In Memorium: The Third Roster

The Third Roster:

July 1995 to Trax [September 1995]

Recorded "Corpus Dracon" at Parkersburg City Park Pavillion. Venues included Brass Works, Parkersburg City Park Pavilion and Trax.

Tony Breeden - Vocals.

Jamie "Jaymz" Nichols - Guitar

Brett Green - Bass

Dusty Rhodes - Guitar [Joined August 11, 1995]

Lewis Cass Dalton - Drums

Mark Minear's severance from the band had another nearly fatal effect on the band. Jamie had moved, so the tin foil basement was no longer available to us for practice. We'd resorted to practicing at Mark Minear's garage toward the end, but that door was obviously closed afterward. With nowhere to practice and no drummer, we were dead in the water.

Cass and Shawn

Then Brett and Jamie met Cass Dalton, a drummer who'd moved to Parkersburg, WV from Charlottesville, VA to get his girlfriend settled into her new life here. That was the stated plan anyway.

We started practicing again. I'm pretty sure it was at Cass' place. There was a lot of talk about playing in Charlottesville and recording a new demo. I was out of the loop during most of these conversations. I began to suspect something was amiss, but we were playing again in no time. 

Kicked out of Brassworks - Part One

We got kicked out of Brassworks after a particularly bizarre night. I had a hard and fast band rule that no one was allowed to drink alcohol until the last set of the night. No one wants to hear a sloppy drunk band. The problem that night was that our last set ended, but then I started hearing people using our equipment. One of those people was Cass' girlfriend, Shawn Snably, singing while other members of MIDIAN played drunkenly. Let's call this one foreshadowing. 

And let's note that it was as bad as you think it was. It was basically drunken karaoke with live instruments where the musicians are also drunk. And the drummer has left but someone else who is half as good is pounding on them. Jamie claimed to be upset that Shawn was on the mic, initially.

It was shortly after this that I went to Sherry at the urging of the band. That post-show karaoke number aside, it had been a solid performance. We were getting more fans all the time. A few of our songs, "Corpus Dracon," "Kraven," "Mind's Eye," "Screwdriver," and, of course, "Sign My Name," were getting requested by name. We'd been playing Monday Open Mics and Thursday's Powerhouse in good faith, on the promise that a headlining gig was on the horizon. We thought it was time to make the ask.

I came to Brassworks to meet with Sherry full of optimism and confidence. I left that meeting angry and embarrassed. We weren't getting a headline gig. Our music was fine for Powerhouse, but they wanted something else entirely for a weekend headliner. They didn't think we'd appeal to their weekend crowd. 

I might have been able to talk my way around that but then she dropped the bomb: Brett and Jamie had been acting like entitled rock stars behind the scenes. They came to Brassworks on a regular basis and demanded free drinks and generally made asses of themselves. She also found out that Brett had been drinking underage the entire time, until they were dumb enough to let the cat out of the bag on his 18th birthday (July 4). So not only were we not getting that headline gig, we were suspended from Brassworks for a while, a month if I recall correctly. 

I remember being devastated at the time because it wasn't my fault but we were cut off from the only local venue available in town. And to be clear, Brassworks said that they were only suspending the band and not banning us outright on my account; however, they warned me in no uncertain terms to get my band members in line because bar owners talk to each other. Honestly, we had approached other bars to play but they only wanted a brand of rock that sounded like Lynyrd Skynyrd or folksy blues rock like locals Todd Burge, Mike Morningstar, Jimmy Clinton and the Mean Red Spiders, and the like. We we initially punk and were slowly but surely developing a style that we called alternative or metal for lack of a better term but would eventually come to be called NuMetal.

The Northeast Tour That Never Was

Things had been going down behind my back. I’d been suspicious for a while. 

Jamie and Brett were spending a lot of time with Cass without me. Practice was held at Cass’ house, often without a full drum set (something that alarmed me given the fact that I’d once had a drummer hock his snare right before a gig in a previous band!) and things there just felt off. I could feel an undercurrent of contempt. I figured they somehow blamed me for the Brassworks suspension (or for, at least, not telling them off in old school punk rock fashion as I departed). The jokes were more mean-spirited. And Cass’

girlfriend, the very one who was singing after that last Brassworks gig, was in on it too. She'd even taunted me that I had a crush on her. I didn't. 

