Category Archives: Times Of Yore

Times Of Yore: DINK

So I am slacking on updating here with good quality reading material. My apologies. It was Thanksgiving weekend you know…. I know not a good enough excuse…

Anyways, let’s talk about the gem I came across recently, rather…a few weeks ago.  Well actually let’s clear that up by saying my friend John hooked me up with a CD I loved from the past (read on for an explanation) so I guess I was handed the gem.

Where was I?  Oh yeah…

It all started when I tried to buy a CD from the Ex-(we’d never fire you after xmas)-change in Kent last month.  I was looking for something I have not listened to in a while, something completely random.  As I was shopping in Kent I could not help but to think of a certain alt-industrial act from Kent that had a small taste of success.  The band was Dink.

As soon as I came to the decision that I would leave that music shop with a Dink CD in hand I went searching for it and found nothing.  The CD that comes through the store a lot according to a certain pal who works there just ao happened to be out of stock at the time.  I managed to find the Blame It On Tito EP that Dink released but after getting home I realized the wrong CD was in it…

Fail.

My buddy John who hung out with me later in the week confessed that he had an extra copy of the CD and gave it to me after finding out I was having a hard time finding it.

Score.

Dink
Dink

Dink was not around for a very long time but they sure are not a band many have forgotten about.  Hailing from Kent, OH the band formed in 1992 and stood out from may of the bands at that time combining elements of industrial metal, hip hop style (mainly excessive samples), and alt punk sounds.

The first time I heard them I was an instant fan.  In 1994 the band released their debut self-titled CD under Capitol Records.  To me it was a fine mix of bands like Ministry with the industrial feel and Faith No More with the rock jam.  At times the lead singer even sang like Mike Patton.

Included on that CD was a song called “Green Mind” that was the band’s big commercial hit.  I to this day still listen to the track once in a while.  The song, produced by Skinny Puppy‘s Dave Ogilvie, was really the only success the band tasted.  The video for “Green Mind”, which I need to mention my good friend Kevin can be seen in it for a brief moment, debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes.  The band was actually discovered by Capitol Records as the track was played contently on a Cleveland radio station program, 107.9 The End’s Inner Sanctum (recently resurrected on Cleveland’s 92.3).

After Dink was released the band recorded some more songs for a follow up CD that would never be released as Capitol Records dropped the band due to a change in the music scene (some of the tracks can be found on the Blame It On Tito EP).  Industrial apparently was not “in” anymore and the record label said bye bye to the talented band.  With no record deal the band called it quits.

Sucks to see such a talented band just stop because they were let go.  I would be very interested in hearing some of the unreleased material that may still be out there.  Rumor has it there are 3 cassettes worth of demos floating around out there that the band sold at their local shows before they made it big.  I wonder if any of the original band members continued with a musical career or if they just all called it quits and ended their short stint of fame?

Hopefully I will find out one day.

Until then, enjoy the “Green Mind” video:

The voice at the beginning of the video is none other than Ohio’s most overheard rightwing car salesman Bob Serpentini.

Here is an interview I found while surfing the net with an unamed member of Dink.  Pretty interesting read.

Stompbox Bassist Tells His Story

One of the cool things about having a blog site is just the total randomness.  I posted a blog a couple weeks ago about post-hardcore now defunct band Stompbox in my new Times Of Yore posts.

Apparently one of the former band members happened to come across my post and shot me an email asking if I wanted some elaboration on what really happened.  The band member was Patrick, the former bassist of Stompbox.

Well of course I did.  So I interviewed him…

I sent him back an email asking what really happened to the band and what he and the rest of the band members were up to these days.  Here are his responses collectively as I’ve mixed up the few emails we exchanged and categorized them with Patrick’s approval of course.

Stompbox Flyer - Vintage!!!
Stompbox Flyer - Vintage!!!

