"the rise and fall of the bgt empire"
or 
"anyone can do this, everyone should do this"

by king maxwell

Bryon was an unknown crap. He was a good debater, but without a big school name, a lot of money or a giant coaching staff, he was not well known. The debate was really close. Dartmouth clearly won the debate, but Bryon had them on the ropes and we all saw that there was fear in their eyes. The Dartmouth guys became mean and pushed their weight around. I was just enough of an unknown factor that they became dangerously afraid that I would vote against them.

I sat there curious about what I would do. I wanted to vote for Pitt to send a signal to all the asshole debate teams out there . . . but I knew that Dartmouth had won the debate. In the end, I did what any self-serving depressed sack of shit does . . . votes for Dartmouth.

The next time Bryon and I crossed paths was at a gaming convention. I had come to Pitt to work on my PHD and didn't know anyone. I went to a gaming convention to play a board game I liked and because there was a poker tournament. Bryon was there to play Magic, a collectable card game, over which I had just gotten over my own addiction to. Bryon recognized me and we chatted about random shit for a few minutes. I discovered that Bryon was actually competing in a tournament right then. It was my first indication that Bryon Gill was something special. Bryon has that certain madness in him that lets him put aside the things that he should do and in exchange, doing the things that he wants to do. Bryon did quite well in that tournament despite having taken time off to jaw with me. We agreed to get together to hang out and play some magic.

Of course we didn't. I didn’t really want to play magic, I was bored with the game. So instead I ignored the phone message and it slipped into oblivion.

A month later or so, I went to play the board game Samurai with my friend Holly and her new boyfriend Michael. Bryon was there and we played a vicious game filled with intrigue and lots of back-handed deals. Eventually Bryon and I devoured Michael and Holly and I was able to kill Bryon. I was sleepy, because killing all these other players had taken many hours and it was almost 2am. Bryon was really excited because he had just put some songs on his website. He wanted us to hear them. So he dialed in with Holly's computer and we all sat around listening to his homemade music. I wasn't particularly impressed.

Bryon seemed to be ignoring everyone else's obvious exhaustion and was thrilled that three other humans were actually listening to his music. I asked some questions just to be nice. "Was it hard to record it?" (no, because he had taped it with a shitty walkman). "How did you get that screeching sound?" (that is feedback that he couldn't figure out how to get rid of, so he incorporated it into the song). As we were leaving, I made another tepid offer to get together, suggesting that we play some magic, or I could play bass and add it to his songs.

I played bass in high school in a couple of shitty rock bands (all named for slang terms for the vagina if I remember correctly). I also played in some disastrous punk bands. In college I became a much bigger fan of punk/hardcore music than an actual musician myself. I played some pick-up music, but nothing serious.

So I came over to his apartment in Squirrel hill and brought my magic cards. At first we just played magic. I would amaze him with all the old cards I had and he would dazzle me with new ones. He could tell I wasn't really into it, so after a few visits, he suggested that next time I bring my amp and guitar. I said that I would.

I figured that I never would. Deep inside I was terrified because I knew that I couldn't really play any music. I knew how to play Twist of Cain by Danzig and a few random riffs. I knew maybe six notes on the guitar. But I was the original inept musician. In all the other bands I was in, the guitarist just told me what to play and I did. I didn't have ANY musical talent or the patience to actually teach myself.

Bryon called a couple of times and I bagged on him. Finally I just told him that I wasn't very good and that he probably didn't want to play with me. But if he really wanted I would come over and he could teach me one of his songs.

I brought over my bass and amp with a lot of trepidation. I was really worried. Bryon and I set up and he helped me tune (yet another musical skill I never picked up!) Then he patiently walked me through one of his songs, I think it was buzzer. It was sort of metal and kind of catchy. I was enjoying the basic stuff and starting to feel good about jamming (and my fingers started to hurt).

Bryon went to the bathroom and I started to play sympathy for the devil (a song I had played in a rock band in high school) except I had fucked up the notes and was playing it way to fast. When he came out, he started to play along with me and I just started screaming out some words. I was yelling about sex (something that is always on my mind) and killing people and some old Ice-T rhymes. It sounded like absolute shit.

