Black Hollies promote their work via Internet and word of mouth

The music of The Black Hollies looks back to the '60s, but the band's methods look to the future.

The four-piece garage-rock outfit is one of many bands working without a major label. With the industry in disarray, they skip the middleman and use the Internet and word of mouth to promote their music.

The Hollies may not pack an arena, but they support their music (and vice versa) through appearances at intimate, do-it-yourself venues across the country. The Boot in Norfolk, where they'll be tonight, is an example.

Groups like these are creating by the day a new paradigm for the way music is created, distributed and enjoyed.

"I don't know if we'd go with a big label," says lead singer/songwriter Justin Angelo Morey, also the group's bassist. "I feel like it's just one big label and a thousand subsidiaries. I'd rather be a semidecent fish in a medium pond than this tiny guppy in an ocean of predators."

Based in Jersey City, N.J., a stone's throw from Manhattan, the group is gigging down the East Coast and then across to Austin for the massive music festival South by Southwest. "SXSW," which runs Friday through March 16, is one of dozens of spring and summer festivals that have sprung up in the past few years packed with indie and well-known acts, giving another platform for hundreds of groups doing it themselves.

"We all have day jobs," Morey said of his band, which has been called "the best band currently making the rounds in NYC" by The L Magazine, an events guide, and praised in Rolling Stone. "By the time we finish what we do for rent, we are exhausted and have to crawl out of bed to get to work, but that comes through the music being truly genuine and sincere. I don't see us having major commercial radio play."

Instead, they're focusing on licensing and endorsement deals. Dell, the computer company, used their song "Tell Me What You Want" in a commercial, which gave them a chunk of cash to keep the group going. "Licensing deals are a fantastic new medium for bands like us."

They are a stylish garage rock band whose niche is '60s-style music that dabbles in soul and psychedelia. It's the kind of music that, as Rolling Stone writes, "would bring a smile to Brian Jones' face."

There's little particularly watershed about this group of guys in their early 30s playing music that sounds decidedly vintage - that is, until you consider how musicians like Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson have interwoven the music of the '60s back into the pop canon.

Even the band's imagery comes from that period - promotional posters and the fonts they use on album covers look as if they could be props from an "Austin Powers" film.

"Maybe I am connected to that era on a higher, spiritual level," Morey said. "My mother had an amazing soul and '60s-rock record collection."

She played the Supremes, The Temptations, The Beatles and Memphis soul - often. He soaked it up.

"That stuff is just timeless. It just kind of united everybody. Now, things are lot more divided. But that's the great thing about our shows: It's all walks of life, and it's grand to see all those people grooving together."

In that way, the group that's totally now is just one in a million.

Malcolm Venable, (757) 446-2662, malcolm.venable@pilotonline.com