Most of these songs were written within the first 6 months of me getting a bass guitar and drum machine, which would have been Spring and Summer 1989. I bought the bass some time during my junior year in high school from a friend of a friend's girlfriend. Then, I worked at Braum's Ice Cream during the summer before my senior year so that I could buy the drum machine. Once I had enough money, I bought the device and quit the job. After about 6 months of playing bass and 1 month with the drum machine, I was ready to start a band.
I knew Deron through a friend, and Amy through another friend. I got to know them pretty well over the course of junior year. They were individualists like me, they played instruments, they were my friends, and I knew I could trust them. I was glad that they were interested. I can't remember exactly when we first met for a trial practice. It may have been as early as August 1989, right before the start of our senior year. We eventually played a live 3 times. It seems like we stayed busy with it, practicing regularly, but there were not many opportunities to play shows. I imagine that we weren't too active towards the end of the school year, though at least one of our shows was in the spring. Around the end of the school year, one of us must have said to the other two, "hey we should record this stuff before we all go off to different cities and schools", and I am thankful that we did. In August of 1990 we recorded our songs, and by September we had gone our separate ways.
Deron: I had known Scott for a while through mutual friends. There were maybe 8 or 10 of us punks and weirdos tops, so we were hard to miss. He sold me and some other friends his drum set as he had changed to bass. Once I started playing in The Comedian, Iconoclast went on without me. My friend Graham was in Swim class with Amy and of course we all had secret crushes on her. Being that we weren't Fleetwood Mac everything stayed utterly professional.
Amy: I met Scott in the second half of 11th grade through a mutual friend named Nirav, who I met on the school bus in 10th grade. I remember having summer school P.E. with Graham, but don't recall meeting Deron until I joined the band (although we lived only a few streets apart). At this juncture, I was feeling like an outsider compared to the friends I'd had in middle school and early high school: oversensitive, dissatisfied, too "deep." When I met Scott and Deron, I'd found the kindred spirits I was looking for and reveled in a context of finally feeling accepted. They also had/have a wickedly dry sense of humor and interests in movies, music, and books that were just fantastic from my perspective…these were among my first "guy" friends, and it felt like such a breath of fresh air after recent experiences with superficiality and hypocrisy from certain female friends; I could now refuse to tolerate such things with confidence. On top of that, we were making music, which always felt like home to me. I did have choir throughout high school, but the reference point for the majority of my fellow singers was Protestant (Baptist) church youth groups…more alienation.
Secret crushes is right! I couldn't have guessed on my own, not with such luminaries as Rebecca Sawicky and Amy Kizer in our circle!
I know our first rehearsal was in the summer of 1989, perhaps even early summer. Spring was a period of consolidation and getting to know Scott's musical influences. I remember that being a great summer in many respects: besides regular band practice at Scott's house, there was only one more year of high school, the alternative station KDGE with DJ George Gimarc premiered on Dallas radio, and I was actually having fun in summer school P.E. with fellow P.E. haters.
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