You see, Jamie’s wife, Angie, let the cat out of the bag just before I went into that meeting that they were planning on kicking me out of the band and replacing me with Shawn Snably with Jamie providing backing vocals, like a poor man’s redneck Evanescence. They'd been discussing this plan since a few days after that last Brassworks gig. I was apparently now bad for the band. Shortly before I arrived, Angie had walked into Cass and Shawn's house and found them plotting. They intended to kick me out as soon as I arrived. She immediately pointed out that my talent was carrying the band; I booked the gigs and made the fliers in addition to singing. Shawn immediately produced a flier she'd made with clipart at Kinko's. Angie pointed out that there was no Kinko's in Parkersburg. She also noted that Shawn sang through her nose and that my talent was the only good thing the band had going for it and that they weren’t going to find another vocalist of my caliber. Then she left because they were all obviously against her for defending me. In fact, Jamie had kept it a secret from her because he was afraid she'd warn me about it. One of the few tines Jamie has ever been right about something. 

When she told me, my first inclination was to tell them all off and find another band, and maybe I should have. But I had several reasons not to throw in the towel, one of which was that no one was going to toss me out of the band I’d poured my blood, sweat, intellect and creativity into, if I could help it. I’d written all of the bands lyrics and some of the songs entirely, managed the band’s practices, shows and contacts, and served as its recognized front man. I also knew that would never see Angie again and we'd become good friends again and, yes frankly, I still had feelings for her even if I was too honorable to act on them.

So I set my face on the task at hand and walked in with a plan forming in my head to sell them on the idea of a northeast tour I was ostensibly planning. I was purposely vague. The idea was to make a full court press with my “plan” to erase any idea of my being somehow replaceable.

It worked obviously. I admit to this day that I took a page out of Jamie Fletcher’s book. Fketcher was the lead singer of my brother’s old band, Asylum. Remember him? We took the name MIDIAN from his crazy interview with Grafitti where he claimed that his band was about to launch their Lock Up Your Daughter Tour with songs like “Locked with a Key” and, of course, “The Search for Midian.” A tour and song list that existed in name only until he told the band what he’d said and they started planning that tour and writing those songs. So I started making plans, but I purposely kept them close to the vest for pretty obvious reasons.

Jeff Popolillo 

Cass told Jeff Popolillo of "Media World Productions" about our interest in touring elsewhere. When he came into the picture, I knew something was off. Popolillo showed up out of the blue one day (from my perspective anyway). He was one of Cass and Scott’s acquaintances and claimed to be a promoter wanting to sign us. I was

immediately skeptical.

I had good reason to be skeptical.

For one thing, my skepticism had led to us meeting Syd Edwards in Point Pleasant, WV at the Maplewood Drive Inn gig. In that case, I was wrong; that guy did know someone in Pointless Pleasant who had designed the shirts for Type O Negative and wrote for Rock Out Censorship magazine. The point is: if I had just gormlessly accepted that fellow’s claim, Syd might not have shown up the next day to prove his friend right.

For another thing, Cass was behind the plan to replace me with Shawn. I couldn't prove it initially. It was just a hunch.  I knew things were broken between Cass and Shawn. They were always fighting. Eventually, we would come to find out that he’d only come to Parkersburg to set her up in a new life here and had every intention of returning to Charlottesville, VA to be with his actual girlfriend. I wasn’t privy to this information, including the bit about the girl back home until the end, because I was being kept out of the loop for other reasons. But it made sense suddenly that he was trying to further enmesh her in Parkersburg’s fabric so he could slip away.

I was right to be skeptical of Popolillo. He came with big energy and bigger promises, claiming he could get us gigs in the New Jersey and New York abd beyond. He claimed to have connections. As proof of his claims to an openly skeptical yours truly, he placed a call to one of the bigger bands he claimed to know: Chris Caffery of Savatage and Doctor Butcher (He wasn’t able to connect with Jon Oliva, whom he also claimed to know). Interestingly enough, when I asked Caffery about Popolillo, he said effectively that he was a great guy but he wasn’t really sure the man had the ability to pull off what he was claiming, so be careful. This was in the old days before speaker phones and only I heard his answer. I kept my expression guarded. It fed the idea that were going on tour, as promised.

The Parkersburg City Park Pavilion

At some point here, right before or after I announced the "tour", we landed Dusty Rhodes. I wish I could remember how that happened, but I know he joined the band as our lead guitarist shortly before the Parkersburg City Park Pavilion show, because he played that one.

Losing Brassworks was obviously a pretty heavy blow to our band morale. We desperately wanted to

play somewhere, anywhere! In a way, the Brassworks suspension was a blessing in disguise. We were in a comfortable rut. This forced us to find new avenues for exposure. One of the first things we thought of was renting a community building. We’d learned from the fiasco of the Darker demo release at the Cedar Grove Community Building: Location matters. So this time we chose a location right smack in the middle of our town, Parkersburg’s City Park Pavilion.

