HXR20YR RETROSPECTIVE: HXR009- CURSED, "Hell Comes Home" 7"

You would think that given their sort of cult status now Cursed was a successful band during their tenure.  Yes and no.  By the time they began the members had played in a number of influential bands and had a pretty good resume.  So when they did get rolling there was certainly some talk about them and they quickly released their first full length on Deathwish, which was already gaining momentum, but not nearly as established as they are now.  However, even though they were a touring machine Cursed often played to crowds where they could dedicate each song to a different person in the room and still have part of their set leftover to shout out to no one.  It really wasn’t until they were wrapping up that people really started to pay attention.  I had already known these guys for awhile and it wasn’t long before they came down my way and I booked a show for them in Syracuse.  On a couple of other occasions my band went up to Canada and played with them on their turf.  Each time was far less people than I expected, which was bizarre to me considering they were a pretty established group of people. It didn’t really matter either way though because they were always a treat to see.

I can’t count how many times I saw them play in some tiny hole-in-the-wall place (a gallery space in Ithaca, the basement of Sonic Unyon in Hamilton, ABC No Rio, the Hamilton Street Café in New Brunswick) and no matter the place they brought their wall of amps, cramming as many guitar cabs in as they possibly could and cranking things up to 11 so your teeth rattled while they played and your chest caved in from the total disregard for any one else’s hearing or well-being.  It was incredibly confrontational in the sonic sense, but also in frontman Chris Colohan’s forays into the crowd, getting all up in their confused faces.  Cursed just annihilated through and through.

So since we had a pretty good rapport going I talked Chris into doing a Cursed record through Hex.  The talks went back and forth for a quite a long time too, but mostly we talked about our shared love for the Rollins Band and our lot in life as short, scrawny frontmen with a very similar stage presence.  So the idea was that they would do a 7” record with a Rollins Band cover and an original song.  But being that Rollins Band songs are pretty tough to cover they decided to do a cover of a song that I guarantee had a huge impact upon the Rollins Band- “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges.  So it was more of a cover of a band that the band they wanted to cover would probably cover themselves.  In addition, there was a demo version of “Hell Comes Home”, which would become the lead single of their next full length (Cursed, “II”).  So this record acted as kind of a lead up to their second LP and I’m OK with it.  It was also the first time in awhile that I had done a 7” so I thought it would be fun to do several colors of vinyl for it.  Why not?  In all, 2000 copies of the 7” were made and they all flew off the shelves, so to speak.  I made an oath that it would be a one time pressing, never to be repressed, and I’m sticking to that.

A lot has changed since Cursed has split.  Most of the guys from that band have more or less stopped playing music, or do so in a non-touring sense.  Chris joined up with Burning Love for several years, another wild punk band that I thought was just excellent before that ended.  He currently fronts Sect, a decidedly vegan straightedge band featuring members spread out all over from bands like Earth Crisis, Fallout Boy, Day Of Suffering, Catharsis and Undying.  He also is the man behind Vegan Magic and Parmageddon, a couple food items that are amazing and versatile.  I’ve also interviewed Chris Colohan like seven times over the years so what’s one more time, right?  This time we’re talking about probably the same shit we were ten years ago, as well as that seven inch they did on the label all those years ago.

                               Chris, in mustache phase

At the time of this 7” you were between the first and second LPs.  What was going on with the band at that time?

Man, it’s a blur. We set it all in motion but it took us a year or so of lining up our lives (aka putting them in storage) to be able to go with it. So at that point, Radwan had moved back to Lebanon, I think Tom was with us on bass and it was 4 piece. I was back in Toronto from Montreal, and we were just going from one tour to the next.

Did Cursed end up having a lot of people ask you all to do records?  It seems like most of the attention to the band came after you all split up.

That’s pretty much right on. We were approached by labels from Relapse to Interscope (to a resounding "yeah right, whatever narc") and hardcore labels obviously, but we preferred not to look up like that, not to have anything dictating the thing we were making. And you’re right, in true form, most of it went over people’s flip phones (that they were texting their girlfriend on waiting for Evergreen Terrace to start) until the last year or two of the band, by which point we were in a total tailspin internally. 

I’m trying to recall exactly how doing the “Hell Comes Home” 7” came up between us.  When it did we had known each for awhile at that point and I thought the idea of doing a record for one of your bands would be fun.  But I think it revolved more around the idea of recording covers and how we had some shared interest in certain bands that would be fun to cover.  What’s your recollection of it?

I think I was like “Hey Hex, want to do a 7” and I’ll totally flake on getting you the artwork until 4 minutes before it goes to the printing press?” and you were like “dude, that sounds like it would be an enjoyable and non-stressful experience”, and then we went for rib-eye steaks, spat in our hands and shook on it. 

I know the initial idea for the 7” was to have a Rollins Band cover on it.  Was there any particular reason that ended up being a Stooges cover instead?  Did the rest of the band not share your (by ‘your’ I mean ‘our’) passion for the man/band?

Answer I: Come on. We’re both short, angry men. We know what kinda Danzig Syndrome this is really all about. 

Answer II: No, we all loved Rollins Band. Christian and I in particular, we saw them and COC in 92 here and it was a pivotal night of life. Rollins connected with a lot of young peoples’ aimless pent-up dad-hating anger, or, whatever we were all trying to prove connected with whatever he was trying to prove. That band though was worldly in its influences despite the cartoonish hyper-maleness of it, and led me to a lot of older bands like the Pink Fairies (Do It). That OG lineup was just ferocious and the production was great in a way that still holds up. If anything, I have to roll my eyes at Rollins’ part in it, but I feel like he’s smart enough to see that he laid that on a biiiiiit thick. I get it, Black Flag was a 5 year hazing ritual. But look at Kira. She’s not Joe Rogan about it.

