Slow Your Role (Part Deux)

Salutations my metal head friends:

After reading Marco’s blog last week I found myself flashing way back to where it all began. It was nice to go down memory lane. I thought I would elaborate on some of Marco’s stories and expand on the whole history of Desolate Rage in the shortest possible way. So here it goes!

The Glue:

This refers to me. I am the one with ties to all the members of this group. We all met through me. First is Nelson our Guitarist. We go way back!! I met him in grade 3. we were 8 yrs old. Nelson was playing with some weird fan thingy he created from a motor and tin foil. I said “hey….what the hell is that” and we have been friends ever since.  I got my first bass at 12 yrs old. Nelson got his Guitar a year later. We jammed on our little shitty toaster amps. It was pretty cool. At this point we never played together in a band. Once I got to high school I joined up with my first band. As Marco stated we played together in music class and when my band was looking for a drummer, well it made sense to get Marco into the fold. We did that for about 2 yrs, by this time there was a serious shift in philosophies between myself, Marco and the rest of the group. Things went south fast. I quit and Marco was not too far behind. At this point Nelson was jamming here and there with a few other guys. Nothing too serious. I had written a song from top to bottom. I wanted to hear what it sounded like with a full band playing behind it. I recruited my good bud Nelson to play guitar on the track. Got another childhood buddy to drop vocals and finally I reached out to Marco (who was still playing for the previously mentioned first band) to do the drum tracks. We all clicked really well together. The song came out awesome. So of course we all kind off looked at each other and knew this was the way to go. This was the first time the 3 of us had played together.

While all this was going on, I was also playing in another band. It was a traditional Portuguese band. We would do 3 hr sets of 40 songs a night. The money was awesome !! so before you laugh at me, remember that!! The pay out was worth it. LOL of course like all bands, we had our own issues and what not. We were going through a transitional period. Our guitarist and keyboard players (brothers) had both left the band. So the remaining members begun auditioning for replacements. This is where I run into Jorge for the first time. Actually not the first time. I remembered him instantly as being a guy I use to see waiting for the trains at Bathurst station. He was always picking on some poor 9er kids. I wanted to punch him in the face. A fact that I mentioned to him at our first encounter at rehearsal, I can imagine what he was thinking? Ha-ha so long story short he joined the Portuguese band and we had a good long run doing that.

The Formation:

Now for the good stuff,

After many different singers things were looking bleak for Desolate Rage or Bleed at that time. We had a long-ish run with one singer but things went real sour. All b/c of a woman. He left us high and dry two days before a gig. It was too late to pull out. So we had to think of something fast. Jorge was playing guitar and singing in my other band. We had all hung out together and I thought why not ask him to fill in? we had most of the lyrics written down (Marco and I use to write the lyrics back in the day) so we practiced our nads off for two days. Jorge filled in on vocals and we did the show. I remember having to kick him on stage to queue him in when it was time to sing. LOL the show went well all things considered. It was determined that Jorge would be the fill in guy until we were able to find a replacement. Well that never happened. He never left. LOL

This caused a huge problem for the Portuguese band. For some reason it was ok for me to be in two bands for years with out ever having a conflict of interest, however it was now an issue for Jorge to do the same. Needless to say we were not able to keep that band together. Now it was only the 4 of us. We changed our name to Condemned and Jorge slowly begun to play guitar as well as sing for us. We have had the same line up since approx 2002. That makes 12 yrs together. Last year we thought it was a good idea to change the name and try a re brand. See the name “Condemned” showed up everywhere. There must have been 5 or 6 other bands with the same name world wide. We pre-date all of them but we were a little slow on the technology side. We never took claim to any of the social media outlets and it was impossible to find us on Google or anywhere else by the name “Condemned” the re brand of “Desolate Rage” was much more preemptive. We made damn sure that no one else had this name, and scooped up the .com domain and all other Media outlets. And here we are doing weekly blogs for you all.

Hope you enjoyed the history lesson?

Till next time.

Jeff