Music from former bands.
Stroud : 1998 to 2001
I joined Stroud by accident. LoweRLeveL (music below) was practicing in the same place as Stroud. The bassplayer for Stroud owned the house where we practiced. He was cool enough to let LoweRLeveL practice there. After L2 disbanded (pun intended), I was invited to JAM with Stroud. Felt strange playing radio-rock but I was having fun and that's what matters. This is what came out of the 3-4 year marraige I had with them.
In my opinion, I was never happy with Flood, Caretaker, the Dawn, Vision or anything we did at Dave Pitman's studio in Decatur. Mixed by our drummer and tempo set by our drummer (click tracks) and ruined by our drummer (the first drummer). It's too damned slow and the kick drum should never drown out the other instruments. Half of my guitar work was shoved on the back of your eardrum where nothing is heard. Thanks to Stephen for fuckin up this weekend of work. He paid for it tho, so guess I can't bitch too much.
Click on the name of the song to open the song.
Flood : Written while I was away on my honeymoon. Greg and Derek put this one together.
Why Not : Original progression came out of Greg's amp and I took it, put it thru my Johnson amplifier with a wah effect and added some groove-ish picking... it ended up like this :
Caretaker : Sitting in the bass player's driveway ALONE for an hour before every practice helped me clear my head and think about my day. One day, my baby-momma had a problem with her boyfriend kickin' her ass... this came out of it.
The Dawn : Another riff-by-product of playing guitar during 'down time' at the practice pad. Everyone decides to talk or go piss or get a beer, I keep playing hoping something I kick out will catch an ear and turn into a riff.
Vision : Another one written while I was away on my honeymoon. Came back, assisted in finishing the song.
Gone too Far - Live : Walked in, Derek said Hey play this Bob... and we have this. Little to zero work put into this song.
Believe in You-Live : Simple song, good riff. Came up with it while everyone was talking. Some band named UNLOCO stole it and turned it into a song called "Face Down". Look that one up yourself. I was pissed. The studio version --well, let's say the vocals are so horrid, I can't stand to listen to it. Guess Derek wasn't in his ZONE that night. In this live version, he gets off-time in the intro. Keep drinkin heavilly, that's the message kids!
Stroud had much local success and played a ton of out-of-town gigs. Colleges, bars, didn't matter. We had fun doing it and could not believe the money we were getting while doing it. We've played huge arenas with 7,000+ people and played huge shows sharing stages with bands like 3 Doors Down, Fastball, the Baja Men (I let the dogs out ya dumbasses). We've won huge talent shows (where major lable artists showed up to be in the running) and arranged benefit shows on a whim to support local charities. We've been on 3 tv networks including ABC, NBC, and UPN (2x). Our singer performed in an episode of former ABC then UPN show 'Your Big Break'. Our songs Why Not and Flood have seen moderate to heavy radio airplay locally on Huntsville's 95.1 The Rocket and 104.1 Wzyp. Flood and Why Not took the reigns when we entered the Rocket's 'smash or trash' show which pinned 2 local acts up against each other with the winner decided by phone call voting. We set records with that one. Longest reign and most voting.. including a first, the opposing band on one night, rec'd a negative number of votes!.
We had fun and got paid to do it. I'll never forget Stroud. Egos got too big and management got out of hand adn I had to leave them. They broke up about 6 months after I left them. Rumor has it, they are reuniting as I type this. Good luck to them.
Shouts out to B'ron of 40 Cycle Hum. I'm gonna upload those pics I have of you singing with us now that you're signed to Capital HAHA. Rock on brother. See em at www.40cyclehum.com . I'll miss Chris, Jody and Robert tho. New band sounds good, can't wait to hear Jesse's Girl slammin' on the radio at work.
I'll upload some LoweRLeveL and other original material when I have time to capture the audio.