I Like Music, Sometimes.: Apr 21, 2017

A couple of years ago, I wrote briefly about my old band, The Control, but I felt like getting a little more in depth...

Apparently we're in some sort of lunar eclipse

After No Reason broke up in November of 1998, I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to be in a band again. The end of NR had been such a clusterfuck of disappointment that trying all over again seemed like such a waste of time. Not to mention, the strangely sedate late 90’s “youth crew revival” was in full swing, which is something I should have been excited about, but I just wasn’t. No Reason got to reap some of the fruits of that happening, especially towards the end, but, much like the vegan mosh from early in the decade, a lot of it came across as pretentious and contrived. I had seen The Swarm AKA: Knee Deep in the Dead play a bunch of times from 98 to 99 and noodled out a simple-yet-heavy riff on my guitar that I really liked and felt compelled to try and “hash it out.” It was essentially the same notes as Black Sabbath’s “Symptom of the Universe” in a different order; total pedestrian heavy metal 101, but effective and cool, so in the spring of 1999 I asked my friend Bill “Farside” Wickham, who I had been in Halfmast with, and this drummer dude Cak, to get together and “maybe do a band.”

Cak, forever the king.

Our first couple of “band practices” were in the basement of Farside’s mother’s place, but that didn’t last long, and neither did the “heavy riff.” The riff was solid, but I had painted myself into a corner, I really know nothing about writing heavy hardcore, my wheelhouse is firmly planted in fast hardcore punk and quickly songs started coming together in more of a “SSD-meets-7- Seconds-meets-Minor-Threat-meets-Scream-and-Naked-Raygun” vein. It was a little contrived, stylistically, at first, as I didn’t want to fall into the comforts of the “Youth Crew” stuff I had been writing for the past 8 years and wanted to go back a little earlier, to when punk and hardcore had a more blurred line. We practiced for a while without a singer until my friend Char suggested, or rather demanded, because “he had a great voice,” that I get Kevin McElligott to front the band. The thing is, Char had never heard Kevin sign, but was completely infatuated with him at the time and (I think) just wanted him to come around more if he was in a band with me. Still, we gave him a list of covers, some 7 Seconds songs and the like, and he came down, nailing it with a snotty Sam McPheeters vs. Dave Insurgent like delivery. After like no deliberation, Kevin was in and the lineup was complete. I had no idea the roller coaster ride that would follow or that I was about to be in a band with the best front man that I’ve ever had the pleasure of providing the sonic background for.

The first show

We played our first show in a basement in University Heights and it kind of fell a little flat, we played well, but everyone wanted the second coming of No Reason and The Control most certainly was not that. We had songs with “whoah-ohs” and a singer who was definitely NOT straight edge. We played a show with Reach The Sky, Fastbreak and Atari in the fall of 1999 in Toronto and Kevin did his usual ”Why work a job you hate?” diatribe, which was lost on the singer of Reach The Sky, who when they played, trashed us, saying he was “proud to be working class,” completely missing the point of what Kevin said or meant .

We recorded a demo with Nate Boorman, who had a portable digital recording studio set up and did it all in our practice space, Farside’s house and Nate’s place into the wee hours of the morning. Andy Dempz, who I had met when he was in Earthmover, and was now in a band called Bloodpact, after hearing our demo asked, “So, who’s doing your record?” So, we planned for him to our record on his label +/-. I thought that 7”s were an ignorable format by that point and fought to do a 10” because, you know, that size record ISN’T forgettable. WHOOPS.

Early show- the Cak

Rochester, NY

The Author looking sharp on the road

Kevin and Cak

Basement show in Chicago

Andy offered to come out from Ann Arbor, MI and drive us in his van down to D.C. to record at Monster Island studios in D.C. with Issa Diao from Good Clean Fun. The studio was owned by Ken Olden from Battery/ Damnation A.D. and resided in the exact same space where WGNS studios was, which had formerly been owned by Geoff from Grey Matter. I was pretty pumped on that prospect; a direct line to the old D.isC.hord scene and Ken Olden, who always had a unique guitar sound. I wrote to Ian MacKaye, and asked him to produce. He sent a VERY nice postcard back saying that our demo sounded nearly good enough to release as a record in its own right, but ultimately declined. The plan was to drive down a day early, relax in D.C. and start recording the next day, but it was January in the north east and things did not go as planned.

