Kaplan Cbe Booking
Jan Dominquez
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Well, I was already familiar with the Ramones and The Clash, but it's hard to count that since I never really perceived those bands as being "punk" at the time. They were just rock bands who were on MTV whose music I liked. There were no classifications like that for me at the time. But as far as consciously getting into punk/hardcore, well, there was a local record store in Merrick, Island Sound, which is long gone now. But I used to bike up there every Friday night with my paper route money and come home with a couple of things. The guy who ran the store was really great to me. I think he was impressed that such a young kid was so immersed in music, and not just the Top 40 stuff. By the time I got into punk/hardcore, I was already buying tons of stuff out of the "Metal" section. But one day, and it must have been the summer of 1986, so I was 12 going on 13, a t-shirt hanging up caught my eye... it was an image of a creepy smiling puppet holding a knife. It was, of course, a Black Flag My War t-shirt... and I absolutely had to hear what that was about.
I asked the guy who ran the store if he had anything by this band and he said he did, but he didn't think I'd really like it. He had two cassettes behind the counter: Family Man and Slip it In. He told me he would sell them to me, but if I didn't like them, he would refund my money. In retrospect, I know that these are very weird gateway records, but they made a huge impact on me. When I went back to the store the next week, I told him I needed more of that, and he pointed me in the direction of the "Punk/Hardcore" section. I was a little shocked that this was even classified as "punk," but I didn't know any better. My weekly purchases were all out of that bin from then on.
Long Island has had a rich tradition of rock, metal, and hardcore/punk bands since the '70s. Who are some of the local bands that had a big impact on you when you started going out to see live music? Even though I wasn't from Long Island, I remember going to Sundance and February's to see shows.
Long Island definitely does, and possibly my favorite band of all time (like you, I have dozens of bands who are my favorite band of all time), Blue yster Cult, is originally from Long Island. I was a late starter on live music and didn't start going to shows until I was already in college. I was a freshman in 1991, and so those first bands that I saw back then probably all made an impression on me: Garden Variety, Bad Trip, and 1.6 Band were early Long Island live favorites for me. I think the local bands that made the most impact on me at that time, though, were bands more from NYC and New Jersey, especially bands that played ABC No Rio: Rorschach, Born Against, and Merel.
Sundance and February's were both a bit before my time. I did go to the Right Track Inn quite a bit. Some of my early bands that few will remember played there, and I saw Garden Variety, Science Diet, and Sound Bite House more times there than I could count. It was a good venue, close to home... the guy that ran the place was okay, but was intimidating if he felt your band didn't bring in enough people.
The first "real" band I was in (I'm not counting high school cover bands or anything like that), was Humstinger. I played bass in that band, Vinny Segarra (from Situated Chaos/Mint Tone Records) was our singer, Kevin McManus (later in Farckus Affair and Dahlia Seed) played guitar, and Aaron Pagdon (a.k.a. Coach from Two Man Advantage) was the drummer. It was the first band I was in with Aaron, who has been a bit of a musical partner going on 25 years now (Two Man Advantage, The Judas Iscariot, Hudson Falcons, among others).
Quarters was another band I was in with Aaron. The first lineup had a song on the Drunk & Disorderly 7" comp which came out on Puncrock Records in 1995, and the third and final lineup of the band had a song on the Workers Compilation CD comp that came out on The Headlock Society in 1997. You would never know the two songs came from the same band from listening to them.
And I guess the last one I'll mention was Jody Crutch, which was a band I played drums in. It was a more melodic kind of band. We were big Samiam fans. We recorded a couple of demos and played some shows here and there. I set up a Bandcamp page a couple of years back for posterity. Listening back, I think there was a lot of potential with this band that was never fully realized.
Actually, the first time I remember meeting you was at an early Black Army Jacket practice somewhere on Long Island. We had already befriended [guitarist] Andrew [Orlando] and he invited us down. We had one bass player and no guitar and you guys one-upped us with two bass players [laughs].
