StickNick dot Com - Music

Doug, as it turns out, ditched metal and became punk. After we moved the music shit out of my folks basement, we saw him a couple of times here and there. He had shaved his long, blond hair into a half assed mohawk and replaced his sneakers for second (third? fourth?) hand combat boots.

He had all these new ideas about what he wanted out of life and none of them had anything to do with the Heavy Metal lifestyle.

Doug had pretty much told us that he had little time for drumming even though Geoff's mom had said we could move the set into her basement if we agreed to only play on Saturdays.

From what I remember, Doug just kind of shook his head at this. "Naw. I seriously don't know if I want to do that right now."

This left Geoff and I pretty much on our own when it came to the band.

I have to say that during this time I was in a zone that brought out some of my best songwriting ever. Geoff and I started by stripping back the songs on the demo; we cut out the crazy middle bits and gave them a touch of punk. Geoff also started coming up with bass riffs influenced by Rush, a band he was unashamedly a fan of. So we'd have a weird ass prog-punk bass line underneath with crunchy, basic, metal power chords on top. And I mean basic; an open E chug for a bar with an F/F# combo thrown in on the second bar. Thinking back on the few songs that I remember, they were pretty kick ass for the time.

Lyrically, I was getting a little better. I wrote about suicide (The Lemming Song) and the fur trade (Trapped For Fashion ... I know, clever eh?) and every other 80's Metal cliche topic you could think about. I even penned words to a song we dubbed "Death". Each verse had only four words. What I would do for this was scream unintelligible nonsense and throw in one of the words. It was our riff on Death Metal - as long as you could understand a word every now and then, people thought you were singing something of importance.

"Blah, scream, mumble, blah DEATH! ... blah, scream, mumble, SOCIETY!"

The only thing missing was drums.

To this end, Geoff was jamming with a few guys in his school. They were going to do an air band of Slayer's "Angel of Death" and a non-air band version of an Ozzy tune (without the vocals) for an assembly. I can't remember the drummers name... I think it was Steve so I'll call him that from here on in.

Steve was a pretty kick ass rock drummer. He was all about the 4/4 steady beat with fancy fills and he played this big, shiny silver five piece kit. I jammed briefly with them at the school one afternoon. Geoff and I busted out one of our newer tunes and Steve tried to add some drums, but it wasn't really working.

"Come on Nick, fuck that stuff. Show us what you GOT!"

Now what the fuck did I have exactly? I was proud of the tunes Geoff and I had written. I didn't spend a lot of time learning other peoples music. I looked around the room and the others were staring at me; this scrawny teenager with bad acne, hair that was still growing out properly, and a blue Aria Explorer - sans case. I didn't really know what they wanted so I busted into "For Whom The Bell Tolls".

They approved.

Whatever.

So they seemed to like covers. Geoff was indifferent and I was bored. Steve, on the other hand, freaked out. Based solely on my rendition of "Bells", he asked if he could drum for us. At this point we had nothing to loose and needed a drummer, so we said sure.

Steve moved his kit into Geoff's basement that very weekend.

From the first jam, we kind of knew that Steve was simply not what we were looking for. He didn't like our tunes at all and kept pushing us to write more commercial stuff: "Come on guys! You get into Rock N Roll for the chicks and the money! You need to write stuff that is more like Guns n Roses!"

While I was (and still am) a pretty big fan of "Appetite For Destruction", I did not want to write music like that. I wanted to write precisely what we were already writing: Dirty, filthy, simplistic metal-punk-hardcore.

We decided to let Steve try his hand at a Metallica cover. We played him the actual version "Orion". He nodded his head. We then played our version of "Orion", which was pretty damn close to the original. He could not find that simple, Lars Ulrich off-beat at all.

I will give him this, as much as Steve hated our music, as much as he could not play along with something like Orion, he tried like a motherfucker to bring us over to his side; a world where the rock was packaged blandness and it was all about the chicks and the money. He even went so far as to dub the band (I kid you not) "Sweet Fuck Allll" (yes, with four L's), and asked me to paint a skull and the name "Sweet Fuck Alll" on his bass drum. Never one to stop people from doing what they want, I obliged.

