(Live at Big Al Doogie's birthday party August 2006)My band, i.e., the functioning one that practices every week and plays out once in a while.
John and I met in Maggot, a Lower East Side scummy punk band that I joined after seeing them play once. Unfortunately, main man Greg Maggot and I butted heads and I was out of the band a few months later. Shortly afterward, I started playing with a douchebag who called himself Atom, where I met Dan, but that's another story.
Basically, John called me out of the blue one day after the Maggot debacle, right when I was realizing things weren't working out with Atom, and he asked me if I wanted to play music with him. Of course I did - he's a great guy, really easy to work with and he played bass. So we started writing and practicing songs with a drum machine in his garage. John wanted to name the band "Hypocrite," and I liked "Jackhammer," so we became Jackhammer Hypocrite. We actually played a show with the drum machine to about five people in a sandlot.
The thing was, we really wanted a singer and a drummer. Eventually, we found the latter in Dan Brown, a guy from my neck of the woods, the North Fork of Long Island. None of the singers we "auditioned" worked out, so John and I took over vocal duties. This line-up played several great shows, most notably at The King's Club in Centereach and Saints'N'Sinners in Smithtown. We also changed our name to JAKKHAMR HYPOCRYT for some reason.
Eventually, Dan Brown, who's a helluva musician by the way, began flaking on band practice, leaving John and I to sit there pissed off and frustrated. Finally, we just never called him back for practice and we returned to square one. We put a classified ad in a local music mag and talked to a few people, but nothing worked out. In the meantime, I played with Optimus Prime. Then one day, John called and said, "I've got a dumb idea - why don't I switch to drums and get Dan from Optimus Prime to play bass?" So that's what we did, and it's stayed that way for better or worse ever since, although now we practice in Dan's basement and we're called ULTRABASTARD!
There's been a lot of fun and a lot of turmoil. We did a mini-tour of Florida with Libyan Hit Squad. We played Cleveland and met Nightmare Mode. We've had incredible, ass-kicking shows and really horrible, embarrassing ones. We've hated each other and loved each other. We all love it, though, and we always come back for more. In fact, we're recording again (finally).
These songs were recorded in late 2005, right after John switched to drums and Dan joined.
(Live at Joe's going away party October 2009)About the songs:
(note: songs that are linked can be downloaded as samples)
01. Turning Fat Into Muscle - This instrumental evolved out of a riff I pulled out of my ass one night when John was playing bass and Dan Brown was still drumming. It became our staple opener for quite a while.
02. Numb - John wrote this one, though I came up with the chords for the solo part. It's a heavy, solid song about frustration - a subject that appears often in our lyrics. This was one of the original seven songs John and I assembled with the drum machine.
03. Don't Need You - I wrote this trying to write the "Sonic Reducer" of break-up songs. I actually originally recorded it on my 4-track for the second FPOS album that never materialized (because I had a real band for a change). It remains a crowd favorite.
04. Alive - John write this, but his original lyrics were some "pretty girl, dream come true" drivel that had no place in our repertoire, so I wrote lyrics about the asshole my mom married. Another of the original seven songs.
05. Kiss Me - One of mine, written shortly before "Don't Need You." One of the original seven.
06. Citiots - Dan came up with the music for this killer song and we all worked together to arrange it into what it is here. I wrote the lyrics about summers on the North Fork with some inspiration from The Candy Snatchers.
07. Piss & Hatred - John wrote this about a rough patch in his marriage. Also one of the original seven.
08. Big Fat Dumb - I was on a Motorhead kick when I wrote this song about an asshole I had to work with. We don't play it anymore, mostly because Dan can't remember the bass line and I'm too lazy to re-teach him.
09. Myrtle (Something Good) - Dan wrote and sang this garage-y stomper. He titled it "Something Good," but John said it should be called "Myrtle." Still one of my favorites.
10. Blues Type Thing - One of the original seven I wrote that was inadvertently ripped from Iggy Pop's "Rock And Roll Party" from Party. And yes, that's a Robert Plant reference in the lyrics.
11. Fight Song - I wrote this song about my experience moving across the country after being annoyed by Rush on the radio at work. Funny how that worked out. John said he could see the crowd fighting to it, so the name stuck. I think I wanted to call it "Wanderlust," but that didn't last long. One of the original seven, and, just for the hell of it, I'm gonna post that original seven song, four-track demo up here at some point. Also, be sure to listen to the hidden track, which appears 30 seconds after "Fight Song" ends.
PLAY LOUD AND DRINK HEAVILY.
ULTRABASTARD!Demo CDR
(MPAE)
2005
Bonus!!! A video of us in the basement performing a song that's not on the CD!!!
