It's always a little tough to go back and watch old films of yourself, especially when the video is of a performance of some sort, and especially when the video is of you when you were a kid. I would assume most people would rather just not do it. Like, I don't think Justin Bieber is watching videos of himself at the age of four playing the drums or whatever the fuck the myth is about that jabroni. It's just too cringeworthy.
But you know this by now—we dabble in quite a lot of cringe around these blogging parts. I hate watching old videos, but I watch them anyway. It's an exercise in humility, a reminder that I used to suck but every day I'm getting better (even though I still suck). So this is what we're going to do today, and more or less every Thursday afternoon for the time being. We're going to watch some old home videos.
Now, the subject. There's been plenty of mention of a band called "Burholme" on Puke on Your Birthday over the years. Here's the three-sentence deal with Burholme. A "garage band," formed approx. 2005, featuring Mike on guitar and lead vocals, Kev on bass, and Joe (me) on drums, Burholme (originally called "Schmooze," but we don't have to talk about that just yet) was a way to fuck around and have some fun playing some of the music a trio of friends liked in the mid-00s. We played a few gigs—a few battles of the bands, a few birthday parties, Cheltenham H.S.'s Spirit Night, that sort of shit—but mostly this was just an excuse to jam out in my parents' garage and spend some time with a couple of my best friends. Some high school garage bands have higher aspirations; we were cool to just kick it and play a few shows for friends in the local church hall basement.
Anything else you've heard is just myth-building, that's all. And if you thought just talking about it and writing about it did enough to puncture the myth, then wait till you actually watch us perform. Because now I have the tapes.
Kev's dad captured bits and pieces of a few of our performances over the years, including most of our final concert in August 2007 at the Presentation B.V.M. Church Hall, and the tapes survived. They are those mini VHS tapes that were en vogue for a bit in the mid-00s. Kev let me borrow the tapes and the camcorder, and I hooked 'em up to my computer. Using sketchy software that I found in an obscure corner of the internet (since, as always, I'm not trying to spend actual money on this shit), I was able to digitalize every song from every performance that has survived on tape over the past fifteen-plus years.
We as humans are always our own harshest critics, and so of course I'm not going to come away from this experience of rewatching our shows thinking that we were any good. The music was occasionally tight but mostly chaotic; the vocals—all three of us were singing by the end there—could, um, use some work. But again, let me stress this: that was never the point. We didn't have aspirations to get signed by a major recording label. We just wanted to fuck around with friends. You can see from the video of our final performance that our friends came out in droves, and regardless of quality, I think the experience was validating because of that.
Being in a band with your pals is a uniquely high school experience. This year, I'm celebrating the 20th anniversary of entering high school. Not that Burholme was established on Day 1, but I still find myself thinking about some of the shit that I got into during those four years. Burholme looms large over my memories. So I guess consider this limited blog series as another misguided attempt at processing my nostalgia.
Each week, we're gonna watch a single song from our final performance, and talk about it a little bit. Talk about the song, talk about our performance of that song, talk about Burholme memories I have specifically associated with that song, talk about Burholme in general and how much it meant to me to be able to express myself in this particular context. I'll include any alternate takes I have from other concerts. I'll also try to get Kev to have his say each week, if he wants to (Mike has already indicated to me that he does not want to participate—sucks that law school instilled a fear of blogging within his soul). We're gonna go in order of the set list from that late-August 2007 concert.
Please excuse the quality of the tapes, and the quality of the performances, and the quality of this blog that waxes and wanes depending on how nostalgic I get, and just enjoy.
Now, the subject. There's been plenty of mention of a band called "Burholme" on Puke on Your Birthday over the years. Here's the three-sentence deal with Burholme. A "garage band," formed approx. 2005, featuring Mike on guitar and lead vocals, Kev on bass, and Joe (me) on drums, Burholme (originally called "Schmooze," but we don't have to talk about that just yet) was a way to fuck around and have some fun playing some of the music a trio of friends liked in the mid-00s. We played a few gigs—a few battles of the bands, a few birthday parties, Cheltenham H.S.'s Spirit Night, that sort of shit—but mostly this was just an excuse to jam out in my parents' garage and spend some time with a couple of my best friends. Some high school garage bands have higher aspirations; we were cool to just kick it and play a few shows for friends in the local church hall basement.