 Cursed at ABC No Rio.  Dan Yemin from Paint It Black getting hearing damage in background

The main track off that record was “Hell Comes Home”, which dealt with the current, at the time, situation of getting into a war on false pretenses and how that will eventually come back to bite us in the ass, so to speak.  Was there any reason that was the song used, or was it the only thing demo’ed at the time for Cursed, “II”?

No, it was intentional to make that song a 7". That was just after Iraq part II kicked back up post-9.11. Things were getting hairy, aimlessly xenophobic and war-minded, and you could see them laying down the groundwork that led us up to the current state of authoritarian overreach and total dependence on misinformation. So I thought it was important to put that front and centre, if only to say “look at this objectively outside of the fear, keep looking when they want you to look in another direction and remember it the way it really went down”. Now as always the people that put that into motion are safely off the hook and we can look back at it truthfully, that there weren’t WMDs, that it was a wind-up, that it didn’t achieve any lasting stability, and have Trump saying flat out “yeah we shoulda took their oil”. Yet you couldn’t talk about that, or 9/11, in real time. And likewise right now you can’t make a truthful picture like that about post-Chavez Venezuela, so we’re going to watch them install a US employee as leader, secure the natural resources (which had been nationalized) for private corporations, the money from which will never make Americans any better off , but then we’ll be able to say it out loud in 10 years, when it’s done, and so on. That was the Hell Comes Home situation, but regarding the reality that if you export dominance and greed, of course it doesn’t end there, and you end up importing resentment and desperation in the form of terrorism and backlash proportionately to the injustices you put out there somewhere outside the bubble of the West, which everyday people on both sides will always pay the price for.

The band also began touring quite a bit more during this time period.  Would you say you were doing better with getting audiences by this point, or was it hit or miss?  Were there any bands that stand out that you toured with that you formed a kinship with?

Hit and miss for sure. There was never any correlation between how much we toured and the reality of the world asking for that. Most of our lifespan was playing at ourselves and handfuls of people that were into it, and we were fine with that. Touring with our friends and making trouble. Mi Amore from Quebec City were probably our closest kin on this side of the border. And I think the Louisville family of Coliseum/Breather Resist/Young Widows were our tightest friendships that came out of touring down there. But we had great times with a long list of great bands, American Nightmare, Daughters, Mare, KEN Mode, Converge, Darkest Hour, Bane, Verse, the Secret, Ringworm, Disfear, Rotten Sound, too many more to list.

I thought it was kind of a weird transition to do your first record with a very well-established label like Deathwish, to doing the next two through Goodfellow/Sonic Unyon.  Can you talk a bit about how and why that came about?

Hooking up with DWI was pretty random. Two of us were living in Montreal when Cursed started and 2 in Ontario. Our first weekend of shows were with Converge at Salle L’ex (a fantastic, long gone Montreal club). It was early on for both Deathwish and us, but we’d known all those guys through years of seeing and playing with Converge and their other bands. Jake just asked and I think we said “sure” that night. There’s miles of story between then and everything that went down in the next few years, but Goodfellow when it happened made sense too after us being awful if not self-defeating communicators and wanting to go back to our smaller home town circles, and run out of the building we practiced in the basement of. We’d had offers from bigger and different kinds of labels but we weren’t looking at anything like there was an up or down, just forward for however much longer we could get away with it. 

So the rest of the guys who were in Cursed over the years are pretty much not active with music anymore, or in a very limited capacity.  However, you still play in a pretty active band.  How is it the guy that doesn’t write music stays the most active?

Hey man, have you seriously never heard my mouth riffs? 

There’s another interview we did years ago when The Swarm was active where we were talking about if we could picture ourselves at 40 and you mentioned not wanting to still do band stuff when you were 40.  But here we are, each into our 40s and you’re still doing band stuff.  Does your past self hate you for your betrayal, or does your current self reflect to your past self and say, ‘listen man, I’m not dead yet so cut me a break’?

Don’t worry, my current self hates my current self and my future self hates my past self as much as my past self hated my then-future present self. I couldn’t picture life more than 6 months ahead at that point and even now I still can’t work that far ahead. I guess time and age just happen by default. I know that every time something would burn down and I was faced with stopping I had a guilty teenaged Black Flag fan on my shoulder making me just turn around and double back down on the next and the next thing from scratch, and here we are.  Sect is the most fun I’ve had in years and for me it brings  the whole thing full circle to play with people my own generation and starting point. So maybe bump that up to…70? And I’m basically dead inside, so you don’t have to cut me a break. Loop Hooooole. 

 excerpt from our first interview together back in 1999

What was your favorite thing about being in Cursed?  What was the thing you disliked the most?

Hrm. I mean, we went about it in a very self-punishing way and with a lot of internal bravado aimed at each other. It was more of a sick dare after a point than a band, and we all paid for how far we let that go in different ways. I think by virtue of sheer exasperation with ourselves and life it was very unfiltered and self-honest. So I’m proud of my part in that. We played shows like we were trying to kill each other, regardless of anyone else in the room. It was never an option or question not to give it our all, no matter how bad things got, and looking back I’m proud of that. I’m not as stoked on the damage we did to ourselves, or the fact that we all came from straightedge and we weren’t more honest with each other when it went in two extreme directions in real time. We let a lot of things between us fester and grow into something that consumed it all. And honestly, i don’t even know if I can say I dislike that, it’s kind of perfect for what we were to end in genuine disaster. But it left several people permanently damaged and myself, sober or not, pretty raggedy in the mental health department as well. If anything I’d change that but again, you buy the ticket, you take the ride. I like what we left behind. 

