Hello and welcome to the official Eric's Trip home. We've never had a
website of our own before. There were no computers back then. Or was
there? We were simple folk i guess. Kind of on our own path out here in
Moncton circa 1990. Listening to old records and late night radio, getting hold of cheap and giant 70's Traynor amps at the pawn shop. Torturing the
neighbours with our youthfull feedback experiments. Small town canadian life in a city known for a magnetic hill, skinheads, hash, eccentrics, heavy snowfall, Acadians, a muddy strangled river, and a giant mall. We started making our
4-track tapes that summer and after a couple, Denis at Room 201 records told us we'd outsold the last big Moncton cassette, the great 1986 Syntax Error demo. Excited, we began playing concerts with friends at the few Moncton spots like the Kacho, and gathered
a little following and some confidence. We loved noisy rock music, SST stuff,
early 80's hardcore, Feed me with your kiss and the Ramones alongside melodic types of 60's pop, folk and psych. Like mixing Neil Youngs "comes a time" with the first Discharge album. Pretty and delicate voices hiding under the noisy anxiety. Not that we were the first to do such a thing. Weve got our VU.
We lost our drummer Ed somehow in late 91 and after a couple shows as a
three piece convinced Mark Gaudet to record some songs with us. We were a
little intimidated by him cause he was a few years older and we all thought
of him as the best drummer around. He also was a passionate fan of good music and an encyclopedia on the subject. We figured he could only help the band. The "Warm girl" demo cassette
was sent off to Peter Rowan one day because we really wanted to make
a 7-inch and we heard of him as a guy with a little label in Fredericton called DTK. When he got
back to us he said everyone he knew loved the tape, he lived in Halifax now
and managed a brand new band called Sloan.
He got us some shows in Halifax
and helped us record in a small studio. Our "Belong" single came out in
summer 92 and our shows in Moncton and Halifax grew. We recorded a bunch more songs at home on the 4-track and intended to release a 10 song album with the new Murder records from halifax that Peter was involved in. Before we did, a rep for Subpop records came to town and showed interest in signing us. We were invited to play a subpop festival in Burlington Vermont, and an opening slot for Sonic Youth in Toronto. We signed with them shortly after but the album still came out on Murder, edited down to the 7 song "Peter" ep. Peter Rowan became our manager and we started doing lots of tours, including 2 weeks in England with Redd Kross and a cross Canada Subpop tour with Six Finger Sattalite and Pond. We picked up a 1/4 inch 8-track on our travels and got to work on our first Subpop LP. We found it very important to record our own music ourselves at our home and luckily Subpop agreed with us. We had our own kind of sound that stuck out like a sore thumb on the radio and they saw our differentness as a charm. Bob Weston was flown to Moncton to live at Rick's folks house for a week and help make a good master mix of the album. We toured alot more through 93 then slowed down in 94 as Julie was expecting her first baby. This is where the drama really began. "Love Tara" was done during Rick and Julie's breaking up but "The Gordon st. Haunting" and "Forever Again" were recorded during a strange year of a new baby, excessive dope smoking, a lack of shows and an unlack of heavy emotional moods. A new 1/2 inch 8-track was acquired for Forever Again and we mixed it all ourselves at our apartment inspired by and endless flow of LP's on the stereo. We got really into the mixing styles of the great 4 and 8 track recorded past. Beatles, Electric Prunes, Love, Buffalo Springfield. Lots of stereo seperation.
In the spring of 95 we were ready to tour again and spent alot of that year doing so. We even got invited to be a part of the Tragically Hip's "Another Roadside Attraction" tour. We recorded our last album in a studio in Moncton with Bob Weston engineering on a 2 inch 24 track. Our previous record was so home sounding that we really wanted to try and capture more of a live feel for this one. We had songs well practiced from touring and laided the album down in two days. "Purple Blue" came out in spring 96 and we agreed to do an American tour in may. After a week of surprisingly very well attended shows in the U.S. north-east and a climatic emotional breakdown, we stopped and drove home. We were a very close little group of friends and as we started to grow apart, move to different cities, start seperate familys and lives, the band just lost it's magic. We just needed to stop. We got back to Moncton on May 11th. (as premonitioned on Love Tara?) One last show was booked for our hometown in June so we could break up properly with our friends instead of in New Jersey. Rick and Mark stayed together after the trip, and formed a more heavy psychedellic band called Elevator with
Rick's new wife Tara and continued exploring the farout side of the music. Julie
had 2 more kids and kept making her beautifully emotional albums which she still
does today. Chris kept making his Moonsocket music, with and without a band
behind him, and also had a kid of his own. It wasn't until 2001
that we got the urge to hear and play the songs again. Back when we broke up in May 96, we had a cross canada tour booked that also had to be cancelled. We always felt guilty about that so we booked a cross
Canada tour and called it the "Lost last tour". We rehearsed twice and off we went. It seemed like exactly where we left off. We were tight and noisy, we still had all the same gear (and bodies), our friend and original live soundman Nick Holmes was with us, people came out to the shows and the only difference from five
years earlier was that it was fun again. We were close and we remembered how close we were. And Are. We are family. We did a few shows again in the summer of 2006 and in 2007 actually did a 10 show tour. It's fun but the records and photos are immortal. That young
energy and emotional drama is captured in there forever. Thank goodness. In 2008 with the help of those photos and lots of old VHS tapes, we started work on a 2 hour DVD retrospective. It won't be a biography but just a cronilogical collection of 1990 - 1996 footage of the band playing along with all our super 8 films and TV bits. It is now complete and will hopefully be available in summer 2009. We're not touring anymore but we still may play the odd show once in awhile, we'll list any upcoming things on here if we do.
Thank you for caring about our band, i hope you enjoy this little
digital archive. We will try to change the music and photos often to keep it alive. Thanks againEric's Trip.
