Intransit consisted of myself, Zac Cochran, Phil Valenti and a rotating cast of bass players, running for about 3 years in the 1998-2001 era. This was one of our first attempts at a “rocker”.
One More Minute - Intransit
Holy Import, Batman!
Wow, decided to migrate all my old blogs back here and just be done with this whole 4 domains to do a simple task such as blogging thing.
So, yeah, imported 146 posts, NONE OF WHICH HAVE A DATE STAMP.
Apparantly my 10 year high school reunion was the other day. Neat.
Posted in General.
I’m Gonna Run Through The Halls of My High School
Well….not really.
The 10 year reunion was last weekend. Having to realize that not only am I 10 years past high school, but so many brain cells have been lost throughout the last 10 years from drinking that I can’t remember anything about it.
Hell, I don’t remember much about last month, let alone 10 years ago. Continued…
Posted in imported.
Space….The Forgotten Frontier
We’ve been using the same shuttle design for 24 years. In the last decade the government has cut more than 40% of the budget for the space program. After cutting nearly half of the budget, they wonder why they can’t ensure the shuttle is safe anymore.
You know, you shouldn’t listen to me bitch about this, because frankly, I’m not an authority on it and I’m way too fucking tired of trying to keep up to date with what freedom’s I’ve lost today and the lack of testicular fortitude of anyone to come anywhere close to running for President against the GOP in ‘08. I’ve zoned myself out to wanting to follow any of it anymore, frankly because I have enough stress in my life that is poorly handled, and if I think about the outside world too much my head starts spinning. So, given that.
Space is a scary, potentially dangerous fucking place. The people that first came into the space program when NASA was formed as well as the people in it out should fully realize that when they strap a shuttle to a ginormous fuel tank and add some more fuel tanks on the side for a little more pep, then ignite them and try to push what’s left into the atmosphere, there’s bound to be a few casualties. There’s been something like 115 shuttle missions since ‘81. There’s been 2 explosions. Simple math dictates that any crew that jumps on board has a, oh, about 2% chance of blowing up.
an we get a big, huge mega technological or societal advancement before I die, please? The only thing I’ve seen in my lifetime is SpaceShipOne, and the only reason that was cool was because it showed that you don’t have to be a government sponsored organization to build something capable of getting into space. We haven’t had a new idea for the shuttle since 1981. In 1981, the Commodore 64 was fucking evolutionary. Come on, people, let’s fucking innovate already. It’s space. It’s fucking scary and dangerous and one day Tom Cruise’s spaceship will fry you with a death ray while you are spacewalking. Of course, my figures can be off here, but we’ve had something like 100 launches since ‘81. 2 failed. You have a 2% chance of dying. That’s better that my odds every time I eat ham. Get your ass to Mars. Quatto is waiting for you.
Posted in imported.
Teens Use Internet? That’s Unpossible!
In short: 9 out of 10 teenagers these days are using the Internet.
In long: Thank Christ. I’ve been working in the Internet business for a decade now, save for a year of consulting, working at a school and finding myself (aka unemployable filthmonger). As much as Microsoft, Apple and those wacky Linux lads try to make this whole connecting to the Internet thing easier, I firmly believe it will always take a fundamental knowledge of what that box on your desk is and that being on the Internet means that box gets to talk to other boxes. People just don’t want to consider that. It’s like a bad Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer sketch come to life.
Little secret…I hate the people I talk to. Well, not all of them, just the one’s that never took the time to learn a single thing about their computer other than clicking the blue E will take them to Internet. These are the same people that blame my Internet company for freezing their computer and breaking their Chess game. I fear that there will come a time that I, too, shall forego learning new technology and plead my irritated nephew how to get the brain reading thingy to work on my Omega device. The sooner these kids learn the intricisies of networking and the difference between RAM, hard drive space and the processing speed of the computer, the better they’ll be able to adapt and learn new technology and the sooner they can get a job at Best Buy for $8.75/hr where they will make fun of me in 20 years for not knowing which combination of miniscule buttons I have to hold down on the Omega to scan my Homeland Security approved implant so the government can clear my email and I can find out how to increase the size of my penis.
Note to teens: The Internet has great porn.
Posted in imported.
Hist. of Killie McGee
The History of Killie McGee
by Matthew Stone
Volume One,
“Got no money and you got no car then you got no women and there you are”
–Young MC
May of 2001 is a month that will live in infamy for me. It is the month I learned that life was most definitely not peachy.
Ya see, prior to May 2001, I was living a slovenly dream I had just put in my 5th year of working for an Internet Service Provider, during the dot-com boom of the late 90’s. I was paid well to slack off, turn servers into houses for my mp3 collection, run an internet radio station, learn how to drop shadow anything in Photoshop, oh, and occasionally reset a user’s password or rebuild a web server. The previous three years, I had lived in an apartment with Zac and John, who I was in the band, Intransit, with (Zac is now with Uncle Fister, John with Government Warning).
