We Only Come Out at Night

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

The Strange World of Davidh - Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE (Originally Written and Posted Friday, October 06, 2006)

"A Long Time Ago in a Garage Far Far Away"

My real love for music started in December of 1987, we had a local radio station called 97 star and they used to have a nightly countdown called top 9 at 9 or something to that effect, and i was into what was popular at the time, Motley Crue and Guns and Roses (which i still think that the first 2 albums by both of these bands still hold up well). I was listening to the top 9 one night and it was the usual fare for 1987, Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, Georgia Satellites and the Cure....yes the Cure, this is when i was fully exposed to the Cure, the single at the time was "Just Like Heaven". I was in love with this new sound i heard which sounded like nothing else on the radio, no crazy guitar solos, drums weren't reverbed to a hundred...so different for the times. At the age of thirteen i have no idea how i got the money to get the 12" single (which i still have to this day) but once i got it i played it over and over driving my parents crazy. Anyone who knows about the Cure will find this funny i think, for months all i had to listen to was the "Just Like Heaven" single and it's b-sides and when i finally had the money to buy something else i bought the record "Faith" which is slow, gothic and the complete opposite of what i had come to know what the Cure sounded like, it was quite a shock but a welcome one none the less. This music was perfect because i was getting into my early teens and dealing with new things in life that would bounce my emotions back and forth so it was a cool backdrop to these new adventures in my life, another band The Smiths, would turn out to be just as important to me in these years as well.

In our local scene my brother was in a band called Baby Farm, i always thought that was so cool, they were amazing, truly great for their time and when i saw them or talked to them it was like they were rock stars...but this was just kayfabe, i was on the outside looking in, it wasn't until later i learned being in a band is just a work (that's for the carnys). I was heavily into skating through these times but breaking/fracturing my ankle in the summer of 1990 opened my eyes to other things i could do (besides heavy drinking that lead to me repeatedly re-injuring myself all summer), So, with me liking music so much i figured creating it was the next logical step.

In early 1991 a plan was hatched, my friends Brance Morefield, Chad Cleaver along with myself (possibly under the influence of our once great local music scene and our love of the same bands) decided we wanted to start a band. Brance luckily had a bass and had taken a year of lessons, but i had no money to buy a guitar, Chad had no money to buy drums....this wasn't going to be easy. I am left handed, so when i borrowed a friends right handed guitar i had to play it upside down, it wasn't mine so i wasn't going to reverse the strings, and Chad was just out of luck so we came up with the idea to build his drumset out of wooden boxes and plastic buckets, it actually worked and didn't sound all that bad. This band was dubbed World Issue, we didn't last to long though because i was kicked out after about 2 months and to be honest i don't blame them, i sucked! I showed up to practice one day and there was someone else there playing guitar!!! Ouch. We were kids and nothing was done classy, you never want to tell your friends anything bad, especially about themselves so that's how it was. Now, it would have been smart for me to cut my losses and get into something a little nicer like quilting, but after about 2 months of practicing, the guys welcomed me back into the band. Also during this time i bought my first guitar, it was a Aria Pro II Cat model. I bought it from a friend of mine, Joe Whitlock, i paid him my lunch money my parents gave me ($1.25) everyday for 50 days, funny i know but i was determined.

We didn't have a singer for a while and then Eric Yevak joined the fold and we were now known as Ultraviolet Dawn. We played few shows in this form, parties and 2 gigs at the now defunct Crossroads Cafe in Portsmouth, Va. I remember being a nervous wreck at the first show and wouldn't face the audience, also breaking down on the James River Bridge right in the middle on the way there...scary, we opened for BabyFarm and the second time was my live debut as the co-singer of the group, we opened that night for Monkey Spank......after this show i found myself with the responsibility of lead singing duties, we had a good writing structure, i would write the music and me and Chad wrote the lyrics, we somehow talked Paco Diaz (bass player for BabyFarm) into coming over to our practice spot and recording a proper demo for us for 80 bucks, we recorded an 8 song demo but only received 5 of the songs when we couldn't come up with the money to pay for the rest to be mixed, all the music was recorded at the practice spot, most of the lyrics were recorded at the practice spot and the rest were recorded at Paco's house, sadly, Chad's vocal demo for the song "Driveway" has never been heard...for fun we played a party at the Baby Farm house one weekend and the results were hilarious, i think we only got over because i was Artie's Brother (the singer of BabyFarm), the mingling of our friends and their friends was awful, drunken fights, yelling and screaming, really embarrassing...the punkers were not into the clean cut kids, I spent the late hours of the night talking to a drunk Paco about how weird i thought Gary (the guitar player for BabyFarm) was, although i didn't really know him and now that i do i think he is a class act, but by the summer cracks started to appear in the band, i think that the better we got at our instruments (our improvement was rapid, all we did was go to school and practice...sometimes we would practice on the weekends from 10 in the morning until 8 at night) the bigger our heads got and we just couldn't fit into a room together anymore, some things we never outgrow, after awhile you start to believe the things people say about you and that's not good when you feed off of people's appreciation/admiration because eventually, you start to reject it. In August of 1992 we played our last and biggest show at the annual Zeal Stortion Festival alongside other local bands 190 Proof, MadCap, Lightbulb and Nobody. We debuted a new song titled "Ring" at this show, written 2 weeks prior to the show it was a good piece of music and a perfect example of our growth as musicians, we played a brief clip of "Thirteen" ( a Baby Farm song) as a half hearted tribute to our fallen heros. Zeal Stortion ( known as Zeal Pregression and Zeal Distortion) was once an awesome indoor venue where in our early years before we started playing in our own bands we got to see great local artists like BabyFarm, Rhithm Lyd...who would go on to become Fulflej..., False Sacrament, the Wonder Twins, and so many, many others, the area once known as the "804" was brimming with local talent and lucky for me and most of my friends we spent many a weekend immersed in said talent .

