HXR20YR RETROSPECTIVE: HXR018- OAK AND BONE 7"

Another year goes by and another changing of the guard takes place.  Things keep moving along.  As more established bands of the Syracuse area either split up, or got more serious about their touring, new bands rose up to fill the gaps. 

In 2005 I had become involved with a collective of people who were working to establish a new venue in the area.  My role seemed to be to give some perspective, a little guidance, and design a couple logos.  There was a wellspring of interest from a group of kids who came out of the Cicero (North of Syracuse) area whom I’d never met before.  All these kids were starting their first bands and many of them played in this little hole in the wall space we had running for the entirety of about one summer before it was shut down.

I made sure to keep tabs on what these kids were up to because in them I definitely saw the next wave of people who would make a significant impact upon the Syracuse scene.  A myriad of short-lived bands sprang up and eventually some of those groups disbanded and distilled into what became Oak and Bone.  Having an idea of where the members had come from previously, and talking with their singer Weston Czerkies (who I could see was very interested in booking shows, making zines, and essentially just making shit happen- all very admirable qualities) about some of the sounds his new band was going for I pretty much knew right from the get-go, before even hearing them, that I would probably be game for what they were planning.

I ended up booking the band’s debut show, opening for Young Widows in 2008.  They were well received and began playing out frequently.  Their guitarist, Jon Sorber, had a wild set up and an almost natural inclination for getting crazy guitar tones and maximum riffage.  Drummer Drew Fitzgerald kind of surprised everyone because it seemed as if no one knew that some John Bonham type kid was wailing away furiously without a band until now.  Those two made a great team for mixing wild riffs with crazy drumming and bassist Chris Putzer holding down a sludgy/fuzzy low-end.  What the group came up with was music that had as much to do with riffy-sludge metal as it did crusty punk and the ideals of a straight up hardcore band.  It was a great mixture and they did it really well.

Their singer Weston eventually moved into the house I was renting with about 5 or 6 other people.  The band had been going for several months at this point.  I distinctly remember one night while we were both separately making some late night dinner in the kitchen and plainly stating, “I should do a record for Oak and Bone”.  Weston seemed surprised, but open to the idea.  And that was about that.

They went ahead and recorded their first 7”, which had 4 songs on the physical version, and a download including a 5^th secret track.  The guys gave me this wild painting they found at a garage sale to use for the cover.  Our man (and Black Sheep Squadron vocalist) Chuck Hickey drew a logo for the band that evoked the Beatles “Rubber Soul” logo, but in more of a hippie-death cult sort of way and I slapped the whole thing together with laying out an insert and a neat inside cover image.  And that’s how Oak and Bone got started.

But to really get into detail, especially about the beginnings of this band that burned short and bright, I caught up with professional grown-up Jon Sorber about all that crazy noise he helped make.

What was it like growing up in the area that you and when did you start getting into heavier music?

Well, unfortunately, my first taste of that was Christian rock.  Not Christian ‘rock’, but like Norma Jean and The Chariot.  Stuff like that.  It kind of evolved from there.  I found Botch, Breather Resist, and stuff like that was pretty awesome at the time.  It still is awesome.

When I first heard bands like Torche that really stuck with me because I had never heard stuff like that before.  It really influenced me in terms of my writing.  That whole vibe of big, open chords, and crushing sounds behind them was great.  But I also really liked rock n’ roll stuff like Queens Of the Stone Age, and that really stuck out for me.  Plus, being friends with people like you and Ted (Niccoli, second bassist for Oak and Bone) definitely exposed me to a lot of great music.

As far as growing up I didn’t really have any great taste in music, so I’m glad I found people who could influence me in the right way insofar as music goes.

Did you find it easy to seek that stuff out?

Oh yeah, and back then, there were a lot of shows at the Westcott Community Center and The Furnace.  A lot of great touring bands would come through.  My early, early influences were metalcore and it kind of just progressed from there.  Smoking weed opened up my eyes to a lot!  (laughs)

(laughs) As it did many people.

I’m trying to think of some early influences for that first 7”.  Definitely Queens Of the Stone Age, Torche, that was kind of the vibe that we were going for.  But it definitely came from hardcore with the vocals.

All the guys came from different parts of town.  How did you all end up meeting each other?

I’ve known Drew (Fitzgerald, drums) forever.  I knew Drew and Chris (Putzer, bass) from church.  I grew up with Drew.

