GOGBLOG

In 1991 I formed a band with my best friend Dave, his friend Steve, and a guy we were told was a good keyboard player named Omar. The result was GOG, and this is the BLOG of GOG.

If you have any photos, flyers, videos, recordings, or stories to contribute, please get in touch!

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Zeroplate - The Home of Larvae

Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor

 

This is the video we shot for “Warlord.” I say “we,” but I am not in fact in this one—thus preserving our trend of missing someone from the band in each video. Of the three actual videos we shot, this one probably looks the best on account of the locations. It’s also edited pretty well considering it was being edited between camcorders and mixed down to a VHS tape using the overdub feature.

This was one of the first full songs we ever wrote, and although the version on this video was re-recorded later in the GOG career, it sounds pretty similar to the original version that was released on the Green Cassette. I wrote the words to this one, I am sad to say. The title was inspired by the Atari 2600 game WARLORDS!

I don’t remember exactly who took this photo—I think it might have been Joe. In any event, we found a giant pile of scrap metal, strapped on our best industrial gear, and posed for this picture.

I don’t remember exactly who took this photo—I think it might have been Joe. In any event, we found a giant pile of scrap metal, strapped on our best industrial gear, and posed for this picture.

Saved by Sowhound

At some point in GOG’s brief run, there was a shakeup and I was left to figure out how to reconstruct our live set without Omar and all of his equipment. A lot of the songs didn’t need much more than the RY30 and a TX81z, but there were a handful with samples, loops, and other synths that I couldn’t recreate. At this point, I was still half a year away from purchasing my own sampler so I was stuck.

Some friends from Angry Young Man/Sowhound came to the rescue, specifically Raul who was a much older and more seasoned musician than anyone in GOG (not hard considering none of us had turned 20 yet.) Raul was a guy with a real job and his own place—a nice apartment with a room for a studio. Hanging out with him was like peering into my own future a little bit. He made some weird, edgy music but he cleaned up for his 9-5 and it all worked and I admired that.

Raul essentially helped to recreate a handful of GOG tracks using whatever equipment he had available and we mixed them down to be backing tracks on a cassette 4-track. I remember the Raul-produced versions of “Warlord” and “Psychodrill” being a little more metallic with more natural sounding drums, but overall he was able to help me bash out something that sounded pretty effectively GOG-like.

Those last couple of shows without Omar were tough because the music all fell to me and I had little idea what I was doing.  Dave and Steve were putting up flyers and making costumes but it was kind of expected that I would just turn up at the gig with the means to play our live set. All in all, it worked and I even learned a lot in cramming to put the Kill the Bunny show together, but it wouldn’t have been possible without Raul.

I was in such disbelief that we would be opening for Consolidated that I had to call Tony at NoClubs myself to ask who the opening acts were. I tried to play it like I was just an interested fan, but really, who calls the promoter to find out the bands on the bill before the show is even being advertised? Anyway, when I heard Tony with his sort of cranky English accent say “GOG,” I was ecstatic. The Funky Groovy Caterpillars were great. They had one song where the hook involved everyone chanting their name, and another where the hook was “Pass the Gravy.” It was fun, party hip-hop that I believe David Christophere from Rabbit in the Moon had something to do with.

I was in such disbelief that we would be opening for Consolidated that I had to call Tony at NoClubs myself to ask who the opening acts were. I tried to play it like I was just an interested fan, but really, who calls the promoter to find out the bands on the bill before the show is even being advertised? Anyway, when I heard Tony with his sort of cranky English accent say “GOG,” I was ecstatic.

The Funky Groovy Caterpillars were great. They had one song where the hook involved everyone chanting their name, and another where the hook was “Pass the Gravy.” It was fun, party hip-hop that I believe David Christophere from Rabbit in the Moon had something to do with.

Tropical Heatwave

By the time that GOG was invited to play at Tampa’s annual Tropical Heatwave festival in 1992, I was already being relegated to less of a musical member of the group and more of a “sideshow” performer. Omar, Dave, and Steve were all out of school, working jobs here and there, and planning shows and costumes and writing new music. Meanwhile, I was stuck in High School for seven hours a day and then working 20 hours a week at Pizza Hut to pay for Roland Drum Triggers and stuff like that.

I had a great homeroom teacher my senior year—Mr. Mason. He coached the wrestling team, taught math (which seems like the most thankless teacher job in any high school,) made mixes to play on community radio, and sponsored the chess team. He was young enough to carry on a conversation about music without sounding square. He was also one of the few teachers that knew I was in a band and took some kind of interest in it.