The rent for a night was pretty cheap as I recall. The real problem here was advertising. One of the better ways to get the word out was from the stage of your current show, but Brassworks had taken that ability away from us for the present. So it really came down to band fliers and telling anyone we thought might show up.

A couple of things to note about advertising your band’s gigs in 1995 in a West Virginia town not predisposed to appreciate your genre: The internet was not really a thing. The internet came out in 1990, the year I graduated high school, but social media didn’t come into its own until 2005 and later when we had things like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. So there were a few main (largely analog) ways of getting the word out: word of mouth and band fliers were the most common methods. Mailing lists (and I mean snail mail here, not email lists) and radio advertisements were the other. We hadn’t generated a mailing list and radio spots were out of our price range at that time, so we stuck with the tried and true old school methods. 

We booked the show, but a lot of the fliers that were supposed to be hung up on telephone poles, on community bulletin boards and in store windows by Brett and Jamie… simply went nowhere. This would come to be a pattern. If they were given a task, I could assume it would never get done. The night of the show came and we didn’t have a great crowd. In fact, it was pretty small.

Which was unfortunate because we were supposed to be recording that show live. We needed a new demo to showcase our talent. Dusty absolutely transformed every song we'd written into something better. It was amazing having a lead guitarist. Likewise, we had new songs and the Darker and Time demos weren't that great of quality, though the latter was certainly an improvement. I convinced them that we needed a new demo to really sell ourselves to the unnamed venues that would be included in our East Coast Tour. To make this happen, Cass and Jamie had arranged for Scott, one of Cass’ friends from Charlottesville, VA, and Jeff Popolillo to bring equipment to record the show. I’m not sure they ever did that. What they did instead was record one of our more popular songs, Corpus Dracon, without the vocals. We were supposed to add the vocals later, they said, but it was late and they were out of time and the acoustics weren’t great for recording in the City Park Pavilion. We never saw that recording ever again. 

Given Popolillo's involvement, when the City Park Pavilion gig resulted in a recording of “Corpus Dracon” getting somehow lost, you bet I was suspicious. It was a great song, and had only been made better by the contributions of our new lead guitar player, Dusty Rhodes. To this day, I wonder if Jamie or Jeff sold that song out from under the rest of us. It wouldn’t surprise me, given what else was going on.

Oddly enough, Popolillo pulled me aside to attempt to steal me away from MIDIAN for a band he was putting together elsewhere. I said no, because I didn't trust him and because my loyalties remained in Parkersburg, but I do wonder if "Corpus Dracon" would've magically shown up in that proposed new band's set list.

Trax (Charlottesville, VA)

One of the better things that came out of our discussions over the next few weeks was the possibility of playing Trax in Charlottesville, VA through Cass’ connections. We managed to secure a gig (pretty sure it was September 2nd) and Cass, Jamie and Brett went ahead a week before to get the word out by spreading fliers. Which meant, historically speaking, that they did nothing. I'm pretty sure they just partied. Jamie came back to get When we arrived in Charlottesville, the marquis at Trax announced that "Marilyn” would be playing tonight. That was supposed to read “MIDIAN” obviously. We weren’t off to a great start.

For more reasons than one.  Half the band was sicker than dogs when we got onstage. It turns out that most of us got food poisoning on the way down.

Even so, we jammed like madmen up there. Cass' friend Scott stage-dived during our set. Brett claims that he and Dusty dived off the stage during one of the other bands' sets, but Dusty has no memory of this; of course, he was very, very sick and "self-medicated" so anything is possible.

The very fact that we managed to rage that stage like the little rock gods we aspired to be, despite the condition we were in, says a lot about our dedication at that time. It was inarguably one of the best shows we ever played and definitely the biggest stage MIDIAN ever had the honor of dominating. And we did dominate it! We started out with When I Wake Up and Armageddon Is Near. I remember those huge fans blowing my hair, the intensity of the crowd and the lights. It was amazing!

Of course, we fell apart the second we ended Don't Push Me and got backstage. Jamie wandered off to the restrooms and puked up black afterwards. From there, he crawled back out to the van, where his presence reportedly stopped someone from trying to steal our equipment. I put myself out of my misery with a bottle of Jaegermeister as soon as our set was done. I downed half the bottle on the first swig, praying for sweet oblivion. I cannot recall the name of the other two bands we played with but they let us know they were very impressed when we got backstage. 

Of course, Cass announced immediately shortly before that this was his last gig. He was staying in Charlottesville with his girlfriend. Ironically, so was Shawn Snably but she was at last convinced that it

was over.

So like Spinal Tap we needed a drummer yet again. Fortunately, Dusty knew a guy.

For the record, Trax was shuttered in 2000 and then demolished in 2002.