The Organizing Years; 1990 - May 1991

From left to right: Anders, Andy(drummer), Mike, Matt, Andy(guitarist).

These were the good 'ole years (almost)! These were the years where we thought we ruled it all... our High School band was number 1! Almost. Boy did we rock with that late 80's cheese metal. Great influences like, Warrant, Winger, Def Leppard. (I shouldn't even be saying that)
Come one, everyone who listened to rock in those days worshipped these bands. It was the hip thing. Now we can look back and say.. "Totally 80's dude!"
Well let me get back to our band, Side FX. After we lost our first drummer a couple years back, we had a hell of a time picking up another one. It seemed everyone and their grandmother was a guitarist. Even our bass player was a guitarist gone bassist on the white, practice piece of shit. I must get a picture of that bass online. Tatoo from "Fantasy Island" made that thing look small. I don't remember exactly how we wound up finding Andy M. as a drummer but he worked out for the time being. Unfortunately he thought he was god and he knew we sucked, so it didn't last long. But it was long enough for us to make complete fools out of ourselved at "Battle of the Bands" at John Jay High School.
We practiced and practiced for about a month and we had a good 11 songs for our "4 Track" demo, which didn't turn out that bad I must say. You can sample some here online.
It was the rhythm guitarist's and my senior year at the school so we figured, what the hell go out with a bang. (yeah we did that). We had songs that sounded like everything else except our own. Riffs ripped off from Cinderella, Black Sabbath, etc. Even the solos were ripped. (I didn't know this until a year or two later. heh) But the point is, we had fun.
Well the time came in late May for the show. We were ready.. almost.

We got there that night at 7pm to watch the first band play (stupid move). There were six bands, and out of the six, we were picked to go last. We didn't know if that was good or bad. (it turned out to be bad because the other bands sucked so much everyone left before we got on.) Well the moment came and were ready to go. We had this fucked up intro that I can't remember. All I know is it was written in Anders' humor. It was amusing to say the least. It went something like this: Side FX, the band with the hip-hopping groovy new age jazz metal, with and R&B twist. Bizarre...
The curtain opened and we all began our song. I came out with this fucked up ski hat on and the bass player had a gorilla suit on. Andy (the rhythm guitarist) forgot his wammy bar and he fucked up the solo. We started to rock... almost.

We were rocking so hard, we blew our speakers, no... I think the sound guys just forgot to turn the sound up. How embarrasing.. people thought it was amusing. I remember being so nervous I didn't wear my contacts so I couldn't see anyone.

We finally settled down and got through most of the set. It turned out later on that the backing vocal mike wasn't on, and Andy's (drummer) monitor kicked out. To top it all off, I think Anders stepped on his chord a few times and yanked it out. Well the finale was pretty amusing bringing back an old 'Urinal Death' tune called 'Slap Your Grandmother' (don't ask! thats a whole other Web page in itself!)

Well we finished our 6 songs off with a scream, thanks to me and a little echo that lasted about 30 secs. I though the crowd was roaring and I looked up and there was like 5 people in the audience. I remember one dude was actually head-banging to our music. (head banging.. is that 80's??) Well we figured if all else failed, we got a great recording of... THE RADIO. Some idiot named Steve forgot to put the tape switch back on the box we brought to record on. Doesn't matter, I'd rather not hear it anyway...

In fact that show was so awful, the band picture you see above was actually our last ever with that band.

All I remember is having to look for ANOTHER drummer and bassist, because they wound up taking the nestea plunge off the end of the cliff...

... and the search continues...