After the Hive was demolished it seemed like Crispin’s Lover (my band before Blood Drive) was going to be homeless for a while (without a studio that is). Fortunately my brother Steve (who was also Crispin’s Lover drummer) found a place I had never heard of before, but turned out to be ground zero for Boston’s local underground. That place was the Sound Museum in Allston (a neighborhood in Boston) which was known for it’s music scene and the Sound Museum was right at the center of it all. My brother must have pulled some kind of Jedi mind trick on someone because where every other jam space had a waiting list, we got the perfect room for us, just vacated and somehow we slipped right in.

Crispin’s Lover was coming to an end as we had a problem holding on to a bass player. My brother joined another local band, The Coward Flowers, and I had a space but no band. I had been doing some jamming with my son Winter and he was coming along fast so I thought he could help me get something going. Soon after that we met Carl who immediately fit right in on bass, and finally Mark filled in the drum spot and we were a band!

We got to gigging and recording pretty quick as Carl and I already had enough songs to put a debut album together. Unfortunately, about a quarter of the way into recording our first album Mark had to leave the band. He was a really good drummer and it seemed like a bit of a blow. Once again, however, fortune smiled on us when we found Devlin, who had a different style than Mark, but proved to be an equally great drummer.

We finished our first album which we dubbed Trash Can Trophies, garage, psych, punk, and generally Blood Drive was somewhere in that area. Over the next 8 years we recorded a few more albums and a bunch of shows in the Boston and Providence, Rhode Island areas. Mark came back after our 4th album and took over drums while Devlin switched to guitar and I focused on analog synths. We played some more shows with this lineup and finally during our last year together recorded a series of improvised jams complete with improvised lyrics that we were going to refine into our 5th studio album. Unfortunately the Sound Museum got bought out by some big money bio tech and that marked the end of an era for Allston, as well as for Blood Drive.

All in all Blood Drive was the most solid, reliable, productive and long lasting band I have ever played in. We all seemed to have the perfect balance of hard working and hard playing that a rock band needs to have. We played a lot of good shows, got to be regulars of sorts on WEMF radio, recorded some great music that I am really proud of, and had a lot of fun along the way.

I think the best place to start with Blood Drive is the last compilation, The Thirty Five Majesticles Of Blood Drive, which has 18 songs from our first 3 studio albums and 17 live improvised jams. The lyrics are on Spotify so if you play the songs in Spotify you can see them or just click on the song name below and the lyrics for that song will pop up. So without further adieu, I present Blood Drive, The Thirty Five Majesticles Of Blood Drive!

Although I played in several short lived bands during high school and the next 5 or 6 years we never really managed to keep anything together long enough to actually play shows or even have a name until after my son (Winter) was born when I was 23. About a year after Winter was born we moved from San Clemente, CA. to Fullerton, CA. where I went to art school for three years. It was the most stable I had been since living at my dad’s house and it was during this period we formed The Earthlings, the first official band I played in.

Now we were not a typical band writing songs and playing gigs. We did some shows and wrote some songs but the majority of what we did was improvise and invite people over to do drugs and listen. We were also pretty flexible with the lineup switching instruments multiple times in a set. There Goes The Neighborhood was recorded on a mini-disc recorder in Court’s living room, aka our jam space. It’s a pretty good example of how loose and raw we were with everything on it being one off improvisations music and lyrics.

When we finally got noticed and tried to record an official album on an independent label things fell apart. We just couldn’t capture the sound multi-tracking because nothing was the same twice and trying to conform to that standard really flattened everything. Honestly I don’t really remember how everything went down. I mostly just showed up and played an instrument but didn’t have the discipline to do more than that. Still, we definitely had our moments and they were pretty great.

Nearly 10 years later I played guitar in a band with Jack and Court that actually practiced the same song multiple times, we stayed on our instruments (Jack: Bass & Vocals, and Court: Drums) and made a pretty decent recording of a rocking set at St. Andrew’s in Santa Ana but I will get into The Friendlies later. Stay tuned.

After the Earthlings there were several short lasting bands, different amalgams of post Earthlings and friends. However one of the most successful of these short lived projects started with a show David, Jack and Court decided to put on at the St. Andrews studio in 2008. With only a month or so to put together a setlist and rehearse songs they had never played together the whole thing was more about fun than anything else.

But the three piece just clicked and the recording they got that night was gold. A couple years later they tried to mimic their initial success with another album of covers and originals but they had to record in an hourly rental studio and the vibes just weren’t the same.

So without further delay here is the classic Live at St. Andrews recording from 2008 featuring the three piece playing a mix of covers and originals that was a great performance to have captured.