When I first moved back to SF in 2008, I lived in an office building downtown that, in many ways, was ideal but also kind of lonely. I soon moved into a big house in Glen Park with a bunch of wonderful people, but I hardly ever stayed there. You see, I hated the neighborhood, I thought my room sucked and I just never felt "at home" there, even though I had great roommates. Within the 9 or 10 months that I lived there, I probably slept in the house less than 10 times.
Tony hung out at our house a lot and played guitars with my roommate Gaybob. They were starting to amass a pretty good bundle of songs and decided to start a band. I had played with Tony briefly in one of the many lineups of SHOTWELL and he asked how I felt about playing drums for their band. I kinda felt too scattered in my life to actually be in a band at the time, but decided to do it anyway. We asked our other roommate, Sarah to play bass and started practicing later that week. Nothing too noteworthy happened in those early days, besides the time I borrowed a drum set that was covered in mold and it made Sarah really sick (Sorry Sarah).
We played our first show at Thrillhouse Records and then Sarah decided to move to Athens, GA. We recorded this demo at Tony's house in the Mission, with the help of our friends Josh and Carly (she now works for Metallica). We waited around that day for Sarah to show up, but she never did. We were kinda bummed at the time, but I don't hold it against her (when someone takes away your dog while you are packing up your room to move across the country within 8 hours, maybe you don't have time to record a demo with a band you played in for 5 minutes. That's valid.) So, we recorded the basic tracks without her. While Tony and Gaybob did their vocals, I got drunk in Tony's living room and learned all the bass lines for the songs. On the one or two that I had trouble with, Tony played it.
The next week, we went to the Pacific Northwest with ONION FLAVORED RINGS with their bass player Paul filling in for us. The morning of our show in Portland, we walked by the house we were gonna play at and there was a funny sight in the front yard. Tony took a picture of it, drew it and then we photocopied the covers at the Multnomah County Library in NE Portland. Needless to say, the residents of the house were confused to see a demo cover of something in their front yard (pictured above).
When we got home, we got our friend, Mars to play bass for us. We continued on until September of 2011 with a couple more changes on the bass (thanks Jeanette and Cinque!). We put out a 4 song EP that you can get from Squirmy Records and our final six song tape that you can still get from Remote Outposts Analog.
Playing at a goat farm in Jacksonville, OR.
p.s. This demo is so slow!! We played this a lot faster later on.
Hey Greg,
ReplyDeletethe download link for this tape no longer works. Any chance you can repost it or email me the files?
Thanks!
Mike