Miserable Prick

I think for my first actual blog entry I want to talk about my old band Miserable Prick. My brother Mike, my best friend Nick Kremer, and I started a crappy 3 piece filthy racket of a music project back in the fall of 2006. That fall and winter we mostly were just out there sort of fucking around, and trying to decide what sort of music we were capable of making, if we were capable at all. My brother had always been a pretty gifted guitar player. Kremer had actually purchased a drum kit sometime in the spring of '05. Don't fucking doubt me on the dates of this shit either. Steel trap memory. Anyway, we fucked around out there for the duration of that winter season. Kremer continually improving on the drums. Mike honing his guitar talents. I was sort of the vocalist by default, and we didn't bother with a bass player. I think we were sort of in line with the thinking of bands like Pig Destroyer and the like who didn't bother with bass. That and we didn't really know any bass players anyway. We practiced in my mom's garage. She lived in a little hamlet known as "Hollywood", north of Monticello. Kremer and I moved out to Hollywood, we lived in the upstairs of this duplex, and my mom lived downstairs. We had moved out to this area because prior to us moving into the upstairs, my mom let us jam out in the garage. We had a crappy ass PA system (I can't remember the brand), and we would crank that fucker up and just let er rip. The guy who lived upstairs prior to us was pretty cool with us jamming in mom's garage downstairs. Well this feller decided he was going to move out from the upstairs, and Kremer, my brother and I all sort of started panicking about a potential new person moving up there who wouldn't be so accepting of 3 young cretins making terrible musick downstairs every weekend. So Kremer and I decided to move up into the upstairs apartment. Kremer and I moved up there in the spring of 2007. April. It was awesome. It is sort of a quiet, wooded area. Not a lot of traffic. It wasn't officially a part of Monticello, it was sort of an area unto itself. We had a fire pit out back, and mom lived downstairs. Life was good. Kremer and I were both 21. Heavy partying every weekend. We were jamming a lot, basically whenever we wanted to, my Mom was working two jobs so she wasn't home much, and when she was she didn't care that we jammed. I should also add that my brother was also living downstairs with mom too. He was 18.

 Anyways, trying to keep up with the subject at hand here, things sort of started getting more "official" in the spring of 07 once Kremer and I made the move out there to sort of keep things going. We made it a habit of recording most of the stuff we played on a little Tascam? recording unit that we had purchased. At that point we had realized that trying to play any sort of techy death metal or grind was going to be way beyond any of our talents as musicians. Kremer and I were just starting to get into heavier sludge and doom metal. That definitely started rubbing off on our songwriting. Eyehategod was a big influence. Acid Bath was definitely there. Doomier stuff like Electric Wizard. Writing songs was always a laborious affair. I was constantly writing lyrics back then. I was sort of exploring a lot of certain botanical substances in those days, and I would hole myself up in my room with my headphones and a notebook and write a few days a week. Kremer and Mike's approach to writing songs was as easy as drinking 7 or 8 beers and then getting behind their respective instruments.

To keep it simple: We were awful. After a summer and a half we had more or less crafted 5 or 6 very basic, 3 or 4 segment songs that we deemed good enough to get drunk and play in front of our friends. The thing is, those times in that garage were some of the best times of my life. A lot of memories were forged in that dank ass basement. Kremer, Mike, and I grew up out there, we learned a lot about ourselves during those summers from 2007 to 2009. A few people came and went as temporary members. Guys like Kevin James(who we called the secret Asian man, because he was, ya know, Asian)  on guitar, Jesse Albaugh had a brief stint on guitar, Isaac Helgens had a brief stint as a bass player(I am eternally thankful to Isaac for him contributing the idea to cover Electric Wizard's "Torquemada 71", we had a blast playing that song). But it was always the core of Nick Kremer, Mike Tjaden, and I. We lived it and breathed it everyday. Even though we were terrible. I like to think our songs had an endearing sincerity about them, as rudimentary as they were. There exists footage of these songs being played live at a house party Kremer and I hosted upstairs in April of 2009. If anyone wants to see these songs "performed" live contact me.