There Were Wires (official)

A History of Retardation, the TWW story. (As told by J.G. Mason).
I'm going to tell you the story of There Were Wires, so gather round, kids.
Way back when we were still young and had ideals and actually worried about sodium sterol lactylate being vegan, a bunch of dudes lived on an island off of the east coast, and were incredibly bored. Like, REALLY bored. There's only so much swimming, port-o-potty tipping, and assorted gaying-off that you can do before its time to focus on something else. So we amassed our collective talents and begat a metal band, the most face-ripping sonic abortion Martha’s Vineyard has ever seen: Axe Wielder. We terrorized the shit out of our parent’s basements and bummed out a few folks at BBQ’s, and it was rad. Then the next summer I looked at a dictionary or something and we changed our name to ‘Acratia’ and we had some pretty cool stickers, and played some shows off-island with other crappy hardcore bands. This was when the band was Noah, Ryan, Neil, Lukas and me.
The first time I met Ryan, he was medium-chubby, had a permanent moshcore headband, and was jumping off a bridge onto jellyfish. I liked him immediately. He’s a total sonofabitch now, but he played drums like no ones business and liked any song that had breakdowns. He was sensitive and didn’t eat animals, just like myself, and we were the only two people on earth who liked Chokehold. Instant bff’s. I maintain, to this day, that Ryan Begley is one of the funniest human beings to walk the planet. Also, for some reason, he was always messing around with his balls, and he and Lukas developed some pretty disturbing ‘pranks’ that always involved a naked rectum mere inches from each others faces. Sick.
Let me tell you something about Lukas.
He was like, 11 or something at the time, but CONSTANTLY lied about his age so we all thought he was at least 17 or…..something. And I was closing in on 40, or somewhere thereabouts, and living in his parents guest room, so it was amazing I didn’t get arrested on principle alone. We practiced in Lukas' parents basement and did shitty metal-style graffiti on the walls, while his mom ate circus peanuts and quietly worried that her delicate son was being molested by a poorly-dressed gang of 20-somethings. Lukas hated when his friends would 1) shit in his toilet 2) leave the door to his room open 3) have to get out of bed. He was so lazy and home-schooled that he had a pale-greenish tint to his skin from lack on sunlight and nutritional deprivation. He was one of the raddest kids I’ve ever known. He’s the guy that wrote (ie. ripped off completely from Portraits of Past) our ‘Hit’ song ‘Physics of Air Hockey. A song that, to this day, makes me kinda want to stab my eyes out with stale breadsticks. It was great at the time, though, before all the damnable clapping.
Noah was in the band, too. He played bass and was going through a weird phase that former fat kids must face when they lose a bunch of weight and suddenly realize that they are actually pretty handsome. He packed away all his fat-kid tie-dyed shirts and started shopping at J-Crew and Diesel and became the hottest video-rental guy on the island. With his newfound handsomeness, he found the confidence to confront the fact that playing in a metal band is pretty gay and it was time to move on to more sensitive pastures. Which he did. We love Noah.
When Noah left, we brought in this super tall dude who was like, I dunno, 8’5” or something? I tried on his shoes once and it was like when a toddler puts on his dads shoes and walks around and everyone laughs. Jebb played bass in Carrying 74, Neil’s other band, and he rocked hard, so we kept him. He had all these hidden talents and could do art and was uber-amped on shit and had a really eclectic music collection. I think because he was into so many different kinds of music, he always pushed us forward to try new stuff, not to mention that he was a pretty good mediator whenever we would behave like children and fight. We were roommates for a few years and he ate taco salad all the time, and had some pretty amazingly disgusting pimple stories. Feel free to email him and ask him about it, he’ll be stoked! Long live Jebb.
Neil played guitar and he was Neil. There was no one quite like him, thankfully.
So anyway. We’re trapped on an island and do you know how hard it is to be an active band when you have to take a fucking FERRY every time you want to play someplace that isn’t your friends Mom’s basement? It sucks. So we changed the name of the band to 'There Were Wires', moved to/around Boston, and went to school and got jobs and became real human adults. Well, except for Lukas, because he was still only 12 or something, and he ended up moving to NY to start pre-school.
The BOSTON YEARS.
We had some bands that we were friends with that would come and hang out with us on the island. My Magnificent Machine was one of them, and they were good dudes who rocked hard. It was a relationship that would last pretty much forever because we cannibalized each others members left and right. Not literally. But we stole Don as a ‘fill in’ (ha!) for Lukas and just never let him leave. He was so rad, and by far the most technically proficient guitar player we’ve ever had. He played in this death metal band called Eviscerate and whenever they played everyone would just laugh because it was so fast and tech and ridiculous. It was also nice having someone who knew how to use a tuner and was actually concerned about how songs sounded when we played. One time I saw Don eat and entire spring roll log cabin at Grasshopper. I love him for it.