The band finally came to an end at the end of the summer due pretty much to 2 things, 1, we were all exploring different music and we didn't really have a common musical interest anymore and 2, I just wasn't that good at playing the guitar or singing (something they never had any problem letting me know), but in my defense I had only been playing for less than a year so I still had a long way to go...so the summer was over and so were we, Chad joined another band but as fate would have it, Brance and I looked into the horizon to see a Chicago Bulls fan waiting in the wings.......

The Strange World of Davidh - Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO (Originally Written and Posted Friday, October 13, 2006)

"Over the Street and Through the Woods We Go"

After the summer of 1992, me and Brance hooked up with Paul Ketterman (vocals and guitar) and Chris Kell (guitars) and formed the short lived band Whirl, in this band i switched instruments and played drums which ironically i wanted to play in Ultraviolet Dawn, Chad Just beat me to saying "i want to play drums". Again with no money, i had to borrow a drum set, i looked to my friend Joe Whitlock again who had played drums in a band called Concrete that was no longer together so he offered them up, the only thing was, the set had no snare so everything i played was tom based. I always figured the harder it is on you to learn something the better you will learn it...i hadn't been to impressed with my vocal duties in the last band, it was fun but i just wasn't that great at it so it was cool when i finally heard Paul sing, i thought ok, now were onto something. We learned and recorded 2 songs, and then kinda lost interest in the whole thing, i think this was due to everyone's newness to their instruments except Brance, and i was ready to get back to playing guitar anyway.

At this point in time, Jay Walters, a long time friend and novice drummer who caught the creative spark watching Chad play during the Ultraviolet Dawn days, came in to the musical picture...this was perfect for me because i needed a fresh start...start all over, having someone new to their instrument as Jay was, it helped me start over. So, by the end of 1992 and early 1993 was spent seasoning Jay and trying different things...bluesy, funky, jazzy, grungy, reggae/ska, anything and everything to try and broaden ourselves, we spent the early winter loosely writing songs and riffing on songs by our favorite bands. During this time we had the chance to record a video to document our progress, it's amazing how fast Jay progressed, definitely a natural. As an early Christmas present my parents bout me my first store bought guitar, the Musicians Shop (formerly 3 Guys Music...for all you old school Hampton nerds) was running their annual half price weekend and i found a right handed Fender Strat imitation i really liked and bought it, i was into Jimi Hendrix at the time and the idea of playing a right handed Strat looking guitar left handed seemed pretty cool to me, my good friend at the time David Morin adopted the same practice so that rubbed on to me as well.

A few months later Paul came back into the fold and we started the band Channel One...this opened up a good opportunity for me because up until this time i had to carry the band(s) in the guitar area, so for the most part all i learned and played was rhythm guitar, with Paul joining in and playing rhythm guitar it gave me a chance to grow as a lead guitarist, inspired by guitarists like Robert Smith and John Squire, i tried to emulate them as much as i possibly could. We spent many a day in Paul's Garage practicing much to the chagrin of me and Jay's girlfriends who thought the prospect of us being in a band was kinda stupid (fun times huh), Paul's dad was a former musician and would check us out every once in awhile and offer advice, he taught us how to play "Hey Joe" and was generally just a nice fellow. In what we knew was a long shot, me and Paul were pushing for the band to be a part of our school's talent show, we even attended an after school meeting with the talent show committee to screen a short video we shot at a practice, unfortunately we never got the chance to play under the guise that all the members didn't go to our school. The only problem (and i mean this as a good thing) we ever had in this band is that it was hard to have a proper full productive practice, we were goofballs who were very good friends and fun and hi-jinxs definitely took precedence over music making. One other good thing to come out of this band though was the chance to share the writing duties with people who were into the same music as i was, Paul happened to be just as big of fan of The Cure and The Smiths and Jay was a fan of the Smiths. We all contributed equally to the lyrics down to the individual instrumentation. Strange indeed. In the end i think we just kinda drifted apart as people tend to do, you change, get into different things, become brainwashed by girls, hehe. (fun times huh)

During this time i had also recorded a few songs on my own, using a crude form of 2 track manipulation, i would record a rhythm and drum track on a cassette with one boom box, then play the track back and at the same time record a lead track over top of it using another boombox, i only recorded a few songs and the results varied between ok sounding and really bad sounding, this method was not going to work on permanent basis for multi-tracking which i was just discovering the joys of. When i was playing in Ultraviolet Dawn i had the chance to record on one of my brothers four tracks one night at his house and had absolutely no idea what i was doing or really how to form everything together into a coherent piece of music and it was frustrating, so getting back into and learning this process was really fun.

Brance and Paul went their separate ways, did well for themselves and enjoyed stints in other bands, me and Jay decided to keep going though, we had just started and had much left to accomplish.......

The Strange World of Davidh - Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE (Originally Written and Posted Friday, October 20, 2006)

"A Step in a Different Direction or Is It Just Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen?"

I started recording my own solo stuff as well as stuff with Jay, we did lots and lots of boombox recording, we set up camp in his garage, luckily his mom let us set up in there because we had nowhere left to go...this is one of the many reasons Jay is so important to this story, he is one of the four elements to this story that without, there would be no story. The others i will not point out so obvious, it is for you to try and figure out...

In the summer of 1994 i was involved in a car accident, weirdly enough it happened turning on to the road i would end up living on 7 years later. I received a paltry settlement of 500 dollars but it was put to good use as i bought my first four track recorder. I bought a nice "Tascam Porta 02" Kit, came with the four track multi-tracker, headphones, a mic, some cassette tapes and a big multi-tracker trick book. It was nice to be able to do everything myself and do it quickly, it also schooled me on the art of mixing although in the early days i didn't push my vocals up to much as i was still coming to terms with them. Still friendly with Brance and Chad i rounded them up to try and record a full band piece, we recorded one song, a funk number and unfortunately that was the only song we recorded, however, for a few months in 1995 we got together a number of times to rehearse new material in the hopes of giving it another try but after awhile we realized the tree just wasn't going to bear any fruit.

