POTENTIAL

My friends and I started a new band. It's called Potential, and we recorded some songs last month. It's not a full-time band, or even a part-time band, really. It only existed in group text until we met up at the studio, and finished almost everything in a single session that day. No practices beforehand or anything. The five of us literally showed up at the studio around noon, played through the songs a few times, then hit record.

It was really easy and super fun. We also thought it would be cool to do something different for a release, so we ordered 23 lathe cut records. Of course, you can listen to it online if you want, too. The records are for anyone that still wants a physical copy of something, which is increasingly rare.

Anyway, here's a video that Dan shot while we were recording, and go to the band website if you want to hear the other 3 minutes of music we have.

THE COMEDOWN

What did I make it? Three days? Four?

Four days before I fell off. It wasn't intentional, but I just kind of forgot.

Saturday night, I went to see my friends band play at Urban Lounge, which isn't the best place for a small show. Bar shows are weird in general, because most people are there for the bar first and the band second, and that's not a concept that I ever dealt with in all my years of playing shows.

It made me (kind of) miss playing shows on a regular basis, but not enough to deal with all the other stuff that goes into being in a band full time. And by that I mean, finding a place to practice, coming to a compromise on what kind of stuff to play, figuring out and working around the schedules of three to four other people in their 30's with wives, families, full time jobs, etc.

Probably the biggest thing though is that I never really got as much out of being in a band compared to how much effort I put into them. The music should have just been enough, but there was so much other stuff that went with it, that I kind of soured on the whole thing. Maybe that will change.

I watched Dan, Matt, Chase and Drew play the other night and had a little urge to come out of retirement, but not a lot. Especially not to play at 10:30 at not even half-full bar. And the size of the crowd wasn't because of them. They've only played one other show, and it just seems that not as many people are interested in hardcore/punk anymore. All the kids are into EDM and DJ's and stuff like that. Probably because they're all on drugs.

But aside from that, Run Into The Sun is really good and you should listen to them. I'll make it easy for you.

With that, I'll hopefully be back tomorrow with more things to ramble about.

STREAM SOME OLD SLCHC

Every once in a while, someone will contact me (via text, FB message, Tumblr, email, etc.) to ask why Cherem or Tamerlane isn't on Spotify, and my answer is usually just a shrug followed by "I don't know."

When we recorded all that stuff, streaming services weren't a thing and most people still only wanted CD's. By the time the tide had fully shifted to digital, those bands had been dormant or dead for a while. I also don't think any of us knew how to get that stuff up on those sites, and it was a pretty low priority.

Last weekend, I found a site that basically did all the hard work for me. I spent a couple of hours putting everything that I had together and opened an Old News Records digital account. The plan I signed up for lets me have unlimited songs from 5 bands, and it spreads them across basically every digital/streaming site online. It took a few days to process (and a few of the sites are still processing them) but for the most part, they're up on iTunes, Apple Music, Google Play, and Spotify. Everything else like Tidal, Amazon, YouTube, Microsoft Groove, shouldn't be far behind. There are a few others that I've never heard of, but those aren't far behind either.

As of right now, you can stream everything that Cherem, Tamerlane, 78 Days After Death, Opened Up, and City to City ever recorded.

My original plan was to put up every old SLCHC band, but that was way more money than I wanted to spend. The plans come in tiers, and the first tier allowed for 5 bands so I chose the ones that I had a part in.

I'm not trying to make money off of this stuff, but in the off chance that someone actually buys any of these albums on iTunes (or streams the songs enough times that a little money is dropped into my account) I'll just use that to upgrade and add more stuff. There are tons of other bands like Dogwelder, Up River, Skeiff D'Bargg, and Pushing Up Daisies, that would be fun to add, but for now you've got these.

There are still a few kinks that I'm trying to work out—like the City to City and Tamerlane albums showing up under another artists page. Shockingly, there were other bands with those same names that beat us to these places, so they technically have claim to them. I've requested they be separated, but we'll see what happens.

To get things started, I made a Spotify playlist with everything that I uploaded on it to get you started. So there you go. If there are any issues that you come across, let me know. I haven't checked everything for quality, but everything should be fine. If it's not, email me at trevorhale@gmail.com and I'll look into it. But for now, enjoy a little bit of what the Salt Lake City Hardcore Scene looked like between 2000 and 2010.

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.

...AND IT'S DONE

For the time being, anyway.

