Entry date: 11-9-2023 – The Father Figures part 6 – Letters to My Friends

Dear Friends,

When we last left the story of the band, it was around 2011. Our first CD, Lesson Number One, came out that year and people seemed to be really excited about the band. I was certainly excited about it and what we were doing. We were already well on our way through our second batch of songs during that year and there was a lot of confidence building among us.

When you are learning how to play with other people, it is so important to figure out how to say, “I’m not really digging that riff” without saying “I don’t want to play that riff.” We were all developing a really good way to do just that. One of the things we decided to do was always give a riff a chance, or in most cases, many chances.

We would do our due diligence before giving up on things and that worked really well for us over the years. There were a number of riffs that didn’t make the cut, but what we found was that when we kept noodling around with something that we weren’t quite sure about, we often found a way to make it work. Sometimes it morphed into something completely different, too, which was almost better.

As I mentioned previously, in those first few years, we started to finish each other’s riffs a lot. I don’t think there were too many in the fifty plus songs we made together that stayed almost exactly the same from beginning to end.

We plowed through the songs for All About Everything pretty fast. We recorded it in 2012 and we had a big release party at Crescent Ballroom in January of 2013., which was a considerable step up from doing our first at Rips. No offense to Rips, we really loved playing there, but playing at the Crescent was a whole different ball game.

I’m trying to remember some of the shows we played back in 2012. I’m going to have to do some research here. I know that Smoke Bombs and Vellum played with us that night at Crescent. We had also played at Crescent in December of 2012 with X.

This was a pretty great night. Not only was X amazing as usual, but we brought the goods, too. I was standing on the side of the stage watching X when they finished up and as they were getting ready to do their encore, John Doe spotted me and told me how great he thought we were. I was floored and, truly, I still am. He’s one of the good ones, for sure, and he took a moment in the heat of their own thing to say how much he liked us. Thank you, John, wherever you are.

Prior to that, we opened for PIL at the Marquee in late October. What an amazing couple of months, right? PIL was a bucket lister for me, and I think for Bobby and Michael, too. I was so mortified at the idea of bumping into John Lydon who has been an inspiration and idol of mine since the early 80s. I didn’t get a chance to meet him, but Bobby had a fun interaction with him.

Right before we went on, Bobby had to pee and someone told him there was a bathroom in one of the dressing rooms, so Bobby went in and did his thing. It was John’s dressing room and when Bobby got done, he said, “Ruuuuuude.” It may have been before he peed, I can’t remember, but he came back, shared the quick story and we roared through our set.

Apparently, Bobby looked over during our set and John was watching us alongside Lu Edmonds who watched most of our set. Lu played with the Damned, too, so I was super stoked to look over and see him enjoying us. If I would have looked over and seen Johnny Rotten, I would have probably died right there.

Funny thing, a few weeks later played a show at the Time Out Lounge and I got into a little brouhaha with a local guy who liked to shoot his mouth off. I made a public comment that I probably shouldn’t have about how the Time Out Lounge chose to pay bands, but it ended up with us getting into a weird internet fight.

During the exchange, this dude told me that people were hating us during the PIL show and for a minute, I bought into it, but I’ve had too many people tell me we were great at that show over the years. Venomous Pinks also played that night, and they were great, too.

Those were a really fun couple of years, for sure, when it comes to the band.

See you tomorrow.

Three dudes and Exene. She was very nice to us, too. In fact, all the X peeps were great to us the two times we played with them and every other time we saw them afterwards.