In the Next 2 years Jay and I recorded hours and hours of material, some usable some not, by now Jay's mom had moved out and we had total run of the house...the first four track i had bought had burned out, most likely it wasn't built to be used as much as i used it, my brother had one in storage that i decided to borrow and we kept going, we used that thing to death and near the end it was barely usable and held together with duct tape, my friend Chris Butler and his band of merry men needed a four track and that's the last i ever saw of it. We went back to boombox recording for awhile and that got old really quick, i did some trading with our local instrument dealer and traded my amp for a "Fostex X" series multi-tracker, awesome machine, especially on the go. Sessions started again and were done with electric guitar/drum combo, some we only used keyboards/drum machines, and for a short time when Jay was without a drum set we did some Acoustic/homemade drum set sessions...while i talked earlier of Chad's homemade drum set, this one was not like it at all, this one resembled more of a normal set and sounded more like a normal set. Jay fashioned a tambourine as a snare, a bucket as a tom, a floor tom as a bass drum and a ride cymbal as a high hat/cymbal combo. The desire Jay had to create music by any means possible has remained unmatched by anyone i have ever known. In these 2 years it was like the floodgates of our minds had burst open, every sound emitted from our stockade of instruments was turned into a song...at the same time i was at home doing my solo stuff, i was limited to what i could do at home because my dad was not a fan of the loud music i played, so he was forever telling me to turn it off, all i had were Walkman headphones and they allowed to much background noise in so sessions were quick and to the point at my parent's house. I have never been to confident in my singing so doing that while my parents were home also became a problem, some sessions i would complete by using batteries in my four track and doing the vocal sessions in my car, in fact i did one complete live session (balancing guitars, keyboards and vocals all at the same time)of about 8 songs in my car when it got to late to record in my room one night, anything to be creative. It was also around this time i stared to flirt with horror imagery in my lyrics.

I had grown up exposed to the horror culture as my dad and brother were both horror fans so it was natural to me, some early movies i can remember going to see were The Brood, Halloween 3 and the Alchemist, i also have the slight memory of leaving our local drive-in one night and looking through the back window and the seeing the opening segment of Scanners, the part where the guy's head just explodes. So of course we got into film making, more or less horror film making. A few short movies were made consisting of either a maniac killing people or some type of comedy elements of the maniac, we did one on the art of low budget magic and another about a guy who had a magic skateboard that aided him in the search for his missing cat.

Marc Peterson was another friend who i recorded with around this time, we recorded a 4 song session but not much after that, but Marc's role is an important one as well, for one, he was one of the people who got me interested in being a musician in the first place. Marc started out as just a drummer before he came a multi-instrumentalist, in a way, back in the late 80's Marc effected me the same way Chad effected Jay, drums were cool and the looked like fun to play, skating killed my early interest in wanting to be in a band so for a while and i lost the fever. Somewhere floating in space is a tape of me and Marc playing a the songs of Skid Row and the Cure. Secondly, when the Smashing Pumpkins debuted the were shoved down my throat and i hated them, Gish could induce sickness in me, i would ride to school with Brance and he play the tape over and over and repeat, but over at Marc's one night i heard the opening snare of Cherub Rock and my ears pricked up and i thought "damn, that could the best thing i have ever heard in my life", and so now this is my mantra, "Billy Corgan is a Genius", say it with me and say it loud "BILLY CORGAN IS A GENIUS!". Word.

Their first album that came out with me as a fan was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and it greatly impacted my life, it got me through some of the worst times of my life, and it also helped shape my playing style and a lot of Jay's style as well, we were fully aware of the Billy/Jimmy writing connection and we were going to do our best to fully embrace that dynamic ourselves. While we are on the subject, another band that heavily influenced us was Helmet. They were like us, guys who had short hair, wore skate clothes but wrote these heavy metal songs, their look did not match their music and they were way ahead of their time, i was fortunate enough to see them in concert around this time and it was amazing, but unfortunately a lot of stuff from this time period i don't remember, this was the time in our lives when people were moving out of their parent's homes, or their parent's were excepting that their kids were growing up and let go a little bit and we took full advantage of it and partied quite a bit in those days and it's all kind of a haze to me now. There are plenty of bizarre things that happened during this time that weren't music related but we'll save those for another time.

We had a strange chemistry in those days, i felt we shared one mind...Jay always knew where i was going, i always knew where he was going, sometimes we practiced pre-written arrangements and then other times we were the improv machines, no doubt we were the demo machines, we demoed anything and everything, I love to record. Late into this time period we named ourselves 6ft Ghoul, (2 other names used briefly early on were Specimen and War Machine) the 2 years we played together were fantastic but something different was just around the corner.......

The Strange World of Davidh - Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR (Originally Written and Posted Wednesday, November 08, 2006)

"Scary Music for Scary People"

One day at my future wife's apartment i met her cousin Andy, he was sitting in on the session and apparently like what he heard so he offered to record a little bit on a song...i suggested he sing, but with no experience whatsoever he declined. I asked him to come and give it a go at one of our practices which he accepted and for no previous experience he did well, we recorded one song in this time period and as a band, me, Brance and Chad wrote a lot of songs and worked on lots of pieces of music. The longer this went on though i grew weary of having almost zero control over what we were playing and my new desire into the Smashing Pumpkins was really becoming evident in my playing and they were going for more of a funky, jazzy kinda sound, as much as i didn't want to embrace it, i knew it was my time to go. On a sad note, my first ever left handed guitar, a Phantom model, a vintage Memory Man delay pedal, and the stereo which i had used to record countless demos and practices were all stolen from our practice spot. Winter was upon us and i continued to record on my my own into the new year.

