Notes:

Due to constant writing and developing songs, then recording and rerecording every project we did, it usually took 2 years to complete a project. We were usually rehearsing 3 days a week while writing and honing the tunes, then recording nearly every night once they were ready, then mixing, editing.

After that we were then back to rehearsal to further develop the songs in their final form.This let us get very familiar with the songs, and since we played all of them together so much we ended up playing nearly all of the stuff we recorded live. There were exceptions of course, mostly stuff I did all by myself like Blood Money, Judas and Meltdown.

Curt wrote and played The Gates himself. No one in the band really liked much of the Predator album except the title track and HMSQ, which stayed in the set until the end. Even after we started playing covers we would sometimes whip out HMSQ.

Foxholes was played as an encore at our very first real gig (other than playing a set at someone else’s gig) for a Halloween party at a really nice venue after Curt had rejoined. We never played a gig except with the clutch classic core line-up of Curt, Chuck, Mike and me. After Predator, Chuck and I wrote and then rehearsed everything but Blood/Judas with 4 different guitarists; Curt, then Mark, then Nick, Mike re-joined, then back with Curt.

Consequently we were very familiar with that stuff, plus around the time we released it we started to get gigs handed to us, even though we really were more focused on recording and hadn’t played out once before a gig at the Masquerade with a band called Slaughterhouse (not to be confused with Slaughter).

The early sets (which can be seen on the videos pages) started with Black Ace and continued with nearly every song on Malicious Intent plus Predator and HMSQ, and our one cover, Sweet’s ‘Action’, played with our own variation on Raven’s arrangement. Whipped, Murder, Cry Havoc, Carnivore and Reign of Terror would all be major songs throughout our run, though Murder was pushed down the list and finally edged out, I don’t remember why.It’s a great, high-energy song with lots of 3 part vocals, guitar harmony and it was the song we picked to do our first studio video, although maybe we were sick of it by then and that’s why we dropped it.

Alone, Latter Days and Killing Frost were part of the early sets, but were dropped in favor of new stuff off of Bad Crazy after a year or two. Neo-Nazi was never played live, I think because it just wasn’t that great a song and the lyrics were a howl. It was constructed especially to give Chuck space to do some tom-tom business but the rest of the song wasn’t really very notable. Black Ace was eventually dropped as well, although we brought Latter Days back near the end. I always felt that was a very unique and strong song and interesting because of the alternating 3/4 to 4/4 meters. Once Bad Crazy was in the can, we started gigging regularly and nearly every song was played live.

The LP opener, Tiger Shark (adapted from a song Mike wrote while in Brat, ‘Black Widow’, became our permanent opener. I had added lyrics and a new chorus and I think Curt and Mike came up with the structure under the solos, the rhythm and pattern is very Curt-like.Except for the intro and verse rhythm guitar it bore little resemblance to Mike’s orginal song. I think It’s Not Over was a bit commercial for our sets at the time and we never played that one.

Bad Crazy, Goodbye, Damned and Nightmare were all regular set numbers, although Nightmare was the first one dropped when we had a short set because it was a 5 minute song and an easy way to pare down the time. The Cry Havoc-Carnivore segue would usually be the next to go, and voila, 60 minute set became 45 minutes. Meltdown is a favorite of mine and I convinced the guys to try it one time, but we never repeated the experiment.

Liar, Chase and Nomad were all busy little numbers we never did live, they were filler tunes, but Chase was a nice song. It had a lot of stops where the drums dropped out and probably wouldn’t have worked live. It did have an amazing double lead that Curt played on the Guitar Clinic he did for Bobby Bonds’ Metal Shop.

Beijing was our 2nd studio video and that might have condemned it to oblivion live, but it was also quite high to sing and that might have been the reason as well. I found it hard to lip-synch without actually singing, and afer running through it 30-40 times to record the video we were supposed to do a live concert in the Masquerade where we taped the video, but my voice was by that time gone. Plus we were all beat to hell.

Taping a really production-heavy video is a lot of waiting around while lights and cameras and extras were moved and the heat of the lights is especially oppressive and we were in no shape to play anyway. However, Beijing was a great song Curt wrote in Alabama and sent to me on cassette, and I wrote the lyrics from that. Mike added the outro and I gave Chuck the idea to lift the drumbeat from Rainbow’s ‘Gates of Babylon’.

Right about the time we started playing covers we added two three songs from Love Kills; Someday Soon, Don’t Say Goodnight and Bad Day, but they were never part of the originals set while we were strictly playing our own stuff, they were just added to the covers. We had decided to give up the all-original scene because there simply were no venues left to play except little pubs like The Brass Mug, which had no production: no lights, no decent stage, no decent sound system and mostly, no audiences.

