I'll try to wrap it up nicely in one bright package, this accumulation of songs,
years,
human sweat and dreams. All of these shared amongst myself and my band mates, Paul
Kimble and Joey Peters. Grant Lee Buffalo was our band name and the sum total force of
our efforts for most of a decade.
The 1990's saw the underground uprooted and the mainstream
flooded when, for one golden moment, no one seemed to be at the wheel. Our own history
was rooted in Los Angeles near the end of the Eighties. Each of us had come to Los
Angeles to pursue our individual dreams. In the beginning I roofed houses by
day and attended film school by night. Joey Peters held all sorts of odd jobs at the time
we met, from stocking groceries to film crew work, often juggling several drumming
gigs at once. Paul Kimble sold stereos, set up hi-fi gear while pursuing his own
musical yearnings. From the time I had arrived in LA I had hopes of joining a band,
if not putting one together myself. Shiva Burlesque was part band/part lodge. For every
show we played, we must have held 30 rehearsals. Those humid evenings would often
disintegrate into long winded talks on the Marx Brothers and Aldous Huxley and the
hidden parallels that lie between them. My role was primarily that of
guitarist, co-songwriter and co-conspirator. Jeffrey Clark, from my home town
of Stockton, CA was the band's singer and main lyricist.
The original
lineup would evolve over the years, but at one time
or another, Shiva Burlesque featured the likes of James Brenner (later of Scenic),
Biff Sanders (Four Way Cross, Ethel Meatplow), Rich Evac (Phsycom), and a handful of
others. The group finally found it's footing with drummer Joey Peters, frontman Jeff Clark,
bassist James Brenner, and myself. Peters brought with him an original style that
was at once subtle, intuitive and also extremely dramatic. Our musical marriage was
a spontaneous one and I suspect that our influence on one another's development is apt to be
indelible. This lineup would release one self-titled album in 1988.
Not long
after, the band would lose Brenner and would begin to search for a new bassist. It was
around this time that
I first met Paul Kimble.
Paul had traveled the farthest, from
Freeport, Illinois. There was an instant creative chemistry among the group that
ultimately found it's way on record with
Shiva Burlesque's Mercury Blues in 1990. By then
it was a five-piece with the inclusion of cellist Greg Adamson, who later performed on
the song, Mockingbirds. Personality conflicts and growing pains would eventually bring
the group to an end as a new decade was dawning. For Joey, Paul and myself,
Shiva Burlesque had brought us together, but our power as a trio would alter our
lives.
Moonlighting under a different band name every show, we began to
explore the songs that were
gushing out of me in my mid twenties. "Rex Mundi" would appear on
one night, followed by the "Machine Elves" the next. These bands had a whole lot in common --
we were both of 'em. Longing to step forward with the songs I was writing, I needed the
courage of a veil to fully accept my lot as a performer. Grant Lee Buffalo was
precisely that. It provided me with the strength and the camraderie of a pack and it
allowed me the freedom to be vulnerable as an artist. Questions of "who are, who is, and
what is Grant Lee Buffalo still seem to abound. Within our little world, however, the axis
was forever shifting. In the early part of the nineties we began to work diligently on the
home recording of several songs. Most of the basic tracks were quickly cut
with emphasis on capturing the drums.
Joey and I would provide the basic skeleton in the
recording room, as Paul would be
twisting the dials in a separate building. Paul and I would
then proceed to layer the overdubs, all of this just as Joey Peters was enlisting with the
group Cracker. It was a setback that led to various replacement drummers over the
following year. For this reason, early fliers and a limited vinyl single features the likeness
of Kimble, myself and drummer David Strayer, although Peters had actually played
on the
recording. This release, originally a demo recording of "Fuzzy" was distributed by
Bob Mould's Single Only label in the summer of '92 and before long was gathering significant
airplay at Boston's WFNX. In October of that same year we signed a recording deal with
Slash Records, Kimble, myself, and a nearly absent but Cracker-free Joey Peters.
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