2010 Intro: For about nine months in 2006, I collaborated with one of my best friends, Eric Smith, to produce a zine called No Signal. We did five issues during that time, but then ceased production--temporarily, I thought at the time. Though it took us about a year to finally admit it, the cessation ended up being permanent. Eric had come up with the name and concept for the zine, and for a variety of reasons, he no longer wanted to continue it. I'd done most of the writing, though, and had written enough articles to fill two more issues of the zine by the time we officially declared it dead. Most of those articles were time-sensitive--reviews of records and shows, an interview with Landmines from about the time their first EP was released--but part of my intent with No Signal had been to document parts of Richmond's past that were disappearing into the sands of time. To that end, I interviewed longtime Richmond musician Chris Wade, now a resident of Wisconsin, about a variety of bands that he was involved with during the 90s. Coming upon that interview recently, while digging through old text files on a flash drive that I rarely use anymore, I felt bad about the fact that it had never been printed anywhere. Then I realized that, since most of the information discussed in the interview had been long in the past even four years ago when it was conducted, there was no reason why I couldn't run it here on RVA's website.
At the time I conducted this interview, Chris was maintaining a strong web presence, and was doing quite a bit of preservation and distribution of old, mostly forgotten Richmond-area bands, only some of which he had played in. He also had a website set up for his current musical endeavors, which he talked about in his answer to the final question in this interview. Unfortunately, for reasons I'm unaware of, Chris has since disappeared from the internet. His Myspace page (linked above) is still active, as is his Youtube channel, which provided the videos I've embedded below. However, wadebrigade.org is gone, his audiosuede blog is gone, and none of the email addresses I have for him now seem to work. It's a real shame, because there were some awesome things on his websites that are now gone. Cadillac Flambe, the label that released Hose.Got.Cable's CD discography in 2006, still seems to be out there, but I would advise making successful email contact with them before sending any money, as their website hasn't changed since four years ago, and may appear more alive than it actually is. That said, if you don't have the Hose.Got.Cable CD, you need it, so do what you can to secure a copy.
2006 Interview:
No Signal: I know you were in Groove before Hose.Got.Cable--was that your first band?
Chris Wade: Mot counting a million high school bedroom and garage bands, my first band that played shows and put stuff out was called As It Stands.
NS: Can you give me a brief history of that band?
CW:I played bass guitar and I met a metal kid in the next town over named Tony Frasca who played drums. In 1989 we started associating with kids in the straight edge hardcore scene in Newport News, VA. The bassist for Rebound, Ernie Miller, who ended up being a good friend and bandmate a couple years later, introduced us to singer Lance McLeod and guitarist Craig Moore. We started getting shows in DC, RVA and Va Beach. We added another guitarist named Craig Henry and put out a 7" and had a song on a comp 7". Not too bad for high schoolers back then. Our particular mix of influences afforded us the luxury of playng, you know, a hardcore matinee one weekend and then a death metal show the next. We were listening to everything from Born Against and Judge to Slayer, Janes Addiction and Soundgarden. A couple years later, as A.I.S. started to fizzle out, I was asked to sing for the band that would become Groove.
Groove, "Useless," 1991
NS: How'd you guys arrive at that weird alt-rock/post-hardcore sound you had?
CW: Groove was actually the same musicians as Rebound and later Device but with me singing. We were listening to Quicksand, Soulside, Fugazi and stuff and I had developed this whiney yell by singing along in my car on the way to work. Those guys were all great musicians and had the hardcore thing so wired. They wanted to grow and be challenged, pretty much like everyone else in hardcore at the time. I had been writing lyrics forever and was stoked to use them finally. Our demo is one of my favorite recordings of any of my bands. By the time the records came out, however, we had added Nathan Camfiord on guitar. He had been in the band when it was Device and is hands-down the most talented musician I've ever played with. But he took us in a different direction. Plus, it didn't help that we were starting to listen to Pearl Jam and Black Crowes.
