April 27th, 2002
6:35pm
Some people will remember high school, or travelling, or getting so blitzed they didn't know who they were. These people will look back on those days as the golden years, when endless opportunity lay in front of them and they knew absolutely everything. For Jarod, Sky, Matt and I, it'll be a little different. We will remember those three things (some not too fondly), but we will look back upon a much more unique coming of age, our growing up, which was Reserve 34. At this point I could give an in depth history of the band, but that'd take up hundreds of pages, and I have to get to our last show in about 15 minutes. I will, however, say that Reserve 34 is a product of our environment, a tool for our survival in one of the darkest, most isolated and most beautiful cities I've ever seen. With this band we built a place for us to fit in, a home. We had a life, a focus, and a reason for being outside of the doldrums of school and oppressive rainy afternoons. This band was built on the ignorance of its members that came about as a result of Vancouver's isolation in the musical scheme of things. It wasn't until a fateful Boxing Day in tenth grade that we discovered bands like GB and were absolutely floored (I know you knew of them before this Greg). Even then, it wasn't until 1998 that we realized that bands were still playing this style. As far as we knew, we were the only ones. Everything we did was a first and was disastrous, but also extremely awesome. We booked two tours with one functional number, drove in a van that leaked a litre of oil every 20 minutes, and made less than half of our usually cancelled shows. We built this for us, on our own. It was a result of trial and error, and it probably saved our asses. This was ours. Growing up was a blast...
That appeared in 20 limited Lucas editions of our final 7" and it sums it up nicely. If you want to find early Reserve 34 releases I wish you luck. The first demo was limited to 200, 50 of which sit in Matt's closet sans cover. The second demo was limited to 30 copies. It became the S/T 7" which we think was limited to about 600 copies, but who knows, the label had communication issues that seemed to be based largely in his frightening and more than serious legal issues. Homeboy was staring 25 years in the face. The CD was limited to about 1000 copies, I have 2. It was on em records, I hope you can find it, I'm proud of it. The final 7" sounded like ass because we rushed and the engineer we were working with may or may not have known how to record bands. Either way the sound leaves much to be desired, but I feel that the songs are hot. Mark from Go It Alone played second guitar in the band at this point, and really doesn't like that fact to be widely known. Sorry Mark. He wrote 2 of the songs, Sky wrote the rest. It was a good record and it was limited to 500: 400 on red, 100 on white. The 100 on white were divided up into 5 groups of 20 and each of those 20 became the band member's press to do with what he liked. Mark, Matt, Jarod and Lucas' presses are all gone. Sky never made covers for his, and they were never given out. Strange.
Update: There is now a 40-track CD of all of our recordings. Get in touch with Specimen 32 Records through their myspace page if you want one. Also, Sky made the covers for his 20 records... so, that was a surprise.
