We Only Come Out at Night: The Strange World of Davidh

The Strange World of DavidH - Chapter 12

"Rebuilding Myself" aka "The Long One..."

originally written December 13th, 2010

originally published December 13th, 2010

First off let's start out by saying that throughout this entire story i have bared no ill will towards anyone, actually the opposite...if it wasn't for each detail i would not be where i am today which is healthy in the mind, happy, and playing in a good band with people i really like (and like to play with). i have not embellished this story at all, i think i have actually watered it down in some of the negative areas so as to not look bad myself or make others in the story look bad, unlike previous chapters i have decided not to focus so much on the negative stuff, the past is just that, the past. - David Henretta

Ah, where were we, oh yeah 2007...after Kenny had died Andy and I decided to take a long overdue break from playing, no clue what he did but i put the instruments down and took a nice long rest. After about 7 months went by we started hanging again and the inevitable reared it's ugly head, were we going to put the band back together and who could we get to join us?

In the winter of 2007 i had a small party at my house, Andy and I invited a few people over to gauge their ability and cohesiveness, we wrote and recorded one instrumental song which just so happened to sound like disco era Black Sabbath (exactly). The only person that worked well at the time was a bass player named Shawn, moody artist type who at one time worked at our local head shop, Fantasy. It's funny, i wrote all that old stuff in Chapter 1 thru 11 and this stuff is the hardest to remember. We jammed, Andy, Shawn , and I over at some nameless drummer's house who was kind of a space cadet, can't even remember his name, we'll call him drum stool warmer #593, i wasn't playing through good gear...it was a mess. Now Shawn, he worked out for a little while but he had one problem, we had recorded a lot of music previously so of course that, for the time being was gonna be the bulk of what we would play. Problem was, he didn't want to play the basslines that were on the recordings which i found a little bit odd, i don't know, things weren't gelling and i find it so hard to tell someone sorry, were just not interested. The usual means of eradicating someone from the band were done, ignore all phone calls and emails...which by the way, is a sucky thing to do to someone!

Now, if someone i really want to play with informs me of any indication they want to play i go above and beyond to get them on board, so when Chad Cleaver called me up and told me he was interested in playing with us i immediately called up my go to bass player, Tony Rife, and there you have it, Instant Sons of Godzilla (patient pending) before your eyes. We established some ground rules, this wasn't Sons of Godzilla, no Sons of Godzilla songs, new band new songs only. This idea lasted about 5 minutes into the first practice, the Sons of Godzilla was an easy crutch to fall upon and we fell hard, it did give us an opportunity to rehearse songs that were recorded around the time we broke up in 2006 but never had the chance to play live, songs like I Really Wanna Love Her, If I Could, Into You, Red Wig, and one of my solo songs, Suicide is for Lovers. Also During this time i attempted to record another e.p. titled "Hallelujah", i recorded up to 15 songs to sift through but eventually only added lyrics to 1, being the title track. I padded the single out with 2 demo recordings i did the previous year on vacation in Nags Head, NC.

We started out strong, practicing as much as we could, (practicing in of all places...my house) talked about returning to the stage (which never occurred), eventually practices became far and few between, then the news came that Tony had decided he was going to move to another state and Andy was moonlighting with another band, Vessel, the band quickly fell apart. We did manage to sneak in a recording with Chad on the drums, "Into You" which remains one of my favorite recordings to this day.Tony had been drunk when we recorded the song so i took it upon myself to re-record the bassline. The last hurrah of this era was recording the BabyFarm song "Blow Their Minds (Start a Revolution), which we had no intention of recording but our replacement drummer for Mike back in 2006, Steve Spivey phoned up Andy and said he wanted to get together and record it, so we did. My brother didn't like our recording of his song, he never liked our recordings of any BabyFarm songs. I don't think it had anything to do with whether or not they were good, i just think he wished he was the one recording and performing them...not us. After we recorded the song, Andy went on to play with Vessel a bit longer, i participated in an aborted attempt to get another Ocaliflash record together (music was recorded but nothing was ever finished). I wrote and recorded up to about 30 solo instrumental demos during this period but only finished the vocals to about 3 of them. My interest was starting to wane. Also during this time, Chad, Keith Goodwin, and I tried to strike up a band but it just never gelled.

After all this you would think the Sons of Godzilla were done but not quite yet , there was still some life in this beast that just wouldn't go down...just a few months later, in 2008, we were back rehearsing with a member of the definitive version of SOG (the 5 piece) and with a different approach to playing live music.

So, we have another great idea, instead of having a bass player or a drummer we would record these instruments straight to tape and then play live to backing tapes...great idea except for one thing, energy, there was none, the shows were interesting and fun but were just a whole different vibe all together. It seemed like a great idea but under the surface it was the idea of a band gasping for life. The recordings that we committed to tape during these three years (2007-2010) were the best written songs we ever recorded in my opinion, in September of 2008 Sons of Godzilla returned to the stage after a two year hiatus, we played a venue in Nags Head, NC called the Outer Banks Brewing Station and by all accounts it was a good show. We played Schooners in Newport News, Va and the Brewing Station a few more times.

