Undertow: The Someone EP

Undertow formed sometime in the Fall of 1991 or Spring of 1992. I don't quite recall quite how, I just remember someone saying I should show at at some guys house with a few other people and suddenly we were in a band. Originally, there were six of us at the first practice, but we quickly "kicked out" two of them and demoted one of the others to half-time. (Worth noting, the original lead singer is now a professional writer and Salon.com's Washington Bureau Correspondent, and the original keyboardist is now an acclaimed professional keyboardist on Broadway. The guys who stayed in the band mostly work in computers.) In retrospect, I assume it was Jeff who had arranged everything, from the initial formation to the eventual shaping of the band. (And I also doubt the other guys were actually "kicked out", but it makes for a better story.) The core membership quickly set in with me, Jeff and Mat (then Matt, I believe), with sporadic involvement by Jordan.

I remember very little about the first practices. I played bass in the band, which was new for me. I'd only recently purchased a bass, some ugly blue $100 Charvette. My inclusion in the band was likely due more to the fact that I actually owned a bass. By that point (start of sophomore year), guitarists were a dime a dozen, but no one played bass. (Worth noting, I did not own a bass amp. I instead used my guitar amp, which took on some very odd characteristics due to misuse, including a tendency to fart when you turned it off.)

Our sound was really a direct amalgam of our influences. Jeff wanted nothing more deeply than to be Eddie Vedder, Jordan and Mat worshipped Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction, and I loved Warrant & Poison. Our early setlists more or less reflected this combo, with the exception of the hair metal, which was definitively uncool by that point. Album tracks from Gish, stuff from the Singles soundtrack, covers of songs our favorite bands covered... that was what we played. In fact, our very first live song was The Who's Baba O'Reilly, played exclusively because Pearl Jam covered it. (And because Jordan could mostly play the keyboard part.)

In a sense, the band really became our lives. Every Saturday, we'd meet in Mat's basement for 4 or 5 hours, playing music and eating pizza. Waking moments were spent either at school, doing homework, practicing with the band or practicing solo. (Or engaged in low level debauchery.) It took six months or so before we were ready for an audience.

The date of our first show (and the first live rock performance for anyone in the band) is lost to antiquity (or at least my collection of flyers), but it took place at Fatty's Restaurant in downtown Rockville sometime during the spring or summer of 1992. (Fatty's is no more, sadly.) It was a 2 hour show, $8 at the door ($3 cover and $5 food minimum). The show was a wonderful mess. Recordings of it exist somewhere, but I can't find them. We probably played 75% covers, 25% originals, and we bounced around on instruments constantly. (We were proud of our prowess at multi-instrumentalism... one flyer I found read "Jeff - vocals / guitar / bass --- John - bass / guitar / vocals ---- Jordan - guitar / bass / vocals (mysteriously leaving out keyboard).) I remember the stage getting mobbed during an "audience participation" cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Because I could scream reasonably well, I sang the Chris Cornell part on Hunger Strike, probably in a different key than Jeff.

In retrospect, we must have sounded horrible. We didn't have anything resembling a PA, so our sound was entirely dictated by our amps pointing at the audience and people yelling "John's too loud!" or "We can't hear the vocals!" I think we ran vocals through my practice amp. But it worked, and we quickly became the go-to band for all of your sonic needs, if you were an underclassman at Richard Montgomery High. (Mat went to Wootton, which featured more band competition for whatever reason.)

Before long, Jeff had some songs written, probably about a dozen. (Jordan wrote a few songs too, but Mat and I were silent partners for the most part.) My technophile grandfather bought me a Tascam four-track mixer and we set out to make our first EP. I'm reasonably sure that with the exception of my "work" with Fetal Pigs, this was the first time any of us had recorded anything, let alone multi-track recording.

We went down to Tower Records on Rockville Pike and bought a 20 pack of these super high-quality 20 minute Maxell tapes. They became the recording medium for the Undertow "Someone" EP. Over the course of a few weekends, we all took our turns playing into the recorder, and we had a record. Mat technically "engineered" it, in that he did things like putting a table on its side to "isolate" the drums. But mostly we went directly out of our amps in to the recorder and that was it. We had no idea what we were doing, but we did it with gusto. (In one of the more absurd rituals we had, we degaussed before every recording. We'd read that static electricity could mess with the recording medium, so we ran a ring degausser over the 4-track before every session. This probably did more harm than good.)