An Ithaca policeman after Chris showed him his dick.  Yes, really.

And there you have it.  You can catch Chris traveling all over the place with his current band Sect and you will never see Cursed play a show ever again.  Or will you ever see this 7" in print ever again.  And don't even try to get your hands on my copy of the test press, it's the only one I have left.  You can. however, get a digital version of this great record for just $1 this week on the bandcamp page instead.

HXR20YR RETROSPECTIVE: HXR008- ED GEIN, "It's a Shame..." CDEP

“It’s a Shame That a Family Can Be Torn Apart By Something As Simple As a Pack Of Wild Dogs”.  That’s the whole title.  It’s funny though, right?  But you will never see me actually use that whole title to describe this record, except for right now.  As it stands nothing has topped this record insofar as how many I have sold and it still gets more plays digitally than anything else I’ve released.  And I would say a lot of that is due to how hard Ed Gein worked as a band that toured relentlessly.  At their peak the guys were on the road for probably almost 9 months out of the year playing every corner of the United States that they possibly could.  I think in one year they toured the country 4 separate times.  They even had their van (and all their gear) stolen at one point and still finished a tour.  Luckily they got the majority of that back a few months later.

But I couldn’t believe the reception this got from people.  It was just crazy.  I had distro’s re-ordering hundreds of copies from me each month, which was really weird for me to think about.  On my side of things it is where Lumberjack Distribution officially picked me up as an exclusive label.  That meant a lot to me at the time.  They carried all the best punk and hardcore record labels and it opened plenty of doors.  It also meant that I had to learn a lot about deadlines, street dates, and all that other stuff that goes along with it.  Up until that point if I decided to put out a record I just put it out and let it go from there.  Now I had to plan my releases 3-4 months in advance and start coming up with ad copy and press releases way before I knew exactly how the record was going to look when it was done!  I was also still mostly just pressing CDs and this new Ed Gein would be in a somewhat different sort of package than I had done in the past.  I had just been doing jewel cases for the most part, but they wanted to do something a bit more artistic and who was I to argue?  I knew people were already excited about them and that whatever they did next would probably go over well, so we worked out some ideas and the band set off to do what they do, which was to write ridiculously fast and complicated songs with stupid long titles.  Our old friend, and Syracuse go-to guy, Jason “Jocko” Randall recorded things, which, in turn, helped gain him some attention within the metal world for his skill and engineering know-how.  “The Marlboro Man Is a Douchebag” will likely never be topped as a wacky song title with some of the most aggressive and pissed off music ever committed to tape, at least in the Hex Records catalog.  If things set off early on for these guys this was the one that fully unleashed Ed Gein upon the world.

There’s not really too much else to say about this one that hasn’t been said a million times already and you all know it.  So instead, this just gave me an excuse to catch up with my long time friend, bassist extraordinaire, screenprinting expert, and beard farming champ Aaron Jenkins.  We reflect upon the times when each of us still had hair on the top of our heads.

OK, so the 3-song EP was out, you all were touring, and you’re getting ready to write, record, and tour for “It’s a Shame…”.  What was going on with the band during this time period?

Oh man, you’re talking to the member of the band with the worst memory so I’ll have to stumble around to remember stuff.  So, we put out the three song thing around 2002.  I think we were practicing up in Oswego (NY) at the Wet Paint Factory at that point.  That was wild.  So when we were writing “It’s a Shame..” we were practicing about 7 nights a week, for 4 or 5 hours each night, if not more.  We would just go up there whenever Graham and Jesse got out of work and I got out of school.  I was going to community college…  I think maybe Jesse was too around then.  I took a year off between the end of high school and going to college, so it was around 2001 or something.  So we all would get out of work or school and then just go up to the practice space in Oswego and just be there all night until 3 or 4 in the morning.  We’d be there all night just writing music and goofing around.

Discuss your practice space, as it was kind of the stuff of legend.

Yeah, we had this huge room on the top floor of the Wet Paint Factory.  Were you ever there?

I know I passed by it, maybe I went in before.  It was called Wet Paint Factory?

Yeah, I don’t know why.  There was a store in the first floor or something.  Maybe it was the name of the paint store.  I never paid much attention to that part of the building.  But I believe Anthrax practiced there at one point.  It has some history to it for sure.  Anyway, we had the whole top floor of this place, like where the old ass elevator mechanics were, like an old lift elevator.  And it was this really old brick building, so the bricks were pretty much falling out of the building.  Snow would come in the holes in the bricks and pigeons would be flying around in there.  It was a mess.

So we made this place awesome because it was so big.  We put a couch in there and rugs, and everything was running on kerosene heaters because it would get really cold in there.  We had an N64 in there.  Me and Jesse would be like, ‘hey Graham- go write some riffs’, and we would just play video games while Graham would write some weird shit.  And we would do that for 6 hours.  Go grab a pizza and hang out.  We had a white board where we would have to write out sequences for songs and riffs.  It was all mathematical.  We would pick out a random sequence of numbers and then try to write songs to it, play it over and over, and over until we remembered it.  That’s how “It’s a Shame…” came about, just from all that.  For six nights a week.  At least.

Were you touring at that point?  Or just playing here and there?

We were playing around here and there.  I think we did a week with Found, Dead…Hanging out to the Midwest or something.  We didn’t go much farther than maybe Pennsylvania or Ohio.  We did a bunch of solo weekends on our own around the Northeast too.  I know we definitely did a couple things with Found, Dead… Hanging.  I know after “It’s a Shame” came out is when we did our actual first tour and that was with The Minor Times.

