We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shane Ragoonan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Shane, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I always love to tell people that when it comes to the music business, never be scared to take a risk. Take it from me, someone who’s had about 100 gimmicks and has portrayed all kinds of different characters onstage from dressing up as a cowboy to playing a Baptist priest, I’ve done it all.

I think the one that stands out the most was when I dressed up as and imitated The Nature Boy Ric Flair during a Nicaragua Benefit Concert at Miami-Dade College in 2018. I was inspired by Flair, before every performance, I would take the time to watch him cut one of his legendary promos from back in the days, listening to him talk about limousines, jet airplanes, styling and profiling would give me a boost of adrenaline and confidence every time like I transformed from Billy Batson to Captain Marvel. I wanted to do something unforgettable that night and so I donned the robe, aviator sunglasses, and a blonde wig, I went out in front of hundreds of people and I only knew that I had to do two things: style and profile (woo!) and that’s exactly what I did along with performing onstage with my band Galaxy Beat. The crowd loved it, the response I got was overwhelming when I walked out to Ric Flair’s theme song, everyone started applauding and going nuts. We performed about two songs to start the show, we were told we would perform again after intermission, while I was lounging around backstage, I saw an empty wine bottle prop and thought to myself “I could use this for after the intermission!” I just had to clear it with the director of the concert Professor Murphy, I told him my idea and the only thing he asked me was if the bottle would break and I told him it’s a prop, it’ll be fine (I wasn’t planning to hit anyone over the head with it). He approved and after intermission, I had my bandmates Julio and 2-Stixx holding me as if I had been drinking for the past 48 hours and I said something along the lines of “man that was some kind of trip to Hawaii woo!” The crowd laughed and then right when we were about to get started, one of the other musicians who performed that night tried to take the empty bottle from my hand but instead I “punched” him and then we proceeded to perform our songs. The best part about the segment I just told you was that I came up with all of it on the fly during intermission as well, I don’t remember the guys name at the moment but I remember being an awesome person and I asked him, “dude would you be willing to pretend to take the bottle out of my hand and then you pretend like I punched you?” He did not hesitate to agree to it, we proceeded to rehearse it once and nailed it onstage.

The main message of that story I would like for everyone reading this to process is don’t be afraid to take a risk when it comes to new ideas. If you find that the risk was worth it and gets a positive response, keep doing it! If not, don’t worry about it, at least you tried and now you know that it doesn’t work So just move on and never stop trying out new ideas.

Shane, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Ever since I was a young boy listening to the likes of OutKast and Ludacris to a teenager enamored by The Doors, all I ever wanted to be was a musician and for over ten years, that’s exactly what I’ve been. When I was in middle school, I would rap to anyone willing to listen. Sometimes it was a group of people, sometimes it was just a single person who asked to hear me rap. I wanted to do more, learn more music wise so my mom enrolled me into Miami Lakes Educational Center where I met a man by the name of Matais Oxidine who was my music teacher for three years in high school. Because of him, I learned how to play the piano and how to work with music software programs like Reason and Pro Tools in order to make beats and record vocals. I used to record my music in class and then upload it to SoundCloud, a majority of it went unnoticed except for maybe a few songs I did with a couple of my classmates. After I graduated from high school, I spent the next couple of years away from making music, I honestly thought that the days of me performing live and recording were in the rear view mirror………….boy I am so glad I was wrong (laughs). While I was in college, I was approached by two men: Julio Diaz whom I’ve known since we were both 10 years old and Demetrius Conley better known as 2-Stixx. They invited me to hang out and jam with them whenever we had free time in between classes so I dusted off my old keyboard and I would bring with me to campus while Julio brought his guitar and 2-Stixx had like this little drum pad he would take with him everywhere and we would just jam out together, sometimes students and professors would pass by and like what they were hearing. After a few weeks of jamming together, Julio, 2-Stixx, and myself decided to start a band together and thus, Galaxy Beat was born.

It is my goal that whenever Galaxy Beat finishes a show that everyone who attended it leaves with this thought in their minds “damn Galaxy Beat put on a great show tonight!” I want the audience to go home knowing that they just saw something that they have never ever seen before.

There’s so many things about the band that I’m very proud of. I’m proud that we’ve been around for six years and even though we are technically a Punk Rock band, I feel like we’re more of an experimental band than anything else. What I mean by that is yes we have songs that are in the Punk Rock genre and yes we love to cover The Ramones who are The Godfathers of Punk in my opinion but we also love doing songs from other genres of music like for example, Señorita Bonita I think can be classified as Latin Rock, we have a new song called The Takeover which was heavily inspired by Rage Against The Machine so I guess it qualifies as Nu Metal. I think the coolest thing we’ve ever done was take a song like Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot and turn it into a metal song, it’s just pure genius and a lot of fun when people realize what song we’re singing, the looks on their faces is just pure gold and I’d like to thank our good friend Peter Alvarez for coming up with that idea when he was part of our band. I think the main thing I’m most proud of about Galaxy Beat is that we don’t take ourselves seriously, we love to be silly onstage, we love making people laugh, and we love to put on a good show for them. Our fans love it and admittedly in the past, I’ve had other musicians tell me that we should stop being silly onstage and my response is, “if we’re not having fun then what’s the point of all this?” I feel that some bands and fellow musicians out there try to hard to convince their audience that they’re cool, edgy, and other things whereas with Galaxy Beat, what you see is what you get. Julio is the Six String King, 2-Stixx is Captain Crash N Bash, and Shane Ragoonan is The Champ That Runs The Camp, it’s that simple.