The reason Stompbox called it quits, what happened to the lead singer Erich, and what direction did the band members took:

The reason Erich left the band is that we asked him to. There are/were rumors flying around that drugs had a lot to do with our breakup, but that’s all blown way out of proportion.  Sure, Erich was doing drugs, (as were most of the rest of us) but it didn’t bother any of us much.  Erich was (and still is) kind of a dick. By “kind of a dick” I mean a real a–hole. In addition to that, he was… …uh, let’s just say he was an inconsistent singer.  When he was on, he was great, but a lot of times he was off. Way off. There’s some live recordings that Jeff has that are just brutal.  Also, we had some very fundamental differences in what we wanted to do musically.

Erich was in favor (and in hindsight, he was probably right) of “giving the people what they want”. All the kids that came to our shows really wanted the “big riff” so they could get sick in the pit and hurt each other, and (except for the part about hurting each other…we were very “Fugazi” about that and stopped a lot of shows when fights broke out etc…) he (Erich) was perfectly happy with that.

The rest of us wanted to be “artists” and “express ourselves musically”.  Again, hindsight (or maybe cynicism) tells me that we were probably foolish.

So, we gave him the boot and changed the name of the band to Slower.  We wrote a bunch of new tunes and did a couple more tours.  We added a second bass player (Mikey Welch, who later was in Weezer for an album) and I took over vocals.  I wish I had some good recordings of that band, but there just isn’t much around.  I’ve got some abysmal recordings from a show we did in Seattle, but it was straight off the board, so pretty much all you can hear is the drums and vocals.  It’s brutally bad.  There’s a tape from a live radio show that I have, but it’s in pretty crappy condition, much of it is all garbled up.  Zephan’s ex-girlfriend supposedly has a ton of live Slower video, but they didn’t exactly break up on very good terms.  I guess when your boyfriend breaks up with you by telling you he married somebody else, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Go figure.  Zephan is a phenomenal drummer, but he’s a bit on the self centered side!

We did one tour billed as Stompbox still, and used that to introduce the “new sound” to people who were into Stompbox.  Some people liked it more, some liked in less.  (On one of those tours we played with Jesus Lizard at Peabody’s in Cleveland…David Yow drank me under the table and then went out and played their show. I guess he’s got what’s called an “iron constitution”…Ha! I was so tanked I had to pass out in our van after about two Jesus Lizard songs. Good times!)

After those two tours, we just sort of imploded.

Zephan and Mikey Welch [went on to] play with Juliana Hatfield on her attempt at rocking out called “Juliana’s Pony”.   Jeff is [currently] the musical director for the Blue Man Group in NYC now.

Jeff and Zeph were also in a band called Milligram for a while. The CD called This is Class War is absolutely amazing if you can find it.  [Milligram] had Jonah the singer from Only Living Witness and Darryl from Slapshot/Roadsaw playing guitar. That cd is so good it STILL makes me jealous!  You can download the whole Milligram album This is Class War for free, which is a pretty sweet deal! That website has that whole album, plus the EP they did AND a bunch of punk rock covers.

I was in another band for a while called Placer.  Noisy arty stuff.  We did one CD called Summer on Dopamine Records, a teeny indie label out of Boston.  You can find the Placer album on iTunes.  Even if you don’t want to buy it, you can hear little samples of the songs. I played steel guitar in that band. Oddly enough, when I quit that band, Jeff (guitarist of Stompbox) too over my spot on steel.

If you want to hear what Slower sounded like, Jeff’s got a homemade video up on YouTube.  The sound is from a radio show we did, and you get to hear me totally flub the second line of the song.  Slower was in many ways the opposite of Stompbox.  Stompbox was music that made us laugh with words that were brooding and self indulgent, while Slower was words that made us laugh with music that was self indulgent!  Jeff also did a pretty cool video for “Jake Song” with the original demo track we did. It [can be found] on YouTube too.

These days Erich’s living in Los Angeles. I don’t really know what he’s doing for sure, I think he runs sound in clubs.

I had pretty much dropped out of the music biz after Slower dissolved. I decided that maybe it would be fun to find out what it was like to have money to live on. As it turns out, it’s pretty cool!

