Dresden 45 formed in October of 1985 to participate in a high school battle-of-the-bands competition. Dresden 45 wasn't from the mean streets Houston: As it happens, the original members -- Brumby Boylston, Patrick Godbey, Oscar Gray, and Charlie Hardwick -- all attended Episcopal High School and wore uniforms five days a week. Boylston had recently discovered punk rock through some east coast friends and was building a record collection that would include mind-blowing new bands that -- at that time -- existed a little beneath the radar: Agnostic Front, Black Flag, the Crumsuckers, GWAR, Minor Threat, the Minutemen, the Offenders, Rich Kids on LSD, Suicidal Tendencies, and TSOL. Boylston shared his discovery with his schoolmates, and the rest is more or less Texas punk rock history. Not long after its founding, Dresden 45 was blowing the roofs off some legendary Houston-area clubs, including Cabaret Voltaire, the Apocalypse Monster Club, Rockefellers, Fitzgerald's, Power Tools, and the Axiom. The band was quick to craft its own sound and was, in fact, one of the pioneers of an intense guitar-driven variant of hardcore that would eventually be known as "crossover." During the band's most active years, a very young Dresden 45 shared the stage with genre-defining bands like All, Beyond Possession, the Descendents, DRI, the Exploited, the Fearless Iranians from Hell, Firehose, MDC, and NOFX (who -- believe it or not-- opened for them on more than one occasion). Dresden 45 played its last show of the 20th century on January 6, 1990 to a capacity crowd at the Axiom and disappeared without warning or a proverbial "farewell show." Three of the original members -- Boylston, Godbey, and Hardwick -- reformed the band in 2003 to promote Arclight Record's release of "Paradise Lost (Expanded)". They played a handful of reunion shows in their native Texas, drove each other absolutely batshit crazy, then went their separate ways.