Bryon suggested we add a slower part and I started to realize that he was thinking about this as a SONG rather than a bathroom break. I got nervous again. I figured that I was just going to be backing him up on his songs. . . I'd never written a song in my life! But he was so into it, and after we played the slower part and the fast part together it sort of sounded like a song. I was still screaming inane lyrics, assuming that we'd write some serious ones later. We played for another ten minutes and then my fingers hurt too much. I agreed to come back and try it again.

The next day I started to make up a silly poem in the car about a romance turned nasty. I called it a car jack love affair, thinking about all the times that I had been fucked with by people I was in love with. My wife thought the poem was dumb, but jokingly suggested that Byron and I could turn it into a song. So I brought he words to the next session and they fit perfectly into the song we had banged out the previous practice.

It was amazing! It was our own song! Something that I had helped to create! I even made up most of it. In our early practices, I used to require that we would play that song four or five times, just to get the feel of it. It was really comforting, to play a song that you wrote that you know really well . . . and to this day, I love the first few notes of that song, they just make me feel good.

Bryon and I talked after the second practice about doing more song creation. I figured that we could write a song every two practices and then bang out an album in a couple of weeks (ha!)! We started to talk about the musical project as a collaborative one, rather than me just playing Bryon's songs. Bryon had some old half-finished songs that had been bubbling and I was writing lots of dumb songs all the time. We started percolating.

We had our problems; I still couldn't really play. A number of the songs that Bryon wanted to play I was too shitty of a bass player to actually implement. So we changed the songs around so that I could play them. I couldn't keep time, so Bryon downloaded a free drum program on the computer that would help me to keep time. And Bryon was a music fascist.

Bryon would conceptualize a song in his head and orchestrate the entire thing, even if I couldn't or didn't want to play it. So we had a lot of fights about the way songs were supposed to go. If I wanted to change one small part about a song I had to insult Bryon and start a big fight in order to get any changes. Add to this my own feelings of inadequacy about my musical skills and I felt like I was in the Smashing Pumpkins under Billy Corgan. Bryon had his own problems, he was a great musician, but had never really thought about playing songs that people wanted to hear. And he had never really played in a band before.

Bryon had fucked around in high school, but he was really excited to be in an active musical project. He had taught himself to play guitar and had been building up all this musical energy for years . . . I was lucky to be able to tap into his years of not-playing.

So we fought and wrote songs. Outside of the first song we wrote, my songs were almost all political. I wrote one about a friend who had anorexia and my own responsibility in contributing to her eating disorder. Bryon wrote a folk-song about nuclear bombs that was really funny. I wrote a song about getting a B from a bullshit professor. We wrote a song together about how bad-ass we were. Bryon wrote some sci-fi inspired ones. We plundered our existence and found our sound diverse.

That was kind of a problem. As we were coming together as a band, I was becoming much more in touch with the local punk/hardcore scene. I was a big hardcore fan in college, but felt a bit intimidated by the Pittsburgh punk scene. It was much larger and more diverse than any other scene I had ever known. I felt like a punk, I listened to punk and hung out with some punks. But Bryon was not a punk, and our sound was not punk.

Our sound was twisted. Bryon added a lot of metal influences and some bluesey/crazy shit. I wanted to play everything faster . . . together we created something that would turn off almost everyone who listened to us. Couple this with the fact that the computer had become more and more important to our sound. We figured that getting a real drummer was simply impossible. No one would want to play with the intense crazy guy and the idiot who plays bass worse than Sid Vicious. So instead we started using the computer to play drums. Bryon would run his PC through his stereo and create a basic drum track. We both started programming drums on a computer program, but I didn't have the patience for it. So I would make Bryon program all the drums. We weren't really a band . . . more like a bad step-child.

