I first had an inkling something was up when I was in Catholic High School and came home on extremely hot June day to a six-foot-five guy totally covered in leather with a Doberman on a choker chain in the elevator. There was physical room but I felt every single inch of space was filled by their presence. Eleven stories later they left to a mysterious apartment a floor beneath my parent’s place. This parade of incredulity continued throughout the summer with gorgeous young women, guys with guitars, and regularly a very rough-looking gentleman with an eye patch all getting off on the floor before me.
I had been playing guitar ever since I was very young and played in the church across the street beginning in the mid-70s. There was a definite folk thing that was happening in the church in New York and I fell right into it. Later on, I started to study classical guitar and would occasionally play in the 14-story staircase in my building for its cool reverb. It was then I first really met Randy, aside from his neighborly greetings in passing. He invited me over to his apartment to play me some cool sounds.
When I entered it made total sense that this is where all the mysterious traffic was headed. He turned me on to some great bands and I eventually started renting space from him at his rehearsal studio in the New York Music Building for some bands I was playing in.
Some years later I was practicing in the staircase and Randy came in and asked me - do you wanna play in a band? I said sure! That band was Kill Me.
It turned out the first date wasn’t even a gig but a music video - shot in the Broadway studio of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. It was an unusual band, to say the least. It was bass, drums, keys, guitar, lead singer, the singer’s female foil, three-piece horn section, swinet-player and singer, acrobats, body-builders, and later on a three-person rap group. It was a spectacle, to say the least. At our peak, we filled the Palladium in New York and the band fell apart after that gig.
Randy was very active in the scene at New York’s Music Building at 584 8th Avenue. We started playing with other musicians that also rehearsed on our floor and for what we later called “The 903” named after the room number we rehearsed in.
So with Kill Me on hiatus, The 903 started playing out. We played the club scene around the city and played some rockin’ funk-based music.
Later, after 38 gigs (Randy remembers the number of gigs each band played), when 903 imploded, we tried to get Kill Me back together with the singer, Dirty Hanky, and the keyboard player and singer, Wild Bill Olland, but Hank did not show up.
With Wild Bill and the rhythm section of The 903, something really happened. We wrote three songs at the first rehearsal, two of them winding up being classics.
Oh, yeah… “REHEARSALS”. Randy insisted that we rehearse 4 times a week… “or you can’t be in the band”. Reid kind of balked at that but complied. The rehearsals were joyful, hilarious, and artistically fruitful. We knew 100 songs at some point and the mass of recorded rehearsal tapes contain probably another 100 that were only played once.
We wound up playing over 1000 sets, creating some epic stuff, some of which we are still working on, and hope you can see and hear soon. I think we are really leaving a mark with this website/museum…or some would say; “A forever stain"…
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