The eighth grade was where I first acted on my love for music. A few of my friends were also interested in starting a band, so Felony was born. Rob Snider, a drummer in the school marching band, was given a drum set for his birthday. Then Shane Chaney bought a guitar and an amp and the two started playing. A couple of weeks later, I bought my first bass, a hunk of wood called an Electra Westone.(Which to me was the greatest thing in the world.) Eric Phillips began as a singer, but due to time conflicts and other unfortunate circumstances, the singing duties were mostly handed over to Shane. We began by trying to imitate the popular rock bands of the time, but soon turned to trying to make our own music. Our name came from our first song, which was four or five minutes of thrashing and noise-making, with pauses for screaming and other noise-making. Then, after a week or two, we finally wrote our first "real" song, a number we called "Pickle". We thought we were the next great band, we were so proud. We played this song for a few weeks, then came the slow end to Felony. I'm not sure if it was time, or what, but we didn't play as often as we used to, and resorted to writing lyrics for our future songs. Plaid, Lost Socks, and other immature sounding titles were the result. Then a sudden change caused us to play together a lot more often, resulting in our next band, "El-Boh".
Rob, Shane and I began playing often in Rob's basement, teaching ourselves to play our instruments while trying to write the next hit song. We were soon excited as we actualy began to make music that sounded like something other than noise with yelling. We continued to practice and starting coming up with songs, some of which were "Batman Takes Over London", "Steamroller" (it's what the song sounded like), among others. Then, after having four or five songs together, we were asked to play in a show in Hillsboro at the Clean and Sober Club. We opened for Sregor Det (from Hillsboro) and Cigarhead (from Dayton). Shane knew the drummer from Cigarhead, so that's how we got that show. We played our songs and had a video tape made of it. It was very exciting at the time, especially the next day at school when people came up to us and said we played well. Not bad for a group of 8th graders. Soon after the show, Rob and I were at the Prom Promise assembly where we saw Shane on stage with Sregor Det, apparently their newest member. We were devastated. That was the end of El-Boh.
After a little time of being without a band, I started becomming good friends with JEremy Manning, who was a very cool, strange guy. We both loved music and had a somewhat intersting sense of humor, so we hit it off right from the beginning. Since I was only with a bass and a guitar, and he didn't know how to play either, we started experimenting. We ended up making a tape where I played guitar and he made up lyrics as we went along, and we soon found out it was fun, and at least, amusing. So, for the rest of our 8th grade days and into our freshman year, we would get together every few weeks and make a tape of 'Cosmic Blob'. We were quickly becoming known in our group of friends for our music. We had songs named Hot Chocolate, Bum, Meat: Big Feet, Real Wheel and others. If you've ever seen Who's Line is it Anyway?, it's very similar to Greatest Hits, but funnier. =0) I combined some of the best songs into one tape, which I called "The Best of Cosmic Blob", and is still played every few weeks in my apartment.
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