Twenty Years – Part 4

We recorded The Kelvis on a rainy weekend in either October or November of 1998 with Mike Lastra. We had played every song live numerous times so recording went really quickly. Lastra was great, he really got us used to the idea of accepting things as they happened. Scratchy noise or a missed note? Who cares. If it sounds cool then leave it. My only regret is that the album went un-mastered, which is why it sounds so flat unless played loudly. I sure wish we could get a do-over on that decision. We also embarked on our first tour during this time frame. It was only two weeks long, but it was an amazing experience bolting to the East coast in record time. Things were going relatively well but despite it all, Bryan left in 1999. The pace of independent music, i.e. – no money, no fans, no glory, isn’t for everyone. He needed a change and although we were sad to see him go there wasn’t any bad blood between us for his decision.

Very soon after Bryan left we enlisted Jim, who we knew from Bomf! and Underhand. Jim was a different sort of drummer. He played fast and was often just on the edge of out of control. With the slightly more raw sound Jim brought, I knew I wasn’t going to cut it as a solo guitarist for much longer. We started shopping around and after a brief stint with our friend Lyle (also from Bomf!), we got referred to Justin. I remember he made a point to jump during his audition. It was pretty ridiculous to witness, but the enthusiasm is what we wanted. We didn’t even try anyone else out. He was the guy and Justin became official in 2000. This was the lineup where we finally found our sound.

During those years we practiced a lot, wrote a lot and played a lot. The high water mark was 2002-2004 when we averaged about 4-5 shows a month. For a touring band that’s not very impressive, but we were doing it ourselves while holding down real jobs and practicing twice a week. We’d drive out of town on the weekend, return home, work, practice, work, play in town, work some more and then play out of town again. As we got more offers we were driving farther and farther for weekend shows. Eugene, Ashland, Redding and many regions beyond. Once we drove to Salt Lake City for one show where about ten people watched us. Another time we played in San Francisco on a Sunday and rushed home afterwards to be at work on Monday morning. Justin rolled out the van and went straight to work at 6am, possibly without a shower. The farthest one night stand was a trip to Los Angeles to play on a weeknight where we performed to arm-crossed apathy from a legion of bored bros.

The van had rules, especially around music. Album selections must rotate fairly, roadies included. The exception is the drive home where the driver chooses all of the music. If you are playing a game or watching a movie you forfeit your musical selection. Never play the same CD twice or forever be mocked. If you don’t like a CD, shut up since it’s not your turn. If two of you don’t like the music you may complain, but you can’t veto. If three of you hate the music then Dave is likely driving and he will tell all of you to go to Hell. If Justin is driving then pay attention as each song may be your last. Seating also had rules. Equal time is given to the passenger seat, which is the most comfortable and least odorous seat. Whoever had to work the earliest got to sleep on the bench seat. Second due at work got the floor. Next got the passenger seat and he-who-started-work-last had to drive. That was usually me and I spent countless hours watching the miles pass by while everyone dozed off in peace. It was usually ok though since everything I cared about was in that van.

During that time we flipped 100,000 miles on the van, added a roof extension and embarked on a few more tours and extended outings. We recorded a few times, most notably The Return and Rise Again with Conrad Uno at Egg Studios in Seattle. It was surreal getting wisdom from someone who recorded so many bands that were influential to us. I’m really pleased with how those albums turned out and they are usually my go to if someone asks what we sound like.

We were also lucky that we got to play with a ton of huge bands: Face To Face, Guttermouth, Saves The Day, Sum 41, Bigwig, Strung Out, H2O, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, GWAR, The Misfits, The Living End, Tiger Army, TSOL, Agent Orange, Paint It Black, The Loved Ones, Zeke, UK Subs, No Use For A Name, The Deviates, Zebrahead, All, Only Crime and three slots on the Warped Tour. For a perpetually unsigned and DIY we did pretty well.

Eventually real life starts to catch up though.