Can you talk a bit about where you all grew up, which was literally in the middle of nowhere.

The first point to make is that I’m not from there.  I’m from Syracuse and I moved up there with my mom after my parents got divorced.  I was dragged up there against my will and hated every minute of it.  There is literally nothing to do up there.  You’re so isolated from everything up there.   As a kid you couldn’t be in a worse spot.  You were stuck.  I did not belong in that area.  It sucked for me.  I hated it up there. 

But for whatever reason the Central Square school district spawned a lot of bands.  When I was in high school there were 30 or 40 kids who were straight edge, just in one high school!  And we were in the middle of nowhere.  Maybe it was because we were all bored.  So you’d hear that a couple kids were going down to Syracuse for a show, lets pack everyone into a car and go.  The people from up there seem to embody that whole DIY thing.  It’s even more ingrained in us because what else were we going to do? 

You literally have to do it yourself.

I mean, Jesse, Graham, and Adam (Williams, co-owner of Recess Coffee) are all from there and they have Recess going.  The Gorham brothers (Engineer, Blood Sun Circle) are from the North country too, but further west and they have their store going.  The owner of Strong Hearts Café in Syracuse is from there and he’s an old hardcore guy.  It kind of seems like North Country people all run stuff in Syracuse (laughs).

I spent part of my life living in the Westcott neighborhood in Syracuse when I was a kid before I moved up north, so my early childhood was running around Westcott and it’s where I’m most comfortable so that’s why I moved back here.

What was the reaction to the band early on and up to when “It’s a Shame…” came out?

It’s not what we expected at all.  We didn’t give a shit what people thought, at all.  I was in a really terrible band before Beyond Fall and I just needed something to do.  Graham and I have been playing music together since I was 13 or 14.  I started off playing drums and I was horrible at it.  At one point I heard my brother say ‘bass guitar is pretty cool’ so I decided to do that.  I started screwing around with it on my own and then I heard through the grapevine there was this kid named Graham who was a really amazing guitarist.  I had never met him before and I was at a friends birthday party and some kid said ‘hey, that’s Graham over there, you ought to go talk to him’.  He was this skinny little nerdy kid with long hair, hunched over in his own space, not really talking to anybody, all shy, and his arm was broken and in a cast.  And I said, ‘hey, I play bass, you play guitar, we should do a band!’ And he said back (imitating a shy, nerdy voice), ‘OK, sounds good man, I broke my arm though.’ (laughs)

And he’s still pretty much the same!

He’s still Graham, Goofy Graham, but me and him have been playing together for a long-ass time and we did Beyond Fall together and it was just bad metal.  So we wanted to do something that was faster and crazier, and we didn’t give a shit what people thought of it.  When we did Beyond Fall we kind of got tired of doing a thing that people sort of expected us to do, and do something weird, and we didn’t think people would like it at all.  We thought people would see us and just think, ‘what the hell is this crap?’  But, for whatever reason, people were immediately stoked on it.  It really surprised us.

                                       GrahamnationAD on the guitar

When you all were still doing Beyond Fall you played out of town a little bit, but once Ed Gein started you began touring quite a lot.  How did you all manage to make that jump and find contacts and out-of-town shows?

I did all of the booking pretty much.  I kind of got the reputation in the band as the band dad, and more of an asshole.  When we toured with All Else Failed they gave us all nicknames and they called me General Gein.  Like I was a commander.  Whatever, I was cool with it.  Someone had to do it, right?  Otherwise nothing would have gotten done, we wouldn’t have really done anything.  I’m totally cool with that role.  Yet out of the three of us in the band I have the least musical talent, but I have the most drive and ability to get shit done.

But as for touring we were doing this kind of before booking was all through the internet.  I think I got some of my initial contacts from doing shows with Found, Dead…Hanging, and Keith (vocalist) had all these contacts too.  I’m sure I asked you for contacts at one time or another.  Plus, when I was 13 or 14 I would be reading Maximum Rock n’ Roll and hearing stories about bands writing letters, like actual letters, to get shows booked.  Ya know, just going and doing the damn thing.  Since I’ve always known that that’s the way you do it- you just fucking do it.  You figure it out.  So I hit up some people up for contacts, I sent MySpace messages, or whatever we used at the time.  Maybe I was just using an AOL account or AIM at that point!

Were the other guys cool with just getting in the van and going for it as well?

Oh yeah.  Definitely.  Graham’s dad had this old beat-up Dodge van from the 70’s and it had a bed built in the back that they would take camping.  So we had a van we could use.  And we were all like, ‘we’re just going to do this.’  Looking back I don’t think we had a discussion about it, it was just me saying, ‘I’m going to book us some shows’ and that was it.

What was with the long song and album titles?

Ah….  We were pretentious douche bags?  We were kissing As the Sun Sets (pre-Daughters band) ass?  That’s it.  Ed Gein was basically an As the Sun Sets rip off band.  Bottom line.  But I suppose, at the time, we just didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing.  But we were just straight-up ripping other people off too kind of subconsciously.  The more you try to be different the more you’re going to be like everyone else who was trying to be different, ya know?  We just tried to put our own stamp on it.  Even our band name.  We didn’t want something like Poison the Well, or some generic metalcore band name.  Plus, I kind of suck at naming things.  So that’s where it came from- trying to do something different and that I suck at coming up with catchy names.

                                               It's a long title

At the time of recording “It’s a Shame..” were you set with recording with Jocko (Moresound Studios), or did you look around a little bit?

