video sound/mix band crowd

Starts off with a sound-check of Action, and I can remember we were all a little nervous, but confident, the sound guys for the headliner were the ones whooping it up at the end of the soundcheck, they liked us.

This was our first gig in quite a while and the first one we ever video taped. We'd been working on Bad Crazy for nearly 2 years and had only played one date in all that time, so I think I, at least, was a little tight, it sure doesn't sound like I'm having fun in my between song patter, at least until Murder (which we play 100mph, like most of the songs in the set). This song was a staple of the gigs of that time, I don't remember why we dropped it, although Cry Havoc and Carnivore sure fit together nicely for our later, standard gig. Murder got pushed down the set and finally retired from the show. It's fast, has 3 part vocals and a nice double lead guitar part, seems like it would be a good fit, no idea why it got lost. Black Ace would also be replaced by Tiger Shark as our standard opener and Killing Frost rarely played after Bad Crazy came out.

Mike is playing my B.C. Rich Warlock for this show, it was before he got his Explorers. I had ordered that guitar while I was still playing guitar in the band, but it came after I had switched to bass and I never got to play out live with it. I'm glad Mike got some use out of it. He also used an Ironbird I got later in a trade.

On the last verse of Carnivore I get crazy and sing Mike's high part. The intro to Predator "This is a tune we've done every night of the tour, we enjoy doing it, we'd like to do it for you now," was something we'd heard Dio say at a recent concert and it was something of a goofy catchphrase that week, which is why Todd laughs.

This started my Bad Crazy break tradition of running around the crowd like a maniac with my wireless. I moved it to the Highway Star solo when we started doing covers. It may have annoyed some of the guys, either song, but it was fun and freaked people out who hadn't seen it before. "What the fuck is this guy doing?"

I totally blow the words on Damned and screw up a few lines on Bad Crazy as well, something I would never do later on, I was so used ot playing and singing them I didn't even have to think about it. Here I'm still thinking.

All through Action, up in front of the stage going nuts, you can see the former singer for Universe, Todd Plant, Todd Grubb's band at the time, in which I also played bass because Vengeance wasn't all that busy (the drummer was also named Todd, so we considered naming it "3 Todds and a Guy" but then we didn't). Todd had fired him a few months previous, but we were all still buds. He was totally blown away by the band and spent the rest of the night trying to convince me to let him join as lead singer and I could just play bass and sing backups. I declined, obviously.

Very good crowd, when you don't play for a long time it's easy to get people to come and see you because they haven't come out in so long, they aren't burnt out on you. We got this gig because we were doing our video for Beijing up the street and someone from the club stuck their head in to see what was going on, thought we were somebody important, and booked us for the night with Slaughter, who was a national act on a major label. However, at minimum half the crowd was there to see us and took off after our set.

I included some after the show tomfoolery, the crowd was nuts for us to play an encore, but Action was our encore, plus the headliner wanted us off stage, pronto. They were one of those bands who did not like the opener to do too well.

I hung out a song or 2 and the band was a little salty that our crowd had not hung around, but on the other hand, they were playing rockstar and took over an hour to get on stage. They had the only dressing room, we were in a stairway and we never saw them or talked to them, they didn't come out to watch any of our set. They were too cool.

video sound/mix band crowd

The Volley Club, a popular spot for musicians and unique in that it catered to hard rock and metal and girls actually came in, as opposed to later clubs like Ruby's and the Sunset Grill, which were pickle parties on most nights.

I seem a little terse at the onset, not having fun as I usually did, but it was one of our early gigs with this line-up, we hadn't played much in the 2 years we'd spent writing, rehearsing and recording Bad Crazy and I consider this gig our coming out, more than the Masquerade gig because this was in front of our peers. There was a lot of buzz about the band because all of us were known locally as pretty damn good musicians. I played in several high-profile projects outside of Vengeance. Curt was known as one of the area's best guitarists, in a tri-city area that was brimming with talent that's saying something, and Mike and Chuck were very respected players themselves. We'd also done interviews and gotten a lot of world-wide press and airplay for the Bad Crazy album, it was selling well locally and had gotten great reviews in the area music mags.

So now it was time to put up or shut up and prove we pull off the complex arrangements and harmonies live. The music was pretty damn progressive for metal at the time, with weird tempo and time signature changes, complicated structures and some fairly unique compositional techniques.