Intransit seemed to have fizzled out after we recorded an album. In what I like to call a “having a baby to save the marriage” move, we had fired John for month of deadbeat-ism and turfed him from the apartment, and after a handful of shows doing the whole “power-trio” thing, picked up a friend from work to play bass for our album. We finished the album, made about 10 copies, and never rehearsed or played again.
Moving back to May 2001, Zac had decided to move in with his girlfriend and our other roomate, Myron (of Lucky Savage) was bound for a loft on the south side. I was looking for something out in the suburbs, but since I am lazy and procrastinate a lot, I hadn’t found anything decent by the time our lease was up. So, following the path of many a person in their mid-twenties, I moved back in to my parents house. Little did I know, that was the smartest thing I could have done.
I moved home over a weekend. That following Tuesday I was laid off by the Internet company I was working for. Two weeks severance, that’s it.
My folks decided to be nice and withdraw their request for rent while I was there. This is a story for another time, as I could fill 100 pages of what life in unemployment is like, so I’ll just move ahead to the point. In the late 80’s my dad had built a home studio for giving vocal lessons. It had been collecting dust since the late 90’s, when he decided to get back into working for the man. He was still using an ADAT and a mixer to record. Given the new digital editing technology on computers, the next 4 months I spent collecting unemployment, doing side work, and re-building the studio to work with Cakewalk and a nice sound card. Once it was up, it had to be tested.
I began writing. I tried to keep the stuff as simple and “fun” sounding as possible. In the few months I spent down there, I created about 15-20 songs. To name a few that were written in my basement: Toy, Cruel Love (more on this one later), Pump (thrown out after 2 shows), Call My Name, Love to You, Wreck, What’s In It For Me, and more. I had no intention of doing anything with them until John called me out of the blue one day.
His new band, Government Warning, signed on for a 3 hour tour at J.D. Muggs and only had about 90 minutes of music. He asked me to put something together to open. First stop, Dan Garneau.
I gave Dan my bass right out of high school and had him learn root notes so he could be in a band with me. When he went to France for school, the band we had dissolved and we went our seperate ways. In my bout of unemployment, we had gotten together a few times and hung out. So, he was immediately on board. After one awful attempt at playing with another guitarist and drummer (can you say electronic drum kit?) we picked up the phone, called Phil (from Intransit) on drums, and had ourselves a power-trio. The sheer simplicity of the tunes said there was no need for a lead player. I was the guitarist, and I was the singer. Pretty scary, given that I usually had hid behind people playing rhythm or shared vocal duties.
We played the show in October, making it a Red Cross charity for 9/11. I pulled the name “Killie McGee” off a Simpsons episode and we were ready to go. People genuinely liked our stuff. A few days later, Myron called and asked if we could open for Lucky Savage at Mutiny, a bar that would soon come to live in our hearts forever. That show went ever better than the first one. With the goofy chemistry we had formed, and the response for the material being stronger than any of the other bands I’d been in, we decided to throw ourselves to the wolves and make a play for Rock-stardom.
Volume Two,
“Let the good times roll” -The Cars
Chemistry hit Killie McGee. We found our little niche and stuck to it. Dan, getting consistently more confident inventing basslines, laid the foundation for 4th Ex-Boyfriend, Anything you Want to Be and changed Cruel Love from a hack of “Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer into a bonafide tune. Looking for some exposure, we saw a sign for open mike night at Lunar Brewing Company, a small bar in Villa Park. We grabbed our gear and headed over.
Again, the response was great (I’ll stop saying that now). Fuzz, the guy running the open mike (and bassist for Bad Medicine, a bitchin’ Jovi tribute band), invited us to go over to a bar called 602 North and try their open mike night. After we played a 15 minute set, the owners asked us to compete in their Battle of the Bands, moving to the finals and losing out to soon-to-be-friend Humpback Wail and the noise that is Gentlemen Junkie.
In the process, we befriended Humpback and asked them to open for us for another Mutiny gig. This would be the start of Humping Killie.
Well, at first, Greg from HW joked that it should be “Killie Wail” but how can you deny “Humping Killie”? It just *sounds* dirty, despite the squeaky cleanness of it. The two bands were inseperable for about a year. Every show seemed to be either Humpback opening for Killie or Killie opening for Humpback. I would join them on stage to sing “Sister” and wrote “Wasted” for Greg to sing with Killie McGee. Much later our friendships would distance. I think we all may have just gotten tired of each other. I think part of it had to do with Humpback not really coming to any of our shows to support us when we were pulling everyone out to theirs. Either way, I don’t have any hard feelings and wish them the best. They do what they do and do it very well.