We left Buffalo with little fanfare in Andy’s van loaded with our equipment, the weather was fair and everyone was in good spirits, that is, until about an hour and twenty minutes into our journey. Just outside Erie, PA we hit a lake effect “snow band.” Now, I hate to cite Wikipedia in my own blog, however, if you have never experienced one of these bullshit occurrences, l think you have to understand, one second you’re in clear weather and 15 seconds later, you’re in the fucking snowstorm on Hoth where Luke Skywalker sees the vision of Ben Kenobi telling him about Dagobah. Anyway here’s what Wikipedia has to say; “Under certain conditions, strong winds can accompany lake-effect snows creating blizzard-like conditions; however the duration of the event is often slightly less than that required for a blizzard warning.” That day in January had those “certain conditions” and when Andy said “I can’t see the road” and tried to make a lane change to a perceived clearer path, he lost control of the van. The back end got away from him and we were careening across interstate 90 and INTO oncoming traffic. We missed a head on collision with a car by literal inches, I saw the white of their fucking eyes and the fear on their faces, which I was reciprocating right back at them with a grotesque and powerless mask of horror. My life flashed before my eyes, and the realization that this was how I was going to go; “I’m only 25!” was the last thing I remember thinking as the van slammed into the side of a hill, breaking the chair I was sitting in, bringing my head into the ceiling of the van and landing with a final thud into the windshield, which thankfully, did not break on impact.

after all of the excitement

We all stumbled out of the van, dazed, with Andy looking at it in dismay. My left eye really hurt and seemed less effective at seeing as it had been ( I still see a permanent purple spot in that eye) and Farside’s knee had gone through a guitar cabinet. Cak was having some difficulty breathing and I suspect that he broke a rib. Kevin was quiet. We stood there, hurt, but happy to be alive. A doctor, who had a cell phone (a rare commodity in 2000) pulled over and let us call a tow truck with his phone. I looked to my left just in time to see a tractor trailer jack-knife into a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which lost its back end/ hatch when it struck a guardrail. I shouted “UP THE HILL!” as the 18 wheeler was sliding towards the disabled van- the EXACT SPOT we were standing. Thankfully, as we ran up the hillside, the truck stopped a few feet from the van. The Grand Cherokee was not as lucky, when the police arrived; they cited the driver for going less than 45 mph on a highway DURING A BLIZZARD. Anyway, I kept a piece of the back end of that Jeep as a souvenir of the experience. We had the van towed to Buffalo, with Andy and I in the tow truck, leaving the rest of the guys at a sports bar in the PA sticks. We rented a minivan, picked up the guys and got to D.C. a little after midnight and began recording the next day.

Though we were still on schedule, the recording had its issues. Issa kept talking about a day we had booked that we just “couldn’t record” and as it turned out, he had a show booked with his band Good Clean Fun. This kind of put us off, especially after he told us he would be going out of town for the last two days of our booked session, which totally would have left us in the lurch for wrapping up and mixing. Thankfully, Ken Olden had just return from spending time in Germany with his girlfriend and literally swooped in and saved the session from being a wash, I found his approach more enjoyable and we wrapped up on time

The 10” came out a few months after the DC trip and we started playing a lot of shows out of town, renting minivans or cramming what we could into the back of Cak’s Subaru Outback. We played a show in Olean, NY where Ryan, the kid doing the show, which had a great turn out, took all the money from the door, not even providing ample gas money for the bands, citing that it was a “benefit for their punk house rent” and took off. Kevin was friends with Ryan and the kids down there and went to their house screaming at them about being shady and the lack of transparency. It was not communicated to any of the bands that played that it was ever a “benefit,” nor was it on the flyer. Eventually, the story got twisted to that I was the one who went to the house and threw a fit. I didn’t even know where they lived and it was like the first time I had ever been to Olean. Years later, Ryan said I was “worse than Hitler” because of the way I conducted myself. The fact is, he used false pretense to pay his fucking rent, yet I’m the bad guy? Seriously, what a shitheel.