When I’m not making music with Galaxy Beat, I’m co-hosting a podcast called No Latex Needed with my better half Rosa Ragoonan. Before I met Rosa, I was in two different podcasts previously and I remember her coming up with the idea for us to do our own podcast, I said absolutely, I thought it was a great idea. On our podcast, we discuss anything and everything from what we’ve seen on TV and in movies to what’s going in the world of sports like basketball, hockey, and wrestling, and so much more. No Latex Needed has been around for about two years now and it’s still going strong, we’ve come very far from buying a singular microphone to record our episodes with to now having a a proper mixer and lapel mics which provide better sound quality, we started off exclusively on SoundCloud to now being available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and more. Rosa has her own series in the podcast based on everything hockey known as Players, Pucks, and the Cup. I love recording episodes of the podcast with my wife, it’s something I feel we both enjoy and where it goes from here I don’t know but I’m excited to see where it goes.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I think the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is when the show is over, you gave it your all onstage in front of fans and you can smile knowing that you sent them home happy with a memory they’ll never forget. I remember years ago, the band and I used to go to Open Mic Night at the BurgerFI in North Miami Beach, we knew the host and the manager at the time of the place and they would frequently host Open Mic Night there and we loved attending because although we were only allowed to perform one song, we chose to also provide a little comedy to our performance. One of the things I used to do frequently at these shows were rip my shirt off like I was Hulk Hogan, one night I was getting ready to perform and these two kids who had to be about six or eight years old looked at me and asked, “Hey are you gonna rip your shirt off tonight? We love that!” That’s definitely in my Top 10 moments as an artist, ripping my shirt off and the kids loving it (laughs). My favorite shows for me are always the ones that involve a benefit whether it’s raising money for a country that is in need of help or raising money for a hospital that works around the clock to treat children with cancer. I would rather do 100 benefit shows than a show where there’s a 50/50 chance that the promoter is gonna screw you out of the money you made that night.

With No Latex Needed, the most rewarding aspect of it is I get to do it with my wife and I love it. I think the other awesome thing about our podcast too is that we’re basically our own bosses as in we pick the topics we want to discuss, nobody is writing a script for us, we come up with our own stuff and we choose what guests we want to have on our podcast and what questions to ask them. Oh yeah not to mention, we are free to curse and swear without worrying about being censored or pissing off sponsors because we have none (laughs).

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

So Galaxy Beat had a show at the Dive Bar in Fort Lauderdale (the name of the place we performed was literally called Dive Bar). It was on March 8, 2019 and I had been battling an awful cold for a couple of days but I was not planning to cancel that show anytime soon. I figured I’d take a couple of DayQuil pills with me and ingest them before the show, I figured it would be good enough for me to get me through our live performance. On our way to the show, I took about 2 or 3 pills and drank some water, it was pretty dark as we were getting closer to the Dive Bar and I remember feeling tired and sleepy, I thought well maybe it’s taking awhile to kick in. We were informed by the promoter of the show that we were on next and I’m still not feeling well so I thought, I’ll just take another pill, I pulled out a pill from my pocket only to realize that it wasn’t DayQuil I was taking…………….it was NyQuil! It was then that I realized the pills I had taken earlier were NyQuil and I was a few seconds away from counting sheep. I didn’t know what else to do so I just put on my sunglasses and started performing, I don’t know how I did it but I got through the whole performance without messing up even once and the crowd loved our performance that night. They had no clue that I was in La La Land, it was like a Weekend at Burnies sort of situation except obviously I wasn’t dead (laughs).

I’m not sure about resiliency but I think this story is more about being bold and sticking to your guns more than anything else. Rosa and I decided to do an episode called “The Job From Hell” in which we discussed our previous job of working at a court reporting agency and our experience during our employment over there. We knew we had to be careful with this episode, delicate but still have our voices be heard so we decided to change the names of the agency we worked for as well as the manager and owner of the agency along with some of the supervisors. We invited our friends Peter Alvarez and Bryan Lopez to be on the podcast since they also worked for this agency around the same time that we did. It actually turned out to be one of our best episodes to date, the whole purpose of the episode was not to talk smack about our previous employer or talk about how much we hated our former bosses or anything like that, the real reason behind the episode was to show what red flags to look out for in any place of employment so that someone doesn’t end up continuing to work somewhere that has a toxic work environment amongst other things. I got some messages where some people didn’t see it that way but I assured them the exact thing that I am telling you right now and that’s why the episode is still available for all to listen to.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @____kemosabe____
• Facebook: Search “Shane Ragoonan”
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-ragoonan-778511160
• Twitter: @ShaneRagoonan
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@galaxybeat7922
• Other: No Latex Needed IG: @nolatexneeded No Latex Needed is on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as well, just search “No Latex Needed” Galaxy Beat on IG: @galaxybeat_official

Image Credits
Garage To Nowhere Jennifer Glez Photography