Anything else you've heard is just myth-building, that's all. And if you thought just talking about it and writing about it did enough to puncture the myth, then wait till you actually watch us perform. Because now I have the tapes.
Kev's dad captured bits and pieces of a few of our performances over the years, including most of our final concert in August 2007 at the Presentation B.V.M. Church Hall, and the tapes survived. They are those mini VHS tapes that were en vogue for a bit in the mid-00s. Kev let me borrow the tapes and the camcorder, and I hooked 'em up to my computer. Using sketchy software that I found in an obscure corner of the internet (since, as always, I'm not trying to spend actual money on this shit), I was able to digitalize every song from every performance that has survived on tape over the past fifteen-plus years.
We as humans are always our own harshest critics, and so of course I'm not going to come away from this experience of rewatching our shows thinking that we were any good. The music was occasionally tight but mostly chaotic; the vocals—all three of us were singing by the end there—could, um, use some work. But again, let me stress this: that was never the point. We didn't have aspirations to get signed by a major recording label. We just wanted to fuck around with friends. You can see from the video of our final performance that our friends came out in droves, and regardless of quality, I think the experience was validating because of that.
Being in a band with your pals is a uniquely high school experience. This year, I'm celebrating the 20th anniversary of entering high school. Not that Burholme was established on Day 1, but I still find myself thinking about some of the shit that I got into during those four years. Burholme looms large over my memories. So I guess consider this limited blog series as another misguided attempt at processing my nostalgia.
Each week, we're gonna watch a single song from our final performance, and talk about it a little bit. Talk about the song, talk about our performance of that song, talk about Burholme memories I have specifically associated with that song, talk about Burholme in general and how much it meant to me to be able to express myself in this particular context. I'll include any alternate takes I have from other concerts. I'll also try to get Kev to have his say each week, if he wants to (Mike has already indicated to me that he does not want to participate—sucks that law school instilled a fear of blogging within his soul). We're gonna go in order of the set list from that late-August 2007 concert.
Please excuse the quality of the tapes, and the quality of the performances, and the quality of this blog that waxes and wanes depending on how nostalgic I get, and just enjoy.
"In the Flesh?"
I loved playing this song because it felt like such an outlier for us. For one, most of our repertoire consisted of third-wave emo shit and dumb-fun rock songs from the aughts, and then here was this weird classic rock song from a dinosaur band that everyone knew of but whose cultural cache at that point mainly consisted of a pairing with The Wizard of Oz. It made sense to start a concert—the song "In the Flesh?" is the first song on The Wall, one of the more famous rock operas, and Pink Floyd would often play the album in full during their tours at the time, so they were starting their own concerts with this song—but I don't necessarily know if it made sense to being our concerts with the song. It's a very misleading vibe.
Another aspect of this song that makes it one of our more bizarre outliers is that I was on lead vocals, which, if you're coming into this blog series cold, let me emphasize that I was not the lead singer of Burholme. Could anyone in the band sing? That's your judgment to make, not mine. All I can do is speak for myself, and I can definitively say that I personally cannot sing. You'll see some other attempts by yours truly in future weeks, and they are not pretty. But what I can do decently is give you a good Roger Waters impression, and I will sheepishly argue that I did okay in that regard (you can scroll down to see an alternate take of the song from a concert I have literally no recollection of, one where Mike and Kev share vocal duties on the song, and they are giving me more David Gilmour vibes than the required Waters).
Maybe the tempo of the song makes it so that this was an easier song to play? Whatever the reason, I think we did a good job at it. If it sounds worse than Pink Floyd's version, then I think the main reason for that—besides the fact that Pink Floyd were professional musicians and we were just a bunch of kids goofing off, and besides the fact that Pink Floyd was able to use studio trickery to put that monster blimp-crashing sound at the end of the song—was that we didn't have a keyboardist, and Pink Floyd had Richard Wright.