That’s a good question.  I honestly don’t remember.  We did the three song EP with some weird guy down in Liverpool (Syracuse suburb).  It was really random.  This guy had no idea of what we were trying to do.  I think he was listening to douche-y rock shit like Buckcherry when we got there.  The guy was a total weird too.  At one point he was setting up drum mics and he was all hunched over and had like plumber butt going, but he didn’t have plumber’s crack.  He was wearing this pink, frilly thong!  Ad we were kind of poking around at this studio, which had this apartment attached to it, and I went into this storage area and there was a tanning bed in there.  It was just weird and he was a weird guy.  Plus, when we recorded that I was probably around 18 so it was just a weird situation for kids that age to be in.  The guy was like, ‘I don’t know what this is, it’s just noise to me, I’m going to press record and you do your garbage, and then get out.’

So we didn’t want to do that again.  Maybe you might have told us about Jocko.  Everyone had sort of started going to him at that point.  It was still in his parents basement.  I hadn’t really met him at that point. 

It was really cool.  I think I met his mom once while we were there.  I mean, they let him take over that whole basement.  And to let loud stupid bands to come record all day, they must have been the coolest parents ever.  Extremely tolerant.

What were some of the friendships between bands, promoters, people in other towns, that you began forming during this time that continued to last?

The Minor Times guys for sure.  We did our first real tour with them.  In fact, I’m looking at pictures from that tour right now.  My memory really sucks, but I have very clear memories of that tour.  Those guys are just fucking awesome.

We also did a couple things with Anodyne (pre-Tombs)- Mike Hill and those dudes Joel and Josh.  The earlier days of us touring are the memories that I hold on to more.

Some of those people and bands from then I almost consider family.  I don’t see them much or talk to them much.  It’s a weird connection.

The dudes from Anodyne, Minor Times, the guys from Breather Resist- we did a bunch of stuff with them.  We toured with All Else Failed.

We did this ridiculous tour, it was probably almost two months long.  We went around the country, starting in Syracuse, down South and then out West with Breather Resist.  Then we got to Northern California, or something, and met up with All Else Failed and then went back through the country for almost another month.

Those guys are all great.  The All Else Failed guys are all hilarious.  They were a band we all loved for years before we ever started Ed Gein, they were one of our favorite bands.  So when we were touring with them years later we were like, ‘man, these guys are old and they’re still doing this!  That’s awesome’.  At the time they were not old at all, it was just a weird perspective to me since I was a bit younger.  I had no perspective on time, or a band’s life expectancy then.

                     Aaron, pre-beard takeover, pre-chrome dome

What were some of the things that happened that made you think- ‘we could do this all the time’, such as bigger shows, or tours, or attention from larger bands and so forth?

I don’t know.  That kind of stuff didn’t stick with me.  We were young and stupid and we weren’t really thinking about that sort of stuff.  It wasn’t a thought with us.  That sort of stuff kind of came later on when we were touring on “Judas Goats…” when we had to start thinking about paying rent while we were on the road, like adult stuff.

During the “It’s a Shame..” years we were just flying by the seat of our pants and still living at home with our parents.  As long as we were making enough money to put gas in van we would just keep going.

It’s strange because I thought of some of the stuff we were playing then was sort of a flash-in-the-pan genre.  And a lot of the bands that spawned out of that style I don’t like at all.  So I’m surprised when people are still into it.  I’m not really sure why we even played that style.  It’s just sort of what came out of us.  We didn’t sit down and discuss what kind of songs we were going to write.  The only discussion we had is that we didn’t want to be Beyond Fall part 2.  We just wanted to write weirder and faster songs.  We were listening to a lot of As the Sun Sets, but we didn’t say ‘we want to be like them!’  Personally, I was probably listening to more stuff like Turmoil and All Else Failed.

There was a vinyl version that eventually was made of “It’s a Shame…”.  Can you talk about that a little bit?

That was the three song demo, plus “It’s a Shame…” record on record.  Our friend Tim from Shock Value Records did that.  He was in a couple bands we would play with every now and then.  He was out of Long Island.  I think he asked us if he could put it out because he was into records.  It came out a year or two after the CD version I believe.  It was on bubblegum pink vinyl.

              The limited vinyl version of the EP

Did you do the screenprinting of the covers of that?

No, that was done by someone else.  I was interested in it at that point, but I didn’t know how to do it.  I hadn’t figured it out yet.  But I was interested enough in it that I knew I wanted to have screenprinted covers for it.  So I asked if the covers could be screenprinted and they agreed to it.

What was your favorite part of being in Ed Gein? What was your least favorite part?

My favorite thing was probably travelling and hanging out with the guys.  In fact, my favorite thing and least favorite thing are probably the same thing honestly!  Ya know, travelling around is great.  I’ve been to every state except Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota.  So that’s cool, even if a lot of it is just Interstate highways and rest stops.  Even then, just hanging out, making stupid jokes, and sleeping in the van almost every night was great.  I’d rather sleep in the van than at some random person’s house.  I have great memories of doing that.

The worst thing is spending that much time with people, and that much time away from home is tough.  The relationship between me, Jesse, and Graham is weird.  We’re all friends.  It’s more like brothers.  But not in that family sort of way, more in that awkward, resentful, but I still-love-you sort of way.  We’re brothers in that way.  They love me and hate me at the same time and I love them and hate them at the same time.  It’s awkward and weird, but I love them.

