Greetings and such

Since all the cool kids have one of these blogs, and since I've thrived off them for new music and obscure info coming up on 5 years now, I figured I'd start one and give back a little myself.

I guess to start I'll delve into a little about me and, in my next post, my current band, Treason...


I got into music in earnest about November 1995. Before that my musical leanings pretty much consisted of the endless amounts of tapes my mom had in her car (mostly Queen...if you don't like Freddy Mercury you might as well just never come back to this page), whatever interesting quirky things my brother was into (Dire Straits, the Dead, Les Miserables soundtrack, etc), a year or two of obsessively listening to 92Q circa 5th grade to be "hip" (imagine if my mom knew I was 10 years old listening to Salt And Pepa asking about "that thang" and how "it hang" *facepalm*), and the shockingly limited playlist of WQSR (or maybe it seemed so as I listened to it 24/7 for a lot of that time and know a ridiculous list of oldies like the back of my hand).
Sometime around early 1995 my dedication in life was WWF wrestling, and always preferred it to WCW, even during the dark years when they creamed WWF in quality. Anyway, Pamela Anderson was Shawn Michaels' escort to Wrestlemania, and she had just gotten married to this rocker dude, Tommy Lee of Motley Crue. For months I told myself I'd check them out, and only finally got around to buying Decade Of Decadence at Walmart when I had saved some allowance money. I was HOOKED. I proceeded to buy or get gifted every shred of Motley Crue recordings I could find over the next year, including the self titled album with John Corabi which is paaaaainfully underrated. With all of that I dove straight into listening to WHFS and 98Rock religiously until I had amassed more music and nerd trivia within the next year than I can reasonably explain.

I got into punk and hardcore through any number of routes. I found out about Sex Pistols from Motley Crue covering them. In 8th grade, NOFX was huge in my school for some reason, and I picked them up around there. I had more or less known who the Misfits were since I was 3 and saw their shirt as a prize for that Ocean City boardwalk game where you shoot the water into the clown's mouth (funny story....I HATED them when I first heard them and only came to my senses after grabbing up the Earth AD cassette). I snapped up Punk O Rama 3 the day it hit stores and heard Agnostic Front for the first time (albeit in tame "Gotta Go" form). From there I found out about local bands like Issue Of Ignorance and Subsist, but never really got around to actually seeing most of them because I was still a timid middle schooler. Fast forward to about February 1999, and through meeting up with John Glassman at the WHFC college station to do a report about radio for a class, I met up with the nu metal band Margret Heater, who got me and my dad to come see them the next month with a band called Apathy opening for them. Apathy absolutely 100% blew my 15 year old face off. Hyperfast drumming, maniacal screaming, absurd breakdowns, I didn't even see it coming as at the time I thought punk didn't get any heavier or more intense than Straight Faced and the maybe one or two Poison Idea songs I had heard at the time. Fast forward again 11 years and here I am, probably working on easily a few hundred shows later, and remembering most of them detail by nerdy detail. So in conclusion, if you don't like me and wonder why the hell I come to shows and irritate you, blame Apathy. That's all there is to it.