Polar Shift, Tyler and Eric of @gymclassheroesmetal band will be playing our first show at The Note in West Chester, PA September 15th tell your friends and come out and support, I never thought time would allow for us to do this but it’s definetly happening, possibility of a NY and NJ show as well get stoked and check out the teaser below.
Here’s a little taste of the Polar Shift record, love to hear what you guys think, for fans of Black Sabbath, Queens Of The Stone Age etc. We will be playing shows hopefully in late August if me and Eric are off tour with GCH, enjoy and let me know what you think.
Well fuck….hello again tumblr it has been quite a while, I thought I was done posting here but I suppose I feel the need again, the 100 or so charachters that twitter leaves me to express whats going on in my life are rarely enough, and if I were to “tweet” all this I would start getting into bizarre John Maher territory (dude is obsessed with the tweets)anyhow…Things have been pretty cool, I started a new side project band with a couple of dudes you might know:
Eric Roberts of Gym Class heroes
Steve Curtis formerly of The Color Fred/Ley Royal Scam
Mike Cummings of Backwoods Payback
Our new project is called Polar Shift and it will be available to everyone very soon, it is a monster of a record that we are all very proud of recorded in my apartment, it is uncompromising mountain metal full of sweet ass riffs and burly beard sounding vocals.
In other news i’m finding lately that life is very uncertain, things aren’t always what they seem and people aren’t always what you think they are and it is bothering the shit out of me, I feel as though i’m living in constant fear of a number of different things and i’m fucking sick of it. I’m sick of feeling 100% unrelatable to people outside of my touring brethern. The only person in life you can count on is yourself and I really do plan to take that and run with it, I realize this all sounds like some cliche bullshit but right now it rings more truthfully than it ever has, i’m sick of being afraid to speak up, I have made inconvenience a neccessity in my life for far to long and hopefully I can pull my shit together and get life in order. I will now stop with the self pity and get on with the living but I think i’m going to be a frequent blogger again, just typing these little bits has made me feel a bit better about everything. so keep on following and thanks for your support.
This is a pop song my friend Tom Martin wrote and I produced, and by produced I mean played all the instruments and sang….we are hoping to sell it so some young lady pop sensation for bazillions but who knows….if for nothing more than its really funny hearing me try to sing a sexy pop number written fah a gurl!! enjoy its called “Touch It” or at least I think thats what its called Tom never gave me an official title.
In life we generally try to make decisions and do things that we think are right….in some cases they end up being wrong. It is a late night at home 4:27am to be exact. I’m lying in my bed reflecting on my involvement/career in music from the very beggining all the way from the The Blue Flames (my band in the 5th grade) up to my current residency in GCH. I love music more than anything in the entire world, in almost every other aspect of life i’am a complete and utter fuck up, I figured I might as well run through a brief history of my musical career on here mostly for my own enjoyment but also for anyone who might be interested in where exactly I came from and possibly for the enjoyment of people who were a part of the PA music scene in the late 90’s up until now.
I got really into playing music in the 5th grade, I was super into guitar and it was the first time in my life that I was really discovering bands and music on my own, I liked your standard stuff like Green Day, Metallica, NIN and White Zombie but at the same time I got into some of the more out there stuff especially for a fifth grader, stuff like The Pixies, L7, Fugazi and Mudhoney it was a weird time, I formed a friendship with a kid who ended up living only about 15 minutes walking distance from my house named John Walton, John was the first person I ever played music with I believe our first incarnation was me playing a bass through a gorilla practice amp and him banging on a snare drum with a mini cymbal attached, however eventually for whatever reason our parents believed in us and I got my self a hot pink ibanez RG with a floyd rose and a sweet mullet while john aquired an old blue sparkle ludwig kit and sported a crazy curly fro of long hair and soon we were learning bad various covers of green day songs, I remember really wanting to learn how to play cult of personality but just not being good enough to pull it off, eventually we found a bass player in the form of a crazy little bastard named Eric Klatzbaugh, he was fortunate enough during our tenure to aquire a sparkle read BC rich warlock bass with the gold hardware which at this point in time was the holy grail of guitars as far as we were concerned, we only ever played one show and it was at our elementary school D.A.R.E culmination we wrote our own lyrics to the Green Day classic “When I Come Around” about being drug free….over the next 2 years or so I played with John and different bassists and other guitar players in several different not real bands,
in the 5th grade we were also all friends with a dude named Nate Mcafee who at the time didn’t really play anything. By the time I got to middle school Nate, after a stint playing the drums decided that he would play bass and his older brother Bill would play guitar, John had formed a new band called The Hessian Crew so we kinda went our seperate ways musically at that point, we got a drummer named Ken and our evil black metal band Ravenstorm was born, yes somewhere there are pictures of me in full eye make up and leather pants and spikey bracelets.