I decided to call us the Bryon Gill Trio as a joke. Bryon was always really quiet and I was pretty outgoing, so I figured that Bryon would kinda lose out without some leveling influence. We had bounced around a thousand names and couldn't decide on anything. Bryon was really uncomfortable with the band being named after him. He really thought I was making fun of him. His girlfriend Marie put up the strongest argument wondering aloud what would happen if we weren't very good and Bryon was stuck with the name (she would know, we practiced in her dining room for the entire life of the band!)! But I argued that we were destroying every other musical convention, we may as well kill the idea of naming your band "disemboweler" or "plague in a can". We would have a folk-band-sounding name, play with a computer on the drums and fucking freak people out!

All the while we were growing, Bryon was fighting a war in his apartment. His roommates hated the band and I can't really blame them. We filled up the entire dining room with amplifiers, microphones, computers and random shit. We smelled like goats in heat and we were loud. We tried to compromise, but we would inevitably piss someone off.

I was becoming better friends with some Pittsburgh Punk legends. I met the members of Aus Rotten at an animal rights protest I was organizing. They were really fucking nice. They not only remembered my name, but also remembered who I was and we started to hang out. Dave, the lead singer brought a bunch of radical books down to the cafeteria to sell to the apathetic Pitt students. I was running around helping out with a feminist meeting and the animal rights table. Once I started to slow down, I chatted with Dave for a while and he offered the extra seat in their van for a small tour they were doing. I was ecstatic and said yes. So I would go on tour with them as their local animal rights crazy.

The tour convinced me that Aus Rotten was one of the coolest bands ever. They had friends everywhere they went and were treated like kings/queens. And instead of being assholes, they just became nicer. Whenever things went poorly, they just grinned and tried to make things better. And they brought me, someone they had only met a handful of times before, along on a fucking tour. It was simply overwhelming.

On the tour, we planned a concert to benefit the Primate Freedom Tour. I had even mentioned that Bryon and I might be interested in playing. Dave and Corey convinced me that we should. And we planned for an amorphous show in the future . . . that quickly became a reality. A half a dozen punk bands were booked and I reserved an auditorium on campus. We got fucked around by the administration for the show, and were forced to hire cops. The turnout was small and a bunch of awesome bands were there to help the animal rights struggle.

And here Bryon and I were -- getting ready to play our first show. I have debated in front of thousands of people, spoken to crowds that were ten times the size of that crowd, and never been nervous. That night I was almost ready to shit my pants.

I was running around so much and I was so nervous that when we stepped on stage, it simply overwhelmed me. We were on a punk bill with Anti-product and Aus Rotten . . . for our first gig! We played to an almost empty crowd -- people milling around 60 feet in the back, but it felt incredible, as though something in me was alive for the first time. We played six songs -- with a computer set up and run through the PA. We sang a folk-song and had zero stage presence.

I didn't realize quite how out of the loop we were, but on reflection we were a million miles away from the rest of the punk scene. Both Bryon and I were wearing political T-shirts, white shoes and socks and shorts. We didn't have any patches, and we had simple white guitars. We didn't have a drummer-we used a computer. We are both a bit heavy . . . and the music. . . .well the music was not punk. We stuck out like an Earth First!er at a frat party.

When we got off stage (fourteen minutes after we started) -- I asked Corey what he thought. He was really kind . . .telling me how much he liked one of the songs. Eric didn't say anything, but I could see him grimacing from the stage. My partner Elena suggested that we needed more practice. The general consensus was that we stunk . . .

. . . .But I had gotten the bug and was convinced that we could play an important role in the Punk community because we were radicals. For me punk was supposed to be anti-fashion and supportive of individualism. But the reality is that no-one wants to be all that different, and even within punk there are certain ways of doing things . . . we were not doing things the way we were supposed to. So we went back and practiced, we wrote new songs, talked about politics and decided to try to make our own music and decided to fuck what people wanted to hear.

Our second show was with BGA, the local drunk-punk wizards Beer Guzzling Assholes. Like our first gig, we got on through some suspicious means. One of my students in a summer class discovered that I liked punk and offered to put me on the bill. I don't know if it was a move to try to get a better grade or not, but I jumped at the chance to play again.