We were supremely confident: we'd knocked these together writing and rehearsing them for 2 years, doing 2 major studio projects recording these songs so we knew them inside out.

This gig is cool because it has the song Alone from Malicious Intent (sans the acoustic opening part) with a really intricate double lead part. That was another strength of the band, our co-lead guitar attack trading off solos and playing really tough double leads. What was so cool about the double leads Curt composed was they were effortlessly stunning technique-wise, but without relying on the tropes and tricks of the glam and poser metal bands of the time. Also, they were very melodic and respected the underlying chords. He didn't just noodle over the changes and play scales and random licks from out of his bag of tricks.

Mike deserves a lot of credit for learning and mastering Curt's compositions. Some of them, like Murder In Your Eyes were blazingly fast and he pulled them off flawlessly 99% of the time. What is amazing to me listening to these vids after all these years is the lack of "clams", or bad notes or chords. I've listened to them pretty closely multiple times while converting them and I haven't heard a single one, which is pretty amazing, with the exception of a few notes on lead solos. We virtually never had a "train wreck" where everyone was lost, even at the Savatage gig where they turned our monitors off and we couldn't hear the drums very well, although we did get out of synch a few times we never lost it.

Back to the video, I kept going back and messing with the smoke machine, which had a propensity to throw all or nothing. We'd rented it so I wanted to get our money's worth and have plenty of smoke, but it would go out of control and drive people from the club sometimes.The smoke does give a nice overall look to the video and makes the light beams look pretty cool. It's annoying the date is watermarked on the damn video though.

A mosh pit gets going on the intro to Cry Havoc, which is pretty hilarious. I'm in pretty good voice this night, although I lapse out on a few parts of Alone for some reason. I'm impressed with myself (damn I'm good!) at how I'm able to sing and play some fairly contrapuntal bass parts at the same time, but as I say we'd worked these songs endlessly.

We also stick in Black Ace in a weird spot, apparently it was combined with Cry Havoc instead of Carnivore at this point, a weird match. The set was still getting it's legs and is not as contained or well-paced as it would be. Both these songs would be dropped from subsequent gigs. Black Ace is a very driving and effective song but it's kind of a scattered arrangement and hard to pull off live.

The smoke machine really goes nuts during Reign of Terror and I can't quit playing to go back and turn it off so the place was just filled with smoke. That stuff burns your throat and eyes and is just miserable for a singer. I think we left it off for the rest of the night after that. At the beginning of the song my brother Mitch brought fired off some CO2 fire extinguishers for a one-time per gig effect. Right after that the smoke machine goes bonkers.

This is the first time we played Goodbye '89 live and it's not very great or tight, the intro is really weak. The whole thing just doesn't flow as well as it would later. The vocals, other lead and backing, aren't particularly stellar either. It sounds like the soundman really backed my vocals off on this song for some reason. I sing the old lyrics of "recalling all the years gone by" instead of days, so this is before we recorded the final version.

Damned If You Do is impossibly fast, I don't know how we kept it together. It has like 12 very different sections and we manage to hit all the major changes somehow. Very hard to sing all those words that quickly.

video sound/mix band crowd

This is a goofy ass gig along the lines of Spinal Tap at the Air Force Base in that the people just walking up didn't know what to make of us because they were regular, normal people and we were freaks. However, we brought a buttload of our friends so the crowd response is pretty good, plus a bunch of hard rock rednecks were there and every other band was pretty tame so they were glad to see us. We also had a captive audience of trailer park fans of a band called Entourage who were the kings of trailer park fans. I think they all lived in a trailer park, and so all the old ladies and fat redneck chicks who lived there would come out and see them. They were very hostile to us and chanted for Entourage every time there was a lull. I think we played with them at GK's as well and showed they hated us there too.

This gig is interesting in that it was the first time we'd played Goodbye '89 live and the arrangement is different than when we played it after. For one thing, I sing the intro, whereas Mike would take that over in later gigs and I would sing background harmony, he would start the song alone, which was pretty cool. Also, we have a drop-out after the first half of the last chorus, kind of like the record, then the band kicks in again. It's interesting, but I liked our later arrangement better. We also play it very fast here. The backing vocals are a mess, we don't have the vocal arrangement worked out yet, and it's weird how I drop an octave for that break at the end, it just doesn't work, I see why we dropped that.