Ravenstorm were short lived we made two cassette tape releases (yes these were somehow still viable at this point) and after a good amount of fucking around and not doing much of anything (i’m trying to recall if we ever really played any shows) we disbanded and I formed an awful mess of a band called White Rhino with my friend Jason who lived on my street and a couple of dudes he knew, our music was bad punk fused wiith bad metal and slap bass parts ughhhh. For whatever reason though, people liked us we played a bunch of shows with John’s band The Hessian Crew, there was always an unspoken rivalry between us and our respective bands that lasted for quite a few years, we played huge shows and even won our high school talent show, not much of an effort you might think but I remember that was one of the only times in high school where for like a week nobody gave me shit about being the way I was, all the Jock assholes minds were blown because all the cheerleaders wanted to hang out with us and they just wanted to be like us, but that wore off soon enough, I look back on that fondly as the only time in school I ever got any respect for being a musician. White Rhino was plagued with issues from the very beggining, lots of ego’s, lack of direction and I got tired of it, I had been talking with Nate about starting something up again and it seemed like a great idea, White Rhino had a keyboardist named Adam who was still learning but was a great guy to be around and I was super into snagging him up and collaborating with Nate and Ken on a new band, we were all really into extreme prog metal stuff at the time so we formed a band called Monarch.
This was the first awesome band any of us had ever had, we could shred and we knew it and at times we were almost dicks about it, we didn’t play a lot of shows but when we did the kids playing Blink covers got their faces riped off by epic metal riffs shredding solos and time signature changes it was pretty glorious, we stayed together for a while but we were all getting older and our drummer was getting ready to go off to college (I feel like there are some years I missed but its hard to say). After this band I kinda bummed around for a long time, I had a short lived acoustic thing going on and was always trying to get something together but it was harder now that I was out of school, people had jobs and bills to pay. Through working with my friend Myke at his studio I found my way into a band called The Red Tops, these were older guys playing hardcore like stuff in the early vein (Minor Threat, Bad Brains). This was the band that really introduced me to playing out we started playing bars as well as firehall shows and we even got to do a few small tours I remember being terrified driving a van with the trailer attached through a snowstorm into Cleveland, Oh the bands so called home away from home. We made an awesome record called Left For Dead and put it out on Universal Warning records and played an ass ton of shows all over the place. Eventually I grew somewhat bored of playing hardcore and wanted to do something a little more focused, or more so something that had the chance of going somewhere other than the bar or the basement, I got to know the legendary Tom Martin of West Chester, He had been in many various bands over the years and posessed the keen ability to write super sugary catchy pop tunes with a punk rock sensibility, he was also the soundman at my favorite watering hole and I believe sometimes according to legend would request to be paid in chicken fingers, he was/is also totally insane and brilliant.
Tom was working with this chick Teeter on this poppy project called Ley Royal Scam so he wanted to put together a live band for studio work and doing shows/showcases and things like that. I left The Redtops for good and joined Tom’s band. Almost immediately response for the band was off the charts, one of our first shows ever was playing to about 2000 kids with Taking Back Sunday and Circa Survive (think it was also their first show) at West Chester University. It was a disaster, this was the beggining of the ultimate power struggle for band domination between Teeter and Tom, Teeter housed about a bottle of captain morgan before we played and the entire time Tom is just yelling at her onstage and at one point kicks a drink out of her hand, people booed us and the show was rather unsuccessful but I had a good time, this was the first time we ever had a legit dressing room with drinks and PB&J and other stuff we were stoked either way. The hype behind the band was building rapidly despite our inability to hold it together in any sort of live situation we played a CMJ showcase and other various such things, around this point I really began to hate Tom who was running the band like some kind of musical hitler charachter so I sided with Teeter and eventually after several great shows a few record offers and endless amounts of help and support from famous friends in the business and others the whole thing fell through by the time we played our last show at a CMJ showcase in NYC we all basically hated each other and were sick of it. Over the next couple years Tom and I worked together on and off we’ve always had a very hot and cold kind of working relationship but i’ve gotten a little older and Tom has cooled out a little bit so i’m happy to say we are now friends and working together again when we can, hopefully this time it will stick because fighting with that dude is exhausting.
