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Out of the garage: Young musician wows with electric, acoustic talents

By Harry Funk 4 min read
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Zack Keim’s acoustic guitar is the instrument of choice on his soon-to-be-released solo debut.

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Zack Keim’s acoustic guitar is the instrument of choice on his soon-to-be-released solo debut.

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Zack Keim shows off the Nox Boys’ self-titled album during a recent event at Mt. Lebanon Public Library.

Somewhere between the beat of the British Invasion and the purple haze of psychedelia came the glory days of garage bands.

The masses’ musical tastes have changed, but garage rock’s raw, swaggering style continues to attract new fans and practitioners.

As a young musician, guitarist Gregg Kostelich, a Canonsburg native who now lives in Mt. Lebanon, was sufficiently impressed to start a garage-influenced band with singer Michael Kastelic and drummer Bill von Hagen, an aggregation they called the Cynics. Perhaps on a related note, they decided to forgo the travails of trying to sign with a record company and started their own.

Three decades later, Kostelich and his wife, Barbara Garcia-Bernardo, continue to operate North Side-based Get Hip Recordings as an independent music label and distributor, with a decided emphasis on garage acts of the past and present.

Among the latter is the four-piece Nox Boys, named as such because the band’s founders met in Blawnox and most of the members have yet to reach the legal drinking age.

At 19, lead guitarist and vocalist Zack Keim already has established himself as a veteran of the Pittsburgh music scene, from the time his dad, Jack, started taking him to open-mic nights. At one of those, he jammed with Bob Powers, who’s old enough to remember the ’60s but clicked with the much-younger musician.

”Bob and I started playing together, with my acoustic stuff,” Keim recalled. “And then I gave up, because Bob showed me garage rock.”

They recruited a rhythm section to form the Nox Boys, impressing audiences off the bat with a distinctive sound featuring Powers’ work on the Melobar steel guitar.

“Bob told me there was this label in Pittsburgh called Get Hip. I’d never heard of it,” Keim said. “So we went to go see the Cynics. I had a demo tape in my jean jacket, and I gave it to Gregg, personally.”

Kostelich liked what he heard, as did his longtime collaborator Kastelic, who urged the Nox Boys’ signing to Get Hip. At the time, Keim, drummer Sam Berman and bass player Zach Stadtlander all were students at Fox Chapel High School.

Nevertheless, they traveled to Detroit to record their first album with Jim Diamond, a producer and engineer who had worked in the late ’90s with a then-unknown act called the White Stripes. For the Nox Boys, Diamond helped the band deliver a solid set of 11 original songs, to rave reviews.

According to Keim, they plan to start work on their next album in February. In the meantime, he’s kept busy by going back to his acoustic-guitar roots for his solo debut, “First Step,” which represents something of a departure for his label.

”It’s an honor to be the first folk release on Get Hip,” he said.

In advance of the album is a promotional single, with Keim on one side and Pittsburgh singer-songwriter (and attorney) Benjamin Sweet on the other. Keim’s offering, “Alice,” has an interesting background: It actually is a recording he made when he was 16 with Powers.

“It was a favorite when I was playing it at the time, but I just kind of tucked it away,” Keim said.

He wrote “Spring,” another of the “First Step” tracks, when he also was 16 but has recorded a new version for the album. The rest of the compositions are fairly recent, as Keim has rediscovered a preferred style of his not-so-long-ago youth.

“I’m basically back to Square One,” he said, “doing my folk songs again.”

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