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THINGS WIND DOWN
Spring 2010 - Throughout the summer I worked getting together all the lyrics and examples I had to my songwriting catalog. Some was hell to find, being in old folders in the attic or storage house somewhere. It would take me into the next year to find some of it. I'd find some, then lose it, and have to find it all over again.
I did however, while looking for some album lyrics which have yet to be found, a foundation document from the late 80's which was an original part of the Book Of Divinity and which I had used as part of the basis for some of my first forays into forming a political party, way before the world wide web (as another earlier attempt linked here). I cleaned it up a little bit and put it up online, for it was the very beginning of the revolution. Redux of course.
A first date for Rockfest had been set in April for August at a place we could build an amphitheatre. It needed work, time and money, none of which was at hand, so eventually we had to settle on a smaller event in September. Promotions got off to a good start with a huge emailed announcement sending traffic up on the sites. In the end turn no one lost money on the concert but me.
August 2010 - I throw a barn burner 44th birthday party for my self, since no one else gave a damn, and had way too much fun. Got some of the old gang in to jam and somehow managed to go all night without a ruckus, though it got close. Mel from Hell (x-guitarist for Nihilist, Scarecrow, and Lovechild) came by with some pals and rocked the house. Rockin' Rodney was back on the scene and he left his 'ol lady there for 5 days, I finally had to scrape up enough gas money to take her home in Marietta, so for the better part of a week I got to listen to her whine and gripe about cigarettes and beer! Rodney just smiled when I wheeled her in and said "now you see what kind of hell I put up with all the time!" I told him to never do it again!.
At least some of the month was productive, I did a remix of some of the material I had been working on for Massive and uploaded the one of the group almost close enough, another anthem cut with Stumpy Hazelwood called Ride The Bull. The subsequent attempt to get a band together to gig it and do a profile for the Stallion project fell short. By this time that was nothing new.
September 2010 - Towards the end of the month I got about three albums worth of stuff to remix and finish up off the Alesis HD24 and put it on computer. A couple of days into doing it my air conditioning in the studio went out. It was still quite hot outside and the studio had one small rear window that could actually be opened, a tin roof with no installation in the attic. I fixed the screen so I could open the side door for a while but it was obvious Spike would tear it down everytime someone pulled up in the parking lot outside, so that wouldn't work. It was usually at least 10-15 degrees hotter in the studio than outside, it was stiffling! Needless to say cool to cold weather would become the only times I could work inside the studio. Without money to buy another air-conditioning, work on recordings slowed to a crawl and basically stopped.
December 2010 - Start working on some new music again after not touching the guitar for most of the year. Kilgore kept saying we needed to get back into the studio and cut some music, so I talked Philbro into doing some recording in January. It wasn't going to be easy to get everyone in the same room, but it had been over 25 years since Philbro, Kilgore and I had recorded full length stuff. In some ways it brought some excitement back into the picture.
January 2011 - I finally got a date set for the last weekend of the month to cut some new tracks with Philbro and Kilgore. Then on the 22nd Kilgore died. He'd been in bad health for over 10 years and finally his body gave out. I worked on a few numbers for tributes and in his honor, but it just seemed kinda sad so by the end of the year I had not finished anything. Philbro moved back to Florida and time keep on moving along.
Goin to Kilgore's funeral, the radio played Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. Of course you cannot play many songs for a funeral better suited. I know folks don't believe in stuff like that being set-up specifically, but I am here to tell you that stuff like that does not just happen randomly. I pointed this out to mother, she agreed it was a beautiful song she'd been hearing for years, and being Muzz asked, "that Led Zeppelin, does he still perform?" Through the tears I had to crack a smile....
A couple of weeks after The Gore died the phone rang about three in the morning. I got up and answered it and the line was awash in static. I hear "hey man, they broke up". I realized it was Kilgore's voice. It jolted me awake and I stammered "Say what?" He said, faintly beneath the static "The band broke up man." I was about to say Kilgore you're dead when he said "I died man. I died." His voice fading as the static got louder, then it went completely quiet and the phone went dead. Not even a dial tone. I sat there, now wide awake holding the phone in my hand going WTF?? I hung up the receiver, picked it back up, got a dial tone. I hit star 69 and it said the last number called could not be reached. No shit.
For the rest of 2011 I left writing new music alone for the most part. I did mess around with a few new compositions when I'd sit down to try and get on with things, but I was not satisfied with much of anything to do any recording.
