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Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air: Legends
of West Texas Music
"Indeed, Oglesby's introduction of more
than two dozen musicians who called Lubbock home should be required
reading not only for music fans, but for Lubbock residents and
anyone thinking about moving here. On these pages, music becomes
a part of Lubbock's living history." |
-continued from page 1- CM: I wanted to get girls. Greg: Well, that just came with the territory. But we started playing, and we all realized, "Damn! We’re good!" We played Rush; We played The Knack; We played Van Halen. CM: A lot of the bands that were playing along side
of us were doing just the more Chris: When I listened to y’all’s CD, I could tell that there’s an intentional "orchestration" to it. I can tell that y’all are layering a lot, and making a musical sound out of it that’s a lot deeper than just banging on drums or yellin’. There’s a lot going on with it. So how did you figure out that y'all were that good? Greg: When you’re 13, 14 years old and you can
put together a Rush song and make it sound identical
to - exactly what those guys were playing... You get the same
feeling from it - hopefully - that they got out of playin’
it, you have to step back and go, "Damn, Boy! Good job!"
"Hey, you, too!" Chris: Where are you getting that stare? Who’s giving it? Greg: Lubbock, Texas. CM: Just - y’know - playing at parties. Again, we were like 13 years old at the time… And just doing crazy shit. Greg: And parents are there looking at us going, "Oh, My God!" CM: I think we were a little bit of an anomaly just because - like we said before - we were doing some stuff that was beyond what other kids our age were doing. Jason: I think with the times changing, and also with
Tech being there and a lot of youth being in Lubbock, one thing
I’ve noticed that has changed since then is it’s openness
to what these guys were doing back in 1984. Chris: And I think that Rock-n-Roll - Heavy Metal - is not as terrifying to people in Lubbock as it was when it first was starting. When Kiss first came to Lubbock and opened their world tour on Halloween night, the whole city was scared! Like the Devil worshippers were gonna be out taking the blonde virgins and sacrificing them…I mean these are real stories that I heard back then! And it wasn’t "joking around." You really did hear people earnestly saying that. Greg: Yea! "Put your animals in the house." Chris: There were more Devil worshippers in Lubbock, apparently, than anywhere! Jason: That’s funny; I didn’t know any of ‘em, either. [The whole room breaks into laughter]. Chris: And you never heard about anybody actually getting killed by Devil worshippers. Who were all these blonde virgins who were being sacrificed? Jason: The very fact that people thought all those crazy things made that band -- or any other band that had that mystique -- more appealing to the kids. "They’re making a big deal about it; My parents hate it. I’m gonna loooove this band!" Chris: We were talking about how y’all were maybe ahead of your peers musically; How y’all end up getting together as a band in Lubbock? CM: Jason had been playing with Uncle Nasty. I was doing mainly radio deejaying and not doing a whole lot of playing. Jason: Chris did the "seven to midnight"
shift; He was the prime-time deejay at FMX. When we got Greg
in the band, we needed a bass player, and Greg was like, "Man,
I’ll talk to Chris but he’s got this radio gig."
CM: I got fired from FMX no more than two months after Greg had called me up asking if I wanted to come play. We had thought the schedules wouldn't allow it. But when I got fired - That same day, I called up Greg, "If y’all still need a bass player, I’ll come play." Chris: Is there any story to you getting fired? CM: Oh…I knew this would come up…The job I have right now is working
for a company called Clear Channel; FMX is owned by that same
company. So I can’t go into a lot it, because there’s
still some hurt feelings from both sides. Let’s just say
I was a stupid 22 year old kid at that time, did some stupid
stuff on the radio. When I was gonna join the band, I don’t even remember if there was any official try-out or anything… Jason: There wasn’t. We just said, "PLEASE play!" Chris: Jason and Michael and Chad had asked Greg, "Can he really play, or is he just some dude who has a bass?" Luckily, I could play. Chris: Who’s Michael? Jason: He was the other guitar player in Uncle Nasty, Michael Adami. CM: I really had no other real job. I was just doing some construction work for my dad and playing with Uncle Nasty. That was in September of ’92. We went from September through the end of '92, and that was really kinda where Uncle Nasty had kinda peaked out by then. Jason was starting to want to move on to getting past the "cover band" sort of thing. Greg and I both - neither one of us had a lot of experience outside of doing "cover band" stuff, and we were both wanting to write our own music. Jason: In Uncle Nasty,
we were playing mostly "popular" Hard Rock and "popular"
Metal. We weren't doing anything ground breaking. I had always wanted to write heavy songs. I wanted to get heavier. I was always into Megadeth, Metalicca, the heavier shit…The old stuff when it was really heavy. Greg was into that, too. So when Greg got into the band, me and him immediately struck up this deal - Greg was in the band maybe a month or two before Chris was - We ended up really doing all this cool stuff…Pantera like changed out lives in 1992. I’ve gotten over it since then. I was like, "Let’s write some heavier stuff." Then when Chris got in, he and Greg had a history. I said, "Man, now I got a great drummer and a great bass player; I’d like to just get out of Lubbock!" I talked to them one night, "Do you guys wanta split?" They were like, "We’ve been wanting to split, too." It was totally group decision. And we played our last show New Years Eve of ’92. Chris: And you moved to Austin then? Jason: About six months later. CM: But we did make an effort - at the time, it was a major effort on our part - to get the guys in Uncle Nasty to change over to doing some original stuff… Chris: So the three of y’all left Uncle Nasty, and went off on y’all’s own…When did Kerry join the band? CM: I remember pretty vividly: We were right down there
by Main Street Saloon, Chris: Tell me about what y’all’s experience has been here in Austin. Jason: We’ll play anywhere we can, as long as we’re not getting fucked over, basically. We do want to get paid. We have a large draw; We are a significant band in this scene, and we want to get paid for it. CM: Metal bands historically get screwed at every turn.
