A little history...........
Warpath actually formed in the heads of Jethro and Jon while they still played in the heavily Resist and Filth influenced band CHAOS BRIGADE. Jethro and Jon were really influenced and into crusty bands and longed to play in a band that had that sound, especially Disrupt. Jethro and Jon spents days on end just listening to Disrupt and basically driving everyone else completely crazy. So they talked about putting to together a "Disrupt" type of band and began to ask around to see if anyone else was interested. Debbie and Mary of the band Wormhole in Pittsburgh became the first official Warpath members with Jethro and Jon, and Mary had played in Mythic, a death/doom metal band so this seemed perfect. But alas this line up was to never happen, conflicts of schedules led Jethro and Jon to find other band mates.
So at this time, late 1993, Jethro and Jon were still playing with Chaos Brigade and were getting ready to play a benefit show for a local youth who had died in a car crash and was a fan of Chaos Brigade, CB's bass player quit the day of the show and this was the beginning of the end. Jethro, Nat (Chaos Brigade's guitarist) and Jon decided to play the show anyway and recruited Tim (The PC Avenger) to sing along with them at this benefit show. So Chaos Brigade opened their last show to the WORST audience they had ever played too, and after a lousy set, sans bass player, an incredibly mean sound guy and lots of big hair and Aquanet(not for spiky mohawks, this was big hair on girls, 80's style, think, Peg Bundy) CHAOS BRIGADE called it quits and Warpath was born.
Jethro and Jon asked Tim to sing second vocals for Warpath, as they really liked the two singer approach (like Disrupt!!) and Tim could deliver some killer high pitched screams. Tim also knew Elroi from correspondance, and she just happened to live in Pittsburgh at the time, and she was in to the idea of forming a band, so we had a guitarist. Tim also knew Jeff who played bass and lived in Pittsburgh as well, and we all knew Justin from shows and he played bass as well, so we thought a double bass approach would be cool and so this was the beginning.
The six of us met after a show in Pittsburgh and actually had an interview before we had even begun to practice from a local guy Dan. His zine never happened and the interview eventually was printed in WARFEAR zine, put out by Jethro.
Well, Jeff never even made it to a practice, and quit before Warpath even began. Elroi lived and went to school at Chatham college in Pittsburgh and was able to use their HUGE cafeteria area as our practice space, this was seriously, one of the COOLEST places to practice, we even ended up playing shows here later on. The first couple of practices were a bit awkward, as we didn't really know what we wanted to play and Elroi wasn't really into crust so we decided to just play and see what we came up with, and to be honest, that was the best approach we could have ever done. The different genre influences made a unique sound that Warpath may not have had if we had tried to stay a "crust" band. Elroi was influenced by bands like Bikini Kill, Team Dresch and L7, so this just added to the uniqueness that would be my favorite part of WARPATH, our sound. No, not necessarily original (is anything these days??) But in a sea of discharge clone bands and drunk punk that permeated Pittsburgh, we stood out, like a sore infected thumb. And our shows were always in your face with Elroi being the most outspoken member of the band. We quickly adopted the position of being not just girl and queer friendly, but GRRRL and QUEER positive and in your face, with alot of our songs focusing on Queer and Wimmin's issues, as well as Animal rights issues.
More history to come, stay tuned!
Girl and flag and background art by Simon Gane (look him up on the net, he does awesome art and comics!!!) he drew these for the Warpath/Jim jones party mix split 7 inch record. !
Mega HUGE thanks goes to Craigums from the Love Songs for transferring the Warpath tunes from DAT to CD so that i could upload them on this page!! WE LOVE YOU CRAIG!