We had some following, we had some good tunes and we were ever so busy. Dan was a booking machine, never being able to turn down a gig. As a result, some months we were playing 2-3 times on a given week, on top of open mike nights at 602 and other places. I vividly remember this one night where we played at the Prodigal Son in Chicago. It was a Wednesday, and I had a cold and a shot voice from a gig we did the Saturday before. We were on the bill with Treysuno and a couple of other indie bands, and were supposed to be in the opening slot. Well, after load-in, the booker shows up and lets us know that we’ve been moved to the “headlining” slot. Headlining on a Wednesday means you play at 12:30am. For a band whose crowd consists of friends with 8-5 jobs that mostly live in the suburbs, we were screwed. On top of that, I’d been slamming DayQuil all day to kill my cough and was in that morbid state of wide awake but utterly physically destroyed. On top of that, I had 4 hours to kill until show time and the other bands for the most part sucked. Well, they didn’t suck, but noise rock ain’t my bag. So, it was me, John, $1 Pabst Blue Ribbons, and in one of the oddest, scariest promotions ever, free baskets of bacon. Yes, free bacon night at the bar. Myron came down and ran through “Blitzkrieg Bop” with us on stage, and I have a picture of it I will keep with me always. It’s maybe the 4th song of the night, my face is beet red and pouring sweat, there’s 3 PBR cans in front of me, and Myron looks like he’s screaming his bloody head off.
Pardon me while I aside here and tell you a little something about headlining a show. When you are U2, yeah, headlining is the bomb. When you are a local band trying to make a name for yourself, headlining is usually just a flat out bomb. The best place to be is the middle. Throw your ego aside and play in the middle slot. The opening acts crowd is still there, people are filing in late for the last band and you are exposed to both crowds as well as your own. That
Posted in imported.
IT’S OFFICIAL!
Per the U.S. Postal Service, there now exists a person named Rebecca M. Stone, spouse of Matthew R. Stone.
Yay!
Posted in imported.
Sports Are Cool
I think I’ve used that riff in the title before, but fuck it.
This post is in celebration of finally getting to have a lost weekend of uninterrupted Xbox-ing, football and baseball. With the recent pickup of cable in the house, and the recent pickup of a fuckload of decent beer at cheap prices from Costco (man I love that place), I was geared up for the weekend.
A lot is to be said for these weekends. Given my week runs 8-6 for work and transit home, then there’s the hourlong process of deciding on and making something for dinner followed by post-food coma and work-depression making one fall asleep by about 8:30 at night, crashing hard and getting up to do it the next day. That weird mixture of stress and bad sleep, mixed with a few hangovers, doesn’t bode well over time. Being able to just sit there, unwashed, not responsible for jack shit, a case of beer, a fuckload of channels and nothing to do is about the best stress relief I’ve ever had. Having the ability to watch a fuckton of sports is also great, since I haven’t really been able to do that a lot (Becky hates watching sports and is usually in front of the TV with me).
Posted in imported.
Press Kit Blues
So, I’ve got me this band. If you read the site, you know point08 is the band, and point08.net is the website. Plug over.
Anyway, throughout my previous bands, there’s always been one thing that’s harder than I think anything else in this business to do right. We’ve all written songs well, we’ve played them well, but in order to get into places and actually have them let you do what you do so well, you need a press kit. The problem I have with putting these together is what they call image. According to all those “music biz” folks, the band needs an image, aka a gimmick, aka a slightly exaggerated version of yourself as a cohesive unit that tells the world what you are. The Beatles had this, U2 had this, Metallica had this, hell, Hootie had this. So, you put this kit together that showcases your music and sells yourself to the booker. This entails:
1) Demo CD - You need preferably no more or less than 3 tracks for the booker to listen to. This doesn’t have to be pro quality but needs to sound decent enough for people to give you a shot. The booker will most likely listen to the first 20 seconds of every tune and decide from there. Now, we just spent time and money putting together a demo. However, these 3 tracks should be the be representation of what your band does, and in my opinion, the 4 tracks we recorded don’t really capture the feel of the newer 5 or 6 tunes we’ve put together since the demo, and those seem to be more of the direction we’re going in these days. Therefore, scratch the demo and start putting together a freshy. There goes 2 weeks of rehearsals and an additional month of Shawn in his basement with his GuitarPort and a copy of the tracks pinning down solos.
