Everything has to start somewhere, and this fact is no different for our metal heroes. Over that past few years I have been asking some of my favorite artists the question “What was your first band called and what did it sound like?” and here are their answers.
Oderus Urungus of GWAR
Oh, my first band was GWAR. I’ve never been in any other bands than Gwar. I mean, I was in the third shock army of the Master Scumdog Stormtroopers, I guess it was kind of a band in that we were bound together, or bound to get into trouble. A band of brothers if you will! We marry few! We were an elite war unit, but we still had a band, we had a marching band that we would play, you know? Tubas and weird, like, space horns and stuff like that. We didn’t really get into heavy metal until we came to Earth though.
Michael Keene of The Faceless
My first band was called The Electric Complex and it was with Brandon (Giffin), our old bass player in the Faceless and it was like… hard rock I guess. I don’t know what we sounded like, we were really young. We were really confused I guess. We probably wanted to sound like Foo Fighters.
Dan Briggs of between The Buried And Me
I was in my first band when I was twelve and I’ve been in a band every year since up until I joined Between The Buried And Me when I was 20 in 2004, early 2005. it started with cover bands playing Nirvana, Hendrix tunes with me playing guitar back then. I couldn’t even tell you what else we played, probably Metallica. I started on guitar a few years earlier. my mom was a trained cellist and classical guitarist and a music teacher. So, I guess it was kind of natural for me to fall into that. that was right in the early to mid 90’s, and popular rock music was golden. I was kind of lucky because everything around me i was hearing was really awesome and also stuff that seemed an attainable goal to play. From there it snowballed. In high school I got into Dream Theater and playing in a lot of different classical ensembles and jazz ensembles, then college happened and I was studying the upright bass in a strictly classical curriculum. All the while, I had been friends with Tommy (Giles) and Paul (Waggoner) and we kept in touch over the years, and I was about to start my forth semester of college and Tommy called and said, “We’re giving our bass player the boot, I was just curious if you had any interest in relocating and coming down?” and I was like, “Yeah, of course.” There wasn’t a professional musical existence before me joining Between The Buried And Me, but I was active cultivating my musical skills.
Blake Judd of Nachtmystium
Very first band was called Helm’s Deep, a Tolkien reference obviously, and we did that before the movies came out. We read the books when we were younger. Anyway, Helm’s Deep was my band, and it was in probably a year a when I started Nachtmystium when I was seventeen. I was sixteen in Helm’s Deep. So, it was me and the guy who played drums for Nachtmystium originally, this guy named Pat McCormick. It sounded like early Nachtmystium, honestly. Like, our real real early stuff. Like, our demos. We were sloppy and not real skilled players yet, but it was the spirit of what I wound up doing later on.
Listen to Far Beyond Metal on KSSU.com
Follow Daniel on Twitter @ovacord
