RIP BRAD BRICKS

Brad Hancock was shot and killed last Saturday night outside of a show in Salt Lake City.

The fact that something like this happened at a place where people would to go to blow off steam, see bands they loved, and get away from all the bullshit in their life is beyond depressing. Hardcore shows weren't always a sanctuary—there were always going to be disagreements and a fight every now and then—but 85% of the time, they were. Shows were always a place that you'd meet up and chat with friends you hadn't seen in a long time. You'd catch up and then bands would play some breakdowns and everyone would go nuts.

It was fun. Until it wasn't anymore. I've been out of it for a while, so I wasn't there the other night, but that doesn't mean it didn't have an effect on me.

I won’t pretend that Brad and I were close, because we weren’t. And I’m not going to try and convince anyone that I knew him the best, because I didn’t.

But we were friends. I met him as a young, punk kid that I liked because he gave a shit about something—even if it was the wrong thing sometimes. Whenever I'd book a show, or be at one with whatever band I was in at that time, he'd be there. Any time we'd make our way up to Ogden, Brad was there, ready and willing to help with anything we needed.

He changed a lot since I first met him, and I watched him go through the pains of growing up. We didn't hang out, and we barely ever spoke outside of shows, but I watched him get his shit together from a distance. He found a girl he adored and had a son that he loved more than anything in the world. It was nice to see. Now it's gone.

I never told him this, but I was proud of him.

I was, and still am, proud of the way he stepped up and changed course in his life. I'm proud of the way he shifted from that punk kid I met singing for Right on Track to an adult taking on serious responsibilities—especially the task of being a father. That's no easy job, and Brad was up for it.

It's sad for us that he's gone, and it's even worse for his fiancee and young son.

People have been stepping up over the past few days, raising money and trying to help out wherever possible. If you've got a few extra bucks, send it their way. They could really use the support.

There's a Go Fund Me page set up in his honor that you can find here: Go Fund Me for Brad Hancock and Family.

Also, my friends Troy and Gailon at King of Swords Tattoo here in Salt Lake City are getting into the spirit as well. On November 29, Thanksgiving weekend, they'll be doing walk-ins all day and donating the proceeds to Brad's family. Stop by the shop at 248 W. 900 S. in Salt Lake City that weekend, get tattooed and share your memories of Brad.

*UPDATE* Adam Gibson at Cathedral Tattoo will be doing walk-ins this weekend (11/22 & 11/23), donating all proceeds to Brad's family.

UNTIL MY HEART STOPS - UPDATE

I seriously doubt anyone still looks at my other blog (Until My Heart Stops), but in the off chance that someone does, I'm making a little update.

This project is still very much alive, it's just not alive in real time. The method used to be that I'd write a piece and post it immediately, but I stopped doing that a long, long time ago. Like 4 years ago. Ooops.

I transferred everything that's on this site to a Google Doc and added every other out of town date that I've played with Cherem, Tamerlane and Aftermath of a Trainwreck. I made little bullet points of things I remembered about each show and have been slowly plugging away at it ever since.

Earlier this year, I got a boring desk job that comes with A LOT of downtime. In some of that downtime, I've been pecking away at these stories and fleshing them out. The last entry that I published (July 19, 2005 - Redlands, CA) is pages 49-50 of that document. I just hit page 116 this morning. Things are moving along nicely.

My goal is to have the whole thing finished by the end of the year. I'll let it sit for a month or so then dive back in for rewrites. I want to make the tone consistent throughout and hit all the little things that I missed along the way - anecdotes, side stories, new recollections, etc.

The plan is to put it together with some fliers, photos, set lists, news articles and things like that and make a nice, limited edition book. Mostly it would be just for the dudes in the band, but depending on how it turns out and how much it costs to manufacture, I might make a few extra available in the off chance that other people want one.

We'll see. I'm determined to get this finished. Whether or not anyone actually sees it is another story all together.

Either way, I'm pretty proud of the progress, so I thought I'd throw it out there. It's kind of like taking a selfie at the gym - if there's no real time record of you doing it, then you didn't really do it in the first place. I didn't make the rules, but that's what they are.

Back to work.

