Last Nights Vice has really been a 14 year ride for us. Most people don’t believe us when we say we’ve been playing for that long but it is true. The whole idea for a band started in the 4th grade and came from the mind of Chris Blake. He invited me to be in the band and then we started inviting everyone we knew into the band. None of us played instruments, but that didn’t seem important at the time.
In the 6th grade we actually formed our first band, we had no name, and it was very short lived, but we played instruments and had a hand full of practices in our friend’s basement. In 7th grade we actually formed the band, Blame Gary. Blame Gary actually had a few really bad band names prior to settling on one really bad band name. We had a lot of names and band members over the years including, Joe Therina, Chris Hirbe, Tony Delia, Dan O’Keefe and Andrew Wilson to name a few. In this span, I was the singer, which was a bad idea, I played Bass and then Guitar. Blake played Bass, went to Drums, then back to Bass where he belonged in the first place. Why I played Bass, I have no idea. While we were scrambling to get all of our positions in the band set, and figure out which members were staying and leaving, we ended up drummerless. We went on a long, scary quest for a drummer. We even had a 30 year old guy fill in for us for a while, which really isn’t that old now, but seemed like it back when we were 18. We got so desperate we were even shopping for drum machines, which probably would have been cool in a lot of scenes, though they would’ve rather us all be machines. That’s when we found Andrew Ghiassi and things were never the same.
The last guitarist swap we had to make was for Jordan Phoenix. We were trying out guitarist in my parents’ basement and lined the wall with candidates, one of which, coincidently turned out to be Brandon House; very foreshadowing. We decided to go with Jordan who we knew from high school and his previous band A Door Between. We had played a show with them at a Mexican restaurant downtown.
This was the final line-up of Blame Gary. After a while the band disbanded after a horrible show in Topeka, KS that left us stranded in Kansas City. I would go into more detail about this, but I may have to save it for a later blog post.
Jordan then left the band to play with Princeton, while the rest of us started a new band with a new lead singer. That’s when we found Brandon House. During all this time Brandon was playing in a successful band called Duke 45. Duke ran into some troubles and Brandon started his own project called Richboy Falling. Andrew had recorded demos for Richboy Falling and suggested we try out Brandon for Last Nights Vice. This was the genesis of Last Nights Vice.
We went on to record a few songs and play a few shows, and later figured out the tracks of guitars could not be duplicated live with just one guitarist. Cue Jordan Phoenix back into the picture, with his guitar, drive and greasy hair.
The rest is history.
-Joe
(the picture is a Roland TR-808 drum machine)
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