I want to add another thing to the ‘best’ part.  I have an associates degree from college.  But I learned more about just dealing with people, organizing things, and the world in general by touring and doing this band than I would have ever learned in college. It’s like a master’s degree in just doing shit.  I’ve been to 47 out of 50 states just from touring. You really just have to go out there and do it.  Just go for it.  And it all kind of ties back to living in the middle of nowhere and having to be DIY about things.  But after having been in that band I really realized that I can do whatever I want.  I can do anything because of that attitude I learned from touring with this band.

So now that you've gone through that feel free to head over to the Hex webstore and pick up a copy of "It's a Shame..." for only $4 this week HERE.

Or, if you're a digital-only sort of person go over to our bandcamp and score the digital version for only $3 this week.

HXR20YR RETROSPECTIVE: HXR007- THE MINOR TIMES, "Chris Chambers Never Misses" CDEP

Not long after Inkling had split up The Minor Times began.  In fact, it was pretty much immediately after Inkling broke up that the core of the band began writing in earnest and honing the songs that became the “Chris Chambers Never Misses” EP.  I was a little miffed with them for splitting up, especially since it was not that long after the Inkling record I released had come out.  I didn’t see them all for several months and we didn’t talk much.  However, they were hunkered down, writing music and working out their new vocalist, a local Lansdale guy by the name of Brendan McAndrew who been playing in a band of his own for a bit.

Once things began to come into focus I distinctly remember guitarist Chris Mascotti calling me up and stating that he wanted to come visit me up in Syracuse.  Just kind of out of the blue.  That’s kind of how it was with those guys after that.  They would just randomly say they wanted to come visit and next thing you know, they were in town.  Why anyone would want to visit my city as a tourist destination is beyond me.  But here we were.  And within a week both Chris and other guitarist Tim Leo were knocking on my door.   I hadn’t seen either of them in at least several months.  Chris looked the same but I didn’t even recognize Tim.  He had had some health issues and lost a ton of weight.  Prior to that he was a pretty big sturdy guy, but now he was someone different.  He had easily lost over 100 pounds, probably more.  It was a pretty wild transformation.

Either way, we caught up and any feelings of frustration I had about Inkling ending were quickly dissolved because these guys made the effort to come and visit, and hang out, and catch up.  We talked about what they were up to now and, indeed, they were hard at work on The Minor Times.  It was really a thing that was happening.  We kept in close contact once again after that and pretty soon they were ready to record and start playing shows under this new identity.

 The Minor Times (from left): Tim, Brendan, Justin at See Spot Gallery, Ithaca, NY

The Minor Times were heavier, weirder, more technical, and really had it together.  It seemed like everything that they weren’t quite sure of how to do in Inkling they figured out with this band.  Brendan, who had previously played in a band that took more than a handful of cues from stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate, really showed his versatile nature as a vocalist and produced one of the meanest screams possible and a confrontational stage presence that pushed the band into people’s faces.  Pretty quickly they returned to Salad Days Studios (where the Inkling EP was recorded) with Brain McTerrnan and recorded their EP and then set out to get in the van and tour.  They were finally able to make big moves as a band that saw them hit the road frequently.  This is where the real first grouping of Hex-related bands began to coalesce with The Minor Times, Ed Gein, Achilles, and Engineer all playing together and touring together on a pretty regular basis.  The Minor Times ended up moving on to doing records with Level Plane, Robotic Empire, and Prosthetic Records and doing multiple tours across the US and Europe before calling it a day.  Since that time I still try to stay in touch with the guys.  It’s also where my friendship with Tim Leo really began to take off and we became pretty tight since that time.  So much so that when I called him up to do this thing he was in the midst of having a baby and didn’t blow me off, which would have been a totally reasonable thing to do.  Instead I got a message back saying, “I had a baby, I’m at the hospital.  Can I call you back tomorrow?”  Tomorrow?  Dude just had a kid.  I can wait a few days, no big deal.  So a few days later we caught up for real and I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that my old pal Tim Leo has a kid now.  Holy crap. 

So anyway, aside from that, it’s long overdue that I finally pick his brain about that time with The Minor Times and catch up.

So basically right after Inkling split up you began working on The Minor Times, right?  How did that come together and what were things like for you during that transition time?

So the last couple Inkling songs we wrote became Minor Times songs.  Brian (Shmutz, Inkling vocalist) had written vocals to one of them and the other just sort of hung out and they were sort of the starting point for the band.  So we just turned them into Minor Times songs.

We had booked a tour of sorts, like an East Coast tour, down to Florida.  And then Brian Schmutz quit so we just went anyway as a vacation- me, Brain (Medlin, drums), Chris (Mascotti, guitar), and Justin (LaBarge, bass).  We all just went to Florida for a week because we had all taken vacation time from our jobs, since we were planning on touring.  When we got back we started writing songs.  It was a little slow going at first.  I’m sure you remember we were going to get Raver Bob to sing for the band.  He was planning on coming down here.  We sent him a bunch of demos-

Wait, what?  I do not recall this.

-Real deal.  Raver Bob (Bob Swift, Syracuse guy who later ended up being the singer for the Seattle band The Helm, who released records through Hex Records- ed.).

We would just talk on the phone for hours about ideas for the band.  But logistics kind of played out, and then Brendan came into the picture.  Brendan had just played in some local punk bands around here in Lansdale.  One was called Unsuspecting Public.  He came to our practice and at first we didn’t really take it seriously.  But he was so serious about it. It was just this side of Brendan that we had never seen.  He had written all these words to go with certain parts.  So he really impressed us with his preparation.  I think after that Justin was the only one not sold on him because I think he preferred the idea of Bob.  Plus, Brendan was very young at the time, so maybe that was part of it.

I thought Brendan fell in with the band because he was already a local guy and you all knew him.

