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Well this crazy hubub circus once was not so crazy and never in a million years
would i have ever expected this to happen. now someone that sees our band might say hey whats so great about your band. your
known by a handfull of kids in muskegon and youve never played a show farther than holland. then i would say hey theres
a lot of other stuff that we havent done and i would start listing off things. but..... i consider our band so successfull
because of one reason. it is the funnest thing i have ever done in my life. i think i speak for my fellow duckbombers
when i say that because im pretty sure they feel the same way. (theyre all in other states right now but if when they
get back and they say that this isnt the funnest thing theyve ever done then come to my house at 3066 park st. and shoot me
in the head cause im a filthy liar!) anyways... i never thought that this could be this much fun because it all started
very small. what you are about to read is not really known to anyone except me and my brother. it is the official history
of dUcK bOMb, and dont listen to anyone else becasue this is how it began: me and bryan were in my uncle dan and aunt holly's
basement on christmas eve of 2000 bored out of our gourds. i had my bass though, and bryan had his guitar. with our small
amps we started messing around and we made up a creepy song that was sort of called, Clowns Will Eat Me. we liked it
a lot and we had both played in previous "bands" (not really bands kind of just messing around) that didnt work and we both
had a passion for non poppy hardcore punk, so we decided hey, lets just play together. so we started writing another song
called Flock of Sheep, and to this day i still although we dont play it anymore, love that song. well we had a couople things
written and our next step was to come up with a name. we thought and thought and thought and then one day we were in our basement
sitting around thinking and bryan said two words that would stick and become known around this town and that to me would mean
fun music whenever i saw it written or heard it yelled: DUCK BOMB. he said it with a laugh and we both started laughing so
hard that we had to choose that as the name. so we did and we loved it and to this day i still do love the name. our next
step was to find a drummer. (its kind of funny that we had a name before a drummer, but oh well) our friend travis hall was
already playing bass in a band, DBS, but he could play drums and he liked punk rock so he said hed do it. we playd in my room
and recorded thorugh a boombox a couple of demo tapes. we made the songs Flock of Sheep, Whine and Cry, Rock Star, I Love
MExicans, and we played the exploited song sex&violence. my dad got mad at us one day for the lyrics. we have him yelling
at us on video. my brother bryan played guitar and he was good and travis messed up a lot on drums but thats ok cause we had
fun, but we had one problem. i sucked at bass combined with singing. i already wasnt to swell at the bass and combined with
remembering words, i just couldnt handle it. so i dropped my bass and we didnt have bass for a while. we actually had a little
show in my room after skoool one day and i sang and there was no bass player. about 9 people came. it was great. umm soon
we realized that bass sounds good in a punk rock band so we started lookinng for a bass player. my friend jeff hermance played
guitar so i said hey jeff try playing this song on bass. and he did. and i said wow try playing this. and he did. so me and
bryan said hey wanna play punk rock? and he said sure. so we now had a bass player and i could run around and remember the
lyrics. we played after skool in my room for a number of weeks or something like that and it was really fun. well
the fun continued until travis started having conflicts with our band and his other band DBS which he like a lot more because
he really wanted to play bass and just played drums for the heck of it. well this became bad becasue soon travis told
us that we should try looking for another drummer. this was a long annoying process and we actually were gonna meet
shane adam dake's cousing to be our drummer and he is really good but he lived too far away and things didnt work out. so
after a while we were getting tired of having no drums and we had songs to play, and i remembered that i was in a band called
shun and my friend eric daugherty was the drummer and he was a really good drummer, but i wasnt sure if he wanted to play
our style, (which i hoped would become a very fast brand of ugly hard crazy punk. and it has!) but eric said sure id love
to play so he joined up and we practiced in jeff's garage. his parents were very nice and put up with our noise and this was
better becasue playing in my room was bad cause my parents hated the noise. so we showed eric songs that we already made and
he picked up real quick. we then started writing more ditties and we made up the songs Peeajawea, Unwanted Advice, and Mascara,
using an old creepy guitar riff that derek jones made up when we used to mess around a long long time ago. i took the two
lines "i like mascara i wear a dress to skool" that derek used to sing and i forgot what else he said so i just said "i want
to be prom queen but its against the rules" and this song would turn out to now be our "hit" song and gets a really cool wild
chaotic crowd reaction that usually ends up with me being tackled or swarmed with screaming smelly kids. its great. but anyways,
we made up these songs and had 7 others that me bryan and jeff had written and with these 9 originals we added ramones covers
of Blitzkrieg Bop and I Just Wanna Have Something To Do and a quickly made up cover of the star wars theme that was really
bad yet really cool, and we recorded in mike jensen's basement, a strange boy who i always thought looked like a monkey.
