DESCRIPTION:
Date: October 1996.

Location: Fuck me if I can remember exactly. Rather sure that it was a country-western club in a strip mall in the outlying suburbs of San Diego. (Y'play where they'll 'ave ya, mate.) Biggest surprise? the killer stage lights.

Technical details: one Sony EVO broadcast camera, on my goddamn shoulder, in the fucking mosh pit. There are no edits in the footage (ok, two cuts in the first 20 seconds.) This is how they looked. This is how they played it.

Audio: no board feed was available (guess the country-western bands don't need it). And the on-camera mic audio didn't cut it, so we laid in the track from the record.

Band: Ah, 16 Volt. Hell of a fucking band in those days. They played a ton of shows in shitty clubs throughout SoCal, but brought the r-o-c-k each and every time. 16 Volt's history from 1998 onwards is a reknowned case study of the worst record business luck imaginable. I always thought that they were one of the few machine rock bands that had the chops, sound and songwriting to break into some pop music consciousness. Perhaps they did, in a way, as 16 Volt tracks have shown up on dozens of commercials, TV shows and that Primal game I never played.

Eric just put out a new 16 Volt record this year - the first since '98 - and it's a braindamaged rocking synthpop mutant of a beast. Great stuff, and worth checking out.

www.16volt.com