There hasn't been much going on in the universe of satellite provider copy writing, so I've had plenty of time to work on those "Until My Heart Stops" entries. I've kept a pretty good pace since late summer and I'm actually really excited about the fact that I finished it.

Sort of.

I've been working on these stories for about 8 years now (I wrote the first one in February of 2005) and I've probably matured as a writer a little bit over that time. At least I hope I have. If I haven't, then I'm going to run into some serious problems over the next little while.

This was a huge undertaking and now that the first draft is done, I can move on to the second. I know that I need to let it sit for a while before taking it back out, but that's hard to do. I want to treat this as a real thing and give each character (i.e. real person) an actual voice and make it so it reads not so much like a collection of things that happened, but an actual narrative story broken up into segments. I started out just aping Get In The Van, but now I'm trying to figure out ways to avoid that.

There are a bunch of things I want to accomplish with this and make it more of an autobiography of a ten-year stretch of my life. Those ten years weren't incredibly compelling, but they were a lot of fun and made for some great stories. I'm pretty excited to put it out into the world, but that's still a ways away.

There's rewrites, layouts, pictures and a better title in the future, but for now, it's done. It's a cool feeling to finish something this big, but it also feels a little strange. I kind of thought it would be one of those things I kept plugging away at but never actually got anywhere with.

Thank god for corporate desk jobs with downtime, right?

RIP MICK MORRIS

We're a few months early, but it's that time of year again.

Our friend Mick Morris died a few months back because he had a heart condition. He thought he'd be okay and beat it, but one night after he left the hospital, he went to sleep and never woke up. It's a sad story because he was in his early 30's, had a fiance and a young son.

Mick was one of the first dudes I met when I started getting into hardcore, local shows, straight edge and veganism way back in the late 90's. He worked at The Heavy Metal Shop and lived at the house where the Bucket of Death was born. I hadn't talked to Mick for a few years because he had moved to California, played for Eighteen Visions and toured all the time. We just fell out of touch. He moved back to SLC a little bit ago, but I never crossed paths with him and heard about his death through the Internet.

This weekend, his old band Clear is getting back together for a reunion/benefit show for his son. They asked Tamerlane to play and we said yes. Daryl is busy with being a doctor and new dad and Jake wasn't interested, so we've got a couple of hired guns filling in. It's most likely our only show of the year, so come on out, support Mick's kid and watch a bunch of old guys relive their glory days.

It'll be a good time for a good cause.

INTERVIEW OUTTAKES - INSIGHT

Good news, guys! I'm starting a new irregular feature on this site - very similar to the My Friends Over You feature that barely ever gets used anymore. Exciting, right?

I've done a few really fun interviews within the past few months and recorded all of them. Mostly they've been for SLUG Magazine stories, and while I really liked how they turned out, there still wasn't enough room to fit everything in. No matter how many words I have to play with, it's never enough to get through everything we talk about during our conversation. I have to find a way to tighten everything up and sometimes the structure or focus of what the article ends up being about eliminates a huge chunk of the interview.

No matter how long we talk for, and no matter how long the piece is, the interviews still all get transcribed. I spend anywhere from half an hour to two or three typing out everything that was said and it seems like a shame to let some of that go to waste. That's where this new feature comes in.

Every once in a while, I'm going to take a portion of an interview and put it up here. I didn't do all that work for nothing, god damn it.

We'll start with the Insight piece. The actual article had almost nothing from Chubba, the drummer, but that's not because he didn't say anything. He talked a lot, but it was mostly during a portion where we discussed hardcore, straight edge, music and the state of all three back in the early 90's. There wasn't room for any of that stuff when the article started taking shape, though. It would have had to go in a much different direction and would have been hard to get back to the original focus.

But we still talked about some good stuff, so now, for your reading pleasure, INTERVIEW OUTTAKES episode 1, starring INSIGHT!

You can read the proper article at SlugMag.com, but here's the stuff from the cutting room floor.

Me: You guys were kind of the first straight edge band in Salt Lake. What was that like and what do you remember about it?

Jeremy Chatalain: I knew you were going to ask this question. I found straight edge accidentally. Andy, that was just here, he was an obsessive record collector like me. We would go to Raunch every week and buy first pressings of everything we could get. I met him at a skate shop and he asked me if I’d heard of all these bands like Justice League, Minor Threat, 7 Seconds. I went over to his house to borrow records and he drew big X’s on my hands. I was like ‘what is that?’ He just said ‘straight edge’. I said, ‘I don’t know what that is’ and he explained it to me and that was just who I was anyway. I was a skateboarder, I was Mormon growing up, and it fit my lifestyle 100%. I could get behind that. For me, straight edge was all about the music that came with it. The energy was totally addictive. One by one, as we put the band together, James and Doug, James you were into hardcore.

