Gallows Holier than the Cross

joe and i had been in a bevy of noise/grind bands and started feeling like we wanted something along more simple, melodic lines. we employed his brother joseph for bass and a friend of mine, ashley, for vocals. at the time, we were just toolin' around our friend eric's (filthy fuckers, BSA, Train Go Sorry) bedroom writing a couple parts here and there. ashley turned out to be extremely mic-shy, so we booted her. in comes tina (silverlined tragedy). she turns out to be pretty rad and enthusiastic. also, we added our friend nick on second guitar and started practicing regularly, in earnest, at his house. at this point joseph just stops showing up to practice (rigors of fast playing and set parts must have been a factor, as well as two full stacks at live volume). oh no! our first show and no bass player. this must have been february of 2003. we decided that we would play without one, since we could never hear joseph at practice anyway and he could never remember the songs. nick, however, was having none of that, so he invites hans to play for us without asking the rest of the band. i honestly have no idea why he said yes: i had asked him before we started writing songs if he'd like to play with us (said he was kinda busy) -- and he'd never heard any of our songs. i was still pretty stoked despite all of that because he's a grippa good bassist (to be fair, he really was pretty busy). hans was playing with nick in the seminal Laguna Vista powerviolence band "rob is 3/5 robot," along with future member JD. i remember teaching hans the songs and being psyched about how he was catching on to the parts and how loud he was. the show was pretty rad, and afterwords he told me he turned down and that he forgot most of the parts! it sounded pretty rad to me, anyway, it's punk rock.

after a few shows, it became apparent that we were really into this band, so we decided to see what a demo and a short summer tour would do for us. buuuuut. it also became apparent that tina was going to be a bit of a problemo. noshows to practice, and skipping shows. then she didn't show up to recording. hans and nick did vocals for the 8 song demo. it was time to tell Tina: girl, don't go away mad. just go away.

i'll finish this later. at this point we havent got to the part where adrian and jd joined the band.