From South Buffalo to the Bay: Part 2

If you're just joining us, part one covered the Buffalo and Florida years, Cyco Joe, the Cannibal Corpse connection, and Define Divine. Read Part One first → Picking up from there:

Rick, the Skyway, and a Reunion 3,000 Miles Later

In 1984, I met Rick Andolina, better known as "Ricky Baby," in the hallway of my college. I was putting together an intramural football team (we called it Hell Patrol, after the Raven song, because apparently even my football team needed a metal name) and trying to recruit players. Rick looked like the spitting image of Mark Gastineau, which is the entire reason I recruited him. What I actually got was a drummer, and a damn good one. He invited me to try out for the band he was playing in, and we covered "Crazy Train" and Black Sabbath's "N.I.B." I didn't get the gig. Hell Patrol didn't fare much better, I don't think we won a single game that season, but we did have a shit ton of fun.

Rick and I put together our own band anyway, playing covers out of my basement in South Buffalo. One of the classic moments from that band: my mom came downstairs with my grandmother on the phone while I belted out Accept's "Balls to the Wall," one of my favorite childhood memories, singing it to a grandma I loved with all my heart. That band didn't last long, though in fairness, most South Buffalo basement bands didn't. The final night of practice in Buffalo with Rick was the same night I did a full 360 on the Skyway in the pouring rain.

Years later, I found Rick again in California, three thousand miles from where we started and, somehow, closer than we'd been in decades. The full story, a Facebook post, a lonely drum kit, all of it, lives on the history page. Once we were playing together again, Rick, Ace Ybarra, Curran Evans, and I formed Medic Sun. Curran quickly became a critical part of the writing process from the start. We released four songs, produced by our well-respected, longtime creative friend Demonic Dave, David Hughes, at his Shine On Studio in Oakland.

One of those nights turned into one for the books. Bezl, our old drummer from PSTA and bass player from Define Divine, was out visiting from Florida and swung by the studio with us. With Rick on drums, Dave manning the board, and Bezl on bass and backing vocals, we worked out the song structure that became "How About Now" that night, and most of what we came up with stuck all the way through to the final recording. It was a magical night.

Not long after, Rick got sick. We thought he'd get better. We went into the studio to record while he was laid up, and somewhere in there we renamed the band Dethbed, because, as we put it at the time, we're all old.

Rick passed not long after that. One of the most honorable moments of my life was being asked to speak at his celebration of life. Whenever we play these songs now, I think of Rick, and I believe his spirit rides the waves with us. He was one of the happiest, most positive people I've ever known, and he'd never want any of this to be sad. To this day, I've got his photo sitting right next to my computer screen in the studio. Every time I walk in here, he's looking at me like, "Duuude, you better keep playing our music, man!"

How I Met Ace

Leaving Florida wasn't really a choice, not the way that sounds. I was working as a subcontractor at the time, and the company offered me three places to relocate: Maine, Little Rock, Arkansas, or the Bay Area of California. Migwell was the glue that held Pimp Slap the Atmosphere together, my best friend before we ever left Buffalo and all through the PSTA years since, and when he landed the offer to play bass for Neurotica on Ozzfest, I knew that if he wasn't going to be around, the Bay Area was where I wanted to be anyway. I ended up relocating to what had just become the 925 area code, split off in 1998 from the old 510, home of the Bay Area headbangers. Growing up in Buffalo, some of my favorite music was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the Bay Area thrash scene, so of course that's where I'd end up. It was never really a choice, no offense to Little Rock, which turns out to produce crushing drummers and bass players: John Honea, our current drummer in a side project called Burn the Witch alongside Brian Glenn on lead guitar, is a Little Rock guy through and through.

I drove out with a travel trailer hitched to my old Suburban, stopped in Sedona, and hiked down into the Grand Canyon. It felt like a rebirth. Once I got to California, in the summer of 1998, I never really looked back. Neurotica didn't actually make it out on that Ozzfest tour for another three or four years, nobody ever really explained the delay, but I caught my own first Ozzfest not long after the move, watching Slipknot and System of a Down live for the first time in 1999.

A few years in, I met Ace off a guitar player wanted ad from the local music store on Village Parkway. Johnny Panic happened to be visiting from Buffalo at the time, and the studio was about half the size it is now. Ace has told me since that when he walked in and found Johnny Panic there with me, he thought we were about to kill him: he said the two of us looked crazy, and it crossed his mind that he hadn't told anyone what address he was heading to, that these two guys could wipe him off the planet and take his gear. We laugh about it all the time now. A year later, when Neurotica finally made it out on that long-delayed Ozzfest tour, Ace and I went backstage and climbed onto the bus to hang out with Migwell.

Ace and I formed our first project together, Medic, not long after, right around the turn of the century, with Jerry Curl on bass and Budeesh on drums. Around that same time, September 2001, Johnny Panic was staying out here when 9/11 hit. He couldn't fly back to his family for what turned into an uncertain, unsettling stretch, and with nowhere to be and no way to get there, we tore down the walls in the studio to expand the playing space. That's the first version of what's now the Dethbed 925 studio, built out of nothing else to do during one of the worst weeks any of us can remember.