What is weird is how close to our set-list even 2 years later this would be. I guess we got a nice flow going and just kept it.

I walk up to Curt and say something after Predator, probably dropping a song, I would guess Killing Frost, near the end of the set, someone probably signaled me to wrap it up. Then Mike walks up to see what I wanted also. That was about the fastest time we every played Predator, the time for the song itself is about 4 minutes even.

I used this band introduction thing to end our video sampler for a long time, ending right when I say "Hi, I'm Johnny G. Lyons--(laughs and catcalls) Not really!"

For those of you who are non-locals, Johnny G is a popular bar band guy whose band plays all that super old burnt out shit from yesteryear. He's famous for asking you to sit in, then disappearing so you have to stay up there. He's the epitome of "putting in the time" musicianship, and talks away about half his set, but he's very popular and works steady, so he must be doing it right.

I don't know what else to say about this other than the sound is super boomy and it was hard to hear what the hell was going on sometimes. The bass sound, at least at the beginning is fantastic though, the best I've heard on one of these vids. Lots of fret rattle, which I love.

Two other great stories: this drunk asshole came up to a group of us before the gig while we were waiting to go on and started fucking with Curt, who just stood there and didn't say much, although he was probably about to deck the guy. A very good friend of ours, who had set up the first Vengeance gig in several years a couple years before, Jim Thomas, told the guy to settle down and lay off. Jim was about 6'4" and pretty buff. The guy slurred a really smart-ass remark and made a move as if to swing. Jim hit the guy and knocked him out with one punch, then landed another while the guy was on the way to the ground. I mean, this guy dropped straight down like his bones liquified. Jim walked away and the cops were there in like 2 seconds. We all said the guy seemed really drunk and just passed out in front of us (his mouth was bleeding but the cops didn't make an issue of it). Last I saw of him the paramedics were taking him away in an ambulance.

The second story is that one band member, (not our drummer and not me, and Curt's girlfriend was there and with him the entire time so it wasn't him) met a girl who looked to be about 15 but might have been older (she had tits) and talked her into going upstairs where the dressing area (wouldn't call it a dressing room) was and knocked off a quick piece of ass. I won't say who it was to protect the guilty. We all thought it was pretty funny, she came down looking kind of dazed, I think she just wanted an autograph. She got one.

My girlfriend at the time, Mary, walks up to the stage at the end of Carnivore, a song I wrote about her.

Rocket Club 02.18.91
w/ Dokken
Video Camera: Todd Grubbs

video sound/mix band crowd

I don't remember a great deal about this gig. It was our first time playing at the Rocket Club. That was a very coveted gig at the time, they generally had top 40 bands there or very commercial hard rock bands, they didn't book many original bands and very few heavy metal acts either back then. We lucked into the gig when I heard a band was cancelling and called up offering our services cheap and got booked immediately. A lot of other bands were trying to get in there and it was quite a coup. Of course later on we played there regularly, but at the time it was a big deal for us.

Dokken was playing that night, but they weren't huge even then and there was not anything like the crowd for Savatage a year later. The date refers to the fact we were playing after midnight, it was actually a Sunday night, or very early Monday.

Once again you can see how little our setlist changed over the years. This is pretty much our standard set from mid '90 until we quit playing all originals in '94. This is the updated arrangement of Goodbye '89 with me singing the intro and but with Mike singing harmony and his solo at the end.

Once again the hated time-stamp is over the entire gig.

Some interesting background stuff at the end with the entire band and Frank, the singer for Todd's band Universe, in which I played bass, his wife Cindy, my very lovely but volatile girlfriend Mary, with the big blonde hair and leather mini-skirt and Todd Newland, Universe's drummer all hanging around and shooting the breeze after the gig.

The sound isn't bad and it's a good video picture. There was a decent crowd for Dokken. All in all a pretty fair gig.

A funny story, after the gig Don Dokken and some of his flunkies were playing pool in the back poolroom, and he had a bodyguard or someone blocking anyone else from coming in and "bothering Don". The Vengeance guys and Todd's crew and a few friends just wanted to play some pool and drink a few beers and wind down. We told the guy we didn't give a shit about Don Dokken and he heard what was going on and knew he looked like a dick, so he let us in. Some of the people did talk to him, but it was cool and everything worked out, but it was kind of funny for him to hear us bitching about how we didn't care about him being there and had no intention of "bugging him" for autographs or whatever he thought people were going to do. He seemed like an ok guy, the guys in his band were friendly and we talked about the metal scene with them a little bit.