2) Band Bio - I’ve always been utterly terrible at these at best. You need to sell yourself in a couple of short paragraphs that pretty much back up the music and live experience the booker is going to get from you. What makes this difficult is trying to sell yourself and be honest, which comes out something like:
Point08 are a bunch of dudes from Chicago that sit on their asses, drink a fuckton of beer and whiskey and chain smoke through every rehearsal, show and downtime of more than 3 minutes in length. We play rock. Our live show sounds like a bunch of dudes drunk on a fuckton of beer and whiskey and making a rather awesome sounding racket while chain smoking during any downtime of more than 30 seconds in length.
Now, do you want those jackasses playing your bar? No. So, we’ll have to nicen up the words a bit to get something useable.
3) Press Clippings - Wherein a paper or e-zine reviews your band. Now, a band with no CD and hardly any live shows save for once a quarter that doesn’t really advertise itself anywhere other than it’s mailing list of friends from other jobs they’ve worked might have a problem with this. There are many sites that will review single mp3s however, and I’ve submitted to those. Mind you, they aren’t as reputable as say, a review from the Reader, but it’ll have to do for now.
4) A Gig Calendar - Now, every time I see one of thses in a book I see a band listing 40 dates in the next 60 days, which seems utterly fucking stupid. If you are playing a market with a limited following, what’s the friggin’ point in playing that many shows? I’ve done it with Killie and I can tell you from experience, you cannot build a crowd that fast and the regulars will burn out by show #6 and not be heard from again. I like the P08 general idea of a gig every other month or so. It makes it a little more special, and allows us to at least keep working at the same place without them being pissed.
5) Press Photo - aka the WORST THING EVER! I’ve never had a good press photo experience. Basically, you lose a day fucking POSING and trying to look cool. The only real thing I’ve learned is that you always try to put the fat guy in the back and NEVER shoot against a plain brick wall. This is your first impression on the booker, even before the music, so your “image” is supposed to come out bright and clear. Once again, our image is of slovenly folks playing music for fun and maybe one day profit. Not a real photogenic idea. No mohawks, no black leather, no rings (save for the wedding band), no painted nails or eye liner or spiky hair or long hair or flannel shirts or charismatic front men or spandex or glamorous outfits or any of that. This is us in blue jeans, black t-shirts and a look of mild drunkeness and more than mild annoyance. Viva la image.
So, I dunno. I’m at a complete and total loss for how to “image” this band. For the 11 of you that visit this site (WEBSTATS DON’T LIE!) and know the band, can you recommend anything to do for a photo shoot? Are there any songs you want on the demo? Help a brother out….leave a comment or something.
Posted in imported.
More Random Thoughts From The Overnight Shift
Regardless of how much sleep I get during the day, I still have to face the following facts:
- I will always be tired. Always.
- You know eye boogers? I get them while awake, but not the physical ones, I just feel like my eyes have them…constantly.
- There is no social hour of the day. Getting off of work means having a bagel and taking sleeping pills, then going through the day from 11-10 totally groggy and feeling crappy. I can’t drink, because the only window for drinking has been taken over by od’ing on sleeping pills. I smoke once during the night shift, then chain smoke until I pass out later in the day, wake up, chain smoke until I go to work and make some food in the process. Which food to make I can never figure out, because technically breakfast should be at 10:30 at night, lunch around 4am and dinner around 10 or 11 in the morning.
- I assuming this is because of the general grogginess and crappiness posted above, but the only people I don’t want to punch in the mouth at any given moment of the day are Zac and maybe Cori, and I think that’s only because they are the only nice people I see in the morning. That’s caused some awesome stress at home. Heh, props to Zac also for being the only 8am person this week that actually gets in before 8:15…..or before 8 for that matter.
- Coffee and caffeine are absolutely useless to me for some reason. The only way to stay awake is slamming 3 or 4 energy drinks and hoping my heart doesn’t explode.
- My ability to work with Unix is gone. My brain cannot handle anything complex. I’ve had to push back on some plans I had for the week simply because I cannot functionally perform the tasks I need to perform. This also applies to music. I can’t absorb any music save for pretty bad country music…although that Brad Paisley ain’t too shabby.
- You leave work on Tuesday. You come back to work on Tuesday. That fucking sucks.
- A bit of the vulgar: Moving back to days will be hard from the sole point that I’ll have to hold in farts now. This last week has truly been a gas.
Well, regardless, one more day of this shit ass schedule and I can come back to work and maybe actually do something worthwhile instead of the daily 9 hour struggle to stay awake. The only lessons really learned this week are that I will a) never volunteer for graveyard again and b) gladly walk out the door if ever forced to. What a fucking waste of time, energy, money, skillset and sanity just to babysit two phones that have a 9% chance of ringing between the hours of 12am and 6:30am. Blech.
The mouth-punching line forms to the left.
-matt
Posted in imported.
