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
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.
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.
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!