By this time the EMF bullshit had blasted most of my equipment with really bad power surges, so another mixing board ended up with just one mono channel (the third one in as many years). The conglomeration of EMFs rumbling, both together made it a nightmare for not only me but millions of people. Figures. The entire nation, and the world even, was well into a new age of tyranny, though most didn't know it at the time (some of us figured it out before it even began), it was already over a decade old. Think reality of the Patriot Act as in the really bad shit; as in really really bad nation destroying, because it's been going on a while during your life. You are no more the "safer" for it.....
September 2011 - Finally decided with time running out to book Rockfest as a small-venue industry showcase on November 11th at a place in Rome called The Sports Page. It was a very small place ran by my cousin and her husband. I started approaching some cool bands I knew to gig on the bill.
October 2011 - I contacted as many industry people I could about Rockfest, also did heavy contacts through Myspace and Facebook. Did a few hundred email address mailer to local media and other NW GA area folks I though would be good choices to invite for the show. By months end I had the bill full for the show, though of course there would always be last minute changes at almost all multi-band events I had ever done. Rockfest 2011 would be no different.
Though the bands were set up on the floor without a stage and no lights except a couple I'd brought it was a great night of music. The Sports Page is really small so my practice PA was able to handle the job and the bands that played were all fantastic! For the 20th Anniversary of the first gig it was fitting, and at least most of the bands got gas money! Everyone I think though, had a good time.
February 2012 - With time beginning to run out on having the studio on Hwy 140, I began trying to finish the stuff got off the 24 track hard drive recorder. I tackled the Bootlegger, 200 Proof album first. I had to do whatever it took to get the albums onto a computer to be mixed, so I did this one track at the time using a working channel I would find on the board. This took FOREVER and it forced me sometimes to leave the tracks as they were pan wise, which caused some bummer mixes, but I did not know when, if ever, I would get this equipment set up again, so it was necessary to get it done however. Life can be a bitch that way.
June 2012 - Published my blog about being exposed to radio forcing (Electromagnetic Weaponry - AKA Havana Syndrome years later) crimes. Also published an increasingly politically incorrect Underground Sound Webzine linking up all the continuing madness done by a society and government which had lost its fucking mind. In all honesty though, evidence pointed out we were being ran, world wide, by The Beast. Judgement was not long it would seem, in coming.
July 2012 - Keep up doing the Live At Underground Records show, with bands coming into the studio out on 140 for jams, small shows and interviews we'd do live. I put together a 4th of July gig with some of the bands I'm working with, including Marshall Pope, and I Enemy to broadcast live. I jammed too, with Chuckie Walls on a shot out binger so out there it will never see the light of day! The party was a rousing success!
September 2012 - Half way through finally mixing down all the Bootlegger stuff. Just have to get over the heat and get this stuff done since its been piling up for years, bits and pieces of half way recorded stuff. Not to mention I've got newer stuff I really want, and would rather have been, working on. Got albums waiting to be finished so it's time to get to work, which of course I don't.........
Find out after working on all the songs for the 200 Proof album, that when Kilgore died he took all his back-up vocals with him, because they were no longer on the masters! Nothing surprised me anymore. I'd later find a cassette demo we had made for a gig shopper which had his vocals and alternates of his takes, the only versions of that stuff that will ever be.....
October 2012 - Finally can't afford internet service so it's like 1989 all over again. I actually find a half dozen ep's I'd never finished writing while cleaning out an old briefcase because I had time to clean up the bachelor pad from hell, or should I say explore the mess a little bit, without the pesky internet claiming my attention. When I felt like I worked a lot in the gardens.
November 2012 - Though I had planned to take off 2012 from writing and get the reams of material laying around and so many recordings kinda edged towards the finished line if not completely finished before I had to break the studio down because the highway was coming through, I did manage to write new material. I had been playing around on the bass and a little bit of guitar writing stuff for a project I called Chuck. About mid-month I contacted an old friend from High School, none other than Chuck himself, Brad Walls and pitched getting together to cut a Chuck EP. Looked like it might happen. It never did.
I keep the weekly show runnin' at rockfest.org which has been home to the Live At Underground Records Show I did every Friday night for about five years at that point, still showcasin' new bands......by doing it at friends, open wi-fi spots and where ever I could find to do it. Not being at the studio to do the show mean it transformed into more of a webcam social. Times change.