The Judas Iscariot was an accident. Two of the bands I mentioned already play into the story. I was in Quarters with Aaron (drums) and I was in Jody Crutch with Rich (vocals). Both bands practiced at the same space and Aaron came down one day to watch a Jody Crutch practice and to hang out a bit. During a break, Rob and Dan, the guitarist and bassist, left the space to grab some lunch. While they were gone, I picked up Dan's bass, Aaron sat behind my drums, and Rich held onto the mic, and on a whim, the three of us began to just improvise out these short noise blasts of sound. It was only about 15 minutes before the guys came back and Jody Crutch continued practicing.
Aaron and I didn't think anything of it, but Rich must have seen something we didn't and called the two of us, begging us to get together and try to jam like that again. We staved him off for a while, but we eventually relented. The fact that we didn't have a guitarist wasn't a conscious thing.
It was very obvious after that first "real" practice that there was some amazing chemistry. We would just improvise some songs, figure out what we had done, do some quick arranging, and that was it. We had written all the songs on the first demo by the end of the second practice, and recorded it at our third. That's pretty much how the band worked for its entire history. Except for Rich with his (absolutely amazing) lyrics, no one ever came to practice with a song idea already formed. Everything was always improvised and then constructed... or parts of songs were purposely left open for improvisation. We worked very quickly. We wrote tons of songs in a short amount of time. We then started playing shows and off we went. It was something very different and people in that segment of the scene really took to it.
I could talk for hours about The Judas Iscariot and what it meant to me. It was an incredible two-and-a-half years, which will always stand out to me in my musical journey. There was a tremendous amount of creative freedom, the three of us truly fed off of each other, and we brought very different personalities to the table. We were as close as can be during that time, but we also fought like mad, which generated its own inspiration ("I, Rabble Rouser" was written immediately following a total blowout at practice, for example).
That band made me laugh out loud, it made me cry, it made me think, and it made me stretch my muscles as a musician since there was no just falling back as a bass player behind someone else. It's a band I was incredibly proud to have been in from the first day to its last.
Thanks. Each of our releases had something distinct about it, but that split with Seein' Red was a good one and one of our last releases. We already had established a solid relationship with Chris Jensen and the Mountain Collective. We had played a show and afterward, everyone went out for a late dinner. I apologize that I can't remember his name, but the guy who ran Coalition Records, a label from the Netherlands, was visiting Chris and the two of them were discussing doing a split label release. It would be a split LP and they wanted us to be on one side of it. I was asked for any ideas about who should be on the other side, and I mentioned Seein' Red, who were from the Netherlands as well and who blew me away when they came through on tour. I never really expected that to happen. It was just a longshot choice, but I guess everyone liked the idea enough, and they ended up doing it! We never played with or met them, but we're forever bonded through that piece of vinyl.
As it was one of the later releases, I guess it's as fully-realized a version of us as you're going to get. It had a lot of powerful, brutal, noisy hardcore on it, but it also had some very melodic moments, it had some free jazz-esque improvised stuff, and had some softer moments as well. I think it's a solid release from start to finish, and a pretty good representation of what we did.
Well, if you ask the three of us, you'll get three different answers. Aaron and I would have kept going forever in that band, but Rich was ready to put it to bed and move on. I don't want to speak for him, and there's more to it than this, but I think he wanted to move into music that was a bit more overtly political than Judas was. Although we had a lot of common ground, there were ways in which Rich, Aaron, and I were very different philosophically, and Rich was holding back lyrics that he knew weren't going to be representative of all of us, which was absolutely the right thing to do. He moved on to Countdown to Putsch, which I think freed him up to say a lot more lyrically than he was willing to do with us. There's more to the story than that, but I'll always feel there was unfinished business with that band. I didn't feel any real closure to it until many years later, and in some ways maybe I still don't feel that way. I think the band had a very unique chemistry and was a true creative force that could have done so much more great work, but life doesn't always work out the way you want it to, and sometimes things are just not in your control. I will say it was probably the most exciting couple of years of my life from a musical perspective.