"My freshman year of college was what I imagine is common for a lot of
people. I spent most nights of the week holed up in the painted
cinderblock blandness of my dorm room, being generally miserable. I had
hardly made any friends save for a few that lived down the hall, but no
one that I hung out with with any regularity. In November 2002, my
friend Dave, who was my spanish teacher in high school and the same guy
that had told me about Lightning Bolt, told me that there was an even
crazier band that I needed to check out called Hella, and that their
drummer was the best. They were playing at the venue that is the heart
of Denton, TX: Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios, in a week or so.
The night of their show rolled around, but I decided
that, not even knowing how to get to Rubber Gloves from campus, I would
just blow it off. A month or so later I was home for the holidays and
started looking around on the net for information on Hella after Dave
had told me "Hella was amazing, he's the fastest, tightest drummer I've
ever seen, and they play incredibly together. At one point the
guitarist's amp cutout; they both just looked at each other, and jumped
back in perfectly synchronized!" I ended up on the old 5RC website and
found the free mp3 download for "Cafeteria Bananas" and probably ended
up listening to it three times in a row right off the bat. I'd heard
some things before it that were similar, but this was definitely
something new. I knew that it was something important, and a few weeks
later I finally ordered "Hold Your Horse Is" through the 5rc/kill rock
stars website.
It was a crazy experience. I listened to it as I
was driving up to Denton from my parents house in the suburbs and could
barely believe/didn't know what to make of what I was hearing. I knew
it was going to take me a lot of listens to really get into the vibe of
what was going on. Even just the tones on the record were foreign in an
enchanting kinda way. There was a great blend of intensity peppered
with a sense of mischievous humor, a kind of playfulness that made it
easier to navigate through what could at times be a very dense,
undulating and sputtery cloud.
My initial Hella indoctrination has to onclude the
first time I saw Hella live. They came back to Rubber Gloves a few
months later on March 17, 2003 (there is a pretty popular video on
youtube of them playing "Biblical Violence" from this show, you can
almost see me at the very beginning), nearly a year to the date of the
album's release. I'd been the Rubber Gloves a few times by now and got
there right around the time doors opened, and just sat there in my car
listening to the end of "Led Zeppelin II". I remember thinking
something along the lines of "Kinda funny that I'm listening to one of
the most influential drummers ever, and I think I'm about to witness
another in that line..." I saw their van pull up and as Zach got out I
introduced myself and, being the young drum dork that I was, asked him
what kind of bass drum pedal he used. "It's a... Tama Iron Cobra" but
this was what I really wanted to know: "Double or single?" "It's a
single pedal." Now I knew he was truly the best.
When Hella took the stage and was like nothing else,
just a beautifully intense synergy of these two brilliant musicians,
shattering what I thought was possible with music right in front of me.
As I watched Zach relentlessly pummel his drum set, I felt like I was
watching the realization of the path I'd been on with drums, from the
classic rock players I grew up on through the punk drummers through the
prog guys to the jazzers, this playing was the next level in the
instruments' evolution in my mind. I remember thinking "This guy has
either studied through every rudiment and drum book a thousand times
over, or he's never taken a lesson in his life; I can't wait to ask him"
and it was the latter; which was also a great inspiration to me as
well, because I never studied drums in the academic sense either. I was
now fully immersed, seeing that these two guys weren't just about
playing gnarly music but that it was more like getting to see inside
their brains and watching them function, there was no pretense, this is
just part of how they live and breathe.
This was exactly what I had been looking for as a
musician, I was beginning to grow out of my phase of fast punk music as
being the greatest, and this was the future for me.
"Hold
Your Horse Is" opened the portal to a musical dimension that I had been
seeking out and set me on the path to work harder than ever at pushing
my limits as a musician. They set a new standard for combining superb
musicianship with creativity and using all of it to create new sounds.
I listened to Hella constantly for years thereafter and even now they
are a band that is in consistent rotation in my musical diet. The world
that it opened to me through other music past and present that I
learned about thereafter was all encompassing and its difficult for me
to imagine what life would be like without it. Both Zach and Spencer
have shaped my perception and appreciation of music in ways that I
really can't overstate. It's something that has been a massive
inspiration and something I can always go back to that is both
comfortingly familiar and yet something I can hear and feel new things
in each time. I've been friends with both of them for 9 years now but
there is still the the young 18 year old in me that is still picking his
jaw up off the floor, and I can always think back and feel parts of
that initial jolt to my system that came from their art.
Thanks a lot for sharing this with all of us you actually recognize what you’re speaking about! There are so many fun and exciting things to do and experience around the world that I thought I'd put together a list of my favourite things to do.
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