A few photos from our gigs have been added to the Image section.
Author Archives: David
Some Gig Photos
Here are a few photos from our first couple of gigs, courtesy of Jeff (I lifted them from his Facebook page). I wasn’t even aware that anyone was taking pictures at these gigs, so it came as quite a surprise to find them on Jeff’s page. I’ll add credits to these images as soon as I find out who took them.
David, Luis, Jeff, performing at The Underground (nice hat!)
David, Luis, Jeff, performing at CSM
David, Jeff, performing at CSM
Lyrics
I found an old notebook from San Francisco State University which looks like it used to belong to Luis. In addition to his lecture notes, it contains lyrics for a number of Violet June songs. Jeff and my handwriting are also on these pages, so I guess this must have been our working book for developing lyrics. As the lead singer, Luis wrote the vast majority of the lyrics for our songs, and drew upon his own poetry for some of them. We did all make a deliberate effort to get involved, however, and several songs were entirely group efforts.
Image section added
There is now an “Image” section to the site. I’ve added a couple of gig flyers which I had stuffed in the bottom of a desk drawer all these years. I know Jeff has some photos of us, and he and I both have some embarrassing videos to add, so look for more updates in the future.
Underground Gig Flyer
This is the flyer for our second gig, which was the first one at a “proper” club. Note my impressive desktop publishing skills on the early Macintosh. The show actually went really well. I don’t remember anything about the other band, C.O.D.
As we were packing up after the show, I was approached by this woman who said she wrote for “Industrial Magazine”, whatever that was. She wanted to know where we got our name, to which I glibly responded “It came to us, as if in a dream”.
To be honest, I had nothing to do with choosing our band name. When I left Black Day to go away to college, the remaining members, along with another friend of theirs, Greg, reformed as Violet June. I believe that version of the band played one gig at some school before disbanding. When I returned to the Bay Area, I got in touch with Luis and the two of us reformed as Violet June, quickly adding Jeff to the lineup.
Being the visionaries that we were, we had already branched out into a multimedia extravaganza by the time of the Underground show. We had, I believe, three television sets on stage- one of which was a green-only monitor from my Apple //e computer. Luis had recorded some weird video of his girlfriend just staring at the camera for the entire length of the tape, and that was what we played on our monitors. The video distribution system I had rigged up to feed the one VCR to three monitors didn’t work very well, and the monitors kept glitching and going out of sync. We all agreed that it looked better that way.
CSM Gig Flyer
This is the promotional flyer for the very first Violet June gig at the College of San Mateo. Mark Knight and Todd Tauscher of Red Assembly put this show together, and asked us to be the opening act. Second up was Ceremony featuring Tom Marin, formerly of our first band, Black Day. We all knew each other.
The show took place in the student union. Our live setup involved so many audio sources that I had a mixer on stage, and would provide a mixdown for the house sound system. I don’t think the other bands had thought this out very well, and they requested that I stay on stage and mix their music as well. Red Assembly had brought a fog machine along, and when they started playing, their friend began pumping out the fog right next to where I was sitting. The machine kept malfunctioning, and would suddenly send out these bursts of concentrated, thick, sticky, sweet-smelling fog right into my face. By the time the show was over, the entire student union was full of the stuff.
I have a videotape of this performance somewhere… but I’m a little bit scared to see it again!
Doubt
This is the only recording of “Doubt”, the last official Violet June song recorded by Luis and David (Jeff wasn’t around that day). In my mind, this song was never fully completed, although it seems fairly well fleshed-out listening back to it now. Luis and I have both remained extremely fond of this song over the years, and we agreed that it marked an interesting direction to take our future music.
Vile Lynn
This is another recording of “Vile Lynn”. It should probably be stated that this song ultimately resulted in the band breaking up. After months of practicing this song and performing it live at several gigs, I, David, decided that I was now offended by some of the lyrics. Luis didn’t like the idea of changing his lyrics, and thus a conflict was born. Its difficult to see now what was so offensive about these lyrics as to merit breaking up the band. I mean, yes, they were intentionally shocking, but so was much of our other material. What was I even doing in an aggressive, industrial band if my delicate sensibilities were so easily challenged? At any rate, its all water under the bridge at this point. I quite like the song!
Violet June – “Tape 2”
This tape contains a variety of material, including solo music by Luis and early versions of Violet June songs. Some of these may not have names at all, or at least I never knew them, while others I have simply forgotten the names.
Another experimental technique we employed a few times was to play the sequence for one song, but with an entirely different set of samples loaded into our keyboards. I know we recorded at least one of these experiments, and that may be on this tape too… I’m just not sure.
Violet June – “Tape 1”
This is a tape descriptively labeled “Violet June”. No date was indicated, but based on the inclusion of “Vile Lynn”, this had to have been from the first half of 1991.