After this I decided to return to working on my solo shit, around this time I split up with my girlfriend of about 4 years and started writing really bad contrived dashboard confessional type bullshit for a solo record I was making with my buddy Arik, we got halfway through the record and I decided I couldn’t do it and bailed on it all together, I didn’t have the balls to make a solo record yet. for a while I just drank and bummed around and was kinda miserable, I was delivering car parts making $200 a week and trying to pay rent, car insurance, gas and still be able to drink and have some fun, it was fucking hard and for a short time when I was drinking pretty heavy I was going to mcdonalds or chic fil a and paying in quarters…(note: i’m not looking for any sympathy or trying to seem cool i’m just saying I was poor and as hard as it was at times looking back I was having a lot of fun and was too stupid to realize it at the time.) eventually Arik played me some demos of a songwriter he’d worked with a few months back named Chris Aspite, I heard the stuff and fell in love with it it was the rawness of Iggy and the Stooges mixed with the bleakness of Joy Division, it was really angry young man music but with a sort of poetic beauty to it. I met up with Chris at a bar in West Chester to discuss the prospect of turning his thing into a band and eventually we got it going and people were really into it, it was very different Chris was an incredible vocalist and the band was really good, Chris had grown up in West Chester with Bam Margera so it wasn’t long before Bam got involved and tryed to help us out much against the wishes of Chris, we eventually ended up practicing in Bam’s garage and it was super nice, we played a bunch of huge huge shows with CKY and started to attract a bit of attention, Chris is a stand up guy but after a while things got difficult and we were kinda hanging on by a thread. a few days after things started falling apart I was at work delivering some mufflers to black forest auto when I got a call on my cell phone, it was a woman named Bonnie saying that she worked with a band called Gym Class Heroes and they were looking for a keyboardist she had been a friend of Teeters and had heard about me through her, I told her i was interested, I flew up to Geneva to rehearse with the dudes and a day later I quit Chris’s band (we were called Venemous btw) and we flew to the UK for a couple of shows, I got the worst food poisoning of my entire life and was sick for days but I powered through and it paid off. That pretty much brings us up to today.
The music business is crazy, and music has taken me to tons of places and put me in many varying degrees of situations, people ask me for advice sometimes wanting to know how they can get their foot in the door and I haven’t the faintest what to tell them, as cliche as it sounds I knew the right people and was in the right place at the right time and I work my ass off to make sure I can be the best at what I do.
it is 5:52am and I should probably go to sleep if thats even possible, thanks for reading.
this is a new demo I did, its my first time writing at the piano in quite I while….i’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy
Hey there, dirty dogs! Did I miss the song? Sing it again, rookie biotch!!
This summer is going to fucking kill! Its gonna be nice to be off and BBQ and drink beers and play loud guitars i’m hoping at some point in life that this is all I will have to do to survive….but seeing as all my money is converted into guitars/pedals/amps thats probably a long ways off, goddamn i’m stoked to go home! be on the look out for some solo showsMay 9th Amp Show (its in NJ but its gonna be to awesome to miss)
June 3rd Isis, Pelican, Tombs (Sludge and riffz and riffz and riffz)
June 15th BIRTHDAY BASH EXTRAVAGANZA! (Still working out the details)
Saturday May 16th Growing/Thrones (so stoked for this missed their philly joint a while back but hopefully i’ll get to make this one….were doing a show at the store that night but I don’t know whats going on with that at the moment)
Guitar Show July 12th and 13th: The trick to this one is to go and enjoy without blwoing my life savings, I did well last year but thats only because I bought a martin the day before.
May 9th amp show
June 3rd Isis, Pelican, Tombs
June 15th BIRTHDAY BASH EXTRAVAGANZA!
Saturday May 16th Growing/Thrones
Guitar Show July 12th and 13th
one of my new pedal designs, lots of people are gonna want this one.