It turned out that we were playing on the last night of a famous Pittsburgh club the Last Decade. The show hadn't been promoted at all, and there was nobody there. We showed up early (a hallmark of an incurably anal-retentive bass player) and then went out to eat while more people supposedly showed up. An hour later, no one was there except my friend Ron. So we set up, putting the computer where the drums would be and while I fizzled, Bryon played solitaire on the computer on the stage. I set out some vegan lemon cookies and we started to play to our partners and my friend Ron. Since there was no one there, I decided to try to insult people in order to get them from the bar into the back room where we were playing. It didn't work, but I did make BGA (who were trying to get drunk) mad.

I had decided that we needed costumes, so I dressed up in a Kimono that I had bought in Kyoto earlier that summer. Bryon wore his karate Gi. I had on a rock-climbing helmet with a stuffed squirrel jammed into the front. We looked like some kind of maniac bus had overturned on a computer chess club party. I was trying to convince people to come and hear us play -- alternately bribing them with free lemon cookies and insulting them for having no musical taste. So in frustration, I started to disrobe, exclaiming loudly that the fat kids were getting naked, and that anyone with their clothes on must suck . . .

We played a much better set -- we now had a couple of songs with some serious groove to them, including Civil War Pittsburgh, and Frustration Station. (At this show we played one of our best versions ever of CWP . . . it was actually caught on tape and it made it onto our first demo). But no matter how strange or energetic we were, no one would come to listen. So we went to get some burritos. When we returned BGA were in the middle of their set and were all naked. Apparently, while I was calling on everyone in the audience to get naked, they were stripping at the bar. So we watched the slow collapse of their set and the drunken state of the rest of the club wondering when it would be our turn. . .

We decided to make a demo CD. We recorded it entirely in Bryon's dining room around the complaints of his roommates. I discovered that I hated recording with a passion and that Bryon had an eye for perfection that made us go over songs that I swore were perfect. We recorded it all digitally on his computer with like 18 dollars worth of cheap software and radio-shack microphones. Given the constraints, it came out really well. I forced us to use a half-a-dozen sound bites ranging from my favorite kung-fu movies to the sounds of activists getting ready to burn down the state. We recorded a half-a dozen songs and while Bryon mixed them, I created a song out of my favorite Simpson's samples and a Malcolm X speech. We burned 45 copies and just tried to get them out into people's hands.

The demo was finished just in time for us to play the Primate Freedom Tour that hit Pittsburgh in August of 1999. The tour featured some of the most awesome punk bands on the planet and once again, we were opening for bands that were out of our league. We opened for Oi Polloi and Harum Scarum at the Upstage with more than a hundred people in the crowd. Despite our best intentions, we did not go over very well.

I decided that since I owned a gorilla suit, I should wear it when we played. I didn't really think about the fact that it was more than 90 degrees without wearing a gigantic rubber and faux fur suit. We got all set up, hooked the computer into the PA and then took the stage wearing an ape suit. We started the first song and I realized that I couldn't sing or play because I was wearing the stupid suit! Worse than that, I was having a hard time breathing and was sweating like a rabid rhinoceros. I pulled off the suit, but I had lost quarts of water in sweat and couldn't stand up. I had to play wobbling around like I was drunk. Our sound suffered unfortunately, and given our style of music and the lack of a human drummer, we weren't really garnering any converts.

That night I sold a lot of copies of my zine King Maxwell's Snotrag but only a handful of demos. I started to watch the other bands to see what they did in order to get the crowd moving. I was torn, I really wanted to play my own sound and to do whatever we wanted to do, but I also was getting sick of looking out at a crowd that just wanted us off the stage. I realized that so long as there were only two of us, there wasn't much that we could really do to change things. . .

One thing that I figured I could do, was to get more fans for the BGT. A couple of weeks later when we were scheduled to play a basement show in Mount Oliver, I decided that the big problem was that I wasn't forcing my friends to come see my band. All the other bands I knew had a consistent fan base that they could expect to show up and save any performance from total disaster. All Bryon and I had were Marie and Elena, and even they were getting sick of us. So I called on all my debaters to come and see the show. I organized a couple of cars and got more than a dozen debaters up to a basement show.