It was a total surprise.  A total surprise.  He had the one punk band, and then he did another band called Fairmount with Mark Price (visual artist and frequent collaborator with The Minor Times), which was way more mellow, kind of Weezer or Hum sort of music.  We didn’t expect anything like that from him.  He came to practice and flipped out in our tiny little practice space.  And before he was doing lights for us Mark (Price) came in and did this sort of harsh noise stuff for the first few songs we wrote and it sounded really cool at first, but it was pretty limited.  He had only, like, five or six sounds he could make so it stopped making sense.  But at first it was really cool.  So at that point we were like, ‘well, we should probably entertain Brendan as our singer because the noise stuff isn’t really panning out.’

Early ad for the EP that appeared in several zines around the time

Did you have some of that material already set, or a plan in place, once The Minor Times began because you moved really quick on it.

A little bit.  I think that everyone was a little nervous because we weren’t sure if it was something that you would want to get behind.  Do you remember when Chris and I came up and we stayed at your place, like shortly after Inkling broke up and Minor Times wasn’t exactly a thing yet?

Oh yeah, I remember.  I remember you looked so different and I didn’t even recognize you.

That’s another thing about being in that band.  It sort of follows me around.  Any time that anything that I thought about for so long disintegrates I kind of just go nuts for awhile.  When Inkling broke up I lost 160 pounds in four months.  When The Minor Times broke up I got divorced for the first time.  When Ladder Devils and Legendary Divorce all imploded and I dragged myself into oblivion and got divorced again.

Maybe you should stop doing bands! (laughs)

Right! (laughs)  But yeah, we came up to see you and we were a little tentative about bringing it up that we had a new band.  But you were just like, ‘fuck yeah, let’s do it!’  That was the first stepping stone, to see if you wanted to do the record.  So next was recording and the recording process for that EP was a fucking nightmare.

                         Skeletal Tim, not doing so hot here

Why did you decide to return to Salad Days to record “Chris Chambers”?

We really liked being in a studio where there was an engineer that you didn’t have to direct in any way.  I thought Brian McTerrnan (Salad Days engineer) was awesome.  He’s just steeped in the same type of music we liked, he’s just like 10 years older so he had more experience.  We didn’t have to explain to him what we wanted to sound like, he would tell us- ‘this will sound cool. Or this will sound cool’.  It was great recording with him, he was funny as fuck.  When we went to record “Chris Chambers” with him his studio had moved to Maryland so it was all new.  But I was really, really sick when we went to record.  I was super sick.  It was freezing cold.  I remember trying to play guitar and I just couldn’t.  I could barely do it man.  I just wrapped myself in this electric blanket because I weighed like 98 pounds, and trying to play the electric guitar.  And McTerrnan was finally like, ‘I don’t need you to die in my house.’  I tracked as much as I could and then Eric (Haag, former Inkling bassist) came down and got me before they even started tracking vocals.  I just went back to Philadelphia.  I was out of it for about three days.  It was brutal.  But then things started to get better.

Once that record came out we really wanted to tour and started doing weekends and stuff.  Breather Resist took us out for about a week and a half.  We went out as far as Louisville and then stayed at the Patterson compound (Ryan and Evan Patterson’s house) for about three days and played a bit more around there.  That was the first time we went out with a band that was like-minded people.  Same with the Ed Gein dudes.  We liked just finding other weird people and playing weird shows.  And it didn’t matter how many people were at the show, we were just happy to be around good-spirited people that we toured with.  After that we did tours with All Else Failed.  We toured with that band Dead To Fall.  All Else Failed was fun, but Dead To Fall just didn’t feel like the crowd we wanted to play to.  They were a cool band to hang out with, just their audience was not our audience, ya know?

Plus, at the time, none of us really drank and neither did the Ed Gein guys.  Most of the Engineer guys didn’t either.  So we would tour with them and we were all just weirdos.  It was just hanging out with friends.

What was the idea of calling the EP “Chris Chambers Never Misses”?

We threw a bunch of titles around but we settled on that.  It’s from that movie “Stand By Me” and it’s that idea of the camaraderie, all the kids in that movie have their jokes with one another, and when River Phoenix is saying that line about having a dream where he’s falling and the other person doesn’t drop him…  I don’t know, it’s just a melodramatic thing about how the whole world was just us.  It’s literally how we spent our entire early 20’s- we just practiced all the time, and if we weren’t practicing then we were just writing songs.  My first bachelor party was literally all of us in our practice space just jamming the night before I got married the first time.

There was a weird European pressing that happened with the EP where it became a split with another European band called Llynch on a 12”.  How did that come about?

That might have been Medlin.  He tended to handle most of the correspondence that came in for the band because he’s such a friendly dude.  And that Llynch band hit up Medlin saying they had just recorded this record, and had a label, and do you want to hear it?  So they sent us some songs and we thought it was cool so they asked if we wanted to split a record.  So, sure, let’s do it.  I remember, too, they had really specific art direction for that record.  They didn’t want photographs.  They wanted video stills instead.  So we all went to my old apartment and took video in my hallway of us just standing around, it was really awkward.  I still never met those guys, but I know one of them is in that band Heads.

The LP version of the EP, released as a split in Europe with Llynch

It seems like Minor Times were really set on hitting the road even more and you all didn’t waste much time in doing that.  How did you manage to get over the issue of not having as many contacts or resources which held Inkling back from touring more to going full-on with Minor Times?

