Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Gag Reflex - Warhorse Tape Demo

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Ah yes, the infamous Gag Reflex. This was another treasure Adriana dug up so much thanks to her. This tape is fucking great, rather than explain it I'll let Brian do it:

"I wrote the music in 2003 and 2004 and the demo tape was released in 2004. This was a real fun time for tacoma. We had a big house show scene and a myriad of incestuous bands and humorous side projects. To get that authentic 80's sound I got Tony Wolfe to play drums. He is a guitar player, not a drummer and is completely awful at drums to this day. At the time I was listening to alot of Antidote, Cause for Alarm, The Abused and Agnostic Front. Jay Tichy was my roommate at the time. It made sense for him to play guitar. He was really into the influences but not so much the songs. At first he was just excited to play music but it was always a struggle to keep him interested in the band. Most people these days know Adam Barnes as the vocalist from Marrow and Greyskull, but growing up I knew him as this mad bass player in a band called Divinity of Truth. Tacoma was really living in a weird hc commune around 04. All the punk houses were really connected and getting Adam Barnes to play bass just furthered the connections between the houses and bands.

The band was not serious, purposefully generic and full of inside jokes. Our tireless advocacy of Tacoma's merits kind of elevated us as a flagship band for that era of Tacoma HC. Most people outside of Tacoma thought the band was horrible and ridiculous. But in Tacoma it was this whole other thing. Rightly so, the band was ridiculous.

We had 3-4 songs that we were playing live towards the end that never got recorded. I had a vision of releasing an LP with only a cover of TURBONEGRO's - I GOT ERECTION on the B side. I kinda wish this had happened. Jay swears that I had unused songs from the demo recording session but I must have never gotten the mix from the studio because we can't find them anywhere. I remember when I recorded the demo I did all the music in a couple hours and made plans to come back later in the week for the vocals. The engineer forgot I was coming and had booked this christian indie rock band to record. I did all my vocals in front of them in about 30 minutes and left. They were totally weirded out.

We had one tape, one shirt and did one tour. The tour was with Owen Hart, Sidetracked & Gag Reflex. Adam Barnes has always been the Owen Hart roadie so 3 bands with only a handful of members. I don't really remember to much standing out about the tour but If I went through the flyers and pictures I am sure it would start coming back. We played a show with Rambo in 2005. I opened our set with a Paul Bearer classic "your mother's got aids"... Rambo was staying at Adam Barnes house and somehow didn't make the connection that he was in the band. I guess they were just calling me a total piece of shit and giving diatribes to the housemates about what is wrong with hc these days.

Gag Reflex ended somewhere around 2006. Jay left the band because he was distraught that people enjoyed his joke band more than his serious efforts. The joke might have ended for Jay, but it lives on in the rest of our hearts.

TACOMA!"

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