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by elizabeth
Rachel and I started playing together in September of 95 when her old Corndolly bandmate Angie Heaton (now of the fabulous Angie Heaton and the Gentle Tamers) introduced us. I'd been playing guitar and writing songs for about a year and we worked on those and began writing some together. Then we got lucky (no, not like that!) and found a great drummer named Russ Horvath. After I got over my initial refusal to sing
above a whisper, we started practicing like crazy and played our first show on January 12, 1996 opening for June of '44.
Things sorta fell into place after that. I kept writing songs (albeit slowly) and Rachel was a booking machine. Friend and neighbor Geoff Merritt from Mud Records heard our demo tape and called me at home over Christmas break about putting out a 7inch. We recorded more songs in bits and pieces including some stuff with Mark Rubel who just recorded the new Hum CD. "Charcoal," a 9-song CD, was rreleased in October of 96. The nice boys of Braid also released the song "Backlash" on their label Grand Theft Autumn as a split with the band Supporting Actress.
Unfortunately, right when the CD was set to come out, Russ left to teach high school. Rachel and I freaked because we had shows coming
up but luckily Chad cornered me drunk one night (me, not him - or who knows? probably both of us) and said he wanted to play drums. He played his first show with us after only 3 practices and was amazing. When he said he was up for touring, Rachel and I breathed a sigh of relief. We started touring in January of 97 and went to the East Coast twice, the South twice, and the West once in the next 7 months. In March of 1997, we released another 7inch recorded by Mr. Matt Talbot of Hum with our
punk rawk cover of Time After Time on the b-side.
When I started writing songs for a new CD, I was writing a lot of second guitar parts and all of us agreed that we wanted to sound more "rawk" live so we began looking for a second guitar player. Pat Cramer joined us in November of 97, two months before we were set to record our new CD. We recorded "the glass intact" with Matt Allison in Chicago and Pat played on 4 of the songs. We finished mixing just in time to leave on a short two-week east coast tour.
Pat left the band towards the end of April during our east coast tour and we've had two people fill in for second guitar while touring for "the glass intact," Jim Minor and Dan Keene.
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