Halloween 2008 i recorded my last E.P. to date, "Bring me the Head of David", another concept E.P., this time dealing with the birth of my son, growing up, driven by the emotions of fumbling my way through the process of being a first time father. I recorded 20 new demos to choose from and trimmed that down to 4 to make up the E.P., at the last minute i recorded the intro ("Intro into Madness") and it was finished. Christmas brought another song (the MySpace Christmas gift song) which was recorded during the "Head' sessions, a proper re-recording of the "Hallelujah" track, "How many Luvers Will you Take", now renamed "La Partie Deux D'amoureux" which roughly translates to The Lovers Part II.

December 31st 2009, Me, Andy, and our families headed to Bristol, Virginia to visit Mike Bright and his family and we played a New Years Party at Mike's house with the classic line-up (Me, Andy, Mike, and Tony), it was great us four playing together again and a bit bittersweet because i knew that it would probably be for the last time. In January SoG in it's current form, Me, Andy , and Marc played the Brewing Station in what would be our last ever show, the last song we would ever play would be a joint effort with the headlining band the Dreadnecks and we played "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys...ironic that our last song would be a cover, a crime for which i have fought against my entire band playing life!

In April of 2009 my wife was involved in a terrible auto accident which put our lives on hold so i had no choice but to put my music on hold to devote myself to my wife and her situation. I recorded 2 songs the first week she was in the hospital the one night i stayed at home to get that raw emotion, an original called "Will You be the One" and a cover of the Queens of the Stone Age's song "Gonna Leave You", these would be the last songs i have recorded to date.

In the month of August to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the debut Bliss cd, Marc and I put together an E.P. of new Bliss songs and posted it up on MySpace, 1 new song every week for 4 weeks, we also renamed the month of August to AugBLISSt. The idea for the E.P. was to record old Bliss material we never got around to recording and brand new material. The other idea i had was to incorporate original Bliss drummer Jay Walters in the recording process to contribute drums to the songs but unfortunately, this did not come to pass. On Halloween of 2009 Marc and I released a digital split E.P. of our solo recordings, because i was in a writing slump only one of my songs was new and the other song was from a session in 2004. After Marc and I finished promoting that thing to death on Facebook Andy and I slowly started to put a new band together which slowly drifted into SoG territory again. By this time i was so over playing, the chaos in my life coupled with the long break not playing in a democratic band environment had me reeling, i was retroactively back to being burnt out again, all i wanted to do was start over fresh. Now this isn't to disregard anything SoG did, but if me and Andy were going to continue on playing in a healthy environment it need to something completely new, new music, new name, new everything. In the end the fact i had somehow lost all power in my own band and that i didn't have much time to spare anyway left me no choice but to put my ball down and go home. With everything else i had going on i was just relieved to not be in a band anymore, one less commitment.

My initial plan was to go ahead and sell my head and speaker therefore insuring that i wouldn't play in any bands again. I made a trip to Ripper's to either trade or sell my equipment, i can't remember, and when i got there they were closed, that little bit of hesitation was all i needed to realize that i probably shouldn't sell my stuff, you know, just incase. In the meantime, i left a small message of evolution to a friend, probably went over their head but at this point i didn't really care...the vision was gone? So, in the musical dumps (if i was in a band i was unhappy, if i wasn't in a band i wasn't happy...just a state of mental collapse) i talked to Marc one day and he told me about jamming with a band over at Brian Spike's house, a mutual friend of ours, and i was just sitting here after we talked and decided to check out their MySpace page. I had kept up with Brian's band a bit, another mutual friend of ours, Jeff Carroll, was in the band as well. The stuff that i had heard before were practice recordings of noodler jams and pieces of songs but what i heard when i went to their MySpace page blew me away, Brian and Jeff both had been asking me to come over and jam through the years so i immediately called up Brian and asked if i could come over and play with the hopes (in my mind) that if i meshed well enough, join the band. The band was called Alpha Whale which i liked, always good that if your going to be in a band, you have a good name.

I decided a few days prior to the first meeting to run the 4 songs from their MySpace through my multi-tracker at home and practice along with them so i didn't go into the first practice/jam blind, not much different than what Tony and I did with Ocaliflash back in 2002. The first practice couldn't have gone better, i felt like i was reborn musically speaking, most important...i felt welcome. My initial goal was to go into this band with zero input, just show up and play, no hassles, no worries, this idea quickly came to an end because it was feeling so right to be in this band after just a few practices. To be honest, i wish i had taken their initial invitation to join up 5 years earlier because after spinning my wheels for the last 5 years it was good to be doing something productive with everyone on the same page.

So here we are, January of 2011, and i have drafted this chapter over a period of about a week or so and when i read it all back i wonder, does it really matter, does this story have any meaning and what does it mean to me? This is the story of my life, how i arrived at this point which is the final point in this story in many ways. Alpha Whale is like my musical nursing home so to speak, once this band ceases to exist i will cease to exist musically. I hope to put out one more solo cd before my run is over but if i don't it won't be a big deal, things change so much when you get older and you start a family, have children...you priorities shift, things that were so important five years ago don't seem as important now, with peace comes serenity. I have very little time to devote to music these days (once a week, twice if i am lucky) and that time is solely devoted to my number one music priority, Alpha Whale, the band that brought me back to life, the band that saved my musical soul. Undoubtedly there will be more chapters because i feel Alpha Whale has the potential to be really good and do some really amazing things, this band is probably the strongest band musically i have ever been in. If you have made it this far in the story i will end this particular chapter with this, never give up hope, something, someone, is out there for you, i have had to take this incredible journey to get to the place i always wanted to be,...i started playing music when i was 16 years old and at 35 i finally found my home. Till the next chapter...the End?