2012 was also the year I couldn't pay to keep rockfest.net. How it all was handled with NSI selling the domain name for whatever they thought they could smacked of digital cronyism rackets, but that was nothing new. It did suck because I had been trying to develop the domain as a
personals site for a number of years now, as well as for older archvies of media, music and other band stuff. Being poor positively sucks in more ways than one!
January 2013 - I found some forgotten stuff, things like unfinished multi-track versions of Electro Punk and Atomic Love, and old cassette versions of things like the Theme From Lunaris. I also realized time was growing short to get an analog-to-digital converter to get some of the still working old videos off tapes. So much to do, so little time.
Spring 2013 - Took personal time away from closing down everything out on 140 to hang out with local friends before I left to move wherever that was going to be. All I knew was within a year I'd have to be out of there and somewhere else, and I wasn't getting much help from the people the State hired to help me move, in fact it seemed like a complete shit show. So by now I was tired of all the negativity and throughout the spring I jammed with local friends down at Opies, the closest music venue only three miles a straight shot down the road. It would be one of the things I missed most about not living out on 140, social wise. It was cool to be out in the country and just have to go a few miles down a country highway to hear bands. It's no longer there but instead is now down the road in the next county and called Crazy Acres. Enjoy!
August 2013 - Though I had told myself not to start any new projects, I had too much stuff laying around, got too bored not working on anything, and started compiling new projects. What turned into Troublemaker and Dimensional Doorway also spawned the new Los Angeles project. I loved the results as the experimentation took hold!
Fall 2013 - Finished writing for the Troublemaker and Dimensional Doorway albums. Began shaping some of the recordings I had for the Los Angeles - Revolution ep, which at first I had started to do as an lp. The slow pace of recording gave birth to too much material with just a track or two, perhaps just ideas on paper, to ever get the full album together as I wanted, so I decided to go with the first release as an ep. Progress was super slow as the year ground to an end, not that I had much time to mess around!
March 2014 - Finally got some relocation money to get some kind of storage space for stuff from the record store, studio/house and stuff I had stored in a large garage out back for almost a year. The payment didn't cover but around half the cost of a storage building so my dad covered most of it. Later on within a week after I was no longer on the property it would be broken into over and over and everything from boxes of albums & CD's, old computers, spare music gear and the vast majority of stuff I had accumulated for 30 years would be stolen.
Spring & Early Summer 2014 - Finished breaking the studio down without finishing any of the projects. Not the stuff I had been transferring for over a year nor the new stuff I had written in 2013. I did get past the starting point on the first Los Angeles recordings in the spring of '14, but never liked anything enough to finish the songs. By early summer all the gear is broken down ready to be moved or has been moved except my guitar and amp, just in case I hook up with some players to round out the band. I had been advertising for drummers and bass players all winter and spring long. Nothing ever jelled.
Underground Records was basically where it was when I started it, a label for my recordings and a place for me to promote my favorite bands and artists I liked. I hoped whatever affiliates I could drum up might make enough to pay for the server space and internet domains. That was a stretch. As a hobby at least it afforded me a place to work on my coding skills.
July 2014 - Finally got a place to live so I start moving. Since, as I've said, it was I pay to move and get re-established then turn in to get reimbursed, it was up to me somehow to finance this move and re-establishing. It all was a fucking hot bitch I mostly did by myself through the summer of 2014. It took forever having to borrow friend's trucks because I didn't really have any money to rent anything or pay anyone to help me. Still ended up though me owing people.
Fall 2014 - Started setting the studio back up to finish the Los Angeles ep. Everything was strewn all over the place, some physical stuff gone forever, stolen. Most of the music equipment, shoddy and worn out as it was, made the trip. The old house I moved into was derelict and needed months of work. It was a long haul.
November 2014 - As the year began to draw to a close it turned really cold and I froze my ass off, not being able to heat the house much nor afford to replace the furnance. Looked like a long cold winter ahead. I did the best I could for Spike and I to survive. For months I'd stay anywhere else I could that had heat and running water. I stayed as much as I could with Spike and grew even closer to my little buddy. He was such a good dog, and friend. He and I both were growing old very quickly as exposure to the 24/7 blast of electromagnetic energy for years on end took their toll.
I applied for SSI disability which meandered around for the next few years which offered no relief, and a buncha grief. For something as serious as this EMF shit going on, which I mentioned as a cause among many of disability on the paperwork, to just be ignored by the US Federal Government as far as helping someone damaged by it, reeks of criminality. Though they and most anyone would just say I was crazy, except the actual physical damages pretty much ruled out only in my head nonsense, soon in a year or two their own would be affected; so I guess everyone saying I was crazy would need to apply that to the federal government employees whose description of the phenomenon and effects on them were almost identical to mine, which I'd been raising hell about at this point for many years.