Off-Limits 02.16.92
w/ Injustice & Roadkill
Video Camera: Todd Grubbs

video sound/mix band crowd

This video is kind of unique. First, there is a long soundcheck focusing on each band member, and 2 soundcheck songs. I remember the other bands sitting around and kind of salty at all the soundchecking we were getting, because obviously with 5 other bands they would not get the same time invested in their sound in the hustle to change over. Often mikes got misplaced or left off amps picking up ambient sounds. I told one a couple of the guys in one band that we'd been doing this for a while, and as long as you didn't have to start too early in the night, first slot was not a bad way to go. Not only did you get a really good soundcheck, all the other bands and their fans would be your audience, which would dwindle as the night went on and each band's fans left. One kid disagreed and said it was worth it to headline.

I heard him later complaining to the sound guy that we had gotten about an hour's soundcheck and wondering how long theirs would be in between bands. The soundguy said "none, I'll do it on the fly" which didn't go down well, but we thought it was kind of funny, anyway.

Headlining was not always a glory position, not in this type of situation.

Secondly, Todd got on stage for parts of Bad Crazy and focused on Chuck from behind the kit, and then shot across the front of the stage from Curt's side for HMSQ and Reign of Terror.

Also, this is the only live version of Beast w/ 2 Backs, a song we added for just this one gig. It didn't work that well so we dropped it right after. This was the first night, Saturday, of 2 gig nights in a row. Sunday night we did the Graveyard Shift at the Rocket Club and played the same set, but replaced Beast with Nightmare Landscape and Murder with Latter days.

You can see when Todd pans the audience that there were a lot of people there, but they were a bit subdued. We had a good contingent of fans there, it was our first time playing the Off Limits. It was obstensibly a teen club, but since they had bands, and it was hard to find venues for original acts, most of the people in the club were adults, not kids. All of the bands were guys in their 20's and 30's. The other bands were blown away by our soundcheck songs and had a lot of nice things to say about our set when we were done. I don't think I saw any teens there at all, maybe a couple. Most of them were playing obscure metal cuts and a few originals, but nothing as ambitious as the stuff we were doing, no double leads or 3 part harmonies, if any backing vocals at all. So, it was a pretty fun gig.

Other than the fact that the monitors fed my vocal mike back the entire night (the soundguy did considerably more work on the outfront sound than he did with our monitors). I stop singing sometimes and leave out lines, most noticably in Bad Crazy. The guy had a stage board for mixing the monitors, but no one running it, so he had run up to the side of the stage and it was a bitch getting him to move. We just dealt with it best we could. The front of the house sound was stellar though, I have to say, the long soundcheck was worth it. This may be the best mixed video, you can hear everything other than a few times he misses that it's Mike playing lead.

I once again fuck up the first few lines of Damned. I have no idea why, at earlier gigs I was fine. Brain damage kicking in. This show has the new arrangement of Goodbye '89, with Mike's guitar solo replacing the stop break, but I still sing the intro instead of Mike. The very next night he would start doing it and continue to do so as long as we played it. I can't remember why he didn't sing it this night, but it sounded much better with him taking the lead and me on backing vocals.

video sound/mix band crowd

Sunday Night and there are like 20 people there including the bar-maids. We try to keep a good attitude on a lousy night. Original metal bands were relegated to crap nights like this: at least we always had the foresight to go first, which would seem like a lesser position, but on a Sunday or Monday night, which are the nights an all original metal band with out a consistent following plays, the earlier the better. I did hang around occassionally to see some friend or another's band play and it was not pretty, sometimes I would literally be the only person in the audience unless they had girlfriends or a crew.

This is one camera placed on a tripod and left alone, so its a pretty boring video, and its a wide shot to get the entire stage, meaning the top and bottom are completely black, so there's just a thin strip of us in the middle, like widescreen. The sound quality isn't bad and the band is tight, so its still worthwhile.

Except for Latter Days, this set list is very much our standard set during this time. Latter Days was usually inserted for heavier gigs.