At some point, we recorded a 3-song demo with Kurt at the newly functional God City Studios and he blamed us for breaking his VCR. Which we might have, but I don’t think so. To this day, that mothefucker still owes me $2.79 for a liter of coke that I bought him. The demo was duplicated on my tape deck, one by one, with no high-speed dubbing. If you have one in your possession now, it is currently worth roughly two years of my life.
Then we wrote some more songs, and played some more shows, and got pretty popular with the east coast whine-mosh crowd. I made sure to flail around and screech and avoid actually having to sing whenever possible. I also talked a lot in between songs, which gave the illusion of caring about ‘issues’ when in fact I was just kinda fat and needed a breather before the next song. Kids liked to jump on our heads when we played ‘Fat with Glasses’ and I made sure to print little lyric ‘zines and stuff so everyone knew how deadly seriously important my sad little lyrics were. I had a pretty massive self-righteous streak going on back then, but I was a hardcore kid, so I everyone assumed it was par for the course.
We finally had some more songs and we hooked up with Keith Suiza in RI and recorded the 1st s/t CD, which came out pretty ok. I can’t listen to it at all, but we were all pretty stoked at the time. This was pretty much right after Lukas had left, and Don was “filling in”, so unfortunately neither of them played on the actual recording. All guitar parts were recorded by Neil, with the exception of the last track ‘Bigger & Better Things, which was written by Ryan and included fairly last minute. I remember writing the words on the way to the studio. Funny how that one became as popular as it did, considering that it’s just some asshole screaming over an acoustic guitar. In any case, we self-released that mother and agonized over the artwork and layout, as was the case with every release we ever did. Eventually, we re-released the s/t CD on Iodine Records with all new artwork and a bonus live set on WERS (which caused a huge fuss with the station and almost got us sued. Thankfully we had a friend at the station who smoothed it all out).
Then we kicked Neil out.
Then we demanded that Moment (another Boston-area band that we were good friends with, and did a split 7” with) surrender Thomas to us, because we goddamn deserved another good guitarist like Don. And being the spoiled little shits that we were, we got em’. And then Moment broke up and T-Moses was stoked just to have another gig even though we were all a bunch of disorganized retards. The thing about Thomas Moses is that he’s such a man’s man. And I mean that only partially in the gay sense. He drinks his coffee black and works as a carpenter and likes a beer after work to unwind. His general attitude always made me feel kind of like a sissy, even though I outweighed him by roughly 250 lbs. At some horrible point he stopped coming to practice and stopped calling and we got all worried and then found out he was in the hospital getting his fingers sewn back on after a tablesaw mishap. Eeeesh. So brutal. And MANLY. But, a couple of surgeries later he was good as new and then we recorded SOMNAMBULISTS.
The ‘Somnambulists’ MCD was a pretty rad experience. We recorded it with an actual producer, Matt Squire, who was very short and just a rad dude, all in all. He worked us pretty hard and demanded results. The studio (formerly known as ‘Fort Apache’ in Cambridge) was about a thousand times nicer than anywhere we had ever recorded before, so we felt really out of place and weird. We owe a lot of thanks to Casey at Iodine Records for hooking us up with Matt, because the record wouldn’t have been nearly as good without him. I have a picture of Jebb playing with his balls in the mixing room.
Are you seriously still reading this? Christ. Okay.
We managed to make a lot of good friends over the few years we were together, and hooking up with Ben Sisto (who booked shows at Massart) became one of the most fun and worthwhile partnerships we ever had. We were pretty much the ‘house band’ for a year or two, and played whenever possible. The kids always came out to scream along and buy shittily printed t-shirts, and we are forever thankful to them. We even dragged Ben out on tour with us once. We were always an incredibly fortunate band that had enourmous amounts of support from friends, family, and other bands, and in retrospect, it’s easy to see how we could have taken a lot of it for granted. We tried not to, but if you do anything long enough, eventually someone is going to want something different from life.
So, towards the end in 2004, Don decided that he would like to take a break from playing music, and left TWW. After all the member changes over the years, Ryan, Thomas, Jebb and I decided to start anew with a new name and new direction, which spawned Disappearer. After several practices and some great material, some employment opportunities opened up for me on the west coast, and I decided to make the move to Portland, Oregon, while the guys carried on as an instrumental three-piece (and clearly the better for it). There has been some member shifts since, but Disappearer is still active and recording, so make sure to check them out. Other bands spawned from TWW are Thomas’ Earth-esque HOLY MOSES, Don's un-named bedroom black metal band, and the rocking skatethrash of DOOMRIDERS.
TWW never tried to be anything but what we were—just five guys playing music that we liked, and making as big of a racket as we could for anyone who cared to listen. We had fun, and knew how to laugh at ourselves (and everyone else). This page is probably a few years too late, but I'm glad to have these songs up for anyone who might not have had access to them before now. We'll check this page regularly, so stop in and say hi if you happen to stumble across it.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for taking part.
-Jaime