CITY TO CITY

This is my love letter to City to City. I'm not ashamed of it at all.

For those that don't know, City to City is a band from Salt Lake that I absolutely loved. Granted, I'm great friends with every single person in the band, but that doesn't change the way I feel about their music. It was a great mix of hardcore, post-hardcore, rock & roll and good old punk rock.

They were a great live band and people loved watching them, because they were one of the rare SLC bands that had great sing-a-long choruses. That's not to say that other bands didn't try to write those parts, it's just that none of them did it as well as City to City did.

I tagged along the weekend they recorded and took my video camera to try and make some sort of documentary out of it for my old blog, Grudge City Activities. I managed to get some really good footage and I was actually pretty happy with the way it turned out.

The EP they recorded that weekend ranks among one of my favorite SLCHC releases to date and if you haven't heard it, you should.

You can download the entire thing for free by clicking this link.

Also, if you're interested, there's a whole bunch of old SLCHC releases in the GCA Music Archive—all free.

But back to City to City.

One of the best bands to have around and I miss them. This is all the footage I shot during that weekend and made in to 4 separate videos.

*Edited to Add*

I put a break before the videos because the page was taking forever to load, and that's not a good thing. So hit the jump to see the rest of the post. It's worth it.

OPENED UP

I just found the Opened Up archives.

For those of you not from SLC, Opened Up was a band I was in way back in the early 2000s. We were way into Starkweather, Skycamefalling, and a slew of other bands you've probably not thought about in a hot minute.

I grabbed the box I keep all my old show flyers in and at the bottom was a manilla envelope of everything we used to put the CD layout together. Hand written thank you lists, the lyric sheet, the photos, everything was there. It was a nice little trip down memory lane.

If you're curious, I wrote a bit more about the band over at my other (pretty much now defunct) blog. It's even got the MediaFire link if you want to actually listen to it. Beware though, we were young and banged the entire recording out in a single day.

Opened Up - SLCHC Music Archives from GrudgeCityActivities.com

CITY TO CITY

A couple of years back, my friends band was recording and I decided to tag along with the video camera. This is the 'teaser' for the in-studio documentary. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

WORLDBREAKER

Once upon a time I did a podcast for my other website (the recently put on hiatus GrudgeCityActivities). Casey, Dan and I had been talking about the Guinness Book of World Records wondering if there were any that would be easy enough to break. Casey had seen the Jalapeno Record attempt a few days before on the internet and it seemed like one that would work. We had our friend Travis come in and give it a shot, filmed it and threw it up on the Internet—exactly where ridiculous stuff like this belongs.

*Edited to Add* Upon re-watching this video I noticed something. Around the 2:50 mark, a little balloon pops up saying that the world record was set with pickled jalapenos and that we were mistaken. I edited this video originally and I didn't put that in. Someone from YouTube went through, saw this video and took it upon themselves to point out a mistake, even though we pretty much came to that conclusion ourselves after Travis couldn't swallow the fresh jalapenos. In summation: Fuck off, YouTube. Let us do our thing.

I SAY IMPORTANT THINGS

If you were unaware (and you might be, because I hardly ever mention it) I also write for/run a site called GrudgeCityActivities.com. Remember that, because we'll get back to it in just a minute. But now, imagine a ripple effect as I go for a bit of a flashback...

For the better part of two years now I've been a huge fan of podcasts. I had no idea what they were when they first hit the Internet, but slowly I started coming around. Podcasts are kind of like radio shows, but there's no commercials (usually) and any idiot with a microphone and GarageBand can make one (remember that part, too).

The first one I heard was SModcast. It's Kevin Smith and his producer/best friend Scott Mosier basically shooting the shit for an hour or so each week. It's hilarious and I look forward to it each time it starts downloading. After that, I looked around for more. Most news sites have old broadcasts in podcast form, Ira Glass has This American Life, ESPN's Bill Simmons has The BS Report (which is a close second to SModcast, in my opinion) and so on.

At first I thought you had to have access to professional microphones and all kinds of technical stuff, because they were basically radio shows. Then smaller podcasts started showing up everywhere and a lot of them were done on the cheap by people I know. A Damn Podcast is great and so is The Geek Show Podcast. After I heard those, I realized that literally anyone could have their own podcast.

