NOT

1990-1991

Hardcore teenage angst at its best. NOT was comprised of me on guitar and vocals, Stewart Lesemann on bass, and Rich Reigart on drums. Until NOT formed, Rich and Stewart had been playing with another guitarist named Dave Lee (no relation to me) in a band called Plug Ugly, and I was still in The Rotting Potatoes. Plug Ugly broke up, and I left The Rotting Potatoes in search of a new music-making experience. With the formation of NOT, I went through a rather big change in my music listening. I left Rush and Led Zeppelin behind, and turned my ears towards the then just blossoming "alternative" music culture. This included bands like The Descendants, All, The Jesus Lizard, Tar, Primus, etc. We even got into some heavier things, like The Melvins and Prong. It took us a little time to find "our sound." Some of the early NOT songs, (like All You Need and The Point In It) are kind of blatant in their reflection of self indulgent, late 80's style "prog metal," but we broke out of that fairly quickly, and tunes like The Kind and At the Same Time are good examples of our version of slightly poppy, "punk influenced, thrash alterna-hard core." :-)

Perhaps the coolest thing about playing in NOT was that we got our own band room/rehearsal space in a warehouse in the industrial part of Charleston, for which we had to pay monthly rent. All of us had jobs by this point, so this wasn't so much of an issue, but having a private rehearsal space was kind of a cool thing for us. The band room became sort of the hub for our activities, mostly jamming and funneling 24 oz. "Master Cylinder" cans of Schlitz Malt Liquor. We played as many gigs as we could- Club Dog Alley (later Ground Zero) and the Music Farm in Charleston, and a few other gigs in Asheville, NC, Athens, GA and Florence, SC. At this point, Stewart had bought an old school bus (a converted Ford Econo-line van) from our high school which we used to haul our gear and travel in.

We did a radio interview for a local radio station once. It was on 96 Wave FM's (WAVF) Local Look. Unfortunately, the recording of the interview is now lost! Oh well, I remember that we sounded like a bunch of self concious teen-agers anyway :-)

These recordings were made in our band room on a 4-track cassette recorder in 1991. We played the songs live, then mixed everything down to two tracks. I went back and added an overdubbed guitar part and improvised some totally incomprehensible, nonsenseical lyrics as I was recording. I was able to glean these tracks from a copy of the master (which is lost) on a normal bias tape. The sound quality is ok for the most part, although the tunes are a little noisy. Also, the guitar is mixed a little high, which is too bad, since Rich and Stewart were a great rhythm section.