my first year in belgium, i brought my guitar over with me, thinking it’s be a good way to pass the time. once there, my roommate and i, kurt found that we were spending alot of money in bars b/c we’d get bored in our apartment and had nothing to do. so i convinced him that, if he were to buy a bass, we could hang out at home and jam and not spend money at the bars. so he did. and we sorta did.
soon after, we found out that craig, a fellow student, in a different program, was a drummer. i some how convinced him if he were to buy a set of drums we could be a band, possibly rockstars.
i also worked a bar, cleaning toilets and cooking chili, soup and spaghetti sauce (i wore gloves for the bathroom part AND washed my hands, don’t worry) the owners let us practice in the basement, and even let us play almost every friday, as the local students were usually gone, and we could bring in an international crowd on what would be a quiet night.
a couple of those nights were recorded on a 4 D battery powered cassette boom box. sometime in oh 2001 or so, i ripped those tapes to mp3. below is the result. i dunno if i even have the tapes anymore to redo them. the quality is pretty bad, but nevertheless, it is what it is.
El coche fantastico: the fantastic car-the spanish translation for knight rider. how could one not use that as a band name. orginally we were going to be a concept band, pretending we were ophans from detroit or some shit, our first gig, we played in wife beaters and winter hats. i dont’ remember what the fuck that was about. we had no mic, i screamed the lyrics.
people liked us. we played and played. our peak was playing on the back of a leffe flatbed truck as part of the groupe T election process. there’s a video tape somewhere in canada, i swear.
one night we did a guest appearance at a ‘technical school’ in heverlee. the rest of the bands were pretty much death/trash metal. we showed up, opened with a cover of my sherona, and fucking rocked out. our set, all 22 mins of it, went too fast for the crowd. the had us play it again, in order, again. metal heads were doing the “swim” to our ‘we got the beat’ cover. it was good times.
so i humbly (re)post el coche to the interwebs:
Live at the pig 02.28.97 (yes—-97)
Do it
Post Tune up (1)
Envelope (1)
Live at the pig late may 97
live at pg’s cover / sound check
Envelope (2)
the leaving
speach for rudi/special secrit song
little boy
war