Yes, there were times when we were hamstrung in our selection of covers due to being a power trio, and occasionally our covers might seem emptier than the original song. But I say fuck it. We were doing our best up there, and despite how fucking weird it is that we started the concert with this song particularly, I'll argue that this song, during this specific performance anyway, was one of our best.
(Even though the video quality is fucking awful on this one. That's the tape's fault, not mine. I can only record what I can play from the tape. Don't worry—they get better from here.)
ALTERNATE TAKE:
Another aspect of this song that makes it one of our more bizarre outliers is that I was on lead vocals, which, if you're coming into this blog series cold, let me emphasize that I was not the lead singer of Burholme. Could anyone in the band sing? That's your judgment to make, not mine. All I can do is speak for myself, and I can definitively say that I personally cannot sing. You'll see some other attempts by yours truly in future weeks, and they are not pretty. But what I can do decently is give you a good Roger Waters impression, and I will sheepishly argue that I did okay in that regard (you can scroll down to see an alternate take of the song from a concert I have literally no recollection of, one where Mike and Kev share vocal duties on the song, and they are giving me more David Gilmour vibes than the required Waters).
Maybe the tempo of the song makes it so that this was an easier song to play? Whatever the reason, I think we did a good job at it. If it sounds worse than Pink Floyd's version, then I think the main reason for that—besides the fact that Pink Floyd were professional musicians and we were just a bunch of kids goofing off, and besides the fact that Pink Floyd was able to use studio trickery to put that monster blimp-crashing sound at the end of the song—was that we didn't have a keyboardist, and Pink Floyd had Richard Wright.
Yes, there were times when we were hamstrung in our selection of covers due to being a power trio, and occasionally our covers might seem emptier than the original song. But I say fuck it. We were doing our best up there, and despite how fucking weird it is that we started the concert with this song particularly, I'll argue that this song, during this specific performance anyway, was one of our best.
(Even though the video quality is fucking awful on this one. That's the tape's fault, not mine. I can only record what I can play from the tape. Don't worry—they get better from here.)
ALTERNATE TAKE:
Like I said above, I literally have no clue where this was, or why we played it. Kev's parents were there (clearly), so maybe it had something to do with Cheltenham High School? By the time you read this, I will have asked Kev and Mike about it, and by next week, I'll have an answer for you.
What this performance tells me, besides the fact that there was exactly one Pink Floyd fan in attendance that day and he was sitting behind a drum set without a microphone, is that Burholme was always a work in progress. You can see the improvement between this concert (which must have been sometime in 2006, over a year before the final concert) and our finale. Improvements in every aspect of the song—timing, riffs, energy, everything (note that YouTube gave me a copyright restriction on one of these videos and not the other, meaning that only one video actually sounds enough like "In the Flesh?" that the AI bots could notice). The more you play together, the tighter you become, and we played a lot over those two-plus years. Improvement came naturally, even if (one final time for those in the nosebleeds) that was never the fucking point.
In future weeks, I'll try to get Kev (and maybe Mike, who knows) to write some words to send us off down here. There are also allegedly more tapes scattered around the four corners of the globe, so as we proceed, know that I'm continuing my search for them, and will let you know if I secure anything before we wrap this whole thing up in (*counts the number of songs I have documented as being performed at some point*) 26 weeks.
What this performance tells me, besides the fact that there was exactly one Pink Floyd fan in attendance that day and he was sitting behind a drum set without a microphone, is that Burholme was always a work in progress. You can see the improvement between this concert (which must have been sometime in 2006, over a year before the final concert) and our finale. Improvements in every aspect of the song—timing, riffs, energy, everything (note that YouTube gave me a copyright restriction on one of these videos and not the other, meaning that only one video actually sounds enough like "In the Flesh?" that the AI bots could notice). The more you play together, the tighter you become, and we played a lot over those two-plus years. Improvement came naturally, even if (one final time for those in the nosebleeds) that was never the fucking point.
In future weeks, I'll try to get Kev (and maybe Mike, who knows) to write some words to send us off down here. There are also allegedly more tapes scattered around the four corners of the globe, so as we proceed, know that I'm continuing my search for them, and will let you know if I secure anything before we wrap this whole thing up in (*counts the number of songs I have documented as being performed at some point*) 26 weeks.
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