This was the first time Mike sang the lead intro to Goodbye '89, and it sounds 100% better with me on backing vocals. It's kind of weird that the night before I did it, then he did it the following night, maybe I forget he was going to do it? I can't remember why he didn't sing it the previous night, but it's a vast improvement.

video sound/mix band crowd

Well, its a weekend gig, but once again at the teen club with 5 other bands, all as obscure as we were but we took our accustomed opening slot because we got to play for all the other bands and their friends, and we probably outdrew the other bands put together 2-1, so after we were done the place got very empty, sad to say. This was not a horrible gig, but we'd done better. We had been asked back by the owners since we had a decent following, but I believe the place went bust the next month. Still, this one was fun and went well.!

Obviously we wouldn't have opened with Nightmare, I would guess Todd was a bit late and missed the first 4 songs of our usual one hour set, no big loss. This gig does feature some differences from our cookie-cutter performance of our usual set, very tight but very much the same. First, I attempt a crowd sing-along in Predator, which seems to get some of the crowd resentfully chiming in, but their hearts aren't in it. Secondly, there is a long intro from Mike on Goodbye '89 and a long intro from Curt, who never spoke into the mike much, on another song, plus some noodling on guitar. Other than that though, and my usual lame between song patter, there's nothing much different here.

video sound/mix band crowd

This was a Monday Night regular event and the club publicized it, plus we had a several dozen people there so it was a decent turn-out for a Monday, maybe 100 people, 200 if it was a really good night, and the early band again had the advantage here; you got all the other bands and their fans watching you waiting until it was there turn.

This is a hand-held shoot, and although its shaky, its a lot more interesting and the band looks great and we're up with the crowd and playing well. Todd also pushed the saturation and light on the camera so it looks more like film. There's also plenty of smoke so you get nice beams from the lights.

I still have that wooden "Vengeance" sign. It used to hang on the wall in my studio, now it sits in a storage closet.

My chatter is better on nights like this when there are actually people out there to respond. Resplendent in my goofy ass jacket for several songs, then my favorite GnR (I hated the band, loved the shirt) "Lose Your Illusions" t-shirt with the arms cut off, as was the style of the day.

This show marked the second time Nightmare Landscape had appeared in the set, which is why its so early. Later on it would settle down into the Latter Days slot.

video sound/mix band crowd

Supposed to be the last gig for lead singer Jon Oliva of the popular local band Savatage, and probably one of the best gigs we ever played. The crowd, as you can see, is nuts, we are high on all the excitement and playing our asses off.

A few minor bad points were that, as you can probably tell, Curt can't hear anything but himself and consequently loses the beat here and there. Also, the soundman "savataged" us by turning Mike's guitar completely off in the mix as well as all the backing vocals and at least half of the bass and drums. All you hear is Curt's guitar and my vocals, really. It didn't matter to the crowd, who had waited like 4 hours and were ready to hear some music, so they loved us, and our 36 minute set of short, fast songs went over great.

We were unsceduled to play that gig, Steve Walchotz put us in because he owed us major favors, and the 2nd opening act, Pariah, were salty about situation and grousing about "who the hell are these guys?". To make matters worse, our short, punchy set went over fine because the crowd was just ready to just hear some fucking music when we took the stage, but Pariah had a full hour, playing a "concert" type set, with slow songs included for pacing, but the result was the appearence of a very long and unwanted delay before the headliner, and throughout the crowd was chanting "SAVATAGE" and even openly booing and telling them to get off and bring on the main act by the end. So they were none too fond of us, still hanging out in the flunky dressing room when their set ended. Words were said, but no blood flowed.

Probably the best gig we ever played as far as the excitement and fun, although technically far from our best performance. If they had done us decent instead of dirty we would have done a better job staying together, but we still did a fine job and they did have my vocals up and I was in full voice. A very great memory and worth all the dead Sunday nights we had to endure to get gigs like this. Todd is obviously being crushed by the crowd, luckily he's a tall guy and could shoot over their heads, although Mike not only gets mixed out of the mix, he gets the far end of the stage and not much face-time. You can see the barmaids crossing occassionally with a 6-pack.