Most of the GOG shows were late-night affairs with other weird bands at clubs, but Tropical Heatwave was the kind of event that people like homeroom teachers could attend. I got stuck with a bunch of dumb stage performance roles at that show—stuff that I generally resented doing but had little choice about if I wanted to stay in the band. I got to work the angle grinder on Steve’s metal mask and I helped with some backstage costume changes, but the part I remember most clearly was the number where I walked out on the stage in my black hooded robe carrying a cross with a velvet painting of Marilyn Monroe tacked to it.

I remember seeing Mr. Mason in the audience, kneeling down with his hand on his chin in a good approximation of The Thinker, and I remember wondering what on earth he could possibly think of all that lunacy. I’m not sure what he had been expecting to see on that stage, but one of his students acting out some goofy sacreligious ritual was probably not it. For the first time in all of my GOG days, I actually felt a little ashamed of what we were doing.

I saw Mr. Mason the next Monday at school and it was pretty clear that he had sized us up correctly as a bunch of rambunctious kids trying to provoke the audience in the name of entertainment. Certainly other bands (Marilyn Manson, G.G. Allin, The Impotent Sea Snakes) were doing the same thing in more extreme ways at the time, but our brand of tomfoolery must have seemed particularly naive. It was.

Mr. Mason took his faith pretty seriously, which was a fact I didn’t know until after our show. He turned off the morning announcements one day because they included a Sex Pistols song and he didn’t want to hear the “antichrist” lyric. I’m not sure if he ever saw me in the same way again after seeing me up on that stage, and I always regretted that.

Thanks for coming out to see our show, Mr. Mason. You were a class act even if we were not.

This is the opening to a show at the Ritz Theatre in 1992. You can see the drummer we added, Chris, briefly in this one. While the audio here isn’t the best, you may be able to tell that this was one of the more melodic songs that we ever wrote. The sampler really changed things.

Steve starts the show out standing on top of a grate that had a light and smoke machine hidden beneath it. He is holding a giant circular mirror and Mike the lighting guy is hitting it with the spotlight that Steve is redirecting onto the audience. None of that is very visible in this clip, but it was a cool effect.

I thought that we had played a show with Scrog, and this seems to be the proof. This is the original paste-up I made for a flyer. I’m sure that we photocopied this and dropped hundreds of these in Ybor. I never would have made it in the old school world of physical cutting and pasting artwork into layouts. Can you imagine putting the words “Cyber Terrorists” on a flyer today?

I thought that we had played a show with Scrog, and this seems to be the proof. This is the original paste-up I made for a flyer. I’m sure that we photocopied this and dropped hundreds of these in Ybor. I never would have made it in the old school world of physical cutting and pasting artwork into layouts.

Can you imagine putting the words “Cyber Terrorists” on a flyer today?

This is another photo from GOG photo shoot with Shannon. Same costumes, same hard lighting, same mixture of serious (Me, Omar, Steve) and playful (Dave.) Omar had a couple of different looks in these pictures. Here, he’s sporting a mechanic’s jumpsuit wrapped up in a MIDI cord or something like that. I am wearing the black robe that was lovingly made for me by my friend Cathy, and Dave is wearing one of Steve’s suits (the one featured in the “Walking Disease” video.) We had to tear apart some eggshell foam cushion that belonged to my parents and had been wrapped up with the family sleeping bags to make that suit. Steve cut the foam into shapes then spray-painted it black and hot glued it to a jumpsuit. In the early days, we went through a lot of hot glue sticks.

This is another photo from GOG photo shoot with Shannon. Same costumes, same hard lighting, same mixture of serious (Me, Omar, Steve) and playful (Dave.)

Omar had a couple of different looks in these pictures. Here, he’s sporting a mechanic’s jumpsuit wrapped up in a MIDI cord or something like that. I am wearing the black robe that was lovingly made for me by my friend Cathy, and Dave is wearing one of Steve’s suits (the one featured in the “Walking Disease” video.)

We had to tear apart some eggshell foam cushion that belonged to my parents and had been wrapped up with the family sleeping bags to make that suit. Steve cut the foam into shapes then spray-painted it black and hot glued it to a jumpsuit. In the early days, we went through a lot of hot glue sticks.

This is the video we produced for the song “Psychodrill.” Before you watch it, you should know that it’s basically three minutes of two guys beating on a 55 gallon oil drum with a sledgehammer. We didn’t have a narrative here, so there’s really nothing more to it than that.

The interesting thing about the video is the visual effect that was achieved rather ingeniously by Dave.  He messed with the horizontal adjustment on his TV until it looked like a letterbox image that had been double-exposed, then filmed the original footage off of the TV through colored filters. You probably couldn’t achieve this look with a modern TV since anything that gets distorted or fuzzy tends to turn to a big blue screen.

This is a good example of the way we created something out of nothing. We found the drum behind a building, borrowed the sledghammer from my dad, shot all of this with hi-8 video, and edited between cameras. It’s not deep, but it looks pretty neat for something a couple of teenagers did in an afternoon with no budget.