I live in Toledo now, and am a stay at home dad. In fact, until about a year ago, we were living in Lakewood, not too far from were you are, I guess.  I used to go to My Minds Eye a lot.  Cool record store.  Bent Crayon too.  I wasn’t a huge fan of Cleveland in general, but I REALLY liked Lakewood. In fact I kind of miss it, which I didn’t think I would when we moved.

The real story about the departure from the record label:

The deal with Columbia was that our A&R person left and went to Maverick. That left us at Columbia with nobody who really cared much about us, so we were sort of in limbo.  Finally, we asked them (Columbia) if they’d let us (Stompbox) go with no strings attached, and they said “Sure!”  Mary (the A&R person from Columbia who went to Maverick) wanted us to come over to Maverick with her, but this was all happening at the same time as we were getting ready to kick Erich out of the band.  After we booted him, she kind of took it personally and said “Oh, well f— you too” and signed the Deftones. (as it turns out, that was a good move…in fact, I still have to say that they were a pretty cool band. I don’t know if they are STILL a cool band, cause that sort of thing can change over time…)

Thoughts about the unofficial Stompbox MySpace Page:

That MySpace thing is pretty funny. I don’t know who started it, but it’s pretty crazy that so many people even remember us.  On the list of Stompbox’s friends, we (the individual former members of the band) are the top four friends. It makes me feel important. (har har)

Videos:

So there you have it.  That was a greatly appreciated dose of information from the source itself.  Patrick, props to you for offering to tell your side of the story.

Times Of Yore: Stompbox – Stress

So this is my first of a series of posts about bands from the past or as I like to call it “Times Of Yore”.  Recently I have been digging deep into my collection and found some real great acts from the past and have decided that people need to know about them or at least need to be reminded of their existence.  I already have a few in mind and will continue to look.  Most of the bands I have discovered were from the 90’s when I was buying everything I could get my hands on.

So let’s kick thinks off shall we?

Stompbox - Stress
Stompbox - Stress

In the day and age when Soundgarden was more grunge metal than adult contemporary and Helmet was still united there was a band that I found at Disc Den called Stompbox.  The CD was called Stress and it might have been the best blind purchase I ever made in 1994.

Already being a huge fan of Helmet, this band was right up my alley.  They had a port-hardcore grunge sound that may have been replicated by many bands at the time, but they sounded so good with their hard striking chords and heavy riffs.  The lead singer’s voice, sounding like Page Hamilton (Helmet) mixed with Neil Fallon (Clutch),was even tolerable throughout the entire CD.  It’s too bad that the band did not continue after their first release.

Not much can be found on the internet about why they disbanded.  Formed in 1991 the band hailed from Boston.  From what I have gathered they were picked up Sony/Columbia and then dropped after the release.  They just didn’t catch on like other bands did and it is a shame.

The lead singer of the band went on to pursue other projects and the remaining members stayed together and changed their band name to Slower (which I am still looking for).  I am still trying to confirm this, but there is a possibility that some of the members even helped out The Blue Man Group and even Juliana Hatfield.  I can not find any proof though…

There is no band website, no Wiki even. There are some reviews out there from fans and everything is thumbs up.  I just wish I could find out a little more about what the members have been up to these days.

I do remember this band having a lot of promotional material for a debut release.  There were posters and fliers all over the place after I bought the CD.  I was also handed a couple of sampler cassettes to give out to my friends as well as a square 2 song record…and I still am kicking myself for doing whatever I did with it.  I wonder if the over-the-top-promotion resulted in this band’s dismay.  I know that kind of happened to Sponge and they were out around the same time as Stompbox….hmmmm….

It’s sad nothing else ever came from Stompbox.  You look at bands like STP and Soundgarden who got their start around the same time and look at how they have progressed.  I can only wonder what would have happened to Stompbox if they would have continued.

This was one band I never got to see live during their heyday.  Luckily YouTube exists.

The CD is long out of print but you can find it for $5.00 or less at a used music shop if you look hard enough.  I myself saw quite a few come in to The Exchange when I happily worked here (sarcasm at it’s finest).  It is worth dishing out the cash if you are looking to hear a straight forward rock album.

Here’s a couple of videos I found of the band.  Boy do these bring back memories.