I think it might have been you.  I think it was the Hex stuff that did it.  When you think about it the first tour we did with Minor Times was with Ed Gein.  The first real exposure we had that mattered to anyone later was at Hellfest.  And then we went out with Breather Resist and we had gotten tight with Evan (from Breather Resist) through The National Acrobat, which he was in, and you put out their record too.  I don’t think they would have heard of us if it weren’t for another thing that had come out on your label.  That’s the way I always saw it anyway. 

I was thinking about why we played more shows in Syracuse than we did in Philadelphia, like 10:1.  I think that has a lot to do with it.  We played shows in Philly, some great ones.  But we were always just the local band.  When we would come to Syracuse we were the traveling band and we had you there to tell us other bands to check out.  That’s why Ed Gein gave a shit about us, ya know?  And in Philly, even to this day, it’s a very clique-y place.  I remember going to eat with some people one night after work back when I worked at Relapse and there was a kid who joined us wearing a Minor Times shirt.  And the whole time I felt so awkward that finally at the end of it I just said, ‘hey man, I like your shirt, I played in that band.’  And he just said, ‘oh, I never listened to the band, I just like the t-shirt.’  It was super weird.  If that makes sense to you- you’ve been in bands- it’s weird to just be ‘the local band’ unless you got some crazy gimmick.  But when you go somewhere else people appreciate it more.  We definitely had local people who came out and would see us, and hung out with us, but we were never going to be another Ink and Dagger, or some other well-loved Philly band.  All Else Failed, for most of their existence, were kind of like that- just the local band no one cared about where the singers would just bludgeon themselves and they played this super chaotic music.  No one cared until they played one of their 20 farewell shows, like ‘where were all these people before?’  But ultimately, having the Syracuse thing where we got to meet other bands that were like us was a good thing.  It got us started on some good tours.

Not long after the EP came out your brother Matt came in on bass.  Had he been in other bands before this, or was it all new to him?

Matt played guitar in high schools bands.  Then he moved to California and became an engineer and started playing with these guys who were in a band called God Lives Underwater.  He came back to Philly for my wedding and he ended up just staying.  Justin ended up quitting and sort of getting kicked out.  Everyone was just fighting all the time.  So we were trying out bass players at the time and Matt just said, ‘I’m not going back to California, I’ll stick around.’  So it just worked out, it made sense. 

                                         Bassist Matt Leo

You all started touring with a lot of gear including TVs and Brendan had his little sampler station thing. I imagine that got to be a real pain in the ass getting everything set up.

Yeah.  But Brendan was really good at it.  When Mark Price would tour with us he and Brendan worked out this system where all the extra stuff just fit in these two tupperware containers.  They also had this light system set up that involved a switch that you would use for like Christmas lights and the whole thing would fit into a suitcase. It was pretty cool.  We would end up often playing these tiny little places and figured as long as the power was there we were good.  But we would blow the power in a lot of places we played.  It was one thing to have these 150 watt amps, but when you put those lights on there and now it’s 1000 watts, you just blow the power.  We blew the power catastrophically in Kansas City one time.  It was this really big venue and into the first song the entire place just went completely dark.  That was the down side, but the rest wasn’t too bad.

Chris left the band after touring on your first full length “Making Enemies”.  What led him to leave?

Well, basically his parents gave him a hard enough time about focusing on school that he left to complete school.  It was a tough decision, but an obvious one.

Why did The Minor Times end up splitting up?

So Chris left, and then we got Lou from Fight Amp for a short amount of time, and then he quit.  So I was the only guitarist for a while.  And I remember we played this show in Philly with Trap Them down in a basement and the promoter was like, ‘did you bring a PA? I was expecting you guys to bring a PA.’  And it was a real deal basement, like a six-foot ceiling, I had to duck to be down there.  So we drove back to Lansdale, got the PA, and then drove back into Philly for the show, and I think we parked in this tiny alley.  Brendan was drinking and I think he was just tired of it.  We had a show a couple days later with Doomriders and he was like, ‘that’s going to be my last show, I’m tired of it.’  I remember him trying to get out of that alley and just banging into everything, it was crazy.

                          Healthy Tim (on left)!

Was it just burn out?

Yeah.  We had just done the “Summer Of Wolves” record and we decided that at that point it was either go on tour forever or just quit.  I was working for Relapse Records at the time and for the first time in a long time I was just like, ‘let’s do it, let’s just be gone for months on end’ and everyone else was like, ‘yeah, either get to it or don’t.’  And Brendan was like, ‘Nope, I’m tired of playing shows, I can’t do it.’  And that was it.  We played maybe a few more shows we were required to play and that was it.

What was your favorite part of being in Minor Times?  What was your least favorite thing?

There were times where writing songs together were the best times and there times where that just totally fucking sucked too.  I remember we got towards the end of writing that “Summer Of Wolves” record and everyone was just so mad.  There was just a lot to be mad about.  The beginning of the writing process would be so fun and the end was just not fun.  What was fun became not fun.  When the Minor Times started we just thought it was all going to be so fun.  We were going to do all this stuff we didn’t do in Inkling.  And we did.  We would play these amazing shows too.  We toured with Engineer and played in New Orleans with Thou and there were like six people there.  We played with Anodyne and Majority Rule in a basement in Philly and like two people came.  That basement show with Trap Them we played, I think one person paid.  After years of doing that we got tired because we would throw everything we had into it and the fun of it became tedious.

 The Minor Times playing one of their early shows in Rochester, NY

Whew, that was a long one!  Well, now you get to the bit where, this week, you can grab the "Chris Chambers" CDEP through the Hex store for only $4!  And if you just want the digital tracks you can grab them via the bandcamp page for only $2!  Sorry, I don't have any of those Euro LP pressings to dole out.