Lightning Bolt
- Issue #262 (December '05) | In Writing
- By: Alan Licht | Featuring: Lightning Bolt
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- Printable version
BC: "We played our first Lightning Bolt show as a duo in December of '94. And then a month later we got a singer, Hisham, and so the second show was as a trio, and that went on for a year and a half. We were all at Rhode Island School of Design..."
BG: "Fun stuff (laughs)."
BC: "I was a junior, I was drumming with this guitarist and we lost our bass player, so Brian was a new freshman, and we heard this new freshman was really good at bass. So we played a few times with him and it didn't gel very well, so we sort of stopped. But I stopped playing with the guitarist and so the next semester me and Brian tried it out again, just the two of us. I don't even know if we were looking for a guitarist..."
BG: "We played once with Dare, who was a guitarist, which was ok, but we decided to do it as just the two of us."
BC: "Did we know Godhead Silo back then? I'm sure I heard Ruins and Godhead Silo, the two bass/drums bands which introduced us to the fact that we could get away with just being bass and drums. He had just one cabinet, and it just seemed so loud at the time (laughs)."
BG: "I had a 15" aluminum cone Hartke speaker combo amp (has 4 speakers now)."
BC: "And I had probably the same drum set. I'd been playing drums all through high school, and had come to college and played in a few little bands, I was really into playing drums, I played as much as I could.."
BC: "Our first show I think we played one really tight song (sings the riff), one really loose song (vocalizes the rhythm) and two others just whatever... so it was pretty loose.."
BG: "We probably have all that stuff on tape."
BC: "(points at wall of cassettes) This is all... we've been four-tracking everything from the start. So, everything (laughs) some of it's really good. I have our first show, up there. Then when Hisham joined, we were still pretty loose, and we saw Le Savvy Fav play their first show - they were another RISD band, with some success, and they were really poppy and tight, and we were like "holy shit, we gotta write songs!" So we ran back, that same night, we ran out of the show and recorded like (sings drum part). So then we came up with like a whole eight or nine song set with Hisham, it was all real tight. We kinda went full u-turn from our first 3-6 months, a year and a half of not much improvisation. And we've kind of ping ponged around since then. For our first record (Yellow), we recorded five songs, and then ditched four of them and put on stuff off the four-track that we liked, that sounded more interesting to us. And kept like one tight song for that record I think. Hisham was singing with delay and effects and stuff, and he was playing drums a little bit. We went into a studio and recorded all that stuff, at Brown University, this kid recorded us... I don't know, some of that stuff's alright, but... some of that stuff's not... alright."
BG: "Fun stuff (laughs)."
BC: "I was a junior, I was drumming with this guitarist and we lost our bass player, so Brian was a new freshman, and we heard this new freshman was really good at bass. So we played a few times with him and it didn't gel very well, so we sort of stopped. But I stopped playing with the guitarist and so the next semester me and Brian tried it out again, just the two of us. I don't even know if we were looking for a guitarist..."
BG: "We played once with Dare, who was a guitarist, which was ok, but we decided to do it as just the two of us."
BC: "Did we know Godhead Silo back then? I'm sure I heard Ruins and Godhead Silo, the two bass/drums bands which introduced us to the fact that we could get away with just being bass and drums. He had just one cabinet, and it just seemed so loud at the time (laughs)."
BG: "I had a 15" aluminum cone Hartke speaker combo amp (has 4 speakers now)."
BC: "And I had probably the same drum set. I'd been playing drums all through high school, and had come to college and played in a few little bands, I was really into playing drums, I played as much as I could.."
BC: "Our first show I think we played one really tight song (sings the riff), one really loose song (vocalizes the rhythm) and two others just whatever... so it was pretty loose.."
BG: "We probably have all that stuff on tape."
BC: "(points at wall of cassettes) This is all... we've been four-tracking everything from the start. So, everything (laughs) some of it's really good. I have our first show, up there. Then when Hisham joined, we were still pretty loose, and we saw Le Savvy Fav play their first show - they were another RISD band, with some success, and they were really poppy and tight, and we were like "holy shit, we gotta write songs!" So we ran back, that same night, we ran out of the show and recorded like (sings drum part). So then we came up with like a whole eight or nine song set with Hisham, it was all real tight. We kinda went full u-turn from our first 3-6 months, a year and a half of not much improvisation. And we've kind of ping ponged around since then. For our first record (Yellow), we recorded five songs, and then ditched four of them and put on stuff off the four-track that we liked, that sounded more interesting to us. And kept like one tight song for that record I think. Hisham was singing with delay and effects and stuff, and he was playing drums a little bit. We went into a studio and recorded all that stuff, at Brown University, this kid recorded us... I don't know, some of that stuff's alright, but... some of that stuff's not... alright."