I went to Jay hoping we could play again but he had no drum set, so i figured we had written and recorded music with almost every form of instrument, why don't we do electric guitar / drum machine again and i'll just come in and add whatever was needed later, without a trace of hesitation he agreed. We set up shop in Jay's mom's house, lucky for us she had moved Downtown and left Jay the use of the house for what would become an almost 3 year 24 / 7 party. On a side note, we got heavy into movie making at this point as well, we had always dabbled in making movies but now we owned cameras so we could do as we pleased any time we wanted to, and we did.

At this point in time around spring of 1997, we used the downstairs den as our recording spot, we didn't need much space...we brought Andy in and we all just sat at a table, we would record all our parts together live insuring a raw aspect to the recordings, i would later add bass and keyboards, if needed, to the mix. Magic, that is the only word to describe what happened next, a month or two after we started this thing me and Andy were sitting at my parent's house and the phone rang...Jay was on the other end urging us to come over, something big was happening.

Walking over to Jay's we had no idea what was going on but once we got there and walked through the front door we knew what was up, we were rewarded for our hard work, suffering for our art all those years. (Jay and I) Shining bright like presents on Christmas day was a drumset, pa equipment, and a guitar amp!!! We were in business again. Important things first though, we needed a name. I had taken a liking to DeSalvo, yes after the serial killer, Andy wanted to shorten it to Salvo for a place in North Carolina he liked, i wasn't really fond of that so i just called it 6ft Ghoul (the name came from a Halloween yard decoration Jay had bought), he went with Salvo and to this day i don't know what the real name of the band was, there are tapes labeled with both names on them. haha!

Practices were held everyday, we had no bass player and never had the want of a bass player, we didn't play shows (although we would near the end) we recorded. We recorded hours and hours of 4 track audio and video footage, we also moved up to the second level of the house to much more spacious living room area. We decided on a lark that we would stage a show in the late fall at Jay's house for all of our friends, for fun we used some synced tape tracks to the music to add effects, unfortunately for some odd reason this show was not taped, it's a shame because i remember this night really going off well. In November i moved out of my parent's house and into a house with Andy and his sister, yes debauchery insued but most important was we had a new place to throw a party for the band to play at.

In December of 1997, almost at our musical peak, we played to a house full of people in what would go down as one of the best times in my life. We played a great show, Brance and Chad showed so we had a impromptu reunion of sorts playing a tight but short three song set. After the new year, we started thinking about getting a bass player, our friend Chris Bryant had recently bought a bass and a bass amp, he had never played before so we figured he would be perfect. We could mold and shape him to be the player we wanted, this didn't work out though because we needed someone to learn the songs fast and he was just super slow to the take so we ditched that idea for the time being, next up another show. Our last show as a band was at the Amoco Docks in Yorktown, Va. This was our biggest show to date with about 200 people in attendance, here is where i first encountered people who didn't care for the band and wanted to dance to radio...We were about 4 songs into our set when they started to turn their backs to us, which only fueled us to played louder and faster, 10 songs in and they wanted a break, they wanted the DJ, we said no and kept playing. I think all 200 backs were turned to us that night and i couldn't have been more pleased as we were playing for the rich, Yorktown elitist kids anyway, i was roots baby and i took pleasure in pissing off these types of people anyway. H-Town Represent........sadly enough, this show wasn't recorded either for some reason.

After this show we again wanted to acquire a bass player, Jay had mentioned to me about a basketball friend of his, Tony Rife who had a friend that was looking for a band to join and he just happened to play bass, we tried him out and he was just too funky of a player for us. I'll never understand why every bass player wants to be Flea or Les Claypool, be yourself...much more interesting. The way we wrote songs was pretty much as before, improve jams would just flesh out from songs or we would record jams and interchange parts to what sounded the best, lyrics were random and improv, some songs like "Computers" and "JFK" we would write out the title and then write just one word descriptions of said title and Andy would riff off of the words we had written. Andy's vocals were very raw, yelling and screaming coming off as a 1996 version of Johnny Rotten, suited the music very well, as usual we played no covers, we would mess around and riff on a few songs for fun but none were in the playable set. Just Say No!

Shortly after this show, Andy moved away for the summer, this was a terrible blow to the band as we were just hitting our stride. Jay and I had just recorded 2 new songs and polished 2 older ones that we had hoped Andy was going to record vocals for and now he was gone. We decided that to do this all over again we would need a full band, so now the search was on for a bass player and a new vocalists, luckily we didn't have to look to far.......

The Strange World of Davidh - Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE (Originally Written and Posted Tuesday, November 14, 2006)

"Four Friends and a Band"

Jay's friend Tony had mentioned if we were still looking for a bass player he was available, meanwhile i had expressed interest to my friend Marc Peterson about acquiring him for this new band as the vocalist. One extra thing Marc would bring to the band is that he also played guitar, this allowed me to get better at playing leads in a live situation and to get better at improving leads. Back in December of 1997 i had the chance to meet Tony at a party, me and Brance were taking full 12oz shots of Bacardi and i was wasted out of my mind when i met Tony and told him we were destined to play together, i was just drunk being crazy but the words i spoke that night turned out to be the truth and would change the course of my life as i knew it.

Me, Marc and Jay go way back, as previously stated in other blogs. We have always been around each other creating, be it a song, a movie, or even a wrestling match back in the 6th grade...we were always putting something together. I asked Jay to call up Tony and we all met up at Jay's house to feel each other out musically. Tony was a guitar player who had decided to play bass so his style was that of a guitar player, he used a pick and played the most basic of bass lines which was perfect for us, one of the odd things was that Marc played acoustic guitar. This was something we (Jay and I) weren't used to, in hindsight i am rather glad he did because it gave us a more unique sound and keep us in the habit of writing softer music with melodies as opposed to just thrashing around in distortion, it helped me grow as a musician and a writer.