James Holder: Yeah, I was in to hardcore. It was more the skate rock stuff. I grew up in Heber, so Gentry (Densley) and I grew up together and he knew these guys. We were always listening to metal or a lot of skate rock stuff. Then I got in to straight edge.

Jeremy Chatalain: Mark and I had some conversations because we had been in bands before Insight, and that was kind of the thing that brought us together on the same plain. Then we were like, ‘this is what we want to do: thrashy hardcore, that’s fast and kind of metal.’ Then Mark felt like he had some things to say, and there was this platform, so not only was it about straight edge, but at the time all of us were vegetarian, there was anti-racism, everything that we thought were positive stances to take. Nobody around here was doing it and it wasn’t what it turned into eventually. The only people that were straight edge were people that we knew. When bands would come through town that were straight edge, we’d hang out with them and go skating or take them to raging waters. That was the extent of it. There wasn’t any tough mentality about it at all.

Me: There weren’t any other straight edge bands in Salt Lake at the time, right?

Jeremy Chatalain: Better Way, Gentry’s straight edge band, started pretty soon after.

Chubba: As much as straight edge it was the unity, the positive kind of thing. Everyone was friends. We played shows just about every weekend at Speedway or The Word. It was just a close community of friends.

Jeremy Chatalain: Insight shows in the late 80s were like kids from all of our high schools, sxe kids, hardcore kids, punk rockers, hippies and just a lot of energy. It started off where we’d play shows and you’d know everyone in the crowd. You’d play The Word and there’d be 35 people and you’d know all of them. Then suddenly new people that we didn’t know were showing up in Uniform Choice shirts, and more hardcore people popping out of the woodwork. Eventually we could pretty much fill up the Speedway.

Photo by Steve Midgley

Me: What have you noticed about the evolution of hardcore?

Jeremy Chatalain: Jamie and I played in other bands, but I did almost a complete 180 afterwards because I discovered Led Zeppelin. I feel like I was the same exact person, but my musical tastes just ballooned. The rest of these guys got into jazz, but I never really caught that bug. We all tried to do something different. I wasn’t involved in the scene too much after Iceburn. I had a serious thirst for music and that’s what I wanted to do—so much so that the bigger picture wasn’t really on my mind.

Chubba: Iceburn was kind of all over. We had quite the evolution and it still had a little bit of hardcore roots to it, a little bit metal, but the songs were more complicated. Once Jeremy and Doug moved on and James moved on, we kind of evolved through all these different genres but there was always a jazz influence and a classical influence. Gentry has a million ideas in his head always. There was a time when we were part of the scene, but there’d be maybe 10 people at the show.

Jeremy Chatalain: I feel like whenever I’d come home and go to an Iceburn show, it was like they’d kind of created their own scene. They were definitely a unique band.

Chubba: The hardcore scene for me kind of ended when everyone moved on and Iceburn slimmed down and went a different direction we kind of got out of the hardcore scene. We played a lot of different shows with different bands.

James Holder: With Insight we weren’t deliberately trying for it, we just played music and ended up as part of the scene. It was just part of the chemistry of it.

Jeremy Chatalain: More than any of the beliefs, I was into the music and I think these guys felt the same way. I think that’s why sometimes Insight was so intense. I also think that the flow and how things ended up – I think hardcore is a young man’s game. It takes youthful energy to have a scene and have these intense shows and I know they happen now. I work with kids that go to hardcore shows and go to house shows and do sing alongs. It happens, I know it, but it just seems the natural order of things for people to drop off and new people come up. When you’re young you can be so hyper focused on one thing and you have all this time for it and all this energy for it. At the time in 1988, I was all about hardcore. When you’re 17, 18 19 you follow this band and your belief system fits right in with theirs and suddenly they go a different direction, you’re like ‘you betrayed me.’ I’ve had these intense conversations with people over the years and they say things like, ‘I loved the first Jets To Brazil album, Orange Rhyming Dictionary, but what the fuck happened with your second record?’ And I would always have to remind them, ‘Do you realize how offensive that is?’ We’d just worked on that record for two years and if a band doesn’t evolve, they’re going to be bored shitless. If a band makes the same record over and over again they’re going to become bored and if someone is just a fan, but doesn’t play music, it’s really difficult to explain that to them.