Post #161911 by WillTiki on Fri, May 27, 2005 7:53 AM

Its a small Tiki world man, far fewer than 6 degress of separation! I was at UVa in the 80's and saw MGB several times, but another band I saw there had a name that just stuck in my mind "The Fleshtones".

Also, this was during the MTV metal and punk era; we were watching this stuff and said "we can do that" so my friends and I briefly formed a band just for the hell of it (and to avoid paying a real band for a couple of big parties.) We called ourselves "Harsh Reality" and wrote a bunch of really bad punk and speed metal songs set to some 12 bar blues. Great fun. Our drummer had grown up in Charlottesville playing in all kinds of bands...one of which had another great band name:
"Continental Drift". He took us over to see a guy who rented sound equipment. He lived in a small apartment in a low rent complex. It was floor to ceiling amps, PA stuff, sound boards etc, a room full of mikes, cabling, so much stuff and good stuff too. The only other things in there were pizza boxes, beer cans and drug paraphenalia. Anyway, we needed some stuff to do a couple of gigs so this dude just said help yourself. We went out to a rental truck he had in the parking lot and it too was full of stuff. We hauled out a few carloads of stuff and took it all to our ground floor on-campus apartment. It was a hoot to see the faces of people as we were setting up this much sound equipment in and outside of our place. We played ... and drank and everyone else listened ... and drank. Of course, we were eventually shut down in the wee hours of Sunday morning by the cops. Somewhere I still have a t-shirt from the batch we had made for our ficticious "Small States of Europe Tour" (you know, Monaco, Andorra, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican City...It was amazing that some folks thought we were really a band I said "Yes, the Holy Father loved us, he really rocks you know...