Not to long after we formed the band we were asked to play at one of our friend's house, Josh Michie, we set up in his garage and played what we knew and improvised the rest, i believe at the time we only had about 4 songs written. One of the songs we improvised in the set would become a Bliss standard, "Josh Michie", a song that was basically used to raise the spirits of the audience and name check anyone we knew who was there watching us at any given moment, the song was performed at almost every single show in 1998 and 1999, by 2000 i think we had more than enough material to play full shows and it was just phased out for that reason. Another thing to go on in the early days of Bliss was the use of three vocal mics, this wasn't done at shows but rather at practice, (in my opinion, in the early days it was way more entertaining to see a practice then a show) we recorded many improv songs featuring myself, Jay, and Marc on vocals, songs ranged from lyrics about South Park (which was just becoming popular at the time) to Jay's neighbors use of tanning oil. Just as a note, two things, one fun thing we used to do was talk smack to the neighbors on the mic which could be easily heard outside, they would eventually knock at the door, we'd still talk smack...good times, another thing is that Jay didn't work so he would just practice on the drums all day (he knew the way to get good) and when we would get off work we would go over there while he was practicing, you always had to wait until he paused so you could knock and he would hear you...you'd knock three times, he'd hit the snare three times and keep playing or hit the bass drum three times and keep playing, it would keep you in stitches.

Meanwhile, when Marc couldn't make it to practice (which was rare) me, Jay and Tony started to riff on some metal and decided to start the side band The BomB, all instrumentals...although for a few short practices me and Tony shared vocal duties on a few songs. We officially only wrote 4 songs but had many loose jams we could improvise at the drop of a hat, this was my first venture into what i dubbed "heavy metal Jam Band" music, it was definitely some of the heaviest stuff i have been a part of and most rewarding to play.

We had moved up to Jay's old bedroom by this time and practice was close quarters but it was good for us because it kept us close personally as well, during this time we recorded the only official Bliss song to be sung by someone other than Marc, Jay sang the lyrics to a song i had written that Jay latter titled "Guns", this also marked the only song Marc played drums on.

On June 28th, 1998 we played our first club show at the now defunct Wipeout Eddies, it was a solid first show, good sound, the band was tight...it was a good night to introduce Bliss to the masses, funny enough, we ran into Mike Bright that night at the show but had know idea at the time that he would save this band from ending. During the summer Jay had found himself getting involved in things that were taking more and more of his time away from the band and eventually had to leave the group. Bliss would continue but the Bomb was over. Jay was my best friend and it was one of the roughest times of my life going on without him, we had played together for the last five years together and it didn't seem right playing with someone else, i have had chemistry with other drummers before and after but never at the level i had with Jay...he is the only musician i have ever felt a chemical connection to. Siamese Twins connected at the thought.

Without a drummer it looked like it was all but over for us, we continued practicing with myself as the drummer but it just wasn't the same. We decided to call upon the services of our longtime friend and drummer Chad Cleaver, he stayed in for about 2 weeks but just couldn't commit to being in the band full time which was a shame because he definitely fit in and was more than qualified to handle the job. He brought new ideas to the band that definitely lit a fire underneath us.

So, without a drummer again we decided to waste no time and try to get another one quickly, Mike Bright had been in and out of our lives since high school and he just so happened to be in our lives at this point in time as he was dating a friend of ours...luckily he was a drummer. One thing i forgot to mention in an earlier blog was that Mike actually had a short stint in Ultraviolet Dawn playing keyboards in the summer of 1991. We had moved everything to Tony's because near the end of Jays run with the band the neighbors had eventually forced us out because of how loud it was, one of the neighbors got Jay's phone number and left threating messages on his answering machine, one of those messages wound up as a sound byte in one of our BomB recordings. Within minutes of jamming with Mike we knew we wanted him in the band, his style was more akin to Chad's so we felt it was a natural progression into the direction we were heading, weeks were spent fine tuning the songs we already had and working on new songs. Our first show with Mike was a Halloween party at Josh Michie's house in 1998, most notable for playing an early version of "Give it Back" and the rarely heard cover of Radiohead's "High and Dry".

Tony was having problems with his neighbors about noise and with nowhere to go and practice we decided to rent a storage unit at Uncle Bobs Self Storage. I called them first and they said no bands were allowed, but i had heard there were bands in there and i was desperate to find us a place to practice, so i went up there and waved the cold hard cash in their face and in 5 minutes flat i was signing a contract to rent a storage unit. The first one we got was way too small so we upgraded and ended up with 2 units with the wall taken down, a 20x20 metal room for practicing and hanging out (no A.C. and no heat, that was the only disadvantage)and we did a lot of both. One cool thing about this place is that we had 24 hour access to our unit, we could go and come as we pleased. There was a guy who was always sitting on a couch watching tv in his unit across from us, i think he must have lived there or used it as a hang out. There was a chop shop in one unit, also an old couple who had 2 units and when they opened them up it looked like a bomb had gone off, papers, books, and random crap just falling out all over the place, there were also about 5 other bands in there as well. Our good friend and Mike's brother in law, Lobo, had a band in there at one time. Once we caught one of the bands trying to break into our unit, that eventually became so much of a problem all the bands in the end were all asked to leave, lucky for us the burden of the monthly bill got us out of there before we were asked to leave, we did spend a year there though. It was a cool setup we had in there, one 10x10 space was the chilling quarters, a sofa, a table, lots of stretching room, and the other 10x10 space was our band setup, you could easily come and enjoy a practice if you wanted to. I was always in fear we would lose the unit due to partying and if i remember correctly we were put on a midnight curfew for about a month one time for rowdiness, the woman who ran the place lived above the office so she was always keeping an eye on everything. I'm glad we got to be a part of the lost art of using a storage unit as a practice place.