Winter 2015 - The EMF problems at the new house were unbearable. I lived about 100 yards from a cell tower now and I understand why people hate them. 20 years ago microwaves weren't around us like this everywhere being used for everything. Anything that causes something similar to the hum, gives people insomnia and more, breeding deadly disease. History I believe, will not be kind.
Spring 2015 - Finally started staying full time at the new house. I had what was left of the recording and music gear set up, but rarely if ever felt like working on any recordings. The old beat up computer of Raven's I used to record on would just randomly shut down. It had a bad power plug and battery, neither of which could be replaced, at least not affordably. Most of the time though I didn't feel like doing shit, so months would go by when I didn't touch my guitar or work on music. It was a huge struggle to get past all the negativity and worsening health, caused by years of exposure to unacceptable levels of radiation, and try to focus on positive things. Luckily, at least mentally, I was strong enough to get by. Being unemployed and broke is never easy. As I started trying to put in a garden I found out my arms and legs would go numb within minutes. Great, I thought. Now I was basically disabled in more ways than one. Hey what can you say? Just keep smiling and working, keep the head up.
August 2015 - I decided to quit making reasons why and figure out reasons how. I was ready to get the Los Angeles album done and move on to the next few albums I had the music ready to go with. With it mid-upper 90's during the day outside it was often well over 100 degrees with no airflow in the house during the day. Where there is a will there is a way though. Momma Roach hooked me up with a tiny air conditioning unit about 20-some years old, so I went to work trying to get it mounted and wired in somehow.
Also in August I finished writing the outline for Reign Of Darkness script including demoing some ideas for accompany music. It was the first script I had written geared specifically as an opportunity for a television or cable series. It definitely fit right in with the times.
September 2015 - Finally about halfway through September the weather cooled down enough to make it bearable in the studio. I set to work redoing most of the guitars for the album Revolution. I'd already set release dates for the thing since the beginning of the year. Now as the autumn of the life of the year 2015 began, I just figured to get the thing finished by the winter of 2016. The writing for the New Jerusalem and Spirit Commando albums continued. I started reworking some of the songs from Age Of Fire as well.
October 2015 - Philbro died on October 6th . He and I had played in Theoria, Equinox and Powercock together. He had lived on and off in Florida the past 10 years and was down there when he passed. We had made arrangements for some year end jams and Philbro had decided to come back to the ATL and some friends had offered to let him live with him while he got re-established. It was a hard blow, losing a friend, such a talented, wonderful person, like Philbro. It was time to take some stock.
In 2011, just one week before Kilgore, who was the bass player in Theoria, died, he, Philbro and I had made a date to work on some new recordings. Now just a few months shy of five years later, Philbro was gone. As always, I went back and found stuff we all had worked on together that had yet to see the light of day. I found what is probably the earliest and first recordings of some gigs we had done in Theoria, when I was 18. Bad as they were, I found one I let see the light of day. It showed young men working on raw, original music. The memories came flooding back.
Philbro had also worked in quite a few other bands I worked with as well. Recording, booking, management, doing distribution, marketing promotions. Some of it could've been better, but isn't life sometimes like that in hindsight? Most of the recordings were actually pretty good, after 30+ years. I uploaded some of the No Control stuff which, surprisingly I'd never uploaded though it shouldn't have been such a mystery. I had vaults of analog stuff that needed to converting. Probably a good 100+ hours of stuff, audio and video. It slowed work on the Los Angeles stuff down quite a bit. Yet much of it needed to be done and put up, before I too wasn't here to do it.
When someone you worked with over a long period of time dies, besides the grief there is everything else sacred to those times and those people. Besides the recordings and a few videos I did with Philbro over the years, I started digging up some stuff from other bands I'd been in over the years just for reviewing the past, as many, myself included, are known to do when someone passes away and we start looking back, being nostalgic, remembering our times.
It certainly made me want to get what I had in the can finished. I realized I needed to make it happen, while there was still time. It wasn't a much a sense of urgency as knowing whatever time was left was finite, and the writing on the wall was that for most of us from my era and generation, the curtains were slowly, and in some cases quickly, closing. It was time to tie up the loose ends, get on with it, and get something done. There were far less years left available.