With that, we decided that GCA should jump on the bandwagon. Only problem was that Dan and I together tend to talk about things that only interest us, and while they're great conversations usually, they might get a little boring. So we needed a Wild Card, of sorts. Someone that would speak before thinking and had a completely different outlook on things. So we called The Big Dogg. And since then, he's been the lifeblood of GCAcast with his crazy theories and tall tales.

Dan wanted to go with more of a magazine/newscast style with a few news stories, a new song review and then a feature, and that's the format we've been running with. When he moved out to NYC, Sias came on board and we've been rolling with he, Casey and myself ever since.

This is where the ripple effect would start up again as we jump back to the present.

GCAcast 11 went up last week and you should check it out.

It's gotten some pretty solid reviews and great pull quotes like these:

"It's the most boring thing I've ever heard." - Danny Payne
and
"I've honestly never made it through an episode." - Brook Lund

So if you're interested in hearing three dudes wax intellectual on things that no one really cares about, then check it out. Each episode is an hour of your life that you will never get back.

We were born to waste your time.

GCAcast on iTunes

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS AND OLD NEWS

And it's all the same.

Old News Records is closing up shop (that's the bad news). It was fun to do while it lasted, but no one really buys CD's anymore. It ended up being fiscally irresponsible (sounds professional, right?) for me to spend money printing CD's and trying to sell them to people that were going to go home, upload the songs to their computer and then throw rest of it away.

I realize I only put out two albums (Tamerlane and Up River) and it may seem like I didn't really try all that hard. Truth is, I didn't.

I didn't want to put forth a whole lot of effort into promoting bands that only 7 people remember and hope that more will be willing to plunk down their hard earned money to take a chance on something they may not even like.

And with the internet, all those songs were going to end up out there for everyone to hear before I could get around to doing it, anyway. Which was the whole point in the first place.

But with this minor downside, there is a massive upside (here comes the good news).

If you weren't aware, I also run a site called Grudge City Activities. It's a hardcore news blog with a heavy focus on the history of Salt Lake City hardcore. But there's a lot of other stuff, too—show videos, a podcast, photos, polls, etc. It's a cool site, and if you haven't checked it out, do that now.

One of the things we've been doing is compiling a massive archive of Salt Lake hardcore bands and Old News Records is basically being folded into this and losing the clever name. Plus, everything in the archive is 100% free. You can't pass that up. And it's far more appealing than charging you $5 for a CD you've never heard of.

I'm going to hold off on putting the Tamerlane and Up River stuff up in the archive just yet, because I still have quite a few copies. I'll still bring them around to shows that Collapse and Tamerlane play, so if you want a physical copy, come by and pick one up.

More importantly, I'll probably take a few copies of each (and a few copies of both Cherem albums and the 7") to the new Raunch Records in Sugarhouse. If you really want one, go there to get it. That guy deserves your support more than I do, so if you haven't been by yet do it today. Or tomorrow. Or every other day you have a chance to.

So thanks everyone for checking out the ONR releases, and thanks to everyone (Candace of CandaceJean for the awesome logo that I'm definitely going to keep for nostalgic purposes, especially) that helped me out in one way or another.

But head over to the GCA Music Archive to download some awesome (and free, did I mention free?) music.

GCA MIXTAPE: VOLUME 1 - UP NOW

It's finally done and ready to go. I worked hard on this thing and I'm really happy with the way it came together, so download it and give it a listen.

It's 11 unreleased tracks from 11 local bands around Salt Lake City and a few from Ogden. Mostly hardcore, but the majority of the bands are pretty diverse. So download it and give it a listen.

It's free. You can't pass that up even if you try.

DOWNLOAD

GCA MIXTAPE: VOLUME 1

This is what I've been working on for the past little while. If you don't ever visit GrudgeCityActivities.com (my other blog), this will be available as a free download sometime later this month.

11 unreleased/brand new tracks from 11 of Salt Lake City's finest bands.

Check out the sweet cover, designed by my man Dan Christofferson. It'll be up soon.