But Drew is from Brewerton and you were out in Camillus, pretty far apart.

We went to school together at Faith Heritage.

OK, so you were both sent out to Catholic School.

Yup.  And me and Drew really started to connect in seventh grade when we found out what punk rock was and we both rebelled at the same time. (laughs)  So the private school didn’t ask us to come back the next year because we were too much to handle (laughs).  So then I started to go to public school at West Genesee, and flourished, because I was just like a normal kid at a public school instead of a punk rock kid at a Catholic school.

 The band in various states of rest (clockwise from top left):  Drew, Chris, Weston, Jon

And how did Weston (Czerkies, vocals) come into the picture?

I met Weston through going to shows at VFWs all over the place.  I think we went to OCC (Onondaga Community College) at the same time possibly?  But I always enjoyed him.  I think the first time I met him was probably through our friends Bill Crate and Shawn O’Brien (Batlord) out in the Central Square area.  Shawn used to have shows in his barn and The Moth Leads the Empire, which was like pre-Oak and Bone, played there.

I forgot about that band!  I was going to bring up your old band Seagrave instead.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Seagrave! (laughs)  When I was playing with Seagrave my harsh sound developed into more of a different style of heavy music.  It was a little more composed, a little less sporadic.  The Moth Leads the Empire was more of a noise thing, but it was fun.

I feel like Seagrave was a bit more metallic, but when Oak and Bone started it was really it’s own thing.  There was nothing like that around town.  So was your intention to completely try to do a different thing, or did it just grow naturally?

It definitely grew naturally.  I had been playing with Drew for so long.  My chemistry with him, to this day, is very natural.  We haven’t played together in a couple years, but I’m sure we would pick up right where we left off in terms of anticipating where the other one is going to go with a riff or a progression.  So me, Drew, and Chris started jamming up in Cicero.  Somehow Weston came into the picture.  Our first practice space was in Chris’ basement, and our first show was with Harbor, Setauket, and Young Widows.  That was a cool first show, especially having been a huge fan of Breather Resist, and getting to see the next step of that band.  Young Widows, for sure, influenced me in writing some of the Oak and Bone stuff.  Definitely them, Queens Of the Stone Age, and Torche mashed up what was I was going for.  And with Drew’s crazy beats behind it I thought it came out cool.  And it just got better from there.  But we did end up having to ask Chris to leave the band.

The first Oak and Bone show

Yeah, what happened there?

We asked him to leave.  It was a band decision that we came to.  We just didn’t really like where it was going with him I guess.  I don’t want to talk crap on him, he didn’t do anything wrong.  He’s a super nice guy, but it just wasn’t working out.  And we wanted to try someone else.

I think Ted was a really good fit as a replacement.

Uncle Ted came into the picture (laughs)

It’s funny you’re calling him Uncle Ted when he’s so much younger than me.  Now I feel super old.  Moving on, I wanted to ask about how you all always seemed to have really shitty luck on the road.

Well, I think our first tour, which was with Chris, we never got stranded anywhere.  That’s good.  But I feel like the shows were decent.  But I think as a group of 18 and 19 year olds out for the first time you’re going to have your poorly promoted shows, and poorly attended shows.  Even to this day that still happens!

We never fought with each other, we had a lot of fun, that’s for sure.  But I think the worst part was when our van broke down in Tampa.  That was our second tour, which was after the full length came out.

We did a bunch of weekends, we did shows with The Helm.  We went up to Burlington in January.  It was so cold.  So cold.

But the worst thing was breaking down in Tampa and having to scrap the van.  And then we got it appraised to see what we could get for it and we only got, like, $300 for it.  So that happened because Drew drove the van from Syracuse to probably Binghamton in second gear, which pretty much fucked the van.  We had issues with it throughout the whole tour.  We sold the van.  Luckily we were at Ted’s grandparents house, who lived down there, while we figured out what to do.  So we went to the beach and swam in his grandparents community pool at their retirement home.  So we hung out there.  Ted ended up flying home.  Weston took a bus.  Drew and I used the money we made from selling the van to rent a U-Haul box truck, because their vans don’t have trailer hitches, and we needed to hitch our trailer with our gear to get it home.  We drove 24 hours straight back home.  We got stuck in a ditch halfway back because we pulled over on the side of the road to get some sleep in Virginia or somewhere and we had to call a tow truck to get us out.  That was pretty wild.  So that’s that.  Success.