During our days at Uncle Bob's we started playing a place called Erlinda's, a part time karaoke bar / Asian eatery, a friend of Mike's ran the place and was more than happy to have us play there, the first night we played was very impromptu, we were actually just visiting and checking the place out, Tony wasn't with us so i played bass. We played there many times over the next year and a half but i think towards the end we had worn out our welcome, we weren't drawing new people because we played there to much and so we just kinda stopped playing there. I will never forget the night Mike tricked me into eating squid, i was under the impression it was onion rings, quite drunk and hungry i started chowing down, needless to say, after that i ate rice only when playing there. Erlinda's was a place where we would always try new material for 2 reasons, one, it was a party atmosphere so we were comfortable and 2, we would sit behind the building and just get trashed before we would go on so we just didn't care, i remember one show where Tony just passed out on stage after we were done playing. Also, i think bars should ply you with free alcohol when you play, unfortunately this is not the case, we would sneak beers into Erlinda's all the time but got caught when we started bringing in longnecks and they didn't sell them at the bar...fun times

We needed somewhere to go and the only place left for us to go was Mike's house, this turned out to be the best thing we ever did because in the 5 years and many bands that played there the cops were never called, neighbors never complained, infact they embraced it. We started playing parties at Mark Haynes house around this time as well, funny thing is we never recorded these shows except for one and i wish that we had recorded them all, they were some of the best shows we ever played. Mike threw a lot of parties at his house as well which we would always play at, the nights would always end with all of us in drunken shambles playing the wrong instruments. A few shows that stick out in my mind from this time are the New Years Eve party we played to start the year of 1999 at the American Legion, a fun drunken new years party with no one we knew, the Bethel Park gig we played in a light drizzle of rain which was perfect for the mood and the music, the YMCA gig we played where no one showed up and the last ever Marc Haynes party we ever played, a very good show and the last show we would play before we broke up.

In August of 1999 we headed into Wintersound Studio in Gloucester, Va. to record our debut cd, we spent a lot of money for us (about 900 dollars) and a lot of time (2 weeks)and the end result was very rewarding, we put all we had into the recordings and it shows. We recorded 11 songs, 9 originals and 2 covers, layers and layers of guitars and vocals, we definitely made the record how we heard it in our heads for all those years.

Unfortunately there is always an end and towards the end i had kinda lost interest in the direction the band was going, i was looking to get back into the heavier side of myself and it looked like it was the right time to do it. During the last few weeks we were together, Marc had gone out of town with his girlfriend and we were expected to play on New Years Eve at Mike's House, with Marc gone we didn't know what we going to do so we called Andy and with a weeks time left before the show we rehearsed about 10 songs, wrote a new one and played a fantastic show. A great feeling yet a guilty one as well. It's hard when you want to do something new and a friends feelings hang in the balance, deep down inside i knew he was growing restless too...things were sketchy for awhile with Marc after this but true friendship prevailed and i'm glad, i grew up with Marc and to not have him around to talk to, create with and laugh with would just be no fun. Just a note, during this time i recorded very few solo works as i was entirely focused on the band.

The Spirit of 6ft Ghoul was alive and well, but it wasn't quite ghoulish without Jay, and it wasn't quite the same without the comradeship of Marc, but we forged on with a new direction, a new attitude, and a new name.......

The Strange World of Davidh - Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX (Originally Written and Posted Tuesday, November 28, 2006)

"Dark Days Ahead"

At the break of 2001 we started anew, you could consider this band Sons of Godzilla in it's fetal form, we had the right components, we just didn't progress very far. Some of the songs we would later play in Sons of Godzilla were created at this time though, songs like "Try", "I'm In", and "Thirteen / 6ft Ghoul" (medley). This also marks Andy's first foray into playing guitar in a band as well. We hurriedly got to work in Mike's house creating new material, that's the one bad thing about starting over...you have to start from scratch. The night before i left for my honeymoon, i was married 2 weeks prior to this this, we asked this guy to come over and tape us, his name was Rambley, he was a recovering drinker (from what i was told) and wanted to stay dry, the recording went late into the night and before you knew it he could have been dancing with a lampshade on his head. Drunk, and crazy he manipulated our recording speeds in various place in the mix and pretty much ruined a few of the songs but oh well, it was a fun night, i think he was pissed though that we helped him fall off the wagon.

Once i returned from our nice honeymoon all over Europe i realized we had a little bit of money left over, so i bought my most expensive guitar to date, a Gibson SG, black on black. I still use this guitar today and is my favorite to play because it is so lightweight and has a thinner neck, i don't have huge guitar hands so the thinner the neck the better. Tony had been doing a few jobs out of town every now and then and we were hoping it wouldn't last but we found out that he would soon be going out of town for awhile to work and we would be short a bass player, we enlisted the skills of Brian Boyd for a short time until Tony returned. He was new to bass but he picked it up pretty fast, if Tony had not returned i am certain we would have picked him up full time. We never got a chance to play out in this form, all we did was play a few parties that were at Mike's house. We booked time at Wintersound Studio in July of 2001, but before we could get in there to record we found ourselves without a singer so the session were canceled and we almost gave up on being a band.