Benefit anyone?

Anyway, shortly after that, Cak decided he could no longer do the band. I don’t remember if it was work or school, but he quit and we were fortunate to quickly get Mike Jeffers in the band. He was a much better drummer than Cak, although I’m not sure it was a good “fit” for us stylistically. Plus, he was in in his own band, Dead to the World, that he was clearly more into. We recorded two songs with Mike and he played one show, with Dillinger Four, and then didn’t show up when we were getting ready to head out for a weekend’s worth of gigs. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but it seemed like he was telling us one thing (he was IN the band) and his other band another (he was just “helping us out”). It caused some weirdness for a time, with the guitar player from his band wanting to kick my ass for some reason, even “calling me out” at shows I wasn’t even at. But whatever, we were young and shit happens, I like Mike, whereas I’ve never even had a conversation with that other guy.

Mike doing his thing

From the only show Mike played

After Mike was out, it seemed like there was no one around that played drums. I think Mike was even doing like 3 or 4 bands behind the kit and there was a serious lack of drummers playing hardcore in the summer of 2000. I remember telling Farside “I’ll even settle for a drummer that likes Bad Religion, like a Bad religion kid!” We posted some fliers that we had a record out and were looking for a drummer. This total fucking weirdo named Steve Kerfien responded and I remember, sticking to the plan asking him on the phone “Do you like Bad Religion?” I don’t remember his answer, but a few weeks later, he was our drummer and we were off to the races once again.

Steve is a wild man.

One of Steve's early shows, Live on WBNY

We got to work right away, playing shows and live on WBNY 91.3fm in November of 2000. The host of the radio show, a guy name Sean asked me “why are your songs so short?” I flippantly replied “Life is short!” I kind of feel bad for being difficult because he was genuinely a nice guy, he just didn’t understand hardcore, like at all. We did a tour in January 0f 2001 that brought us up and down the east coast. On that tour, we got to play with two bands that became instant favorites for us- The Degenerics and Tragedy. Reflections records from the Netherlands offered to do a record for us, and I saw it as a great way to get over to Europe, so in March of 2001, we recorded the Sidearm EP. I think it may have been the first time Steve was in a studio because he seemed to have some issues/ jitteriness during the session, but I think the record turned out great and after its release is when our shows started to get much, much better.

Somewhere in here, we played a show in Minneapolis with Holding On. Kevin was doing his usual front man craziness, when he collided/ pushed me to the side of the stage. I fell, or rather, CRASHED into a door next to the stage, which popped open. I caught myself with the door frame and pulled myself up, mid song. When I looked out the now popped open door, it was a door to nowhere and a straight drop down two stories, like one of the doors at the goddamned Winchester Mansion. Still, during the same song, I ran across stage and took a swing at Kevin, which didn’t connect. We always had great gigs in Minneapolis after that. It also wasn’t the only time I’d take a swing at him while we played either; he knocked over my full stack once which caused me to retaliate. What fun. We did a brief east coast and Canada tour with Kill Your Idols that was great fun, even though some of the shows were weird. I’m pretty sure Fucked Up’s first show was opening up our Toronto show.

I wrote a lot of the songs in the lobby of the hotel I worked at overnight. One such night, I was watching an episode of Sex in the City at like 1am and Carrie is in the shower with her make up running, balling her eyes out because she thought everyone forgot her birthday. Right then and there I wrote the song “The Forgotten.”

Smile; don’t let your mascara eyes run/ This is what it’s like to be forgotten/ This is what it’s like to be alone.
Excited that I had just written a strong catchy song for our new label (Go Kart) debut, I handed the lyrics to Kevin and he song them, with conviction, as he always did, but unbeknownst to me, it was a struggle for him. He had just broken up with his long term girlfriend and people thought that HE had written the lyrics about her and I’m fairly certain that was the beginning of his struggles with being in the band. Our shows were getting better and the Forgotten EP came out, which even helped our popularity at home.