we made cd's and im not sure if we tried selling them or what exactly happened, but some got sold and i think most were given
away but we never were too organized at it so i kind of forgot exactly how it went, becasue during the passing out of our
cd's, there became a bit of turmoil in duckbomb. you see, we were being told that our drummer eric didnt want to play
anymore. things got confusing and finger pointing sucks and is unfair, so to keep it short ill just say that eric decided
to leave. so we had created 3 new songs, covered 3, we did play one party (stephanie haag's birthday party on the day that
code red mountain dew came out) and we made a cd. so id say it was the most productive with jeff, eric, bryan and i in the
lineup so far but we now needed to find a new drummer. this happened towards the end of the school year of 2001, and so it
was now summer, the greatest time of the year, and we were musically at a halt. well we tried like crazy to find people and
we found another guitar player in mike jensen (it was bryan's suggestion that we have two guitars and him and mike were like
best friends so along came a great little monkey. i wasnt actually too keen on the idea at the time but i shut my mouth. the
best thing i ever did for our band) and then we found another bass player who would convert into a drummer. adam
dake. adam said yeah ill play and so we took off to adam's backyard and played on his skateboard ramp (halfpipe) in his
backyard and got eaten alive by mosquitoes. so we moved into his room where it was hotter than dutch love and we sweated crazilly
while trying to teach adam the old songs. he really was a bass player not a drummer and this did not last very long. so we
shakilly went along trying to get songs down but adam really wasnt working out and i think it may have been at this time that
my brother started not having too much fun and kind of wanted out but didnt want to ditch us and stop the process of the band
which was very shaky already. so we just kind of started playing around with bryan on the drums and adam played bass and we
had one guitar again. yay! we messed around and stumbled upon some good songs. Americant, Mock Me Please, and Hole In My Head.
then adam was gone alot because his other band face plant kind of collided with our practiecs and i found out that it was
easy to play our songs on bass. so i did. and we made a cd with those 3 songs on it. and i once again figured out i sucked
at bass and even sucked more at singing and playing bass at the same time. so there was this problem and then there was the
problem that bryan didnt like playing anymore to my surprise and he suggested we look for a new drummer. this was sad for
me because he is my brother and we started the band together. this meant i would be alone! no! but then i realized that he
shouldnt be playing unless hes into it 100% and so i started posting flyers for our need for a drummer. me and mike, who i
had now labeled monkey mike, were alone and i think maybe we developed what is now a good friendship out of being just the
two of us for a short while. well i told everyone i knew that they should look for a drummer for us, and around this time
it was the beginning of the 2001-2002 skool year and i had people asking at their skools for us. the one day mike said to
me, hey theres this kid who moved from california and he plays bass but he says hell try playing drums. and i was thinking
"hmmmmmm this sounds familiar" so i thought maybe that this was a reocurring theme of duckbomb. bass players who fill in on
drums but arent fully into it. and i was losing hope until my best friend jim freye said one day in that same week that mike
told me about this new kid. "hey i found a drummer. i told him you play fast punk music and he said ok ill do it" and
i said is he good jim and jim said i think so. so now this new kid could play his natural instrument, bass and we arranged
a little practice thingy to hear him play. "whats his name?" i asked monkey mike and he said "ryan" and i said "oh no i already
know a ryan" and i asked what his last name was and mike said pangratz. and i remember not understanding it but it sounded
like the first thing that came to my mind. penguin. so i said "yeah his name isnt ryan its penguin" so i went to monkey mike's
house and as i was walking down the stairs i could hear someone playing Journey To The End Of Eastbay on the bass and it was
really good and i thought oh krap. this kid is awesome. and i went down and said hi im gonna call you penguin and tried playing
drums. a couple days later me and monkey mike met with this other stragner named mike savina in my garage (penguin was working)
and we showed him i remember; Mock Me Please and he played it faster than we did and he apologized for playing too FAST. me
and mike laughed out of pure excitement and joy and said thats ok play it too fast all the time and this will work out fine.
and from then on we all joined up and i have trouble remembering peoples last names and i also dont like to beserious so i
called him mike sardine and we have been making noise since. we made a cd in monkey mike's basement where we practice
with 5 old songs and we made up 5 new ones and a cover of Safety Dance by men without hats and since then weve made up 9 more
songs and are still going strong. so finally, on our 4th bass player, 2nd guitarist, and 4th drummer we have found the
true dUcK bOMb and weve played something like 10 or 11 shows and are having more fun than i ever thought was possible. it
is and will continue to be great and this is the end of the dUcK bOMb story. for now.... HA HA! and now the story continues.
It is december 27th, 2002, and we played our last show with Monkey Mike on guitar on december 21st at the spring lake village
hall. Snotty, formely of the Drunk Upstarts, North Lincoln, and Schwill Rotten will be taking over and now i am no longer
the oldest person in duckbomb. Mike has lost interest in our band (and punk rock in general apparently. he was
never really into any of it he says, he just thought he was. yeah im confused too) and Snotty is really excited to start palying
with us on Jan. 18th for our first show and me, penguin, and mike s are glad to have him aboard and we have big aspirations
and are excited to start with shows. check back. It is back time... March 14th rite now and we have played 4 shows with
Snotty. Its all workin out great. Thats it. We hope to be donig a mini like week or two week long tour this
summer. That would be rad. UPDATE Snotty didnt work out. We played 5 or 6 shows i think. He has
personal problems to deal with. Goodbye Snotty. Eric Browning (Look Ma No Ham singer) now plays guitar.
It is currently June 6th, 2003, and we have played 2 shows and had 3 practices. Eric is swell and adds some throaty
screaming vocals which is always a plus. More throat power. Look out for insane back and forth vocals (in style
of pizza butt, cavemen) We would still like to "tour" this summer a little. Play a little string of shows is more
like it. Look out. We have ham on board.
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