May 1995 to June/July 1995
Recorded Time. Venues included Brass Works and the Maplewood Drive Inn.
- Tony Breeden - Vocals.
- Jamie "Jaymz" Nichols - Guitar
- Brett Green - Bass
- Mark Minear - Drums
With Davy Cain gone, along with some of our equipment, MIDIAN was effectively back to square one.
Mark
I honestly can't remember how Mark Minear came to be our drummer. In fact, it was kind of an odd choice. My experience with Mark was that he was a vocalist and guitar player. In fact, I remember him playing the Battle of the Bands at the Smoot Theater in Parkersburg, WV, singing this ballad, "I Give My Love to You," to his girlfriend Becca (msp?). I remember it because he was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a vest, like he was a long-lost member of Poison, and because he wrote the song himself, which I thought was kind of cool. Even so, his style of music was just very, very different from mine. This was the same Battle of the Bands where I saw Davy Cain's band play for the first time. My only other interaction with Mark was when I designed the logo for one of his bands, Tell-A-Tale. I recall that the terminus of the "e" in the logo extendee into a dragonish tail.
Regrouping
I digress. I think we probably connected with him at BrassWorks' Open Mic Night. Anyway, next thing I knew, Mark was moving a drum set into Jamie's tin foil basement. Jamie got his dad to buy me another microphone. John Nichols became our unofficial manager around this point, because we simply did not have enough money to bankroll our dreams.
I'm pretty sure, but not super confident, that we wrote "Wrapped in Foil" around this point. John Nichols thought we should've pitched the song to Reynolds Wrap. Considering that the song is a fictional tale about someone facing the electric chair, much in the vein of Metallica's "Ride the Lightning." I doubt the Reynolds Wrap execs would've went for it. I'm fairly sure that the verses were performed in the Jim Morrison/Glen Danzig vocal blend I was fond of, while the chorus was spit out in that Taime Down (Faster Pussycat) style I'd employed in "I'd Do It All Again."
We also wrote "Diana" and "Typical Nonsense Song" at this time.
"TNS" was a song we wrote to protest songs like Beck's "Loser," Stone Temple Pilot's "Creep," Nirvana's ironic "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and pretty much anything written by Rob Zombie during the 90s, where meaningless lyrics falsely hinting at deeper poetry were inserted into songs to make money. Vocally, it sounded mostly like cross between Beck's vocalist and Faith No More's Mike Patton.
"Diana" was a love song, ostensibly about the moon, but really written anonymously about my lifelong Muse. Vocally, it was very much styled after Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.
Powerhouse
Anyway Mark was only with us a couple months, but they were productive. Granted, most of our gigs centered around Brassworks. Monday Open Mic Nights at Brassworks eventually became Powerhouse Thursday Nights. Blessed Altar started Powerhouse as a local area metal band showcase. We tended to play Open Mic Mondays, while we waited for our turn at Powerhouse. Our first Powerhouse gig was May 25, 1995, a little less than a month after we lost Davy Cain.
We'd been angling for a show at Brassworks from the very beginning. Our first set on Open Mic Night was supposed to be an audition for a headline show. In a lot of ways, that first Powerhouse gig was the culmination of all of our effort until that point. It was certainly our focus! We really didn't know where else to play, because no one else wanted a metal band.
Point in fact, we never did get a Friday/Saturday headline gig at Brassworks. Powerhouse was all they were willing to offer us.
After that show, we were stuck in limbo and everyone knew it. We didn't really have a plan.
The Maplewood Drive Inn
The Point Pleasant at the Maplewood Drive Inn was a welcome break from the doldrums. Brett arranged the whole thing. This was a country bar in the middle of nowhere but they hadn't had a live band in quite some time. We weren't sure how welcoming they'd be to a metal band. Our flier for that gig featured MIDIAN's bindrune. I really forget what it was supposed to represent; in the end, it didn't matter what it initially meant because it came to mean MIDIAN.
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| The Maplewood Drive Inn |
Some joker played "Duelling Banjos" on the jukebox as we were setting up. Since we also knew that particular song was also the "theme song" to the movie Deliverance (1972), I prudently decided to arrange the sets with some of our slower songs and power ballads until we could get a feel fir whether the crowd was on our side. By the end if the night, with the backing of an enthusiastic crowd, we were ready to ramp things up. Maybe it was the booze, or the fact that Metallica's Black album is somehow part of nearly every WV rednecks music collection, but they were into it!
