Part II: Mindshock
Chapter Seven
I had only been playing for a little over two years when I started the 11th grade. I had a few friends who played too, including Jamie, who had inspired me in the first place. But we never really got to jam, because nobody had cars yet or a place to play. I wanted to start a band already, but I didn’t know any drummers or bassists, or anyone who could play good lead guitar. When I listen now to tapes of me playing at that time, I think ‘Damn, I sucked!’ but at the time I was ready.
It was 1990 when I became a junior in High School. I decided to take a guitar class that year, so I could learn how to read music. I had started writing some of my own music by then, but had no words or any idea where to take the songs. This class supplied the students with nylon string classical beginner guitars, which I hated. I went and bought my own guitar, a beautiful black Fender acoustic. All in all, the class was cool, because at least eighty percent of us were metal fans. Most of them had never even picked up a guitar. There was one guy, though, who I ended up hanging out with regularly. His name was Allen Christian, and he was also a big Metallica fan. He was also into Anthrax, Megadeth and Kiss. I started listening to Megadeth and Anthrax that year. Anthrax’s “Persistence of Time” and Megadeth’s “Rust in Peace…Polaris” had both come out that year. Allen and I would sit near the back of the room and play “One” by Metallica, while everyone else played “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Neither of us really learned how to read music too well.
We started working on some stuff together. I made him tapes of some of my songs, and he brought them back to me in a manila folder with the words “Mind Shock-Brink of Destroying the Peace” on it. Plus, he had written lyrics for at least three of the songs I gave him. We tried really hard to find other people to play with us, but there were still no drummers or bassists. My best friend wanted to play drums, but he didn’t have a drum kit or know how to play, so we scratched that idea.
At some point, Allen decided he would play bass, but he didn’t have a bass. So I bought a bass that was the match for the burgundy Ibanez six-string I already had. I had wanted one anyway, and now he had one to play.
Chapter Eight
Allen and I also created a logo and mascot for our “band”. His name was Bloody Bill Mindshock, and was basically a skull with eyeballs, and he was bleeding profusely from the eyes, nose and mouth. Instead of crossbones, we had lightning bolts going in an “X”, not behind his head but through it. He was named after a guy we went to school with named Bill, who had threatened to beat us and my best friend up one night at the mall. We were scared to death, but laughed about it later when we found out he was going to be the father of twins at the age of seventeen with a fifteen year old girl named Mary. So we always joked that Bloody Bill’s wife was Bloody Mary.
Chapter Nine
We worked on some more music, and ended up writing about ten or twelve songs. I wrote most of the music, Allen most of the lyrics. Thinking back now, they were pretty lame by my standards, but when we wrote them, we were going to be the next Metallica. We also were learning parts of other peoples’ songs, playing Anthrax songs, and what little I could pick up of Megadeth. They were tough! I think it was toward the end of the school year, or sometime that summer that I would get a call from an unlikely friend.
Chapter Ten
Brook Johnson was younger than Allen and I were. He went to school with my sister, who is three years younger than me. We used to hang out with the same people, but not together. I couldn’t stand him. I thought he was a prick. Besides, he liked Poison and Motley Crue. Whenever we would see each other, we would just stare at one another, and neither one of us would do anything.
He heard we were looking for a drummer. We decided to drop our differences and try to make some music instead. Allen and I went over to Brook’s house, and tried to play some songs. None of us were great, but it was cool to turn the amps up and play loudly for a change. Brook had only been playing for a little while himself, and had basically two drum beats. Slow and fast. So we had him use the slow one for the slower songs, and the fast one for the faster songs.
I was so impressed with the Metallica story of how their drummer Lars wasn’t really that good to start with, and just got better and better. So we had kinda hoped we would have the same luck with Brook. We continued writing more and more songs. I think by the end of the summer, there were almost twenty songs that Allen and I had written. I only remember about five of them now.
We also met a guy named Curtis who went to our school. We met at the mall on the same night that Bloody Bill’s namesake was messing with us. He played guitar, too. We had him come down one day and jam with us. He said he was a lead player, which was what we needed, but it just wasn’t there. Of course, you have to keep in mind that we all were starting out, basically, but Allen and I were impatient. We didn’t call Curtis back, and kept playing. We actually only played together as a band about three or four times because Allen had a very protective mother who wouldn’t let him come out and play very often. At some point during the summer, Allen went to North Carolina to visit his father.
He never came back. He had decided to stay there and found God.
Chapter Eleven
After Allen left, we needed another bass player. So I tried to teach my sister how to play. She learned one of the songs that had about three different notes in it. Needless to say, it didn’t work either. So we tried and tried to find people to play bass. We gave a couple guys a crash course, and they lasted about two practices.
We also decided to change names around this point. Because Mind Shock was Allen’s idea in the first place, and he was gone. It was still basically just Brook and I at this time. I thought of it while looking at a poster of the comic book character The Punisher. We called ourselves The Punishment, because we decided that with the lack of luck we were having getting a band started, it must be like punishment to stay with us.
When the next school year started, I was a senior and Brook was a freshman. We always cut up in school and had a good time. We also came up with an exclamation we used to drive teachers crazy. “Wild Fuckin’ Dog!” When said right, it sounded like “Walk like a dog” and the teachers couldn’t figure out what we were saying! We also met another guitar player, too. His name was Keith Harris and he was a friend of my best friend Aaron. I went over to his house one day and we played some stuff. This was around October of 1991.
Metallica’s groundbreaking “Black Album” had been released in August, the day before my seventeenth birthday. Everyone was crazy about “Enter Sandman” like it was the best song ever released. Of course, since it was Metallica, I loved it too. We tried to play Sandman, but it didn’t work. We weren’t very good at interpreting other people’s songs. We had a hard enough time with our own. This was also around the time I changed my voice.