There’s a good money shot at the end of this where I pick up the oil drum and throw it down a hill. That thing was heavy.

In honor of the impending Rapture, I give you this flyer for the GOG Cassette Release Show at the Ritz. The cassette was a single for the song “Rapture.” It came with some very NSFW artwork and featured a remix on the B-Side. I had a copy of the tape for years, but I think it’s gone now. This is a pretty creepy flyer, and Outside N’s name is spelled wrong on it. I had nothing to do with designing this one and in fact, until Mike Stillwell sent it to me recently, I had never even seen it. The song itself was a weird bridge between the early, very NE and Front 242 inspired stuff and the later, more techno-leaning stuff. When I eventually had my way with the live version, I threw in a bunch of samples from the fantastic Mimi Rogers/David Duchovny movie The Rapture. Seriously, that’s a good flick. Check it out.

In honor of the impending Rapture, I give you this flyer for the GOG Cassette Release Show at the Ritz. The cassette was a single for the song “Rapture.” It came with some very NSFW artwork and featured a remix on the B-Side. I had a copy of the tape for years, but I think it’s gone now.

This is a pretty creepy flyer, and Outside N’s name is spelled wrong on it. I had nothing to do with designing this one and in fact, until Mike Stillwell sent it to me recently, I had never even seen it.

The song itself was a weird bridge between the early, very NE and Front 242 inspired stuff and the later, more techno-leaning stuff. When I eventually had my way with the live version, I threw in a bunch of samples from the fantastic Mimi Rogers/David Duchovny movie The Rapture. Seriously, that’s a good flick. Check it out.

Faking It

It should come as little surprise that GOG’s live music was not always exactly live. After all, when you cross over from the world of live bands playing instruments to electronic musicians who are heavily reliant on sequencers, the notion of what needs to be “live” gets a little blurry.

Omar actually knew what he was doing, so he ran the live sound including sequencers and background tapes, and he added live keyboards. If his fingers were always tapping out the sounds you heard, I couldn’t tell you, but nobody really plays 16th note basslines on a drum machine.  What would be the point?

Most of the trickery came early on when we were booking shows ahead of having the live music piece worked out. GOG was always about the spectacle, so we spent a lot of time on costumes, props, ideas for the show, and videos, and then a little time leftover for actual band rehearsal.

Dave always sang for real, Omar always had real sounds coming out of some box or other, but I wasn’t so lucky. At our first show, I didn’t even have any drum pads or drums, so I just made two rectangular shapes out of electrical tape on the back of Omar’s keyboard case and I banged on that with drumsticks. The performance was there, just not the sound!

As the band went on, my biggest goal was to perform more of the music live onstage. I beat on metal drums, helped with the grinder, and set things on fire occasionally, but I really wanted to be connected up to something that was coming out of the speakers. I started with an Octapad and some Roland drum pads hooked up to an Alesis D4, and then moved on to triggers that I could tape onto whatever objects looked like fun. I even built a kick pedal out of an old roller skate and some scrap wood. By the time of the Alien Sex Fiend show, I had graduated from beating on an empty keyboard case to playing a full-on sit down percussion set (though I was still only augmenting the sequencer.)

To the two guys who came up to me after the Orlando Nitzer Ebb show and looked at me with disappointment while asking “were you really playing anything?” I apologize—I was trying! But in the end, did it ever matter?

Early on, we decided that we needed some decent band photos. We met a very cool girl named Shannon who was an art student and photographer, and she came over one afternoon for a quick photo shoot at Dave’s house. We used a black comforter as a backdrop and some very directional light and the stuff that she came back with was priceless. This was our go-to band photo. We put it on flyers. We screen printed it on t-shirts. Though all of Shannon’s pictures were great, this one captured the absurdity that was GOG the best. I’ve always loved the fact that we all look quite serious—except for Steve. He’s screaming and wearing a collar made of duct tape! That was kind of how we rolled.

Early on, we decided that we needed some decent band photos. We met a very cool girl named Shannon who was an art student and photographer, and she came over one afternoon for a quick photo shoot at Dave’s house. We used a black comforter as a backdrop and some very directional light and the stuff that she came back with was priceless.

This was our go-to band photo. We put it on flyers. We screen printed it on t-shirts. Though all of Shannon’s pictures were great, this one captured the absurdity that was GOG the best. I’ve always loved the fact that we all look quite serious—except for Steve. He’s screaming and wearing a collar made of duct tape! That was kind of how we rolled.

Four Dudes and a Drum Machine Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Omar joins the GOG BLOG:

Omar in GOGMatt summed it up pretty well, it all started with the infamous RY-30. Never till this day have I used and abused the inner workings of one single device. But in the end, I wouldn’t have changed it for anything.