This was yet another idea that backfired. It was another example of culture clash. The debaters & punks crossed fashion lines and there was a mild animosity . . . and for the first time in our history, Bryon and I really sucked. For all our other failed shows there was a firm feeling that we had played what we wanted to, but failed to get the crowd to dig us. But at this show, we failed the crowd. In the middle of the first song, Carjack love affair, I snapped my A-string and wrecked the song. And we couldn't get the computer to properly mesh with the PA, so we only had one channel of drum sound. So I couldn't hear the drums and was hideously off-time. Bryon had brought a $7 bass guitar that he bought recently and I picked it up to play, but it was built for the Keebler elves and the frets were really close together, the result was that I played all the wrong notes for the rest of the show. I could see Bryon cringe, I could see the audience cringe, and I could hear how bad we sucked. The only thing that redeemed that show was the crazy cover of A Tribe Called Quest's Excursions. But we proved to the world that we sucked that night and we proved it to our biggest crowd ever! We did make buddies with Anihilation Uprising, a cool punk band who played and even lied and told us that they enjoyed our show.

So Bryon and I put our heads down on our chests in shame and started looking for a drummer. We figured that we needed to do something, because we simply couldn't convey the energy that we wanted with just the two of us.

We wrangled up a few people as prospects, but none of them really wanted to play with us . . . so we continued to slog away with the computer (which was becoming increasingly a drag because neither of us wanted to program anything more than the most rudimentary beats). All of the sudden, the gods dropped Zack in our laps.

I was playing on the computer in my office when a new grad-student showed up to ask me about what classes to take. I looked up and I saw this freaky looking kid covered with patches, leather bracelets, a nose-ring, and spacers in his ears and carrying the longest skateboard I'd ever seen. A punk, it was an honest-to-Allah punk in my department! I couldn't believe it. It was like finding a mix tape on the ground with all your favorite song on it, it was both unlikely and really cool! Zack did his undergraduate at Penn state and had come to Pitt to get a PHD, but Pittsburgh was his home. Zack's dad had been one of the 1970's Steelers and had four super-bowl rings, so he was actually a local.

We took to each other pretty quickly. Zack was funny and pretty cynical about the bullshit of school. Once he figured out that graduate school was a scam to avoid having to work for another few years, he got oriented. The twisted thing was that Zack had played drums in a big Ska-Punk band from State College called No On 15. I immediately started to work on getting him together to jam. I sort of figured that if I could snatch him up to drum with us, it might be the solution to a lot of our problems. . .

But there were problems. Zack's drums were still in State College and they were recording and he had agreed to play on their recording. And I was worried about music clash -- I was used to Bryon's craziness about music and love for metal, but what would Zack do? Could Bryon deal with Zack's lust for melody? Would they hate each other? I really liked Zack and started to hang out with him -- eating vegan food, doing political shit with him etc. Bryon and Zack seemed like a recipe for trouble -- they were different personalities and they differed in music . . .

Bryon and I went to see Zack's last show with No On 15 at Coolpeppers. We were stunned with how good of a drummer he was. He held together a pretty tight band. . . Now we had a new problem -- was Zack too good of a drummer for us? Would we be able to hold his attention with our random crazy ass shit?

We finally got together and it was like having sex without a condom on for the first time. It was amazing -- the sound filled out our crazy noise and let us both be a little bit more free. Zack was exactly what we needed, but we needed to convince him to be in the band. So we talked about it, played some pool, talked about musical goals, and interests and tried to hammer it out. Zack was honest that he didn't like about 50% of our songs and that he was worried about trying to fit in the middle of a project. We agreed to scrap a bunch of our old songs and write new songs with Zack, including playing one of his songs that he had recently percolated -- best song in a while.

The three of us started hanging out and jamming. We argued almost as much as when it was just me and Bryon, but slowly we started to find our groove, and some new songs came pretty quickly. We were up to 8 songs and a 25 minute set (including witty banter) when we got the offer to play a benefit of Food Not Bombs, a local group that both Zack and I had been helping out with.