The lead song was "Someone", a rather cheesy little ballad Jeff had penned about his unrequited, though publicly acknowledged, crush on a girl in our class named Kristen Monie. (This crush also manifested itself in the capitalization of the letters M-O-N-I-E to form her last name on our fliers.) It featured four chords, no chorus, and a bridge directly lifted from a Led Zeppelin song. An unlikely hit, but there it was.

Our second track was "Whitewash", my favorite song on the EP. I have no idea what the words are about, but I dig the groove. At one point in the song, Mat and I get completely out of sync and end up creating this awesome alternate groove. I still think this is pretty out there for high school sophomores.

The third track was an acoustic version of "Someone", featuring Jordan playing my parent's baby grand.

Our final track showcased our social awareness (or at least Jeff's social awareness) and was an acoustic number called "Take a Good Look." It was about homelessness, and even managed to work in a pro-choice message too. It was the 90s alright.

The whole thing clocked in at about 17 minutes, and it made us rock stars.

As I remember it, the album was a bit of a big deal. We were the first band in our high school year to actually write and record anything. We sold it for $4 and called it our first single, billed as "featuring the track Someone in both acoustic and electric versions, along with two tracks that would not be released on the impending album!" Yup. B-sides already. (Like any good band, we'd already titled our unwritten album... it was called "Termites in my Wet Basement". Named after a flood in Mat's basement revealed a termite infestation, cancelling practice.) Distribution was all manual... Me & Mat copying tapes in our bedrooms. A guy named Maury Apple did the album cover. I can't remember how many albums we sold, but I think it was in the dozens, approaching 100. All of them were to friends and family, as far as I know. We sold out, or at least came close to it.

Undertow continued to play out quite a bit, both with and without Jordan. We played Fatty's a few more times. The high school Rock Bash, our first show that required auditions. Inexplicably, we played a Jimi Hendrix Festival, despite not knowing any Jimi Hendrix songs. (We learned Purple Haze at the last minute, and I played the Star Spangled Banner.) And we even played the City of Rockville's Battle of the Bands (high school edition, I assume). That was a fun show, since Mat and Jordan had been grounded for something or another (fleeing the police while on a late night stroll, I think?) and Jeff and I played with a backup drummer. We scored really well and may have won the competition, except for a judge who rated us very low for our pro-choice song "The Right", a catchy tune which rather unsubtly declared as its chorus "She's got the right to choose!" and stole its entire musical structure from "Jack & Diane". (His objections stemmed from his own pro-life stance, not his objection to John Melloncamp plagiarism.)

Throughout my junior year (92-93), the band played on, but things started to change. For whatever reason, it started becoming more "Jeff's Band" than Undertow, at least in the eyes of Mat, Jordan and me. Maybe it was one too many Pearl Jam covers, maybe it was a growing friendship between the rest of us that didn't include Jeff as much, maybe it was the realization that Jordan had a much better singing voice, maybe it was my own frustration playing bass rather than lead guitar, maybe it was the inherent need for teen rebellion in an environment without all that much to rebel against or maybe it was something completely invented, but for whatever reason, we just got sick and resentful of the band. Over the summer of 1993, Jeff spent the summer in Germany, and Mat, Jordan and I formed Twisted Fish.

In one of the grand asshole moves of all time, we didn't let Jeff know he wasn't in the band until he saw me selling copies of the new Twisted Fish EP to someone in our English class. (Sorry, man. We sucked.)

That effectively ended the Undertow experience. Later though, in late Summer of 1994, Mat, Jeff and I did get together and record another batch of original songs that were never released. I did uncover the masters for those in my basement recently, and need to get them to Mat for mixing down.

So, without further ado, I present the first appearance online of the Undertow "Someone" single. This recording is super-low quality, just a walkman into my soundcard, but it'll give an idea to anyone curious. Maybe Mat can post a better version at some point. (Sorry these aren't streaming, but the low quality results in weird anomalies when I try to set it up.)

Enjoy!

• Someone
• Whitewash
• Someone (Acoustic)
• Take a Good Look