Liars Grin
Liars Grin was formed by a guy name Bill Schee. I met Bill working at a computer store. He played bass and had not played in a while so he wanted to put something together to play some covers and make a little money on the side. He knew a keyboardist and guitarist so I told him I was game.
The guitarist would turn out to be Frank Matthews and we would go on to be in several bands together. Eric on keys was a cool dude but for reasons I can’t remember, decided he wasn’t into it and left before we started gigging. Bill added another guitarist he knew named Gary Roberts to the mix to fatten things up and we started gigging.
I think we were a darn good band. Bill wasn’t the greatest singer (he’ll tell you that) but we had a lot of fun and we gigged regularly, mostly in roadhouse style bars for several years.
Smoke This
Right after Liars Grin broke up, Frank and I were in limbo so we decided to write some tunes just for us. We never intended to gig or publish anything, we just wanted to write some heavy music and have some fun. So we formed a little project called Smoke This.
The name was really an anti-drug statement since Frank and I were not drug users. It was kind of saying “forget smoking that stuff, smoke this (the music)”. We wrote and recorded 4 songs and I think they were pretty cool, though definitely nothing that could ever break commercially. But it was a fun project.
Frank and I wrote the music and I wrote and sang the lyrics so it was a very personal project. I’ll be honest, I think the vocals are pretty unremarkable and the lyrics are probably really cheesy, but I’ll post some audio here eventually.
An interesting side note; during the Smoke This recording we jammed with a bass player named Chris Chimelewski who was just a young kid at the time but an outstanding player. We would run into Chris years later at Clovis Hills Church.