This set was necessarily shortened for this gig. It clocks in at about 36 minutes, after we'd been told we'd get 45. I believe we dropped Bad Crazy after being told on-stage at the last minute our set-time was being cut. We were lucky it wasn't truncated even more, you see I rush into Action because they were trying to pull us off stage. A good friend of ours, and a pretty big guy, named Greg was intensely debating with the stage manager, who was trying to get us off, and he convinced him. Also, Steve Wacholtz, the drummer for Savatage, who was very familiar with our set, told us under no uncertain terms not to do Action, as it was considered too "wimpy" for this type of show, but we played it anyway and I think the reaction speaks for itself.

Goodbye '89 did not meet with the same enthusiasm, and in retrospect it might have been a good one to cut. Doubly so because Curt is having some sort of problem at the beginning, or he is not paying attention, and there is a good 20 second delay in the start of the song (cut out on this video). Mike or Chuck shouts his name and then he belatedly starts, after leaving Mike hanging for a bit.

video sound/mix

video sound/mix band crowd

Above, an ad in the local music mag, Players, for the gig. That weekend I was playing there again in Todd's band.

This was a big deal night, a 2 camera shoot. Bobby Bonds did one version from one side of the stage and Todd did another. We talked Todd into going ahead and doing a vid even though Bobby was there with the hi-rez 1" video the cable company lent their local show people, we had been dealing with Bobby and discovered, too late, that he was an asshole and not too intelligent on top of that.

16 years later looking at this I'm pissed off all over again, because this could have been something really important and good for us, a high quality live video. Todd did absolutely wonderful service videotaping every gig we did- we traded favors, me with the studio and he with the vid cam and other things, but to stand there through every gig and do good work like he did is a blessing, and hardly any of these vids would be here otherwise.

Bobby, on the other hand, was a piece of work. Local cable was required by law to offer public access time to locals to put on their own shows. If you completed a training course, you also got to check out their very professional equipment, the same kind that local TV news teams of the day took out to cover stories, 1" analog video. The quality was enormously better than what we had been getting, so I traded Bobby substantial hours in the studio, in return he'd tape an entire gig on 1" tape.

Bobby had a cable access show, but with a difference: MTV at the time blocked several hours a day for "local MTV", local programming that ran on whatever local channel carried MTV, and not just at 4am, it might be in the middle of the day or any time. There was so little appropriate programming for the local station to run that they ran Bobby's Metal Shop, which he only produced sporadically, about 20 times each episode. He usually only covered national acts that came to town, schmoozing his way backstage for interviews and they were a lot more lax back then about letting you videotape them live, and he got a lot of that on.

So when it came time to do our gig, you can see the results: its not immediately evident in these flash renderings of the mpg conversions of the avi captures of the VHS bounce of the 3/4" version of the original 1" tape, but the VHS looks pretty damn good, and even with the 4 generations of digital bounce, its markedly better than the other vids, but that's just it: pretty in color and clarity, nearly worthless in execution. He showed up during our first song to set up so he missed almost all of that. He pointed the cam at the floor for minutes at a time. He misframed shots, cut off heads then cut out after taping for about 25 minutes. A monkey with a cam on its head could have done as well.

Todd's much lower rez version is infinately more useful and entertaining. Thank you Mr. Grubbs.

On the "tear-down" clip at the end you can see Todd Newland and his drum roadie "Marty" helping Chuck load out. We always got first slot, but that means you have to get out of the way in like 15 mins. so the other band has 15 mins. to set up so you don't lose the crowd. We always tried to conscientiously get our stuff loaded, there were rock-star types who finished their sets, then ambled off to the bar to schmooze. Sometimes they got their equipment moved for them, and tempers flared.

Todd Newland was the drummer for Todd Grubb's band, in which I also played. We were all buddies and Chuck would help roadie for him when Universe, Todd and Todd's band, would play.

This show is a good example of the standard set we settled into at this period, with the one exception of Meltdown. I had some resistence from the guys about adding it, and this was the one and only time it appeared on a live set. I don't think it was bad, although the guitar line got muffed, and there was an uncomfortable pause between my scream and the beginning of HMSQ, but I think it could have worked. However, we ended up with a much tighter and coherent set with just the main 12; Tiger, Whipped, Bad Crazy, HMSQ, Cry Havoc, Carnivore, Reign, Predator, '89, Damned, Nightmare and Action. Latter Days still appeared in the set, but it was no longer a mainstay by now.

video sound/mix band crowd

Another Sunday night, this time the first opener of 3 bands, the headliner being Paul D'Anno, ex-Iron Maiden, on some of their best albums by our reckoning. Our friends Gardy Loo had the middle spot, which always sucked, that's why we never took it. We got the early crowd, which is the only crowd on a Monday, plus you can hear Gardy Loo and their fans talking back and forth with me: if the other band was going on after you, you got the benefit of all their fans.

