Gearing up...
October - December 1995 Concord, CA rehearsals
Matt - After the guys moved to San Francisco, we got a rehearsal space, full array of rock gear: amps, guitars, PA, with some publishing money that amazingly dropped in our laps. But the cheapest space was in Concord, about a 45 minute drive from San Francisco. Almost every night we went there to practice the album in its entirety. I’m not saying we invented such a thing, but I thought this is the best way to present what the album was about. Now everyone does their classic albums track by track. But we dropped Illegal Specimen Room because I thought the song wasn’t so hot. I sat down on a broken director’s chair because I didn’t know what else to do. I was too nervous to stand up.
Winston - Zeph arrived in time for us all to enjoy Halloween in San Francisco together. Until I arrived in SF, Matt and I had been mere acquaintances, and I had never even met Sean until the night he, CaveDave, and I left Boston to drive the van across the country. I had lived with Z for a couple years in Allston. Now we were all roommates, basically. The four of us got along well, and we seemed to be able to soldier through less than ideal living circumstances together—-that much was clear. What wasn’t so clear was how we were all going to sound as a band. I had never played even a single note with these guys, and I had never played bass guitar—or any other instrument beside the drums—in public before. Now I was going to play their beautifully fucked up music in strange places in front of strangers and try to pass myself off as the real deal. This was going to be fun.
Being of limited means, the ideal situation for us would have been to find a place to both live and rehearse. We looked at a few space in Oakland, such as the one down by the docks with the lovely automatic chain-link gate and barbed wire: fifty-something long-haired Japanese dudes with white t-shirts and cigarettes, shotguns nonchalantly resting in the sunny open doors…only a short walk to the train.
The space in Concord was unremarkable, almost quaint compared to the dumps I was used to in the Fenway and Harrison Ave in Boston. I wasn’t crazy about the way the white-painted drywall looked when the lights were on. But it was big, and the knuckleheads next door playing Faith No More covers or whatever added the correct ambiance. The supermarket next door had beer and sandwiches and chips and smokes. That was the full extent of the comforts as far as I was concerned.
The 30-minute drive from San Fran on the freeway was hazardous, and I’d often think of disaster while crossing the Bay Bridge. The first night, we pulled up to the space and took the gear out of the van. Inside Z set up the drums across from the door, with S and me to his left and Matt—seated in the director’s chair I brought from home—next to Carol on the other side. We played the set over and over. I couldn’t get the right tone, and playing Goin’ Down Slow really made my hand hurt. I wasn’t as good at improvising on bass as I could on drums. More beer and things, eventually the lights went out and we slept on the carpeted floor. I woke up and everything was stinky and ugly and hateful. We pulled into the shopping center and some dude in an old photomat booth in the middle of the parking lot handed us bitter coffees through the driver-side window; we got back on the freeway and rushed back into town; rehearsal didn’t end in those days.
One day Z brought in a new piece of gear. We needed his backing vocals, but were having trouble with the setup. The solution was a headset microphone. It was perfectly adequate for our needs. It was exactly what Z needed…but was it rock?
