Six years in the making and three diffirent owners later, the Shiny Beast cd is finally out on Oklahoma's Little Mafia Records.
I would like to thank Little Mafia Records for caring enough to put this out.
Who is/was Shiny Beast?
(here is a re-print from an older earlier entry:)
WHAT I CAN REMEMBER....
I remember the time when the original Shiny Beast lineup of David, Mike Meadows and myself recorded what would become the tracks for the Boner Records release, we invited our freind Mike Carden to sing on some of the songs. Mike was in the evil local band Garbageman, definitely a unsung class act of yesteryear. Mike was this intense brooding man of (usually) few words who could scream and shriek like the singers of Die Kruezen and Negative Approach. He had a serious hardcore record collection as well. When he did the singing at Jerry Kee's home studio in a residential area of Raleigh, it was maybe a hour later when the police showed up at Jerry's. The police explained that they were summoned to the place because a neighbor thought that someone was being murdered or tortured. No officers, just laying down some vocals. They soon left.
I remember one time when we were on tour with Erectus Monotone and we played at State College, Pa. It was a beautiful little town tucked away in the mountains and the show was pretty good. Some dude let us crash at what seemed like an empty bottom floor of a frat house or college rec room. Well, that was the night everyone decided to get real drunk or something. I remember bonding heavily with EM's Brian Quast that night over our mutual love of the Descendents. He was really talkative and drunk. David was out of control. When he drank he got really animated and funny, not really drunk just really wide open and excited. He got so excited he dove out of an open window, ran around sticking forks into electrical outlets to prove how he wouldn't get shocked: "See? You gotta stick both prongs into the socket to get shocked! See? SEE??" Kim told him to eat a flower that was growing out of a potted plant so he did. Everyone had a good time until there was some drunken conflict (sort of) that I wasn't really aware of and then EM's Kevin Collins got reeeeally bummed out 'cause everything had been going so well personality wise on the trip so far. Then the next morning most everybody was really hungover and quiet and no one really said much for a little while when we left town.
I remember when we played in Buffalo New York a few years later in this huge art loft near downtown. Polvo were nice enough to take us out with them on the road and this was when the band went through our "Fleetwood Mac" period. The three of us ended up sitting on a couch at the entrance drinking a twelve pack of beer. Now, this had NEVER happened before but for some reason it made sense that night. We ended up playing in this hot packed sweaty room where I played a semi drunken set that I alone really enjoyed. David and Kim less so. David had to keep re-tuning his Telecaster. People seemed to like us, some even knew about us. Afterwards some guy who looked just like Dez Cadena of Black Flag came up to us and complimented us and then offered to get us stoned. So we did. I remember Polvo played a set that melted my tiny little mind; they passed around this cowboy hat while they played. Afterwards I was still out of my tree and ended up packing up all of my stuff but stupidly left a cymbal stand at the loft. Later I enjoyed a horrible turkey sub with ranch dressing that made me throw up later on at the house we crashed at. Hooray!
I remember how I learned to get really tired of the one thing everyone yelled at us when we played, no matter where it was: "TURN UP THE VOCALS!! I CAN'T HEAR THEM!! HA HA HA!!"
Even better was the time I had a conversation with a drunk in Columbus Ohio who watched our whole set and then insisted that we had some "great singing". After the third time I denied this, he then compared the band to Rush and that David's playing was "just like Alex Lifeson". That was certainly a new one.
Mike Meadows was the first bass player. When we played our first show it was in Greensboro with Mike Carden singing. I can't stress how weird it all was..me and David had been in Willard before this and it was like this was the first time I had "met" David musically, if you know what I mean. He wrote most of our stuff. Meadows was a great player, a all around talented musician but there was this personality diffirence. Me and David were wimps. Meadows was this sort of swaggering machoish dude who would do things like walk around shirtless in the Greensboro club with some random bass that he just found there and without even asking permission would just walk around with it playing it unplugged. I don't know why that stuck out in my mind but it did. I have to say that when he wasn't in the picture it was sort of a relief...not playing with someone that you maybe wasn't sure if you liked very much but being afraid that he might get mad at you for it. We did lose something without him but gained a whole new thing in the process.