I think one night at GK’s we got bumped from our early slot, and annoyed, we did a set of our originals, which we hadn’t played in a while, but that’s about it. A lot of the young bands would jockey for the “headlining” position of last, but we knew that the 11pm-12midnight slot was the optimum time: after that a lot of people started leaving.

We would often agree to be the first band if we could at least start as late as 10pm- you would be the only band to really get a decent soundcheck since after that the change-over mics got mixed up and the soundman wouldn’t get a decent mix until after your 1st or 2nd song, if you were lucky.

Not only that, you got the benefit of the audience of friends waiting to see the bands after you, while your audience, just like all the bands’ audiences, would probably leave after they played. Playing first allowed you the greatest crowd size. Plus you got out of there nice and early before you were beat to death. Remember, we still had to load up then go home and unload. It’s not all rock and roll decadence.

Nothing else from Love Kills ever saw the light of day, although later docweaselband played Only One a few times. Our bass player had a serious mental block on the chord pattern and fucked it up regularly, so I finally gave up and dropped it. I suspect it was a subtle form of protest on his part at having to play it. There was no point anyway, since we were playing covers for a reason, to go over, so no need to play obscure originals.

Listening back, these are pretty damn good musically, there’s hardly a missed note or dropped beat anywhere. We were so well-rehearsed we could play them in our sleep, and we weren’t the type of band to expand on songs or change them live: most of them were played just like the studio versions, mostly because they had so many parts you couldn’t really play around with them, they were just too complex to “jam”.

If we had ever gotten a good recording we would have had something, but all these are culled from the audio from video tapes, back when you put an actual VHS tape in the camera and most of them had hard-knee compressor mics which squished the sound and pumped up the quiet parts, negating your dynamics. Only 2 gigs, about 6 months apart, really sounded very good, and most of the main set is pulled from those.

The Savatage gig had the best crowd reaction, but the audio was terrible because the soundman fucked us (as is normal for opening bands, don’t want them to sound too good) and Mike’s guitar is inaudible, so I couldn’t use any of that. We didn’t have any monitors either and lost synch during Damned if you Do, but we didn’t trainwreck or anything.

I agonized about doing a mixed set with examples from our early sets mixed in, as well as one-off songs like Alone and Meltdown, but the quality of the gigs where the oddities were played was noticeably inferior (compared to the half-ass sound on the “good” audio) so the final decision was easy. The first 15 songs which represented our normal “big set”, the set we would play when we had a full hour or more to play, and which we played dozens of times uring the 4-5 years we played regularly.

Beast with 2 Backs is also included in that set, even though it’s the only time we played it, because it happened to have been included in the “best audio” gig from which most of the other songs were taken. It was not considered a great song by the band and was never played before nor since this one gig. To round it out and include interesting rare live songs I added Killing Frost, Meltdown, Alone and Black Ace as “bonus” tracks after the main set concludes.

Also, coincidentally we taped the soundcheck on the gig with the best audio, so I included those versions of Action and Reign of Terror “for collectors only”, although I think they are interesting and show how tight we were, even with the harmonies, playing informally. Videos for every song can be found in the video section. I have an audio tape of the gig we played at the Masquerade and I’ll digitize that when I can get my studio set up again.

I believe the sound is fair, taped on a 1/4″ half-track, but as I remember it’s muffled and lacking in top-end for whatever reason. I might be able to remaster it into something, and that will be included as a separate album for continuity’s sake. It was fun to go back in time culling and editing and archiving these songs and it reminds me of how good the band was. However, in the remote chance there would ever be a demand for a reunion tour, it’s impossible now.

The best musician among the 4 of us, the guy who really gave the band credibility musically and gave style and technical chops to my lame-ass compositions, a guy Mike and I had known and admired as a guitarist and musician since highschool, shuffled off this mortal coil this year. We’ve dedicated this collection, nearly 20 years after the fact, to Curt, the best of us, who passed away this fall, 2014 as I write this.

He’s missed not only as a great, intuitive and natural musician, but as a brave and loyal friend. Mike and I had known Curt since highschool, and though we grew apart after the band broke up, for over 20 years he and Mike were my closest friends and I saw them nearly every day.

When we didn’t practice we hung out together, watched football, drank beer and got high, hit the bars to see our friends’ bands when we weren’t playing ourselves or in one of the individual members’ side projects, got in trouble and chased girls.

We miss you and think of you often, old friend.
Guy, December 25, 2014