There is an interesting tale behind D'Anno's band. They showed up while we were standing out behind the bar, where there was a sort of courtyard in this property owned by the bar owner, Fred. They rolled up in an unmarked white Econoline van and piled out of the back, 5 guys plus D'Anno, I think one guy was the road manager/roadie and the guys toted their equipment themselves. They had all been drinking and smelled like it.

They made it to the skanky dressing rooms we all shared and broke out bottles of whiskey, one bottle to each man, like you would drink a beer. We got to hang out and talk to Paul and tried not be idiots and ask stupid questions, but Chuck did ask him outright, what happened, why did you leave Maiden?

"Me pipes" Paul said, pointing to his throat, "me pipes went."

I guess during their pre-fame years he had given it his all and had damaged his vocal chords and just couldn't handle recording and touring. We only watched a few songs, I'm sad to say, and left. There was not a person in the audience. The barmaids walked around tidying up and emptying ashtrays, tasks they usually did after closing. D'Anno sang with his back to the "audience" and the band seemed bored and not all that into it, which is understandable.

I always hoped that every gig on his "tour" wasn't like that, but couldn't help reflecting that he didn't do any better than we did some nights. This is the fate of the semi-star, I guess.

I don't remember much about our performance, from my pre-gig Ren and Stimpy imitation you can see I was up and ready to play. I've had that skull shirt hanging in my closet for years and only recently packed it away somewhere, since there is virtually no chance I'll ever wear it again. Its about the only "stage wear" I have left from those days.

Another short set; we did leave '89 out since we were opening for the presumably very heavy D'Anno, but it ended up not mattering very much, and '89 was a favorite of our fans. Its basically the set from the Savatage gig with Latter Days replacing '89.

video sound/mix band crowd

The last phase of Vengeance, or our last gasp, as a cover band playing hard rock covers when grunge was crowding out metal and hard rock. Luckily, we lived in Tampa, which is about 5 years behind the rest of the world, and songs like Coverdale/Page's Shake My Tree and Megadeth's Symphony of Destruction, plus these Aerosmith songs, were what was on the radio and what the crowd wanted.

We always did very well at GK's and were a top draw there, but after it closed there were very few other places to play and a major factor in the band folding soon after.

This is a pretty good set, but its actually early in our "cover tune" days, we did much cooler shit like Seasons of Wither and Queen's '39 later that I would have liked to have seen on vid instead of Are You Gonna Go and Symphony, but at least we do have vids of Highway Star, Rest in Peace and Living on the Edge, all really cool songs and I think we pull them off very well. We were lucky to have 3 guys who could sing so we were virtually the only local band doing 3 part harmony on stuff like this, usually they had a lead singer and if they were lucky a 2nd guy singing weak harmony. Nobody pulled off the shit we were doing, and we did get props for it.

This sound is as good as it gets, we had ace soundman Bobby Lindberg on the boards, you can hear it on Highway Star, the perfect balance between the lead guitars, the echo chase on my vocal tags, the sound effects on Living on the Edge, etc,, Bobby is still a class act behind the mixer and he always did a fantastic job for us. It didn't hurt that we are good friends and he liked the band and the music, but he always does a great job regardless.

We were probably more successful and made a helluva lot more money doing covers. One night the bar owner bumped us to second slot (midnight) which we hated, so in retaliation we played our old original set. I wish I had a vid of that, we hadn't played them in about a year so they were fresh again (we were so well rehearsed on those songs we were still tight) and we had a lot of fun playing them. We had a loyal following of friends and the other bands and their fans respected us, we were known as a competent band playing hard shit, and we got props for it, which kind of made the sadness of the ass-end of our run a bit more fun. Local big draws would want us to open because not only did we have a crowd, we were a good band, and to their credit they weren't worried about being upstaged, they wanted a good show.

I'm pretty self-deprecating about most of our stuff, but I'm proud of our band and what we did, and how tight we were, and the difficulty of the material we attempted. Its seems a terrible injustice we weren't more successful, no one worked harder, but the world is not a fair place.