Press Release
PHOENIX, AZ, April 23, 2013 – After a year of improbable obstacles, Stuck Outside of Phoenix made its debut. Art Edwards, Bassist and Co-Founder of Tempe’s popular rock band The Refreshments, teamed up with prolific AZ-based Producer Nico Holthaus to tell the story of Stuck Outside of Phoenix, based on Edwards’s first novel of the same name. The movie recaptures the anything-might-happen days of the notorious ’90s Tempe music scene Edwards and Holthaus lived and breathed.
This fictional tale follows Josh “Hote” Hotle, a 21-year-old flailing musician who just wants to escape his stuck-in-the-mud existence, his faltering Tempe band, the sweltering Valley summer heat, and play Rock & Roll – anywhere but in the dormant Phoenix music scene. A talented musician, Hote receives an invitation to join not one, but two bands, one in Tempe and one in Seattle, a city which from a distance seems to be perfect for Hote and his musical ambitions. Making the choice even harder is badly-timed interest from the girl he’s been infatuated with but whom he’d never had the decisiveness to approach.
Wherever you’re from, you’ll be able to relate to this movie’s “behind the scenes” of what it takes for local heroes to become national and international icons. The film, whose screenplay was also penned by Edwards, is packed with drama, romance, comedy and, of course, Rock & Roll. The film is vibrantly filled by a soundtrack of rare and unreleased songs by many of the Tempe ’90s “rock royalty” such as Dead Hot Workshop, Beats the Hell Out of Me, Undertow, Serene Dominic, and the Pistoleros.