In January 2002, with the Forgotten EP hot off the press, Holding On and us booked a west coast tour; after hitting it off every time we played together. They were truly our Midwestern kindred spirits and our camaraderie and shenanigans ran wild. I took our van “The Big Pink” in for service the week before the tour was to start, as it had a weird “vibration” at high speeds. I was told that it was because the brake calipers weren’t releasing properly and had a brake job done. We left Buffalo the day the interstate was reopened after a HUGE snow storm that had buried the city between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The vans “vibration” only got worse as we drove and my hand was numb from holding on to the shaking steering wheel. We stopped for the night in Elkhart, Indiana with the intention of getting the van repaired the very next day. I got up at 6am and began calling places to get us in, I found a garage that was willing to help us out for cheap- we had a bad U Joint that needed to be replaced along with a shaft. Though it took a long time to get the right converter for the u-joint to axle that needed to be replaced, the whole repair cost under 200$ and we left at 1 pm and called the Holding On guys to let them know we were 8 hours away, but should make the show by 9pm, we hit traffic in Chicago and Milwaukee and didn’t make it to Minneapolis until almost midnight about an hour after the show ended. We crashed at the Holding On pad and they were kind enough to pay us as if we had played. The next two days were slated for driving to California then like 2 weeks solid of shows from Anaheim all the way to St Louis. Steve had left the dome light in the van on for a few hours and paranoid, I started it up to charge the battery. Unlike my normal ritual of checking/ adding oil every morning, I didn’t do it that morning, or the day before when we had taken it to the shop, I would regret this as 4 hours into our ride our oil pressure dropped. I pulled over, threw in a quart, thinking we’d be ok and we drove on another two hours. Until the van just stopped. We called for a tow on Farside’s brand new cell phone and Sam Swindler (his real name) came out and asked “where’s your oil son?” apparently, all the oil had burned up in the engine and the crank shaft exploded like buckshot through the engine. We stayed in a hotel that night and while soaking in a hot tub, Farside agreed to through a rental on his credit card so we could do the tour. I drove straight through from Missouri to Anaheim to make the first show at the Chain Reaction- 24 hours. We even caught up with holding on, who were sleeping in a hotel in AZ. By the time we got to that first show, we were wrecked, but I remember the whole tour being a lot of fun.

Kevin extracting our revenge on Sam Swindler

During a weekend warrior 3 show trip, we got stopped at the border to Canada and they asked me if we had anything in our trailer besides band equipment. I replied “just our merch.” We got searched, of course and they asked me why I hadn’t “declared our merchandise.” That was in the back. I said that I had as “merch.” The Border Agent got on his radio and said “the agent in the booth didn’t understand what ‘merch’ meant.” And I flippantly replied; “Just because he didn’t understand it, doesn’t mean I didn’t say it!” Needless to say they confiscated everything and we had to pay $900 worth of taxes on it all. Kevin put it on his credit card, which only added to his struggle with being in the band. 9 months later and after writing a letter of appeal, we got the money back, but the damage had been done, add on top of that Farside confirmed a summer 2003 Warped Tour appearance on the “punk rocks.net” stage for us which offended Kevin’s punk rock sensibilities. That show was actually fucking awesome, surprisingly. By that time all of our local shows were fantastic, we had grown too popular to play basement shows and were playing clubs, but young kids couldn’t get their parents to take them to the Basement Bar or the Backstage Pub, but they could go to Warped Tour. Regardless of Kevin’s feelings the show, while we played, it was incredible for us, but everything else about that day sucked.

