ColorStorm

The story begins when Mike met Miss Elizabeth. I know that is not the way band bios are supposed to start, but this is my story and I am telling it my way, OK? As I was saying, the story begins when Mike met Miss Elizabeth. Mike wrote music and Miss Elizabeth wrote poetry so they decided to start a band. (You must understand that this part of the story is all second hand information, I was not there at the time. I don’t come into the story until later.) Mike was a wiz on the keyboards, he liked Jan Hammer and Phil Collins and knew every 80’s song by heart. Miss Elizabeth had poems published in long haired journals and books and stuff. She celebrated Elvis’ birthday every year and made everyone where a party hat. The first band was less than satisfactory. The drummer’s dentures would fly out of his mouth when he hit the splash cymbal. Rumor has it that he was a Nazi war criminal. The guitar player tuned his guitar using suspect algebraic equations. So they dissolved the band and started over. When life hands you gators - make gatoraide. They found Rex at a party. Perhaps it was one of Elizabeth’s Elvis’ Birthday parties and he had to wear a party hat. Rex was a motorcycle mechanic. He would drive a different car to practice every week. Blue cars, small cars, red cars, green cars, big cars & pickup trucks, hotrods and sports cars, domestics and imports, a kaleidoscope of cars in a rainbow of colors, but different every week. He was real good at fixing cars as well. He could instantly diagnose any car problem. “Your flatulator is sticking.” He would pop the hood and jump in. Two minutes later he would reappear, his hands completely black and a smudge of grease on his nose. “Try it now.” And of course, the car would work perfectly. They liked the way Rex sang, so the band was born again. (If Rex asks you to pull his finger, don’t do it. You’ll have to trust me on this one.) Now that they had a singer, they began performing as a trio at a coffee shop called Downtown 66. It wasn’t really a coffee shop, they served beer and wine and mexican food, too - but it was downtown. The guy who booked the music there was named Luther Daylight. I am not making that up, that is really his name. Luther liked the band, but he thought they could use a cool guitar player. He just happened to know one, one who had been playing in the most popular reggae band in town, and was now playing solo stuff at the very same Downtown 66. Yes, that was me! Luther told me about this band, so I checked them out. I liked them so I auditioned. They must have liked me ‘cause I got the job. We continued to play at the Downtown 66 as a quartet. We wanted to add more songs so we could play other places, too. The band began to play some of my material, songs like Sharks and Tower of Dreams. Miss Elizabeth added words to one of my instrumentals and Companions in the Mist was born. We recorded a demo that had “Amy of the Faces”, “Rachel”, “Had to Let Go”, “Curiosity Man”, “Time”, and “Icky Picky Man”. I helped Mike program the drums for the new songs. We developed our own drum programming language. Boom Boom Crack! Boom Boom Crack! Blattum Blattum Splish! and so forth. One day, as we were programming the drums, Mike said, “This (Boom Boom Crack!) sucks, we need a drummer.” So, we began combing the streets of Albuquerque, looking for stray drummers. We hung up little adverts in music stores, and Miss Elizabeth even checked the pound. We auditioned several drummers who were, how shall we say … less than satisfactory. One day, Nick showed up to audition. He drove up in a turquoise Dodge Coronet (Rex liked that!). He had a cool set of big black Ludwigs, and he was the only drummer we auditioned who could play “Sharks”. Nick collected bottles. He didn’t buy them in a shop, he dug them up from old dump sites. He did all his digging at night, people must have thought he was burying bodies or something. If you want to know where all the bodies are buried in Albuquerque, ask Nick. I’m sure he knows.Now, with a drummer, we could no longer play at the Downtown 66. We began to play at it’s sister bar, Downtown Louie’s. We also played at the Fat Chance & Beyond Ordinary. Now came the task of finding a bass player. Bass players for ColorStorm were like drummers for Spinal Tap. Something was always happening to them. One joined a cult. Another was abducted by aliens. One went to Juarez and was never heard from again. Another joined the Peace Corps. I can not remember all their names, but here are some: Eric, Greg, Miles, and Jeff.About this time, Miss Elizabeth decided to leave the band. It was then we took the name ColorStorm. We had a song called ColorStorm, the title is taken from a book by William Burroughs - Nova Express. If Steely Dan and Soft Machine can take their names from his books, why not us?At last we found a bass player that stayed awhile. Steve Burd. Steve is the one you hear in the recordings. He is a professor at the university, where he teaches computer wizardry and arcane lore. We liked Steve because he would bring fancy imported beer to practice.We played lots of gigs. I can not remember the names of all the bars we played, but here are some: Fat Chance Beyond Ordinary, Launch Pad, Jake’s, Golden West, and Downtown Louie’s. We played more parties than bars. House parties, birthday parties - didn’t matter. We played in closets, garages, patios, horse trailers, and living rooms. Inside or outside, day or night, in the mountains and in the valley - we played parties. Once in the mountains, someone built a stage for us to play on! We recorded what we hoped would be our first CD... those are the tracks here. It turned out to be more demo quality than CD quality, and was never really finished. Most of it is still “in the can” somewhere.Mike moved to Las Vegas. The band tried to continue on. Steve moved over to keyboards & Kevin Sullivan was brought in on bass. Kevin also played bass in the Albuquerque Philharmonic. He had two really cool MG’s, a black sedan and a baby blue convertible. He worked at a leading aerospace firm designing top secret stuff. He is building a space ship in his garage in his spare time.The magic was gone. The band fizzled out. When Mike came back to town, we got together again with Kevin on bass. The magic was back! We began working hard, dusting off the old songs. We put up a MySpace page. We got thousands of friends & hundreds of lovely comments. Then tragedy struck - “Artistic Differences” (that means that some of the band members are fighting like cats & dogs in a Pablo Picasso painting.) and the band is in hiatus again. Some of the members are in cold stasis. Some are in rehab. The rest are working McJobs. Perhaps, one day we will reform … who knows what the future will bring?Ah, but the tragedy was not done, yet. Our MySpace page was deleted. We lost our thousands of friends and hundreds of comments! What you see now is page number two. We hope to make it better than before … When life hands you gators, make gatoraide, right?