Me, Tony, and Mike had no idea what we were going to do, with no singer i decided to take the job until we could find some else to sing, i figured i did it before so i didn't think it would be to hard to do again. It was at this time also that i got heavily back into doing my own solo stuff. I was recording at home and then bringing the songs to life at band practice, also we were playing a few covers...not Top 40 like most bands around here do, stuff we liked (perhaps more so the stuff i liked) like, "everyday is like sunday" by Morrissey, "attitude" by the Misfits, and "subway song" by The Cure, this band was kinda of an excuse to play my favorite songs by my favorite bands and see how my solo stuff would sound live. The name we settled on for this band was August, which was the month this band was started, i was also recording solo stuff under the name August of Glass so it just seemed to fit. I started recording my own stuff quickly, in 2001 i recorded 35 or so songs, some really good, some just stuck in the demo phase...we record a session at Mike Braxton's house that turned out well, a few people were over to witness the session, Chad being one of them.

Mike had a party in the fall, we invited various musicians over to participate in a huge jam and debut ourselves as a live band, we played a short but sweet set, "Seventeen Seconds" by the Cure, "I Would Say", "Scarecrows and Birdies", and "Love or Grace / Everyday is like Sunday" by Morrissey (medley). Then it was on, a musical smorgishboard if you will, a great night of everyone jamming, trading instruments and just having a good time in general...unfortunately it was the last time we would ever do this.......luckily the whole night was captured on video!

My solo stuff was starting to come together well, i had just started using my computer and multitracking programs instead of an analog 4 track. The first session i recorded was the Wonderful Day sessions, the song "Wonderful Day was inspired by a picture i saw of a mouse wearing a red helmet, it put the thought in me that this mouse was using this helmet to defeat mousetraps to acquire cheese, strange i know but thats how it works with me, it's never normal. I demoed about 16 or 17 songs in this session with the standout track being "Uninvited". Music-wise the songs were coming along great but vocally i was still finding my way, especially harmonizing with myself. The second session i recorded during this time was the Drowning Sessions, one song i demoed started out as the last and unfinished BLISS song "Atom Bomb" which would later become the Sons of Godzilla song "Roman Holiday", when i was demoing it it's title was "To Swim", a weird song lyrically...it was about an expierence i had as a teenager when i was witness (to far away to do anything) to a mentally handicapped man who drowned a dog on accident.

New years was coming up, i figured we would do the usual and try and find a show to play, we couldn't get a club show so i was hoping we could play at Mike's house, a weird vibe of apprehension was in the air and we were kept in limbo about the show until the night of, the show didn't happen and before we knew it Mike was playing in another band. Mike and i didn't speak for about 6 months after this and i am atleast partly to blame, I had on occasion before this happened, drunkenly stated the band was over, i was so unhappy with my situation at the time, my good friend Jay was gone, Marc wasn't around, Andy was gone...i still had my good friends Mike and Tony around but the sadness of the others not being around was just overwhelming and for awhile there i was spiraling into depression, it seemed we were starting to turn on one another. I didn't care anymore and i'm sure the drunken tirades got back to Mike...but you know things happen for a reason and i think Mike needed a break from me, i was an iron fisted dictator, a real prick when it came to the band, (actually i still am) i'm sure they were both sick of me it was just Tony had nowhere to go, Mike was an excellent drummer so any band would have been lucky to have him so it was easier for him to find someone else to play with. We had been playing together for close to 4 years and i'm sure he was just as frustrated as i was...it was a rough time for all of us. At the time i was super pissed but later on i realized if it hadn't of happened we may have never gone on to the wonderful things we did in the future together....to the reader this may seem all kinda silly but to me it was my life crumbling before me, for 7 years almost everyday all i did was the band(s), all i knew was the band life and my life with my wife, she was (is) a saint for putting up with me through these times and for helping me get through it all mentally intact....and of course me and Mike worked everything out many months down the road, what did you think... we'd stay like that forever...

So, Tony and i forged on and recorded some demos, i kept recording demos and it looked like the band days were over, the uncertainty of the past year and half kept me from 100% enjoying myself so the thought of doing it all over again was daunting, but hey, i'm a gluten for punishment.

I decided to look on the internet and look for some musicians wanted ads, quite weird for me because i am quite unsocial and close-minded when it comes to music...i didn't want to settle on anyone just because i was in a bind and i wanted the new people i would play with to be into the same music i was and feel the same way about music as i did, so i looked on the first page i opened and there was an ad for 2 guys who were looking for people to join their band, they were into stuff like Bowie and U2, the same stuff i was into and the prospect of meeting them excited me, i talked to one of them over the phone and we arranged a meeting, i squeezed in the fact i had a bass player friend who was available if they wanted and as luck would have it, they did.

As Tony and i climbed into his Mustang to head into the horizon we wondered what our future held, would we mesh as friends with these guys, would we be able to pull our weight in a band that was musicianship first and friends second, would Tony's car make the trip to Virginia Beach???.......

The Strange World of Davidh - Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN (Originally Posted Sunday, December 03, 2006)

"Like a Fish Out of Water"

So, in February of 2002 off we went, heading to a house off of Newtown Rd. in Virginia Beach. Butterflies in my stomach as we talked, we sat and discussed what we were looking for, what they were looking for and it seemed that we would be a perfect fit. We left with a cd to listen to and to use to learn a few of the songs so we would have something to do on the first day of practice...we climbed into Tony's car and we broke down right around the corner, we waited for what seemed like hours for my wife to pick us up, on the way home it hit me like a ton of bricks, we were in a band again.

Ocali Flash, a new band, a new city, it felt great to feel alive again, Mike Gentry (Gregorian enthusiast and vocal stylist) and Scott Callan (guitard extraordinaire) were the two fellows we met that day, them along with recruited drummer Adrian (drums and bank greeter) rounded out the band. A funny thing happened the first day, apparently a fellow who had tried out for keyboards was coming by to get his gear and the guys had been very vague about his inclusion in the band, when he came to get his stuff it had to seem like we weren't there...so there we were, me, Tony, Scott and Adrian sitting in the dark of the garage trying to be silent as possible and holding back giggles whenever anyone made a sound. Mike and Scott had mentioned to me that this was like the last chance band, which i agreed with, we were all a little older and we were all coming from the same place, kinda bottomed out and climbing up that proverbial ladder again. They had many songs written so it was just a case of us coming in and learning them, i was having no problem...i would record practice and then go home and practice playing along to the tapes to get better, Tony on the other hand was having trouble, i kinda knew in the back of my mind that this might happen because i knew outside of practice he wasn't going to work on learning these songs. I decided to get him over to my house and we would play along with the tapes, record it and play it back to see what we needed to work on...this was very helpful, we needed to learn the songs and learn them fast. I didn't want it to seem we couldn't hang.