Two weeks later, he picked up his drums and I never saw him again. In the end, this didn't matter because as luck would have it, shortly after Steve left, Doug reappeared.

He came out of nowhere; his long blond hair shaved into a thin, black mohawk. He wore crusty, ripped up, skanky, denim clothes, and his attitude had changed from a mild "I don't care" to a loud and proud "FUCK YOU!"

He told us he wanted to jam again, even though he didn't have a drum set. He also told us that, if we wanted, we could play an actual show ... of sorts. There was a party happening out in the boonies, at an old farmhouse owned by this guy he knew named Jason. There was a drum set there. We could set up and play to a bunch of punks and skins. Would we be interested?

Sure, what the fuck.

So one chilly Saturday morning my Dad drove the four of us and our amps and guitars out to Kemptville, Ontario and dropped us off at a huge ass, old school farm house. The mailbox said "Legacy". Doug informed us that this was Jason's family name.

The house itself was unlocked and a complete mess inside. My dad found it sketchy, but we loved it. Doug quickly located the drums and we set up our crap.

"Alright," Doug said, "Let's go!"

And we did. Geoff and I started running though the songs we had written in Dougs absence. He just sat there for a moment taking it all in, and then he started to play...

We've all read that sometimes bands have those moments where everything just comes together. I'm pretty sure we experienced that out in Kemptville, in a second floor room of a run down farmhouse. The few songs Geoff and I had were now pretty much completed. Doug told us that he hadn't been playing at all, but I wondered. To this day I believe that if he didn't play during his absence, then he was the most talented drummer I have ever worked with. In an hour we had run through our handful of songs a couple of times, and Doug nailed them.

Everyone started showing up around 7pm. There were one dude there I knew from Canterbury - a skinhead (SHARP) named Rob - but I had met no one else up until that point. We chilled, chatted, and I sipped a beer. After a while, the group of them goaded us to plug in and play.

Nervous as fuck, we did just that. There was some good natured joking at my expense due to the fact that I had a couple of effect pedals for my guitar ("Nice green pedal yah got there Eddie Van Halen!"). This did not help my shaking hands.

For the first, and what would be the last, time since we decided to form a band, Die-Oxide busted into our own material in front of a group of people. I was practically shitting my pants through the first tune. By the halfway point of the second tune there were a couple of guys slam dancing; whether it meant that they like the music, or if they were just making fun of us didn't matter. There were people slamming man! Seeing that and then realizing that the music they were slamming to was coming out of your instrument... I don't even know how to describe it other than to say it's like getting laid real good for the first time. By that I mean not the very first time you ever got laid, I'm talking about your first real good fuck; you start off timid, then you realize that you're doing ok and like it. Then you look up and realize that the person you're with likes it, and likes it with you. You then know that all is well in the world, and you loose yourself in the moment.

The slam dancing didn't last long, maybe a verse and a chorus, but it was enough to curb any nervousness I had and add another reason for me to want to continue playing music.

We finished our set to some mild applause and packed it up. The rest of the night was a story in itself that involved trying to sleep in a cold room, and a madman named King running around the house with a pair of salad tongs. He would find someone who was asleep and then pinch their ears with the tongs while yelling "ZIZZY BALOOOOOOBA!!!!" at the top of this lungs. You can't make this shit up people.

The next morning my Dad showed up and drove us all back to the city. This was pretty cool of him - we had planned to find a way to take the bus back, but Dad figured there was no way we'd be able to do this with all our shit with us so he drove out to Kemptville and collected us.

That weekend was pretty damn fun and I look back on it fondly.

Over the next few months Doug drifted off again and I spent less and less time hanging out with Geoff. I found my first, serious girlfriend (strangely enough, the girl from Part Two who told the art teacher I had no talent as a guitarist), and started discovering and playing around with music other than Heavy Metal.

Finally, almost two years after that "show", tensions with my folks mounted and I moved out on my own.

Of course, this brought about the freedom to drink, discover drugs, and write music to my hearts content...

... to be continued.