Went to see my friend Marshall’s band last night – www.darkholler.net. The band that followed was very heavy, reminded me of one of my favorite heavy metal bands, Motorhead. We stayed for a couple songs, then headed home. I went straight for the closet and dug out the old tapes, trying to find one of my Motorhead cassettes. Couldn’t find it, but I did stumble across one of my old garage band tapes. Yes, yours truly was in a garage band!
We never established a name for our band – I was always keen on Panhead, but we never played anywhere that would necessitate a name except in garages turned into studios with egg crates on the walls or in Ash’s game room.
I think we started the band when I was around 16 or 17 years old. We practiced every Sunday. Core members were Ash Darby (drums), Tom Darby (lead geetar), Chris Whitehead (bass) and myself (rhythm geetar). There were frequent cameos by other ‘local’ musicians including Aaron Sanford, Craig Godden, Eric Arning, Stacy Holba and Derrick Zander.
Unfortunately, I have only one demo tape. Ash had the 4-track, so all of our recordings are either with him, or lost somewhere. I remember one of the first songs we recorded was a cover of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. In order to pay tribute to the gods of heavy metal, we, of course, had to play as loud as Chris’s Crate full stack would allow. Needless to say, Mr. Darby wasn’t too impressed when the sound knocked all of the pictures off of the walls in his game room (seriously!!!)
Anyway – I hooked up the old jambox to my soundcard and ripped a couple mp3s. I wrote “Weedeater” for my girlfriend-at-the-time. Her and I became a couple when she approached me at our senior Homecoming dance. She was into smoking pot and the like. I wasn’t. She wanted out of that lifestyle. To make a long story short, I found out later that she had snuck off a couple times to smoke pot with some of her old friends. I was pissed and wrote the song. It doesn’t have any lyrics – I kind of like to think of it as “instrumental anger”.
The other song, I don’t think it ever had a name. Chris and I just made it up and recorded it one Sunday night after the rest of the band members went home. We performed this song at the Austin County Fair in 1994 and won 3rd prize… don’t ask me why!
Gutz and Bonz was the name of one of the songs.
the old days of jammin I still remember, Ferrell is right you guys had a bunch of tunes ,guts and bones was one of them.