The Bones of my Buried Past

A couple of weeks ago, when I accidentally (and temporarily) wiped out all the older content on this blog, some other things were disrupted as well. One of these was a little chunk of the website dedicated to Scapedog, my old college band from 20 years ago. Nowadays everyone with a band is typically documenting the hell out of it, but back then we didn’t have digital cameras or digital recording equipment of any kind. The things we recorded were on analog tapes, for heaven’s sake. Fortunately the other guitar player, Paul Hagstrom, was pretty eager to record what we were doing with the means at hand, which means that after it was all over in 1993 there was quite a pile of audio tapes and posters. At some point during the 1990s, Paul went through some of this stuff, picked out and cleaned up some of the audio, and put together a simple website.

And there it stands still, the Shrine to Scapedog, now updated just slightly for the modern era but still showing its 1990s roots. If you’ve got flash you can listen to the songs in a playlist doohicky on the page, and if not, you can download or listen to each track individually by clicking its title. No muss, no fuss. The only leanings toward modern HTML you’ll find on that page is the inclusion of a viewport spec in the header to make it display decently on mobile.

You could say our style was grunge or punk, but we started playing before most people had heard the term grunge (I know I hadn’t heard it), and I never called what we were doing “punk” or heard it described that way until someone said it years later. “Oh yeah,” I replied, “I guess we were kind of a punk band.” Whatever, we were just trying to make awesome music with little means and have a good time, and I think we succeeded to some degree on all points. My own personal favorite is definitely Baba Yaga, but by all means, feel free to browse around there, have a listen to some tunes, and make up your own mind.

So why do I bring this up now? Well, I had honestly forgot that these pages were tucked away in the nuthole until it all came tumbling down. And there’s a part of me that forgets, when I’m sitting in front of a screen for hour upon hour, day after day, that I used to spend my weekend evenings (or weekday evenings for that matter, if the opportunity arose) on stage with a group of friends, rocking the hell out of the little campus bar we usually played at. What good parts of your past have you forgotten about? How much do you miss them? Could you have them back now, if you wanted to? I just wonder.