Twenty Years – Part 3

How did we wind up moving to Portland? There was a lot of small talk about moving during 1996, but eventually we sat down at a restaurant with Dave’s trucker atlas and started pointing at places. Chapel Hill? No, let’s leave North Carolina. Chicago? Too big. New York or Pennsylvania? Too cold. West Coast? Sounds good. L.A.? Too many bands. San Francisco? Too expensive. Seattle? Still fresh off of grunge. Portland? Hmmm. All I knew about Portland was that you could get to the ocean in an hour one way or be on top of a mountain an hour the other way. I flew out here to check it out, took some pictures, grabbed some local zines and reported back. Dave and Bryan were in. Sadly, Paul was not. We packed up and in the late months of 1996 and moved to Portland.

Moving was easy. Dealing with the fact that we were suddenly going to be a three piece is what caused me stress. I had only been playing guitar for two years. I could barely tune by ear and could not (and still can’t) play a lead to save my life. I could play loud though so I eventually bought a second Marshall cabinet. We always joke with people “if you can’t play good, play loud.” There was some truth in that. After securing a variety of jobs we eventually found a place that rented storage units off of Cornell and 26 and started to practice. We played three times a week with Sundays being “the long practice” of several hours. Hot, cold, rain, snow. Sometimes two of us would go out and play an extra day. Often we would write in our apartments. If not writing, we were working on merch ideas. For me, almost all down time was spent working on the web page. It was 800 Octane 24-7.

We quickly found ourselves with a whole new set of songs that catered to the reduced lineup pretty. That summer we started playing shows wherever we could. I feel like we played a lot, but in retrospect it was only a few shows a month at best. We started paying our dues at the local clubs, primarily EJ’s, the Satyricon, the Paris Theater and the Ash Street. Most shows were on weekday nights, playing only to the sound guy and bartenders, because even the other bands had bailed. We didn’t care. We were stoked to play. Early on we did something a lot of other bands in the area did not do, which was play any small, off the radar town that we got invited to. Coming from a tiny place like Boone, places like Longview, Bend and Tri-Cities seemed well worth our effort. A lot of bands only played Portland and Seattle. We said we would play every place in between that would take us. Want to play in my living room in Springfield? Yes. Want to play in my garage in Kelso? Yes. Want to play outside in a park near Tacoma? Yes.

During this time we also moved into a house Dave purchased off of 51st and Hawthorne. It was a total bachelor pad with a pool, hot tub and foosball. Songwriting came easily once we all lived together. We made a lot of friends with other local bands during this time including Bomf!, The Leeches, Elmer, Tenpin, The Secludes and dozens more that I am forgetting to mention. A lot of these connections helped define us musically and personally. It was a blur of late nights, driving back and forth across the Northwest and going to shows. In other words, it was perfect.

Twenty Years – Part 2

1996 was a big year. We got a van, made a terrible CD, changed our name and moved across the country. Each of these items in a story in itself, so I’ll try to make it quick.

Contrary to popular belief the van was not purchased with the layer of topsoil and mold many of you are accustomed to seeing. It was incredibly clean, did not have the roof extension and was actually Dave’s daily driver for quite a while. This made out of town shows far more comfortable that the two door jeep and minivan combination we were used to. We’d arrive places and actually feel like a real band. The van, which donned many titles including “the crib”, “the aviary”, and “the procreational vehicle”, was purchased with only a couple thousand miles on it. When we finally parted ways I believe it was close to 170,000. If you include time sleeping, I’m pretty sure I’ve spent a year of my life in that rattling, foul-odored, sticker covered cage.

I mentioned that the first CD is terrible. It really is. The logos were made by a stranger and to this day I wonder if they are actually the result of a cruel and ultimately unfunny joke. I can vividly recall the first time I saw the CDs in front of Dave’s house. I opened the box like a kid on Christmas, saw the front cover and smiled with approval. Then I flipped it over, saw the back “artwork”, swore loudly and put it back in the box. Sometime later I suppressed my anger, removed the shrink wrap, saw the disc art and put it the box again fuming with disgust. A short while after that I played it on a car stereo and sure enough, it sounded as bad as it looked. The volume levels were impossibly low and we are still fairly sure the final recording was slowed down on the DAT to CD transfer since the demos sound better than the final product. The real tragedy is that we spent more time in the studio on that album that we did on any other album. We had a full month of unlimited studio time. For comparison The Kelvis was done in 3.5 days and it was infinitely better. There is a reason we buried half of those things under a slab of concrete in Dave’s back yard.