The Food Not Bombs show represented a real turning point in the band. We were all pretty nervous, but when we took the stage to kick off the show, we really turned it on. There were a lot of old friends and a bunch of the South Oakland punks were there, and we surprised a lot of people who had seen us before and give us up as a shitty/weirdo band. We blitzed through a bunch of songs and got people moving. People were almost universally supportive and we were pretty high energy. I was bouncing around to our new song about how fucked up the drug war was. Our new set was filled with political songs and I was feeling much more confident on the bass. We weren't tight, but we were powerful, and for the first time, I could see the crowd react.

We were psyched and stepped up to write more songs and try to get some more shows given our busy schedules. Zack and I were trying to do school, Bryon was working insane hours at a computer company and I was fighting through a rough debate season. Joe the Punk was in my debate class and he offered us the opportunity to play in his basement for a back to school bash. We were also offered a show at the Mr. Roboto Project with the insano-band (the) Control Group -- whose drummer Tim was drumming for Aus Rotten when I went on tour with them.

We played the show at the Roboto project, and it felt like we were back to our old shitty ways. Bryon was working late and couldn't get to the show until 9:00pm. So the bands we were supposed to open for (53rd State & CG) played and their fans had already left. We took the stage and the lights were all on, and no one was dancing and we sort of fell apart. We hadn't practiced much and it showed. We tried to play an old Clash song and since I couldn't sing it, I could see everyone wincing . . . we thundered through and once again, I felt as though we simply sucked.

I always show up to shows early to ensure that we have time to get loaded in and set up. I hate being late and always force Bryon and Zack to get ready like 3 hours before the show. For Joe's show, I had no idea exactly how late the show would run. So when I had us show up an hour early, and Joe was running on Punk Rock Time . . . we sat around for a long while. But the punks were friendly, a bunch of them had seen us at the Food Not Bombs benefit and recognized the band name. The basement was incredibly dirty and there was a big pool of water in the middle. The PA kept shorting out and the whole place smelled like piss. It was awesome. My stomach turns just thinking about the show.

From our first song, we simply exploded. We were pressed up against a big crowd of punks and we just let ourselves go -- the music and the people got all mixed up and we rocked. We played all our songs and got hotter and hotter, jumping up and down . . . it was like nitroglycerin. We even played the clash song and got the crowd to sing along. Easily the best show we ever played. The crowd loved it, and despite the fact that we didn't have leather jackets with big patches on it, we impacted the crowd.

But every great show has its foil and ours came the next time we played with (the) Control Group. We had played a bunch of shows, but (not surprisingly) we had never been paid for any of them. So when Bryon told me that a buddy of his from high school was willing to book us for a show at California University of PA AND willing to PAY us, I was baffled! We invited Control Group to come and they agreed. But the communication lines between here and Indiana are a little bit frazzled. Bryon didn't hear Control Group because he was still on his way to the Roboto show when they played, so I described their sound to him over the phone and he passed it on to his buddy Rob at Indiana. As that twisted game of Telephone got stretched out, Rob got the idea that they were a heavy metal band (when in fact strange jazz is a lot closer to the truth).

So we showed up at Indiana and set up at the coffeehouse. The flyers advertised an evening of Metal. . . we were surprised because we had prepared a coffee-house set that included the old folk song that Bryon and I had played sans Zack. Control Group were even more baffled. We played our explosive political hardcore (I decided at around this time to start describing our sound as hardcore because it was the closest thing that fit) and no one in the audience moved. There were two dozen people there, and they all just sat there. Many of them were playing checkers and board games while we did our set. The same thing happened for Control Group . . . it simply amazed me. To see one of the best bands in Pittsburgh and not pay any attention, it is like seeing the Rolling Stones in 1954 . . . they ain't famous yet, but they will be!

We started practicing and playing regularly. The band was moving on, and I was really happy. I got mad and yelled at Zack and Bryon still. I became the band totalitarian, forcing us to abandon some songs, and get to gigs on time, but they put up with me and even ridiculed me a little bit. My playing got better, Bryon started to experiment with melody and Zack remembered what heavy music was like. We were a rocking band . . . at times.

We played a disastrous show at Coolpeppers with the Burning Sensations where I twisted my knee in the middle of the first song. I hurt myself so badly that I could barely play and had to be rushed for the hospital and six weeks of physical therapy afterwards.