Kim literally taught herself how to play bass in maybe a month, tops. David helped her. In no time we were back in business. Kim was kind of like how it was playing with Wayne Taylor, they both played bass in this very odd way, weird stuff. Kim later on was in this Greensboro band called Taija Rae who were quite good, more of a straight forward rock thing , and she still played the same oddball way which was nice. She wrote a little bit of the music towards the end.
....yeah, we played with a lot of bands when we were one ourselves. We opened for Cop Shoot Cop once at the old Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill and they were pretty nice guys and seemed to like us even. We opened for the Melvins once when I somehow was able to get them in touch with a short lived and foolheartily ambitious booking agent that worked (breifly) at the Brewery here in Raleigh. I don't know how that one was pulled off but you could imagine how odd that was. The Melvins benfitted greatly from the Brewery's powerful p.a. (sarcasm) that night. We played our music with our rinky dink little candy ass gear and sort of held our own I guess. We played with Don Caballero a couple of times. Their drummer was..sort of a strange fellow, not very consistent personality wise and played in his underwear with his ass hanging out. Nothing you probably haven't heard a thousand times if you are familar with that band. I still like thier first record. We played with Rodan a few times and that too was really cool. We really liked them and had a good time I think. They were so much better then thier record.
Here in the Triangle we played with pretty much every band that was at least once. I remember how we played with bands like Archers Of Loaf, Superchunk and whoever else was peaking during that time when Chapel Hill exploded and eclipsed everything else. I would sort of scratch my head with a tiny bit of twisted jealousy mixed with bewilderment as I sat and tried to figure out what was going on. All of those people were basically pretty nice too. It seemed like I was the only one of us who even thought stupid stuff like this. I just couldn't pretend that I didn't already see bands like the Minutemen and Black Flag back in SoCal so I just chalked it up to that for the most part.
We opened for the "new COC" once and that was maybe the weirdest reaction that we had, or at least the most interesting. At that point, COC were into their Mike Dean-free five piece "heavy rock" period and somehow they let us or asked us to play with them at the Cat's Cradle. The reaction we got was just like the reaction the "animosity" era COC were greeted with the first time I saw them back in SoCal. They played a "crossover" show and the entire metal audience just stood there watching, unsure of what to do or how to react. Not like our band was ANYTHING like the old COC, but six or seven years later thier audience pretty much did the same thing. No one even went anywhere near the stage at all, not like they thought we sucked (well, who knows about that one). Finally, one lone headbanger went up to the front of the stage and started to furiously headbang for like twenty seconds to one of our songs. He then stopped and went back to the rest of the audience who were standing fifteen feet away form the Cat's Cradle stage. Pretty funny.
We usually ended up playing a lot with bands of the time in our area like Erectus Monotone, Orifice, Regraped, Vanilla Trainwreck and Polvo. This worked out well because we all liked those bands the best in the Triangle area. We toured with Erectus of course and that was fun. They had Brian Quast for awhile then and they were finally clicking on the road playing some furious shows in goofy locales like a pizza shop in Conneticut amongst twenty other "enlightened people". Orifice were just..a soundtrack for a absurd weird comedy..everything about them was just hilarious. We played at least seven billion shows with Regraped and those were always fine. Ben and Kip played bass and Brian Q. drummed. I wish they recorded a proper record. Vanilla Trainwreck, horrible name, inconsistent records and lengthy shows aside still could fucking kick it out. And you know about Polvo already, I guess. We all really liked playing with those bands and here is my paragraph dedicated to all of them. Good going, guys..and girls..
Little Mafia Records:
http://www.myspace.com/littlemafiarecords
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