Talk arose of a show, a show at Cogan's in Norfolk, Cogan's to me was the mecca of art rock, it had been around for decades and was even a place my brother's band BabyFarm had played about 15 years earlier, this was going to be great. So we rehearsed and rehearsed, rehearsed till we were a well oiled machine, we sounded great and we were ready. The show was a success, we never sounded better, we had a great time as a band and we packed the place to the rafters, i was on top of the world. I had even managed to sneak in one of my own songs into the set, the song was "Bottle Caps" and had really cool lyrics, actually i really enjoyed all of Mike's lyrics, very smart guy and it showed in his writing. Scott as well was a gifted guitarist who weirdly enough taught me the importance of the ballad. Adrian on the other hand was a different story, i never had a problem with him, to me he was a super sharp drummer and a cool guy, he had too much love for the Hardy Boys (wrestlers) and the WWF (WWE now) in general but that's a different story altogether, but Tony, poor poor Tony, these guys never saw eye to eye and with good reason i guess, Adrian's thing was timing and Tony was always having problems keeping rhythm, to quote Adrian "Tony couldn't tell time if he had a watch", i always hated to hear that but there was nothing i could do, it wasn't my band to call the shots. On the rides home after practices Tony would always come up with good comebacks but never had them ready when they were needed. I really wanted this band to work so i just kept quiet and helped Tony on the off days when we weren't practicing.

We had talked of playing a show in my neck of the woods and even doing a session at Braxton's House but neither of those things ever happened. We tried to do some 4 tracking as well but if i remember correctly, it didn't come out very well because we were doing everything live as opposed to doing it one track at a time.

A second show was booked for Cogan's, this show didn't go off as well as the first due to technical problems, this unfortunately marked the beginning of the end for this band which left me very disappointed, i was just starting to have fun. Tony just wasn't holding up his end of the deal and i couldn't face it, Scott terminated the band and it sucked we had to go...i emailed Scott and told him what i thought of all this and came across as a complete jerk, i'm glad were we able to forget about that down the road and mend what my stupidity had caused, so now this band was over and we didn't know what in the world we were going to do. The only thing i regret from this time is that we didn't socialize enough outside of the band, i think if we had of it might have turned out differently in the end.

As always, i was recording my solo stuff...i recorded various sessions during this time, "The Sunday Sessions" (songs that were written and recorded only on Sundays, just a wacky gimmick i thought i would try), the other songs i recorded were scattered through 2002 and 2003. These would be last songs i would record at my apartment before moving into my house.

At the first Cogan's show i met up with Mike and we buried the hatchet, i even went to check out his band at the time, Mike confided in me his unhappiness with his new band and that he wanted to get up and try playing again, see if it would work. We gave Marc a call and asked him the same thing and he agreed, so the four of us for the first time in 2 years got together and just played, the magic was still there...at the first practice we wrote a new BLISS song and from there we just kept going. A few new songs were written and others resurrected but made to sound different than the originals, we recorded one Braxton Session, never played any shows in this form, although i wish we had, we were writing some good songs that were showing our growth as musicians...we went on a trip to Ocracoke Island for a weekend and holed up in a cottage and just acoustically recorded new songs, old favorites and some of our favorite songs by the bands we liked, the only catch was that we had people with us on the trip and it turned into one big sing along on the night we recorded, this was definitely one of the most heartfelt and family like moments in my life as a band, it was awesome to hear people singing along to the songs we had wrote. Another thing i remember about this trip was us jumping a fence and rummaging around a graveyard very late at night and being super scared...good times.

We carried on for almost a year, well into 2003 and it just got to the point again where we were before, just spinning our wheels, kind of like we had hit a wall, we weren't playing shows, no demos, it had just come to a standstill. BLISS was our band, the one we had all grown together with so it was hard to let go, one of the toughest decisions i have ever been a part of.

I also around this time decided on a whim to try out for another band in my area but nothing come of it, besides a guitarist they needed a bass player and with no bass player there wasn't going to be a full band and this time i was doing it alone without Tony, they called me back, i had made the band but my heart just wasn't in it...so i never went back. During this time me, Mike and Tony also wrote and recorded 2 new instrumentals as a three piece under the band name "The Montgomery Burns Project", one which evolved into the Sons of Godzilla song "Monsters Everywhere".

Mike and i also offered our services to our friend Mike Braxton for a show for his dad's birthday. We were going to play all Elvis Presley songs, all of us were going to dress as Elvis it was going to be fun but Braxton saw it another way, he started slipping in originals and talking about "the band" as in us three. We were different musicians than Braxton with totally different styles as well, it would have never worked. Because of this we kinda disappeared and the show never happened, i really did want to dress as Elvis though!

Again we were in a situation where we had no idea what we were going to do next, i didn't want to sing for it would just turn into a vanity project like the last time, we needed a singer and fast. Mike's neighbor worked with a guy who was a singer and was looking for a band to front...he also had a demo!
We figured if he had a demo he was serious about this, so we got the tape and gave it a listen. In the next few weeks that followed we listened to the demo over and over and decided we would invite him over and see if we felt it as a band. Would this work though, bringing in an outsider to the band? All we could do was give it a shot.......