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???.......
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???.......
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