night in Paris Tennessee – which as we all know is home to the “Worlds Largest Fish Fry” – and ate so much fish they slept right through the radio show and audition the next day…and so as you can see – without Paris TN they may have actually made it to Nashville – and the rest is history?

Although some think what really happened was, we were down in Florida playing the Gamble Rogers festival which we shouldn't have been playing in the first place because it's a folk festival and those people hate rock & roll and we tried to explain that to our booking agent, but he thought that if we played acoustic guitars it'd be okay, and he was wrong cause we got into a big fight that night that ended in a lot of fruit being thrown around, and we were arguing with this Floridian about which fruit is the best fruit, and he was saying oranges cause he's from Florida, of course, and we were saying pears because we have so many pears up here in New England, and that's when Carlo came and grabbed Scott and dragged him away cause he was about to punch this one guy, and that was stupid of him cause the guy was really big and drunk, and someone in our entourage yelled out, "We don't need your freekin' oranges, man!" And then the big drunk dude yelled back, "Oh, yeah? Well, we can do without pears too, fella!" But folks heard it as "Without Paris," and the name just stuck.

Unless the real story is about Paris Hilton. The ubiquitous socialite. She’s plastered on the cover of every magazine in the grocery store checkout lines. Stories of her vacuous exploits abound, but perhaps the only substantial story about Paris Hilton comes from the day she showed up at a Without Paris concert. This was only the second gig the band had ever played, and at the time we were calling ourselves “The Sumo Wrestlers,” and we actually performed in these fat suits and bounced up against each other on stage and stuff, but after the first show we were so sweaty that we dumped the suits and decided to call ourselves “The Skinny Sumos” instead, and that was the name on the marquis the night Ms. Hilton stopped by. We were having snacks in our dressing room after the show when we heard a faint knock. Our road manager answered the door and there she was, and he said, “Man, you look just like Paris Hilton.” The rest of us just stared at her, silent. She said, “You guys were fab, and I loooove the name!” And away she went. Back on the tour bus that night we all agreed that if Paris Hilton likes our name then there must be something wrong with it, and that’s when our driver simply said, “Without Paris.” We didn’t get what Jarvis meant, and Jarvis is a man of few words, so we knew that he wasn’t about to explain himself, and so we didn’t ask, and to this day we really don’t know for sure if he was suggesting a new band name or making a random, Jarvis-like comment, but from that moment on, we were and we will always be, “Without Paris.”