We started working on our full length for Go Kart Records, but I was having a hard time. From the 10” on, I had done the vast majority of music writing and all of the lyrics, but I had hit a wall and couldn’t come up with anything I liked. Farside was insistent that record be a group effort and he would obsess over every note. To make matters worse, it was fairly obvious that Steve and I were not musically compatible. He had wacky ideas like “the words and melody repeat but the music will be totally different!” This hurt my process and brain immensely. Kevin was noticeably frustrated at practice and kept asking if we could go back to me writing the songs, as he felt we had lost focus. Right before we left to go to Atomic Studios in Brooklyn, Kevin let us know that after the recording we would have to find a new singer. I have no fucking idea how we agreed to that, but we did.

We recorded at Atomic Studios with Dean Baltulonis, Matt Henderson from Madball, Mike Dijan from Breakdown and a guy from Vision who’s name I cannot remember. We stayed in the studio and didn’t shower for 10 days (thank the good lord for baby wipes) recording of The Forgotten EP had gone very well, so I expected Steve to nail it in the studio, but out of his comfort zone, he struggled. After finding the perfect guitar tone, the channel on the board burned out and we were never able to recreate it. Greg from Go –Kart records bounced the initial check to the studio. It was a nightmare a band taking its last gasps of air before dying. Still, we got through and even managed to get it mastered at West Westside after they tried to bump us for the “Misfits” Project 1950 record. We booked Kevin’s “last shows” with Holding on and Modern Life is War and began trying out new singers.

We had various people come down to try out, some were just fans of the band, and others were friends of ours or friends of friends. What we didn’t realize, until it was too late, was how absolutely irreplaceable Kevin was. Aaron Weese from Abusing the Word came down and had a good look and swagger, but his voice didn’t work. Nobody who came down had “it” until this guy Chris McHale came down. His voice was so powerful that when he started screaming the first song, I let go of my guitar because it was startling. He told us he has sung for some popular Long Island hardcore band after their first singer quit and that he was best friends with Wes from American Nightmare, sounded pretty good, but it turned out all to be a lie and Chris McHale ended up being the final, shitty nail in The Control’s coffin.

on tour 2002

Though at practice Chris was really on point with the songs, something seemed “off” with his personality; weird mood swings and little lies that we eventually started to catch. Go kart records sent me a link to a message board post with the heading “Who remembers Chris McHale, the scourge of Long Island Hardcore?” with people from where he was from just talking about how shitty the guy was. I had recently moved in with my girlfriend, and he took my old room at my apartment with Farside. I had left my computer and a few other things behind, with the intention of moving them later. One day, he shows up to practice wearing my Baphomet necklace (that I MADE and was recognizable) with some marker on it, claiming it wasn’t mine. Still, I had busted my ass to book an insanely good tour and wanted to play those show, we were hitting all of our hot spots and were playing with bigger/ cooler bands in a lot of places.

The Final tour route

We left on that tour and stuff started turning south right away. On the way to our show in Western MA, Farside got a call on his cell phone from a guy who claimed that Chris had ripped him off selling him illegal reptiles; he had gotten the number from one of the band’s posts online. It was a cluster, one second Chris would be up, and then he would be down. The show that night was actually decent, but after we got to where we stayed, Chris just disappeared for 4 hours. Farside, after only 3 days of that, told me he was going to quit after the tour was done, he couldn’t take it. The stress was palpable.

Through being cool (Farside, Steve, Kevin and The Author)

The fourth show of the tour was the record release for Glasseye, our LP at a record store called Hey Dude in Buffalo. Even though the place was packed (it was tiny) the turnout was only about 1/3 of what we had been used to playing to that past year and a half. 3 songs into our set, the cops showed up and shut it down, with hostile neighbors and a lot of noise, someone had called the cops. Chris and Farside got into after the set and Chris said something like “you’re not my father you don’t speak to me like that!” and he walked off. That was the end of The Control. I knew we couldn’t continue the tour with Chris (he had just quit) and so I went home and wrote a zillion apologetic emails cancelling the tour. Kevin called the next evening saying “fuck it. I’ll do the tour!” but I had already cancelled it all and my stress threshold had been reached. Even a really nice call from Steve trying to pump me up and do it with Kevin didn’t sway me, but maybe it should have, they are still all great guys. RIP The Control 4/1999- 9/2003.