During the early days of learning programming and synthesizers, there were little to no resources to really learn with unless you had money. Plain and simple. There were no software apps, or hacked plugins you could download at the blink of an eye and instantly get access to the vast library of sounds and synthesis techniques that have spanned over the past 40-50 years.

The pawn shops were our haven, and we were gear vampires, countlessly scouring the streets of Tampa on hot muggy afternoons looking for something that looked cool, complex, and expensive, but ultimately within our means. I’ll never forget the countless visits to the local comicbook / pawn shop called Green Shift Music. It was a glorious old place, with that musty smell of old carpet, wood, and cigarettes, and on one side nothing but comic books galore. But to the left of the entrance, down a narrow isle scattered with used music gear, you always knew there was a chance of finding some ancient gem that no one in that day cared about anymore and you’d quietly walk out of the store with some obscure Roland, or a Korg, or just maybe a coveted Oberheim synth—hoping to god that everything about it worked for the price that was being asked. (they were usually very cheap, meaning something was wrong…)

As we started playing more shows, and were slowly able to start funding more and more gear, we soon started learning what types of instruments our influences were using. Bands like Front 242, using the distinct sound of FM synth basses (hence our heavy use of the TX81Z) , Nitzer Ebb with it’s heavy use of analogs and modular (think Xpander and System-700). I was also heavily influenced by the early days of Belgium darkwave stuff by labels like Zoth Omog and Talla2XLC with it’s unique blend of analog and what sounded like wavetable synths (thing PPG or ESQ-1). Of course at that time, this was all still very new to us, so we just knew that if there was one preset on a synth that came close to a sound from a song we knew, then we knew it had potential.

All of the early GOG material was at first primarily written and sequenced solely with the RY-30, including all the buzzy pulsating bass sounds. Soon thereafter we added sampling to our sound with an old AKAI-S900 (god bless the disk load times on that thing), rounding it out by upgrading our ability to pump our hard, aggressive synth dance basses with the TX81Z.  That machine was basically Front-242 and “early” Nitzer Ebb in a box. Dozens and dozens of harsh and abrasive bass sounds that I would program on that thing for nights on end. It was such an awesome experience. Learning for myself through experimentation and countless hours of trying this and trying that, slowly learning the skills of synth programming and understanding how to get the same results from what I was hearing in the music I lived by.

It wasn’t till we came across an old Korg DW-8000 that we really got to experience the sound of “analog” synths. One of my first synths was an old Korg Poly-800, but unfortunately the previous owners cat decided to piss on it and it knocked out an entire octavce on the keyboard, and get this: the EDIT button. So there was absolutely no way to change or modify the sounds. That was like giving a kid a jet to fly with no fuel in it. So when we came across the DW-8000, it brought a whole new level to our sound and production abilities.

But none of this, not a single bit of it would have really been possible had it not been for the MMT-8…


To be continued…

Our Friends and Neighbors

In our short time together, we got to play with a lot of interesting bands. I’m sure that I am going to leave some out here, but these are the bands with whom I remember sharing the stage.

  • The Impotent Sea Snakes
  • Miss America
  • Nitzer Ebb
  • Consolidated
  • The Funky Groovy Caterpillars
  • Outside N
  • Alien Sex Fiend
  • KMFDM
  • Sowhound 

There was a Front Line Assembly/Contagion show that I remember being at but I can’t remember if we played. We played the WMNF Tropical Heatwave Festival one year, so I won’t even count all the bands on that but I think we played with Yothu Yindi.

There was also one GOG show that I missed, some kind of weird party in a warehouse that got shut down. I don’t remember who all played that show, but I seem to remember it being a very early incarnation of Marilyn Manson (who was blowing up in Florida around this time.)

I also distinctly remember making a flyer for a show with GOG and Scrog, but I don’t know if that show actually happened of if we just thought it sounded like a funny double bill. It’s amazing what 20 years will do to these memories!

We usually started every live set out with an instrumental intro and more often than not, that intro was this song called “Kaph.” 

Dave had a penchant for coming up with absurd, meaningless names. We had songs called “Gormpha” and “Garsenich” to go along with “Kaph.” I have no idea how he came up with most of it, but this one actually got its name from a bird-like squawking noise that Dave and Steve used to make at each other.

We were a little small to fill up the big stage at the Ritz, but with the TV monitors covered in spikes (homemade, of course,) a wood and fence cage (a story for another blog), a flaming 55 gallon oil drum, and enough silly antics, it kind of worked. There was also a light and sound guy named Mike who took a liking to us and enjoyed rigging up lights to make us look good—or at least better.

This video includes some nice back-lit footage of Steve with his prosthetic robot arm! We made this out of one of my old cardboard poster mailers, some discarded computer circuit boards, and a fairly lifelike rubber hand that I had for some reason.

This is also some of the best footage I could find of me wailing on the metal drum with pipes—while it’s on fire!