Soylent Green began as a social basement band in December of 1996. Mike Snyder-Barker had happened to meet up with Dana Gillen after Dana’s return to the Adrian area. Mike & Dana had played together in a college band called Albino Zoo (with Chris Broski & Jim Maxwell) several years previous and decided they wanted to put together a band for fun. Mike called up John Ward, another old friend who he had played with briefly in the band “BlackBird” (with Dave Roof & Dave Gillen). Mike called another friend, Stuart MacDonald, (who had no previous experience in a band, but was interested in trying out as a singer). We jammed together for a while until we decided that we would like to perform in front of an audience.

    Our first live performance was in front of a large auditorium in Tecumseh, Michigan. We performed two songs. Other performers that day included a daddy/daughter duo, ballet and acrobats from local children’s schools, you get the picture. We enjoyed live entertainment. However, Stuart’s other duties made it difficult to continue with the commitment, since we thought of doing more than just goofing around.

    Mike then called a guy named Mark Huff, who he had jammed with years before and saw around the local music scene periodically. However, Mark didn’t stick around long. Mike’s brother Matt Linton (with no previous band experience) joined us and we did several live gigs together and wrote, produced and recorded several songs as a unit. However, Adrian was not the life for Matt and he loaded up his truck and he moved to A2, Ann Arbor that is. While Matt was with us we recorded songs in a very interesting way. Dana had an old reel to reel recorder. We would record guitar, bass and drums on the reel to reel, then take these tracks to Dana’s house and add vocals, other percussion and guitars and run this through his computer. This continued to be a lot of fun, although somewhat tedious until Dana purchased a mini disc recorder. By that time, Matt had moved on to Ann Arbor and we were left trying to be vocalists, which didn’t please our spouses ears. However, we continued to keep focused on creating a sound uniquely our own.

    Then an opportunity to perform at Dana & Mike’s undergrad college occurred. So we thought we would try to track down a few old band mates of ours, of course including John in the performance as well. So we tracked down Chris Broski, the former lead singer & guitarist (madman) from the Albino Zoo band. Chris joined us for a few practices and we performed at Adrian College. The Performance hall was not set up for a performance that night, so we decided to perform in the parking lot.  This drew some attention by passersby who had been at the college bonfire. However, they did not stop for long as college kids usually would prefer to enjoy their music on a Friday night in an altered state of consciousness. This was not an acceptable location for this activity. But I digress.

    While all this was being set up Dana purchased a CD recorder and burned a sparse number of CD’s at least for the band members who were on the recordings. This was primarily John, Dana & Mike, however, Matt was on a few tracks. We kept plugging away within the 3-year history of this band with Dana, Mike, and John being at the core. Much in the vein of Spinal Tap, we haven’t lost our current singer. We continue to create songs that we find interesting and feel that Chris has brought some new life into the band. He is experienced, not only in the music arena, but also creating and maintaining web sights, as well as the workings of a computer program that has made our recordings much more adventurous and opened new horizons of merger between technology & art.

--- Mike ---- (9/29/98)