But we also played great shows like the benefit for Books for Prisoners where we talked about politics and sung new songs like Food Not Bombs, and One Dollar One Vote.

We also made a bunch of friends. We played a lot with Annihilation Uprising. We came to find our musical heroes in Gunspiking, we loved Control Group, The Burning Sensations put up with tons of our shit, the guys in Aus Rotten would slog down to whatever shitty place we were playing to cheer us on, and the South Oakland Punks started to learn our songs. I couldn't believe it, when we played at Joe the Punks one time when all of the sudden, a handful of local punks started to sing our songs! It just blew me away.

And things got better . . . We were offered a place on the Iron City Punk Volume III CD that was being put together from Robbie of Silver Tongued Devil. We recorded with Kyle from WPTS (the Pitt radio station) and got a powerful sound for our two songs. Everywhere, it felt as though people were reaching out to help us. Not only were we going to be on a comp with the best bands in pittsburgh (BGA, Aus, STD, Submachine, Anti-flag), but we were able to record the songs on a shoe-string budget with an engineer who did a kick-ass job for fucking FREE (well, we had to pay him in burritos)!

But pride goeth before the fall . . . just when I really wanted to impress Silver Tongued Devil to show them that they didn't totally fuck up by putting us on the compilation, I set up a show with STD, 53rd State and us at the Roboto. I promoted, and flyered the shit out of this show and it just didn't work. A small handful of people showed up and my anal-retentive, flair for the dramatic got the best of me and I had a full-scale flip out. I decided to fuck up our set with dumb shit (I had been listening to the Dwarves too much, so it really wasn't my fault!). But I fucked up our songs, forgot our words, couldn’t play for shit and took off all my clothes in the middle of the set.

Behind my foolishness was a lot of anxiety about setting up a show and wanting to impress STD. And I was still worried that we couldn't draw people to come see us. When were on a bill with someone else they wanted to see, people would come and enjoy our set, but when we were the attraction, people just didn't really come to see the show. To make matters worse, Silver Tongued Devil played the best set I'd ever seen them play . . . and I'd seen them a lot! It’s a wonder Robbie still talks to me!

A few days later, I felt a lot better when we played for a packed house opening for Broken and React. The folks who came to see the political punk/hardcore seemed to like our style a lot. We had a bunch of new demos that we recorded live from practice sessions with Zack. People were buying our Demo and loving our sound. We also decided to turn up the volume knobs -- firmly believing that fuck-ups don't sound all that bad when they are LOUD!

We played another great show at Joe the Punk's house making me think (and wonder aloud) that maybe basement shows in South Oakland were our biggest strength. We played a hot and angry set that got everyone really moving. We had more people who knew the words to our songs and lots of energy. So much power that my body couldn't even hold it together and I almost passed out during Food Not Bombs. Zack's drumming was like thunder and Bryon's guitar slashed through the crowd.

We had been talking with Gunspiking about doing a tour because our politics and sound were so similar and plus because they are wicked cool. We had been talking about recording a split 7" and we wrote a bunch of new songs for an album.

But even great things sometimes go out with a bang. Three days ago, almost a full year after we started playing, Bryon decided to head to Boston to go to school at a new experimental computer science school. The experiment that started over Samurai is slowly coming to an end. We have another month and a handful of shows together, but this band has meant a lot to me.

I'm really happy that Bryon has a cool gig and has finally figured something out to do with his life (just joking!). The last few days as I started to get used to the idea of not being in the BGT. It made me a bit sad and a little nostalgic, so I decided to write this in the middle of the night to commemorate what to me was the greatest band I'll ever know. All over, there are gigs where bands are playing their hearts out to 7 people, and there are people who believe that singing and playing can help to make a difference in our world. Well the BGT was an experiment that touched a lot of people and meant a lot of things.

Most importantly, I think that the BGT represent the spirit of real punk -- Doing everything ourselves (right down to homemade stickers and T-shirts), breaking a lot of "rules" about punk and being ourselves while we did it. Of course I wish we had done some things differently, but I think that we did a lot of things right and I'm proud of what we created . . . beautiful music.

Thanks Zack and Bryon for making it real.