Fall 2015 - Began transfering and uploading some of the releases I had worked on in the past which had been only available on cassette. In a way working on some of the older stuff allowed me some respite on my dissatisfaction with still-as-yet finishing the Revolution album.
Winter 2016 - Thank God this winter wasn't as cold as the last. I had about froze to death! I had plenty of time to work on music, but I just fooled around writing new riffs while a ton of shit sat undone. I thought I felt the twinge of not giving a fuck. It truly was a case of some kind of depression in a dark place at this point.
Summer 2016 - Got a board and converter to get stuff in stereo into the computer easier. I still had to set Garage Band up because of latency problems in Audacity which was what everything had ended up in. I had to transfer everything recording wise, again, to another computer. This was the third time I had to do this. Did a few work sessions over a couple of weeks and got down to the final tracks, most a few leads and some gravy here and there. Fall looked good for, at last, finishing this fucker.
August 2016 - Dad passed away the day before my birthday. For a bried period of time his passing kicked in with me wanting to finish stuff years in the making, and I also wrote some new stuff. Did a zine dedicated to Dad and a few weekly shows doing the music he liked and playing some recordings of his voice pulled from old home videos. My father was a good man and though he always said he didn't like me wasting my time on music above anything else, he had many years before helped me build a box for my EV Force 10 speakers I was using to power my amp. He and I also built a smoke machine for using dry ice and hot water. Like an idiot I scrapped the smoke machine while packing up to move from Aville, but I still have the old speakers and cabinet. I still used them up until early on playing in Bootlegger.
Fall 2016 - Ran into problems trying to hear stuff over the din of a cranked amp in a 10x12 room. Moving stuff into rooms far enough away presented it's own problems. Coulding hear shit basically anyways which for a while seemed very weird. Got disgusted and said fuck it for about 6 months.
Winter 2017 - Worked and record some new material. Including stuff for the albums Gangstalkers, Spirit Commando, Omerta (2nd full Los Angeles album), and Papyrus, which had never been finished. Messed with Revolution a time or two but never got anywhere. I got rid of an old junk strat I had and picked up a Line 6 amp I could use late at night since my neighbor was 100 years old (literally) and I generally tried to quit the open amp stacks around dark. After messing with it for a month I could see it "might" work for rhythms, but not leads. All this digital shit fucks the sound up mostly and put a very slight distortion on the finished sounds, and I don't like it. No wonder so much modern all digital stuff sounds like shit.
Spring 2017 - Working finishing the recordings for Los Angeles - Revolution. At this point I was tired of messin' with it. Got all the songs down to a track to finish. Started getting the Medicine Man and Wrong Crowd stuff I cut 30 years ago digitized off the master or dubbing cassettes for 30 Year Anniversary releases. I had to use cassettes I could find, some of it in the mess of stuff which had been strewn all over the place in the storage building which had gotten robbed a half-dozen times back when I moved from Adairsville, because the old Tascam 388 I had cut the original studio tapes on quit working 20 years ago.
Summer 2018 - The computer ALL the studio stuff was on went on the blink. The machine was an old hand me-down. My sister and mother had lent me the money to fix the plumbing in my house (after 8 years I had working hot water - YAY!) and I had enough to buy another machine. I had to transfer all the stuff again from an Apple over to a Windows machine. The latest computer lasted 6 weeks and the hard drive went out, or at first that's what I thought the problem was. So I had to re-transfer the stuff off the failing Apple onto another windows machine, losing what had been done on the bad hard drive, and onto DVD's to try and save everything. I hate fucking computers. They are foreign made pieces of total shit.
From the Spring of 2018 into the summer (and beyond), my house was entered illegally multiple times, and Spike was poisoned in May. The Zine, Issue 70, covering all that is linked throughout History. That's the best place to rehash all that ridiculous, illegal nonsense. Justice for the burden, further burdens I should say, including the expensive damages, plus life, libery and happiness all that stole from me, is unresolved to this day.
Fall 2018 - Finished up a script I had been working on for a while called Daddy's Boy. Finished writing most of the soundtrack yet was disgusted enough with trying to record anything I said fuck it to doing any work on the soundtrack. When I could get one of these machines of garbage working after doing forensics related to the break-ins (See Issue 70 above), if I felt like fucking with them at all, I might get something done. One day in October they worked for a few hours and I got the old Medicine Man demo I did back in 91 which was still on cassette, digitized. Just as I got finished and decided to work on my stuff the machine crashed and would not stay up and running. So I said fuck it again.
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