We’ve had many, many shows where they’ve refused to
pay us or they paid us less than what they said they were gonna
pay us. But that’s pretty much par for the course. Chris: Is that where you developed a lot of your fan-base? CM: There’s really not one specific club. We have a good following that will follow us wherever we’re playing. I think that’s true of most bands in Austin. There are so many different places to play, you don’t necessarily have "regulars" at any music club, any more. Chris: Are y’all looking to get out of Austin? Or are you happy doing what you’re doing here? Jason: We all have other jobs, but we’d all love to be touring the world playing music as a living and being able to cover our debts. We’d all love to do that, but that doesn’t happen to everybody so we’ll just keep plugging along at what we do until we’re tired of it, I guess. CM: We all have pretty realistic attitude about it. Even if we don’t ever become multi-platinum, touring the world - At least, satisfy ourselves in playing some really good music. The reason why we’re here in Austin is that it’s
a place where you can do music without becoming a big huge Rock
Star. It’s possible to have a good degree of success just
here in town. Jason: My main goal – and I think everyone’s
main goal – is to make the best album we can possibly do.
This album was supposed to come out in August and we kept telling
ourselves to take some time off and just write. The next thing
you know, someone would call and we’d play a show. Chris: What happened there? Jason: We played with some huge acts: Cypress Hill, Weezer, The Nixons. We were the only unsigned act, and the only Metal act. Everything else was way Hip-Hop. And the only Austin act…. Chris: Let’s go back to Lubbock a little more.
Does anybody have any stories about being a kid there? I know
that y’all were aware that there was a lot of good music
going on there - like I was - seeing John Sprott and those people
at Main Street… Jason: I definitely think it was unique. Because even
some bigger towns didn’t have as good of bands as Lubbock
had - like The Nelsons
and Ground Zero -
that were kicking ass and actually making records, writing music
and not just playing cover songs. And my experiences as a kid lead me to Heavy music, because
I was pissed off. Chris: Did you have long hair? Jason: I had long hair. I wore Guns and Roses
shirts; I was a total Rock Kid. I started gettin shit in junior
high - From the "Christian Coalition" is what I call
them - the Lubbock Christian Coalition… I got fucked with a lot, like I was a drug dealer and drug user; I had never even seen any drugs in my life, never done anything! The only thing I had ever done was drink a beer! I got pulled out of class one time. They said to me, "In
the teachers’ lounge, everyone says that you’re a drug
dealer." I remember this so vividly! My student council
sponsor took me out, all of a sudden out of nowhere! Then I was like, "You people fuckin’ suck! Fuck you people!" It really kind of stopped when I went to Lubbock High. I found a bunch of other people who were into what I was into. Chris: It’s a lot easier to be weird at Lubbock High. You kind of revel in it when you’re there. Lubbock High is the one place in Lubbock where it's cool to be wierd. Jason: I kinda got my niche going there, and felt less "fucked with." But then, when we got a new superintendent for Lubbock schools,
he passed out a regulation at the beginning of my 10th Grade
year that said, "You can’t wear these T-shirts,"
and he named like 30 bands - and some of them were Country bands!
Like you couldn’t wear a George Strait shirt because he
had a song about screwing a chick, or some stupid shit like that. I really hated all those people the whole time I was there.
I wrote a song about all that shit in Lubbock. The song is called
"Microcosm of Regression"
that is about how I felt about all those people. "Now I look back on the problem
and see how small it is. Now, I always say that I don’t hate them; I just
feel sorry for them. I really feel that way. I just really feel
sorry for them, for how close-minded they are. Do you like the interviews you have been reading on virtualubbock.com? Buy the book by author Christopher Oglesby Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air: Legends of West Texas Music  "As a whole, the interviews create a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue. This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor, and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Joe Ely." - University of Texas Press
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basic
kind of stuff. As far as I could tell, we were the only one’s
that really started to get more into the progressive stuff -
just for the purpose of doing something a little more advanced.
and we had been talking beforehand that we needed a singer; There’s
nobody that we really wanted to play with who can sing. I wouldn’t
doubt if King Mahon’s
name came up at some point. 
101X-Fest,
and that was really a big turn of events.