gODHEAD jAPANSITE -- HYSTORY -

To trace the beginnings of godhead, we need to start in Washington, DC at the end of 1991.
I was in the middle of my second year of college and my Cure / Smiths rip off band Deep, had just broken up. I was depressed. In a town where metal was still king, we had little success trying to pull off Brit pop. So I had decided to answer ads in the City Paper and local music papers for bands looking for singers. After meeting and jamming with several different people, I realized that nothing was going to work. No one I met seemed to click with me and either I didn't like them, or they didn't like me. So, I decided to start my own band, take out my own ads and see who or what turned up.
In the meantime, I started jamming with a drummer that I had known since kindergarten named Nathan Camfiord. Nathan and I jammed and wrote many songs together in his parent's basement in Clifton, Virginia, but before we could get anything really going, Nate decided to move to Richmond for the next semester, which was 120 miles away. Exit Nate.

In between meeting different people who were answering my ads, I had been talking to an old high school friend of mine, Dwayne Reid, about giving him singing lessons. Dwayne was a drummer, and we had been in several metal bands together all through highschool and had remained acquaintances afterwards. When Dwayne arrived for his first lesson, all we did was talk about the music we were into and what kind of project we wanted to start next, etc. Like I said, in 1991 in the DC suburbs if you wanted to get a gig, metal was the beginning the middle and the end. My favorite band has always been the Cure, but I was also into bands at that time like King's X and Soundgarden (the good, early incarnation).
I was involved with the youth group that is still very active in the DC indie scene called Positive Force, and so of course I was always listening to bands like Fugazi and Shudder to Think.
What I wanted to do was try and combine all of the best elements of these bands and make a group that was appealing to the metal crowd, the progressive crowd and the indie crowd all at the same time.

Dwayne loved my idea and we decided to start jamming. I figured all we needed to start working up a set was a bass player, so we placed ads and hoped for the best. After auditioning scores of would be bassists, no one seemed to work out. Then, out of nowhere I was introduced to a guy at a really lame club called The Wave named Bruce Brandstatter, who hadn't picked up his bass in a year, but liked my musical ideas and wanted to try. The chemistry worked instantly. Dwayne, Bruce and I practiced everyday. A lot of what we played was music that I had been writing at the end of my Deep days, when I first had this idea about combining genres. Before we knew it, we were ready to play out. But what would we call ourselves? We racked our brains for weeks, and it basically came down to two choices, Godhead and Blind. Bruce and I really wanted to use Godhead, but Dwayne was so set against it that finally we caved in and went with Blind.
Blind played it's first show in April of 1992 in the Rathskeller of George Mason University, and then that night at a club inDumfries, VA called Tiki Fala. For the next 6 months, we played all over the DC metropolitan area, in any club that would take us, in front of any band that needed an opener. We even got some headlining gigs and that led to getting a booking agent and a manager. My idea of making a hybrid sound of music seemed to be working, too, because in one of our first reviews, our sound was called "MetalliCure". How cool! A lot of my lyrics were very political at the time (anti-Republican, mostly), and this really seemed to set Dwanye off. We would argue a lot about things like this and it really started to get in the way. I don't blame him for getting upset, but it was obvious that our views just weren't going to be compatible, so Bruce and I had to move on.

Bruce and I decided that we needed a new drummer.
One who could at least agree with our political views and not worry about offending someone. Kicking out Dwayne was incredibly hard though, because we had basically started the band together. I'm a very loyal, emotional person, and it took me a long time to come to that decision. Decide I did though, and then I stuck by it. So now enter John Pettit, a drummer we conveniently stole from a band called Sins of Soul.
Hey all is fair in love, war and drummers, right? John fit in great, didn't care what political or religious figure I supported or trashed, and played with precision and power. Oh yeah, and he had a van! What more could you ask for? For the rest of 1992 and the first half of '93, Blind continued to play the DC area, with occasional excursions up and down the East Coast. We recorded a great demo with Brad Divens of Souls at Zero and Drew Mazurek, producer extraordinare. Then we decided that we really wanted to get to the next level: the elusive recording contract. We figured the best way to go about getting a contract was to keep so busy that we would attract the attention of all sorts of record companies. How does a band keep busy? Get in the van and go on the road!
So that's what we did. I dropped out of college, Bruce quit his day job (John didn't really have a job, I don't think), and from the summer of '92 to the beginning of '94 we toured the US from coast to coast 3 times. I can't tell you how many shit holes we played, how many people were mean to us, or how many clubs ripped us off. Try playing in a town where no one has ever heard of you and you'll see what I mean.
But for every 9 terrible gigs, there was one great one that made it all worth while. We all have so many great memories of those times that will span our entire lives, I suspect.

A record contract didn't instantly appear, but we did get all sorts of endorse- ment deals:
SIT guitar strings, Mesa/ Boogie amps, Gibson guitars, it was great! We played showcases for just about every major record label you can think of: EMI, Elektra, Atlantic, MCA, you name it. But no one wanted us.
Then, a label who never even saw us live sent our management company a contract! Marlboro Music, a record label located in Munich, Germany wanted to put together a double album featuring 4 new bands from the US (5 songs for each band), and they wanted Blind as one of the four bands. Apparently they fell in love with our demo tape and signed us just on that alone.
It was to be released all throughout Europe and to be called, "America Now".
The only catch was, we had to change our name!
It turned out there was a band in Europe who already had the name Blind.
The choice was obvious: the name Bruce and I had always wanted to call the band, Godhead.
I don't remember why we chose to spell it in all lower case letters, but in March of 94, godhead was born.

Hey!

This was great!

All of a sudden there we were in a huge studio in April, just 2 years after our first gig!
Warren Croyle was our producer and Bernhard Lockar was brought in to assist. What a great time we had.
We filmed a video that summer, toured the US one more time and then at the end of the year, we went to Germany and played three showcase gigs promoting the compilation.