On a positive note, that first studio experience was a blast. I have fond memories of many things. The most ridiculous memory was making Bryan record a chicken egg shaker track over and over again only to see how long it would take to agitate him. I can also recall inviting all of our friends down to sing gang vocals on a song, which was awesome to witness and still makes me smile. Perhaps the least appropriate bit of trivia about the album is that at least one half of the songs were mixed while the engineer watched pornography. I may be misremembering this, but I could swear one video featured a hermaphrodite. Inexplicably, he had videos in the studio, but no VCR so we drove to a Blockbuster and rented one just so he could mix in style. When we eventually returned the VCR we felt a bit unclean knowing about the unspeakable filth that had just spewed from its analog heads. Speaking of porn, the album actually got its name from a selection contained within the large stash of adult reading in the studio. ‘Swank’ was the winning title since the runner up, ‘Meat People’ wasn’t going to cut it.

With the album release we accepted the realization that there were two other bands called Hoss and one of them actually had a record out. So, we decided to change the band name. We liked Octane. Not wanting to endure another name change we decided to make it unique and attached a number to it. 800 Octane just had a ring to it. It was that simple. I liked the name until the first time we saw a flyer with 1-800-Octane on it, then I started to question the decision. I’m glad we changed it though, since a year or two later Lagwagon released their album called Hoss, which is still one of my all-time favorite albums.

As for moving across the country? That’s actually not a quick story at all.

Twenty Years – Part 1

1994 was a long time ago. Clinton was in office, OJ was relevant and grunge was winding down. It was also the year Dave, Bryan, Paul and I decided to start a band.

Dave, Bryan and I were all mutual friends who lived in the same dorm in school. We spent that first year driving all over the place to go to shows. If we weren’t driving to see live music, we were listening to music, talking about music or arguing about music. We met Paul the following year and he immediately fit right it. Aside from listening it turned out Dave and Bryan had actually played music in bands before. I don’t recall if Paul was ever in a band previously, but he was a naturally talented guitarist. I was the odd man out since I had never played any music. All I knew was the dozen Misfits songs that Dave taught me on the crappy guitar I bought in Lenoir. Motivated? Yes. Talented? Definitely not. We all got together in various configurations playing covers and for open mic events here and there.

In the summer of ‘94, we were all in town and found ourselves with access to a practice space. It was a pay by the month storage unit attached to an alternator repair shop. I can’t recall the first practices specifically, but I do know something seemed to click pretty quickly. We were able to kick out a batch of songs in a few weeks and just like that we decided to become a band. We quickly and easily settled on the name Hoss. Living in rural North Carolina it was a name you heard from time to time and it seemed to fit with what we were playing. With a name and a new found mission we kept writing. The songs were short, fast, a little quirky and all over the place lyrically. Songs about movies, songs about girls, songs about growing up. I think it’s safe to say we haven’t strayed too far from that formula.

After practicing all summer the next milestone was to actually play some shows. Even at this relatively obscure college town in what could be best be described as a culturally neglected part of the state, there was actually a bit of a music scene. Local bands included Sticky, The Husbians, Smartbomb, Damage Done (“the metal guys”), Silly, Pink Collar Jobs and several more. There were good bands making good music, and despite being such a small town, it had a pretty diverse and positive thing happening. Later that year we finally played shows. For many years our first shows held a nearly magical quality in my mind. I believed this strongly until a few years ago when I copied them from VHS to a computer and witnessed the horror firsthand. We were not rock gods bursting out of a scene that couldn’t contain us, but rather four nerdy looking dudes barely holding the attention of anyone in attendance. Yes, there were a few good shows, but I assure you there were even more terrible ones. We had to experience all of the stuff that new bands go through; equipment problems, travel problems, overly long set lists, a lack of banter between songs and just general sucking on stage. We were paying dues, thankfully to a small and somewhat merciful audience.

As we started to get better we followed the lead of our friends and later started to play some out of town shows. Hickory, Johnson City, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Wilmington, etc. Eventually we did get to open for a few headliners. The show that seemed like the high water mark for us was when we got to open for Antiseen. I presumed that would be as good as it got for us. We kept playing and I figured that when we all got done with school we’d call it quits and go our separate ways. Wow, was I wrong.