It began in the mid-eighties when guitarists Donavan Punch & Brian Patton and singer Glen Rambo of Nuclear Crucifixion contacted drummer Tommy Buckly and I about replacing their rhythm section and wiping the slate clean with all new material. We tried out, they dug us and we started writing in Donavan's grandmothers garage in Chalmette, Louisiana.
At that time, the name we had was Donavan's idea - Corpses with Souls. A month or two later Tommy and I were hanging out and came up with the idea to do a concept song based on the old sci fi movie soylent green. A few beers later we said 'hey, let's call the band soylent green'! We decided to change the spelling to avoid any messy business.
I wrote 99.9% of all the lyrics, lots of the riffs and played on all the demos (also the Voices of A Red God compilation album) for the first four years. We played with underground bands A-Z including Morbid Angel, The Melvins, Exhorder, Exodus, Dead Horse, and many, many more.
Enter The Side Bands. Soilent Drummer, Tom Buckley and I started a group with singer/guitarist Glenn Walle from Osiris. That group was called No Traces. I was growing as a musician and growing out of Soilent. I was starting to write material that the guitarists couldn't handle, technically and I eventually decided to leave Soilent and just play with No Traces. There were some personality conflicts with a certain member..all water under the bridge now, though.
What happened next is that Soilent got the awesome Ben Falgoust from Paralysis to sing and the terrific bassist Scott Williams (R.I.P) from the band New Religion. Scott was a good friend and is missed by all who knew him. However, he couldn't play many of the bass lines I had written and I was reluctant to teach them to him and he respected and understood that. That's why Soilent started all over again with new material.
I became more involved with my other career and eventually fell off the musical map for a while. I moved out to California during the whole dot-com fever and worked on a lot of interesting projects. Things started to get a little brutal out there and companies were folding left and right so I got the itch to retreat to old N.O.
When I returned, I caught wind of some strange rumors. There was a guy in a band that did some time with a guy who was claiming to be me. He apparently had the same first name as me and was claiming to be the original bassist for Soilent Green. I've heard other weird road stories that are usually the case of subtituting someone no one knows with me to make the story more believable. No doubt that some really bizarre shit went down in those days but just don't believe everything you hear. One thing that is true is that singer Glen Rambo was prone to vomiting on the audience and many of the audience members were prone to "bathing" in it and rubbing it on themselves as if it were waters from the fountain of youth or something. I saw it with my own two eyes.
Here are a few photos from back in those days (sorry, no vomit-related stuff in these)....
