this is anthony james cotham...
as a maverick lone-wolf; shunning the internet can get lonely. people think you got something to prove by not watching you-tube all day and jerking off to internet porn. but let me tell you, i'm happy about it.
i'm technically homeless. and just so happens that today i've got free time (no joke, the first time in nearly three weeks) so i thought i would give those who want a band update... a band update.
we've been working on new songs. two are really awesome. The Bucentaur, and Ecology. other songs intended to rock are: Million Dollar Bills, Don't Call Me, Bubbles Turd, and Skateboard. We would like to be playing a show a month. its up to us each, Ax, Casey and Me each to find a show for us to play at in the upcoming months. We've been experimenting with a small electric guitar tuned like a ukelele, and Ax has recently been rocking the Kazoo a lot more. we recently got ripped off hard by Trade Up Music. and someone backed out of a show that we were looking forward to in my hometown of Hoquiam. I still haven't played with the Bills in my own home town. after all this time. its a strange thing to think about how we keep moving forward as a band, writing new songs and making plans, when noone has ever really heard our band beyond our circle of friends. its almost like we are famous in our own minds. screw everyone else. even though i've been getting good feed back from people lately about the bills, people usually just say, "you would be really popular in another town." how depressing is that. we should be popular anywhere but we just don't know who our audience is, who likes this kind of music, who actually understands how hard it really rocks. because our music rocks hard. one big problem we've always had was not playing shows. i would guess that in the seven years of the bills we've played less than 30 shows. and played to less than 150 different people in that entire time.
i don't think we have a gimmick in this band. beyond being fronted by keyboards. but we don't really play that up. i'm happy we don't have a gimmick. i think that is what makes this band so vital and capable of sustaining itself. the drive and purpose of the band is not to further some veneery surface level gimmick. the drive and purpose of this band is to rock hard and play striped down rock music, almost free form in its delivery, and that is almost on the verge of falling apart at all times. my old house mate Holli Papan saw that in our show at the Ash Street Saloon, even though she didn't like the band she said "you guys seemed like you were having a great time and just making it up as you went along." that sounds good to me. if i'm playing music i want people to think it is not hard at all. thats were great rock and roll comes from i think. you just do it. make it look like you don't care. but all the while you do care. you care very much.
casey has a new car that we can probably fit all of our gear in again. so when its finally time once again to play out of town. we can take only one car. i'm playing a nord elctro 2 73 with my alesis qs6.1 on top of that. casey plays the green bass. we've got ax hammer more involved in vocals. which is awesome. casey plays through a peavey TNT with a distortion pedal. and we run the vocals and keyboard through the P.A. with a fostex mixer and two yamaha 15" moniters. if we get around to playing shows. again i think it would be best to not mic the drums. takes to long and doesn't matter. we need a little mixer like we used to have before it got stolen at the MDC show. last july. the fostex mixer is too big. i think it would fit us perfectly to negate the sound guy at venues if we can. just negate the sound guy. do it our selves. just make sure it sounds good to us on stage. that we can hear everything fine. i heard a great quote from Van Halen, "we spend all our sound check time just getting our on stage levels perfect. we don't care so much about how it sounds out in the audience. if we sound good to us then we will play better and that will come across to the audience." I want to do that. if we are bringing our own p.a. to every show why muss it all up by also running our shit through a house p.a.? sound reinforcement you say? we play loud. too loud. how much reinforcement do we need?
sooner or later we are going to get the sampler situation figured out. casey wants samples that corelate to the songs. but i've been thinking about samples that don't really corelate. of course there is a middle ground. maybe half of our samples can be related to the songs we want to play in the set and the other half could be used just as noise. when we played at the Paris Theater in portland. we broke the show down into just noise, samples, general thrashing about. no music. this was a highlight in our band career for me. and i want to recreate that moment every time at our shows. the sampler we hope to use is an Akai s-10. i bought it for $100 at trade up music. i traded my alesis midi sequencer and my casio sk-1 for it. but we still have not found time to fiddle with it. we don't get to practice that often so when we do, we've got to get down to business. no mucking about with a foriegn technology. just rock.
we're ready to play shows i think. but its tricky to manage it. casey works full time and goes to bed at 9:00 pm i work nearly full time and play in a band that goes out of town alot. ax hammer doesn't seem to have a lot of obligations but when he does need to do stuff it of course seems to be during a time when both casey and i are free. but we are not giving up. we are going to make it to japan. the japan tour has been a band goal for a while now. we just can't seem to be able to devote our lives to the rock band. maybe if we weren't in charge of it. maybe if we had a managerial force. that made the band our job. we would be more willing to devote ourselves to it. but we don't. when the time comes that people actually realize how hard we rock, maybe we won't need to do it ourselves. someone else will make us devote our lives to it. take us away. give us money. and only ask us to perform.
it might help us too to not be so god damn unapproachable. i get the impression that people really just aren't attracted to us as a band as a personality. we don't make friends very easily at all. as a band i think we've only got a hand full of rock bands that would support us or even invite us to play with them. we don't schmooze. just count our myspace friends. you can almost count them on one hand. it doesn't help that i can't stand being on the internet and don't want to manage the websites, and it also doesn't help that casey is a little bit picky about accepting friends to our myspace page. but this is who we are. We aren't a big free love party hardy band. we just rock and thats all we are about. we don't schmooze because we don't. the three of us are not social butterflies. and i don't want to change that. we just rock. and that has got to be good enough for everybody else.
on other topics, casey has tricked out a BC Rich guitar. removed the old pick ups and replaced them with one pick up set at about 25 degree angle. it looks sweet and has a drop D detuning lever on the head. and we are very probably going to rock on the 14th of august at a house party. and silverhawk owes us a show for borrowing casey's monitors.
thats where i'm at in relation to our band. if i've left anything out. let us know.
rock on