Popular Colorado cover band celebrates 25 years with Colorado Springs show

Courtesy of Lepik Photography

The six-piece Martini Shot, a rock band with horns that plays covers and originals, will celebrate its 25th anniversary on Saturday at Stargazers Theatre and Event Center. The show will feature some older cover songs they once played at The Ritz and Southside Johnny’s and former members of the group.
Courtesy of Lepik Photography
The underwear kept flying at them on stage and the guys in Martini Shot couldn’t figure out why.
Turns out a friend of the popular party band had gone shopping at Goodwill, bought a bunch of underwear and passed it out to the crowd at a Thirsty Parrot show so they could throw them at the band during a set.
That’s one of the many stories culled from 25 years of playing covers and originals around Colorado, at bars, clubs, festivals, the Colorado State Fair, private parties, weddings and more. They even checked off a bucket list item in June when they played at Red Rocks in Morrison, opening for Film on the Rocks.
“How once in a lifetime, unbelievably memorable moment that was to play our music at Red Rocks,” said lead singer Andy Clementi. “Not many can say I played songs I wrote at Red Rocks.”
The six-piece group, which includes two horn players — trumpet and saxophone — will celebrate its big quarter-century anniversary on Saturday at Stargazers Theatre and Event Center. The show will feature former band members and older cover songs they once played at The Ritz and Southside Johnny’s. They’ll also screen the trailer for a documentary about the band set to release next year.
“I can’t say it’s not fun to truly feel like a rock star on whatever level, small or big,” said Clementi, who’s also the principal at Pueblo East High School. “There’s a certain feeling you get when you have that relationship with the audience and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people are singing along or vibing with you. It’s a feeling like no other. If you can do that while doing something you love — playing music with your best friends — you can’t beat it.”
Clementi attributes their longevity to a few things.
“We treat it as a family. We’re very close, like brothers,” he said. “And fairness. No one person is greater than the entire good. That’s how we deal with it in terms of payment and ideas. It’s 100% fair. That helps with everyone feeling valued with what they bring to the table. It helps we do care about each other rather than that’s just a dude I play next to.”
The band sprouted in 2000 at Adams State College in Alamosa, where Clementi, a junior, was studying music education. He and some other music majors decided to find the best musicians on each instrument at the school, like the best drummer and best guitarist, and start a band. There were also some good horn players at the school, which seemed like a good way to set them apart from other rock bands.
“The idea was to take songs that didn’t have horns and add horns, whether it was a horn line or horns taking the guitar leads,” Clementi said.
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After graduating, he moved the band to Pueblo, where five of the six musicians were born and still live. Trumpet player Brian Person drove from Colorado Springs every weekend to watch the group play at Smitty’s Greenlight Tavern. He was a fan boy, he says, but for a good reason. He also went to Adams State and was in the music program with Clementi, along with being his RA in the dorms. In 2002, when their trumpet player left the band, Clementi asked Person to replace him.
“My friends are playing in a band with horns and they’re playing some rock and ska music,” Person said. “I wanted to be a part of that. I don’t know many trumpet players who get to play in a rock band.”
That early ska sound evolved through the years to become more rock heavy, though they also do a bunch of country, hip hop and rap covers. They like to add up to 10 songs every year. A few of their more recent popular ones include a horn-filled, ska version of “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish, “Shivers” by Ed Sheeran, “Valerie” by Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”
“It doesn’t have to have horns in it or be something we can translate into having horns,” Clementi said. “We want songs that make the crowd have a good time and dance. There’ll be times when I’m doing lunch duty and a tune will come on and I think that would be perfect and we could put that keyboard line into horns.”
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The guys have written original music for the last 25 years, too, resulting in one EP and three albums, the last of which dropped in 2016. Altogether, they’ve recorded 41 original songs.
If the music doesn’t quench your thirst for the band, they’ve also got a new podcast, “Confessions of a Wedding Band,” where they get together and tell anecdotes from their decades of playing, like the first time they auditioned at The Ritz, which ultimately became their first performance in the Springs.
“If you passed the audition on Thursday you could play Friday and Saturday,” Person said. “We came up. We had our parents with us, and it was a blizzard so we played for our parents and the staff. No one came out. There was a foot of snow on the ground. We got the gig. It was great. The vibe in The Ritz was awesome.”
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