My then girlfriend had broken up with me, right after I had bought our tickets to the Homecoming dance. I wrote lyrics to a song called “Hell Hath No Fury” because I was really upset. I wrote the music that evening at Brook’s. It was different enough to mention here because that’s when I started screaming. Well, not screaming, but ‘yelling in key’ as James Hetfield put it once. Keith stuck with us for awhile, and Curtis came back. I decided to play bass myself, since we were having no luck finding anyone.
Now that we were all in school together, we could hang out and talk about band stuff. We dropped most of the songs Allen and I had written, and wrote new ones. There was another song I wrote which was an instrumental, reminiscent of Iron Maiden. I called it “Sleighride to Hell.” I had also written a song about Jim Jones and the Guyana Massacre of 1978. I had done a research paper the previous year for English glass, and decided to make a song out of it. It was called “Shut Up and Drink Your Kool-Aid”. There was one called “Get a Life” which was reminiscent of the riff Randy Rhoads played on “I Don’t Know.” There was also “W.F.D. (Wyldfuckindawg)” about a vicious Rottweiler. There was one called “I’m Sorry, I Didn’t Mean to Kill You”, inspired by something I said to Keith after almost knocking him over In the hall one day.
We were basically writing songs about whatever the hell we could think of. There were many that never left the notebook I wrote them down in. We made a crappy demo with all of these songs on it. I didn’t even have a four-track yet, so I ping-ponged tracks on a dual cassette jam box I had. I basically did everything at my house except for the drums. The other guys didn’t have the songs down well enough. We never got much better, either.
Chapter Twelve
We decided around this time to change the name of the band again. I had been throwing around the name MOSH for awhile, but couldn’t think of what the letters could stand for. A friend of ours, Eli, who has a whack sense of humor anyway (and is subsequently the reason I’m still so fucked up today), came up with it from out of the blue. Mean Ol’ Sadistic Heathens. Hell, it worked for me.
I made a few copies of the demo and gave it to some of my metalhead friends to see what they thought of it. I never heard much. Of course, we were still just starting out. At least that was my excuse. I created a logo for MOSH, with these huge stone letters standing in front of a giant fire.
We had pretty much laid Bloody Bill to rest by this point, too. We made it through the rest of the 1992 school year as MOSH, without ever getting a gig or even playing a song all the way through without messing up. We were bad.
That summer, we played a graduation party that Curtis’ aunt was throwing for him and his friends. I had been writing more songs than I had ever written. The thing was that they were all love songs. I was back together with the girl who inspired me to start yelling my lyrics in the first place. Yeah, I was in love for the first time, but musically, that was probably my worst songwriting period ever.
A couple of months after the party, Keith left the band and I took over the lead guitar spot again. We put up an ad for a bass player, and got a call from this guy named Jimmy. He had all this equipment, a nice bass and a PA. He was much older than we were though. He was in his thirties. He also had some health problems that we worried about a little. He didn’t last long either. Either we sucked too badly for him or the music just wasn’t up his alley. Probably a little of both. He was a really big fan of Ted Nugent, and we were nothing at all like that.
Chapter Thirteen
My dad bought me my first four-track tape recorder toward the end of that year also. It was a welcome piece of equipment, because now I could make better recordings than I could with the jam box. I recorded all kinds of shit to familiarize myself with the machine before we set to make another demo.
Near the beginning of 1993, we made our final name change. This time the name was Brook’s. Explicit Form was what we chose to be called. There was also a new addition to the group. There was a guy named Sid who had just moved to the area, and he was a good guitar player who was into the same things we were into. We wrote another couple songs, one being a song called “Standing In Darkness” which was simple, but heavy. I can’t remember the other one.
We started working on the Explicit Form demo, just Brook and me. It stayed that way. I also decided to bring back an incarnation of Bloody Bill, but this time much more sinister. I had Bill, without eyes and having a body draped in a white robe, hanging by the neck from the Explicit Form logo. He was still bleeding and his hands were bound. Behind him, an old graveyard.
Bill also made another return as the logo for our new imaginary record company, Sudden Death Records. The name was Sid’s idea. I told him about Bill, and he suggested we have the blood coming from his eyes to drain out and make the letters “SD”. He still had no eyes. Bill never saw the light of day again until now.
Brook and I recorded four songs for the demo. “Hell Hath No Fury”, “Get A Life”, “Standing in Darkness”, and a slow song called “Living In A Dream”. It took about a week to record, because I kept falling asleep at the wheel. I worked on recording parts until the wee hours, and would sometimes fall asleep playing. Then I’d wake up still playing and not know where the hell in the song I was! I think we finished it in February or March of 1993.
Chapter Fourteen
Sid left the group awhile later, because of family problems. Plus, the fact that Brook was skipping out on practices to go hang out with his girlfriend, who lived right next door to Sid. If we were supposed to play and Brook was over there, Sid would go over and find out if he intended to play, then call me to cancel practice. Curtis started to look for something else, but I didn’t know this until later. He finally told me one day that he had tried out for another band and that they were looking for a bassist.
I went with him.
Brook wasn’t too happy with this, but I wasn’t too happy where I was anymore, going absolutely nowhere, writing shitty songs. I needed a challenge. I needed a change. I officially left the band in April of 1993 to start over.
Chapter Fifteen
I still talk to Brook once in awhile, or e-mail. I haven’t seen many of the people who played with us for years. I don’t regret the time I spent with this band, because there has to be a beginning for everything. I took a step in the right direction when I left, because it gave me a chance to improve, a chance that until then I didn’t really have. Nobody told me the songs I was writing were shit, and I didn’t see it myself. It took being with another group for me to see that. Little did I know that the next group would actually change the way I thought about music.
