Any Questions? - Lousy Human (Live)

This video is taken from Any Questions? live performance at the Music Invasion Festival (07/10/04).

We were in rare form on that day. The 9' x 12' video screen was indoctrinating the masses with our visual hallucinations. The strobe lights were pulsing at epileptic levels. The PA system was pushed to the edge of overload. MC2P4 hammered synths and video effects. LTJTHC (Tim Harrell) was thrashing away on electronic percussion and I discarded all vestiges of Matt Norcross and became Ttam Troll.

How was that for hype? Seriously, it was a great show and, to this date, it was the last Any Questions? live spectacle. However, we hope to rectify that soon. Stay tuned...

P.S. MC2P4 deserves kudos for being brave (and gullible) enough to be talked into wearing his "wire" costume and special thanks to Beth Ballein and Kelly Hoffman for shooting the Neo-Nazi Cam video footage.

Video Library Part 2

In an earlier post, I showed you one side of the Video Library.  Here's a picture of the other side.  You can see the end of my DVDs (U-Z) as well as my fledgling Blu-ray collection and VHS tapes.  

The far right media case houses original FFS VHS.  Contained on these tapes are our early music videos, video shoot footage, live performances, etc.  We've been digitizing these tapes to DVD for archival purposes and, from those DVDs, I've been pulling content for this blog.  We've only scratched the surface of what is there.  We have everything from MC2P4's Oil In the Gulf mouth chewing video shoot to the making of Ho Magos' Esotericka videos.  Punch Drunk's 1993 strobe light intense Silk City performance to Any Questions? "burn down the club with a flare" 4 G's show.  Oddities which include a long haired, corpulent Ttam Troll waxing poetic and footage of a partygoer puking into a plastic pumpkin.

Good entertainment for the whole family!

The Book Library is unpacked!

I finally made some time this past weekend to get back to unpacking boxes and organizing.  After all, I've been in the new FFS since mid-May so I'm starting to run out of excuses as to why I'm not "unpacked".

In the Book Library, I needed to build some bookcases but, after that, it didn't take me much time to decide where to place things.  The picture above shows one wall of the Book Library.  You'll see my Easton Press 100 Greatest Books Ever Written and Masterpieces of Science Fiction collections as well as my  Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror paperbacks.   In between are such goodies as MAD magazine books, The Three Investigators paperbacks, graphic novels, comics, etc.  There's even a couple of Space coffee table books in there.

Try to identify a book in the picture and post a comment.  I'm sure someone will find my reading tastes "humorous" and will be able to come up with a "smart" comment.

Magazine Archive

OK, so I've kept most (not all) of my magazines since about 1983.  I'm an archivist! Would you expect anything else?  Vlob, my Boglin, watches over them.  That's his cage in the lower left hand side of the picture.

Dungeon Aire

During the Fall of 1987, Scott and I began to search for musicians to form a new band. Our previous band, The Secret Society (rev1), had disbanded after Dirk Frey began to pursue Experimental Jazz music which didn't quite fit with what we wanted to do and Larry Lee Fiber had packed up Melqwar (sp?), the Fiber family station wagon, with all his belongings and headed to Los Angeles, CA to pursue a career in the music business. Larry's move to LA also deserves a special note because, with his move, there was no longer a direct Fiber family presence in Shippensburg. Though their shadows were long from UAS (Underhill Albany Station) and LA, things were never quite the same.

Not to be deterred in our pursuit to form a new band, Scott and I visited a band practice session at the home of Griff "Take a Whiff" Townsend in the Fall of 1987 where we saw Tim "LTJTHC" Harrell on drums and Matt "Scrap Pap" Skirpan on guitar. We liked what we heard from Tim and "Pap" and shortly after that practice we asked them to join the band that we were forming. They said yes and we then collectively began our pursuit for a lead singer.

While attending SU (Shippensburg University), Scott met a guy named Brad Shaeffer whom he had some classes with. Brad told Scott that he was a singer so we arranged to go over to his apartment and audition him. We went over and Brad sang Robin Trower's Bridge of Sighs. Here's where, in hindsight, we should have realized it wasn't going to work out. We really didn't have any similar musical tastes but we needed a singer and he had a microphone (and a "very" small Gorilla amp) so we recruited him and our band was complete.

Now, since we had a band, we needed to find a place to practice and to line up our first gig. Here's where our friend Kurt Smith came into the picture. Kurt was attending SU and living at 9 Queen St in Shippensburg with some of his future Pi Lamba Phi brothers. They were planning a New Year's Eve party for 12/31/87 and asked us if we would play at the party.

At this point, we still hadn't rehearsed together as a band and there was only a week left before the party. Since it was Christmas break for those of us in college and high school, we were able to practice every day but, needless to say, we had a lot of ground to cover. We needed to pick some songs to play and learn how to play them. We ended up with a 7 song set list which included Pung (an original song), Wild Flower (The Cult), Monster Man (The Suburbs), Need You Tonight (INXS), Progressions (an original song), Misty Mountain Hop (Led Zeppelin), and Primitive Love Rights (Mondo Rock).

In addition to picking songs to play and learning how to play them, we also had to pick a name for the band. We had been rehearsing in the basement of 9 Queen St which was also to be the site for our first gig. The basement was affectionately referred to as "The Dungeon" and, as you can see in the picture above, the basement was pretty nasty and was equally "smelly". As an homage to our rehearsal space, we decided on "Dungeon Aire" as the name for our band.

We managed to get through the show and it was well received by the partygoers. They didn't seem to notice that Matt Skirpan's guitar was severely out of tune for most of the set. This was the only gig that we did as "Dungeon Aire" and shortly after this show, we added Kevin "Bart the Fart" Wilson on guitar to the band and changed our name to "This Mistress". More on that in future posts.

There was a jam box recording made of this entire show and, without further ado, here is our version of Monster Man (The Suburbs)...

The Secret Society revisited

This is a follow up to last week's blog entry about The Secret Society.  In that entry, I spoke about how at 8:00pm the powers that be "pulled the plug" on our show and we never had a chance to finish our set.

If you notice the clock in this picture, you'll see that it is exactly 8:00pm and we are in the middle of playing a song.  Seconds later it was all over...

Sharing The Plasma Pool

Sharing The Plasma Pool is our very first music video. It was assembled using footage that we shot ourselves interspersed with a couple of scenes from the horror movie The Evil Dead. Up until this point, we had been shooting a bunch of video footage but didn't have anyway to edit it together. As luck would have it in the Spring of 1991, Tim Harrell (my roommate at the time) was attending MCCC and was majoring in Communications. One day, he let me tag along with him into the MCCC video editing suites and, a couple of hours later, I emerged with a VHS tape containing our first music video.

This song also has the distinction of being the last one we created using a synthesizer sequencer (Ensoniq ESQ-1). After this, we moved onto computer sequencing using an Atari 1040STe running Steinberg/Jones Cubase 2.0.