A year or two after that, Migwell and Bezl both came out to California, and the three of us went into the studio with Ace to record some new music together. We played one live show as Hard Eight somewhere in the West Bay, though for the life of me I can't remember exactly where. We parted ways again not long after that, and I honestly don't remember why.

We've been good friends for over 25 years now, and he'll be heading over the mountain from Reno this weekend to play with Connor and me at the Dethbed 925 studio for another songwriting session.

War Prayer and Beau Grant

JW started playing drums with me right here in this same studio, roughly 20 years ago, before War Prayer even existed. We called that project MF9, because we rehearsed on Mondays and Fridays at 9 p.m. We wrote a few songs together and had a lot of fun with it. Not long after, we formed War Prayer together with Beau Grant on guitar and Dave Robbins on bass. Dave's also the one who taught me what the term "Irish exit" means, a lesson I've gotten plenty of use out of since. We wrote a good half dozen songs together that I still think kick ass, and we've all stayed friends ever since. Last year, JW and I even got back in the studio with Juan and re-recorded one of those old songs.

I know exactly how long ago War Prayer was because my son Iggy Paz was about two years old the first time he did a vocal cameo, right at the start of a song called "Cold Truth." His verbal skills weren't quite there yet, so it came out sounding a little like a sneeze. It was cute, and it's stuck with us ever since. Later in that same song, the lyric "2012, hell's bells, Greenland deforming," was written a full five years before 2012 actually happened, and it still gives me a chill every time I think about it.

War Prayer is also where I got to play alongside Beau Grant, a criminally underrated lead guitar player. We covered Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" together, and Beau played that solo exact, note for note, every single time. I've never even heard Tony Iommi play it that precisely twice in a row, but Beau rehearsed it over and over until he had it locked down cold. Beau's earned my respect for more than just the guitar playing over the years, too: he ran a roller hockey rink for kids for a while, and he still puts on a Toys for Tots show every year around Christmas.

JW and I still play together these days at Jam Night, mostly cover songs, but we made one up on the spot once, right in front of everyone in the room. People seemed to like it, or at least nobody threw anything.

Bleed the Freaks, and the Ones We Lost

My most recent California project before that was called Bleed the Freaks. Two of the guys from that lineup, Mike and Dan Matheny, have since passed away, both true brothers, both excellent players. We recorded that project with Juan Urteaga, and he did a fantastic job with my vocals.

I got into Bleed the Freaks through an ad, though I'd already known Mike Matheny for a few years through a mutual friend. They sent me a batch of music with no vocals on it, I recorded some scratch tracks at my own studio and sent it back, and not long after, the whole band showed up together and handed me a Carhartt jacket with the Bleed the Freaks logo on it. Welcome to the band. That's still one of the coolest moments I can remember. Mike's the one who gave me the moniker Will Rule, probably on account of the tattoo on the side of my head. One of the highlights of that band was playing an acoustic set on Playboy Radio. I had food poisoning on the drive down to LA and kept having to pull over and throw up on the side of the road. By the time we got there, I managed a short nap and felt a lot better before we actually went on.

Coordinating a band gets hard once everybody involved is a grown-ass man with a job, a mortgage, and increasingly, grandkids. Back then our bass player Jamey was getting up at 4 a.m. to work scaffolding on high-rise buildings, and it took real commitment from everybody just to find time to rehearse. Even so, he never missed a session, not even on the nights we were literally moshing into each other, bouncing off each other until 9 p.m. at Bleed the Freaks rehearsals, which meant almost no sleep before that alarm went off again.

Later, I ran into Juan at my corner bar, now owned by metal heroes Phil and Marta Demmel, during a show, and asked if we could get back in the studio together. Juan is who introduced me to Chris Lujan as our session drummer.

Troy, Chris, Dugan, and the First Dethbed Sessions

For the longest time, I'd been trying to get Troy Alexander to record with me. Mostly this happened at shows: we both went to a lot of the bigger concerts as fans, and I'd follow up by phone when I could. When I finally called him to record the first few songs as Dethbed, he asked who the drummer was going to be. When I told him it was Chris, we both laughed: it turned out Troy was already playing in a cover band with Chris at the time. He said, "Hey, that's my drummer." Small scene, smaller drummer pool, apparently.

The two of them made a formidable rhythm section. I'm still very proud of the work they did together: it let me put down some of my best vocals. After that, our friend from work Dylan's dad, Dugan Murray, laid down some awesome off-the-cuff leads to finish off the music, all of it at Juan's Trident Studio.

Losing Guys to Sharks

Chris became a good friend, and these days he's the drummer for Shark in the Water. He stays plenty busy with that band. He's not the only one we've lost that way: our original bass player, Jerry Curl, also left to join Shark in the Water.

We keep losing band members to sharks. At this point we're less worried about getting signed and more worried about getting bitten. Consider this your official Bay Area shark warning.

That's how Dethbed actually came together: a guitar-store whiskey trade, a college hallway football recruit, a basement band that ended in a spin on the Skyway, and a rotating cast of guys who somehow kept ending up in a band called Shark in the Water. Part three picks up where this becomes something you can actually catch live: the current lineup, the honest reasons we're still doing this, and what it'll take to go further.

Read Part Three: Buffalo Angst to DB925 →