A couple of interviews from local cable access goddess Cathy Lucas. I don't want to be mean here, she was nice to have us on, and I was being a wise-ass in parts of these (not in a mean way, just in an "I'm trying to take it less than seriously that I'm being interviewed on a cable access show" kind of way), but she could hardly be more humorless, she comes off as schoolmarmish in the end of the 2nd, shushing and scolding me for cutting up in class. I mean come on Cathy, "Where do you guys see yourselves in 5 years?"- well, let's see. It can't be much worse! I'm pushing 30 in a 2-bit all original heavy metal band on an indy label making zero money and you're the host of a free cable access show that gets fewer viewers than the guy in the chicken hat who sings along to Aerosmith songs while trading insults with the loser teenagers who call him up to slam his singing. Yes, that show really did exist.

And it really did beat out shows like this, that might have been a lot more fun had they taken themselves less seriously, but maybe it was just a game of "we're pretending we're not pathetic", and I include us in that statement. It's just sad. They said there were phonecalls for us but I don't remember ever taking any. In the 2nd one I made a very poor fashion choice for my hair and end up looking like Eddie Munster with that enormous viddow's peek. Hard to look at now, but I bravely include it for posterity's sake. Enjoy the atrocities, kids.

What's less seen and more inconsequential than a local cable access show, you ask? How about a locally produced video magazine? Yes, our stardom ran the gamet from the pathetic to the absurd. However, Mr. Todd Grubbs is a gentleman extraordinaire, a self-promoter beyond compare who really busted his ass locally to try to make a splash in a scene that actually existed in the early-mid 90's, then dried up to nothing. Tampa once had 3 local music magazines, the Suncoast Music Awards, the SXSE Music Conference, a bunch of big and busy music stores that were hang-outs for all the musicians and several circuits of bars, A, B and F. F still exists, nothing else from that era does.

However, Todd did manage to sell some his "Todd's World" vids, and thanks to a support network of things like the local music mags, people actually heard about them and watched them. So, its not as sad as it could have been and later got, and Todd was pretty cool to have us on the first episode, which I think was the one that people actually saw. I was in Todd's band, Universe, part-time because Vengeance wasn't playing any more than once every month or less, and I did a lot of studio work with him, plus writing and recording stuff like radio parody songs etc. and his own solo stuff. Todd was also cool enough to come to almost every gig we did and stand there with a heavy-ass early 90's vid cam on his shoulder for the entire hour+ set of the same goddam songs he'd seen 2 dozen times before, so I give him props for that. This vid is me being a smart-ass and Mike trying to get an answer in edgewise, our usual mode of doing interviews. It's all mostly goofing and bullshit. Hey, we went with our strengths.

Bobby Bonds was a local entrepenuer who copped a local MTV show that highlighted local metal bands. I doubt they even have it anymore, but in the early 90's a certain segment of day would be dedicated "local MTV" if the locality were so inclined and had programming, so anyone in the Greater Tampa Bay Area who had MTV saw his show, because it was repeated endlessly. He would do a feature called "Metal Shop" where basically some local guitar hero or another would noodle around and show you how fast he could play scales or various tapping tricks, unaccompanied. Very impressive.

Having our own studio allowed us to do better. Since Mike and I had done all the interviews up to this point, I thought it would be cool to let Curt have a moment in the sun and basically modeled the show around his parts on the newest album, Bad Crazy. I did all the pre-production, like making custom mixes of the songs we would be using with and without various tracks, ran the tape deck, then Curt would play along, showing and explaining how he added the tracks and what he was doing, what key, mode, etc. We did Chase the Dragon and Nomad like this, and Nightmare Landscape with Curt and Mike doing the double lead together.

I was going to do a segment where I did one of my 32 stacked guitar extravaganzas, but it seemed like it would be boring and stupid in execution, and anyway, I got to do plenty of other stuff so I junked it after doing some test prep work on it. This stuff turned out much better anyway, because Curt is and was the best guitarist in the area, the best I ever played with and the best I've ever seen. You can see on the vids how carefully constructed his leads were, the thought he put into composing them and how well they complement the music, not just playing fast licks over top of vacuous rhythm.

I also included a promo Mike did just because its so goofy (nice sunglasses!). I don't know if Bonds didn't know what he was doing, or if he was just really sloppy, but his editing technique left much to be desired. These lame, sloppy edits are actually cleaned up from what he gave me on the rough VHS. I left in the bad take on Chase just because its kind of funny, but Bonds cut off beginnings and endings and left awkward pauses in the middle that were just too hard to edit out.

Still, its some interesting stuff and I'm glad I dug it up.