As noted, they hadn't had a live band in that place in a long time, so some of the regulars were a bit shocked to find that there was a cover charge at the door. At least two fellows found themselves patting their pockets to cone up with enough spare change for the meager $2 cover charge. I have no idea how they supposed they were paying for money for drinks!
After the first night's show, as we were loading our equipment back into the trailer for the next night, we were accosted by a grizzled old fellow and his two big old mountain boys. He looked at me and said, "You know, I usually don't like this metal sh*t." He looked pretty angry. "And today was my birthday. "
I remember just thinking, 'Please Lord, let them just spare the equipment. And maybe my face.'
Then he grinned. "But you boys kick a$$! You coming back tomorrow?"
We breathed a collective sigh of relief and assured him that we were. He promised to invite his friends.
That night, everyone in the band also met a guy who claimed he knew the guy who did the artwork for Type O Negative. Everyone but me, that is. I was openly skeptical about the whole thing, which paid off in this case. We met the artist in question the following night, and Syd Edwards came to be known as the godfather of MIDIAN.
Syd included MIDIAN (although our name was mispelled as MADIAN) as one of the bands featured in his article, "Unsigned on Dotted Line," for Rock Out Censorship magazine (shortly before it went belly-up), noting that we had "captured the attention of a normally Country & Western audience with their intense all originals set."
What he witnessed that night was certainly memorable. We didn't hold anything back the second night. The crowd was bigger and rowdier. Everyone was there to have a good time!
In fact, our show was much more interactive than intended! At one point, this adorable old couple got up on stage and one of them asked if they could sing a song. The crowd was into into, so we listened to a crooning acapella version of Dwight Yoakum's then-recently released, "Try Not To Look So Pretty."
At another point during this gig, a young woman joined us on stage and began slow dancing to "Wasting Away," a existential song about mortality, suicidal ideation and lost love. It was an odd choice for a solo dance. How was her dancing? Let's just say that this was the only time we played the "extended version" of that song.
Inevitably, the crowd got out of hand. A bar fight broke out. It was only later that I found out that Brett's dad and Brett's little brother, Corey, might've started it. Corey was underage at the time but he was so hairy that he had a full beard and, frankly, no one questioned whether he was supposed to be there. According to the story, a bottle hit Brett's dad and Corey returned fire, only it hit a girl instead of the felliw who threw the first volley, and then the place ignited. We kept playing but as it continued to rage out of control, we realized the show just couldn't go on. This guy who was the spitting image of Tom Petty (but not actually Tom Petty, mind you) got up on one of our mics at one point and announced, "Stop! Tom Petty says no!"
Again, he wasn't actually Tom Petty and they didn't listen. We started packing up our equipment as we played, until we only had the mic and guitar. Then we thanked them for coming out (most folks were oblivious that the music had stopped) and headed on down the road.
The Time Demo
One of the things Syd Edwards remarked was the poor quality of our first demo. "Darker" was recorded in the home of Jon Siders, Brett's uncle. We took Syd's criticism to heart by creating a better demo in Mark's studio garage. The demo called "Time" has been lost; no one seems to own a copy anymore, though everyone remembers it. I'm not sure we ever gave Syd a copy of that one, but we did deliver a copy of the demo after that: "Towards Zero."
"Time" really brought an ongoing disagreement between Mark and Jamie to the fore. Mark thought that we should be concentrating on the songs our crowds were responding to. Jamie wanted to keep writing songs and evolving our style. Their disagreement eventually fixated on one song, "Sign My Name."
Jamie developed this churlish habit of running off band members who disagreed with him, a trend that began with his hostility toward Mark. Their particular point of contention was over a song we'd already recorded on the Darker demo. Jamie started refusing to play "Sign My Name," implying that by playing a popular rock ballad we wrote that we were somehow selling out. Nevermind that the proposed point of writing more songs was to refine our style until we had assembled the cream of the crop. If the popularity of a song wasn't a good indicator of whether we should keep it, I'm at a loss to see how we were supposed to determine what our best songs were. Mark saw potential in "Sign My Name" and wanted it on the new demo we eventually recorded. He also wanted to play it at gigs obviously.
I can't remember if it ended up on Time, though I'm pretty certain it did. The only songs we all agree were definitely on that demo were "Dysfunctional Families in America, "Why Choose Me?" and "Don't Push Me!" (a song that became our big finish). It's probable that we also recorded "Diana," "Darkness is Coming," "Wasting Away," "Typical Nonsense Song," and "Wrapped In Foil" on this demo.
The last piece of advice Mark ever gave me was that I needed to ditch Jamie if MIDIAN was going to go anywhere. I probably should've taken that advice.
