Homicidal Regicidal

If you ever wondered about the music James Joyce and I, along with Gray Kiser and Greg King made in 1996, Beyond Failure is now featuring a detailed eyewitness account. An excerpt from Gray's chapter below:

My first show with the band was on New Years Eve at the I Defy house playing with a bunch of other bands who I don't remember, but Inkwell headlined, and there seemed to be lots of folks from Florida there, so maybe Reversal Of Man played or something. Didn't matter. That show marked a decided shift for the band, as we would now file the music down to a dull, blunt instrument of assault. The fast parts were to be more intense, the heavy parts more suffocating, the noise factor more piercing, and the lyrics more combative.

Everything was to be administered at the highest volume available, and with maximum prejudice. If the music wasn't going to be enough, we would literally hit you in the face with a dead animal. Literally. That show had it all, fire, blood, interpretive dance, flying squirrels...everything.

One final anecdote, and probably a fitting epitaph for the band; we were playing in Gainseville (again with the fucking Florida, what's with that place?) on the partially aborted Regicide/Hal al Shedad tour, when the stocky guy from Hot Water Music, who's name I forget (further proof my memory is terrible), but who was a really nice guy, and our host for the evening to boot, started doing what we as a band wanted people to do at our shows, and that is get loose and go off. He may or may not have been pretty hammered, but that didn't matter, what did matter was that his good time began infringing on good time of someone else there, and the two decided exchange words whilst slam-dancing around to a Regicide soundtrack. At some point in the exchange, the Hot Water Music guy figured his point had not been adequately made, so he felt the need to reinforce it by pounding it into the other dude's face over and over. It really was a good beating, poetic in it's efficiency, but never sparing on the brutality of it's message.

So as this is happening, the other audience member s begin the ritual of pretending they are going to break it up, gathering in a loose circle around the action and more or less hooting and hollering. The band played on. One audience member actually tried to grab the microphone from me mid song which was met with a swift push back and the band played on. As an artiste, I could not allow this one person to ruin the enjoyment of the show for others in attendance (regardless if they were currently on the loosing end of a savage ass kicking). This person then approaches a second time, and screams in my ear, "you have to stop this!" implying that the band was responsible for policing the activities of this establishments (presumably) paying clientele. I grabbed his shirt, got as close as possible, and yelled back into his ear, "don't you get it, this is what we want!", and the band played on.