One of our most notorious shows, I guess, was in Buffalo at Sugar City where Ted drank too much and forgot how to play bass.  It was a rough night.  He got in a fight and had to go to the hospital.  So we all waited in the ER for him.  He was fine.  He got a little banged up.  And then we went to Denny’s and he threw it all up. (laughs)

I think that was sort of the fall of Oak and Bone.  Not too long after that Ted decided to move to Portland and we got Rob Button to play bass for us for a little while, for a handful of shows, before we split.  We did a weekend with him and Drew and I got arrested.  Did you ever hear about that?

Yes I did.  You were all traveling in different vehicles, right?

Yeah.  We were headed back to where we were staying and I had beer in the car and the cops pulled us over.  And they then arrested us.

What was recording the 7” like?  You took a song or two off the demo, re-recorded them, and threw a couple new ones on there too.

Yeah.  We recorded with Josh Coy at Wayne Manor Studios.  He was really into Batman.

AKA, his apartment attic.

Yeah.  I think I recorded guitars in his dining room.  He lived on Miles Ave.  But I think we were recording while I was going to OCC, so we recorded when we weren’t in class.  I don’t think it took very long.  It was a lot of fun though.  I don’t think I’d ever done something like that up to that point.  I never cut an actual record.  And the support you gave us was huge, that meant a lot.  And then we did the little incense packages-

I forgot about those!

(laughs) Yeah, single use incense packages with each record purchased!  I heard that someone had one, and the incense deteriorated, and the oils from the incense ruined the record, or something like that.

The different versions of the 7" and the inside cover

That was funny.  I forgot about that.  And that was all you guys, I had nothing to do with that.  It was like a record release show thing, right?

Yeah, you don’t remember us hanging out on your porch making them?  When you and Weston lived at that big house on Highland?

Yeah, it looked as if you guys were making drug baggies on my porch.  But I had forgot about it until you just brought it up.

I think we made about 40 of them.  A little drug bag action.

So where did the name Oak and Bone come from?

Shawn O’Brien thought of it.  The original name that Shawn thought of was The Staff Of Oak and Bone.  Weston and him were hanging out and Weston said, ‘how about just Oak and Bone’.  And now I feel like if we named the band that it would sound like some kind of tapas and cocktail bar.  Or a men’s clothing company.  Everyone is ‘something and something’ now.

(laughs)  But The Staff Of Oak and Bone would make people think you were a band of wizards, or something.

Yeah.  We like mythical witchcraft too.

That sounds like a very Shawn O’Brien thing to think of, and he wasn’t even in the band.

No, but he went on a bunch of weekends with us as a roadie.  He was always around.  He was a really nice dude too.

So what would you say was your favorite thing about that band, and what was your least favorite thing?

My favorite thing about doing Oak and Bone was the band itself.  It was all fun.  But putting the 7” out, and then the split with Like Wolves and then the full length, just being able to tour and play cities at that age was so cool.  And have label support too!  That was so cool.  That was the best part.  Being a part of that band, as a Syracuse thing, and being from here, I was proud of that. 

I regret none of it…  except getting arrested in Bethleham, Pennsylvania.  That was probably the worst part of the band.

Funny story- when I had to go back to Bethlehem to go to court the judge was talking to everybody in the courtroom and some random guy in the courtroom saw me and said, ‘yo, you’re the guitarist from Oak and Bone!’

Oh, the places you meet people!

Right!  In the courtroom!  So I said, ‘yeah man, I am!’  That was the best part of Oak and Bone actually.  But it was just an appearance, and I jumped through all the hoops for that stuff and it’s all behind me now.

So several weeks or months go by after this arrest and a random guy in court in a different city recognizes you from your band?  That’s staying power.

I guess so.

That guy is in a jail cell right now listening to your records.

He probably just broke our record so he could try and stab somebody with it.

Yes.  So, job well done.  That’s the legacy of Oak and Bone.

Glad I could influence someone’s life in a positive way. (laughs)

 The 7" record release show flyer

So that 7" is long out of print at this point, but you can always get the digital tracks via bandcamp.  AND you can get it all for only $3 this week. AND just to sweeten the deal, I'll randomly pick a person who buys the digital version and send them a test press copy of the 7".  So go do that now.