NS: Did it get you any grief from the hardcore purists of the day?
CW: We really didn't do much in the hardcore arena. We were pretty much accepted everywhere, as all the lines between genres were kinda blurred in those days. There was one show in Portsmouth, VA though, where a crowd of skinheads, led by a now-relatively prominent artist/musician whose name I won't mention, were chanting "Punk's Dead, Shave Your Head" at me between songs and even broke out in a chorus of "White Christmas" for us.
Hose.Got.Cable, "Gumwrapper Roses," 1994
NS: How'd Hose.Got.Cable start? Why'd you go from just singing in Groove to playing guitar in Hose?
CW: JJ Garfinkel, the drummer, and I moved to RVA. We were having trouble meeting up for practices between members in DC, RVA, NN and even OBX. Plus Richmond had opened my mind to alot of new music and the direction Groove was going wasn't as edgy as I wanted so I quit. We had become great friends with Hgual and they sort of adopted me during their period of reconstruction. John Partin (Hguals singer) and I had never been guitarists in a band and didn't really know much about the right way to play, whereas John Skaritza and John Peters (drums and bass) were really, really good and it seemed like a novel idea: have a really tight rhythm section holding it down while these two wankers are making noise on their cheap guitars.
NS: What's the real story behind the name "Hose.Got.Cable"? (I've heard legends, but I don't necessarily trust them.)
CW: You know, I think that the mystery about what it means eclipses the actual meaning and furthermore I think that in some lame, artsy way that was the intention. Ultimately dude, I don't even know what it means. It's just dumb. You can't imagine all the dumb shit we were called on tour. Horse.got.cable? Ho's.got.cable? Just silly. Ours was just one of many bad band names, and most of them happen to be 3 words.
NS: HGC were notoriously accident-prone. Do you have any good stories to share about onstage misadventures?
CW: The time that Partin inhaled his pick and choked on it and Scott Berger wrote in Throttle that it was staged or something, that's the big one. He was holding his pick in the same hand that he was holding the mic and he took a deep breath to scream or whatever and just sucked it in. When he dropped to the floor we all thought he was just rockin' out, y'know...then he didn't get up. Everything stopped. Scary shit. Our friends Chris McPherson and Nikki Price both did the Heimlich or whatever and somehow he coughed it up. We broke stuff alot and I hit Peters in the head with my guitar a couple times. But we weren't violent...just clumsy.
NS: What was the deal with Patrick Kennedy's role in the band?
CW: Pat was alot of things: roadie, manager, accountant, devils advocate.
NS: Was he considered a member or not?
CW: Yeah, I guess so. Inquisition had Trey, AVAIL had Beau Beau and we had Pat. I don't think we gave Pat enough credit back then, actually. Pat could've been even more of an asset. He wanted to help us get bigger by contacting labels and getting us on bigger bills with bigger bands. For whatever reason we didn't do those things and Pats role became unnecessary.
NS: How'd he end up singing "2616"?
CW: We just gave him one song to sing live. People loved it and he loved doing it. He would freak out and have these seizures.
NS: And hey, goofy side-question: did it ever get weird having all of your bandmates be named John?
CW: It made it easy when people were contacting us about shows. Everyone in our circle went by last names back then. You don't even know the half of it, dude. Between a couple of houses lived a bunch of dudes named John and Chris. John Partin, John Skaritza, John Hofbauer, John Peters, John Campbell and John DeMary. Then there's Chris Wade, Chris McPherson, Chris Voccia and Chris Rupp. All I know is that there were some unimaginative parents-to-be circa 1972.
NS:As far as I could always tell, you did the most singing in Hose. Did you also write the lyrics?
CW: Actually, I think Partin sang the most. We wrote the lyrics to the particular songs we sang, though.
NS: Did any of them have any serious meaning to them, or were they just nonsense? (I've always suspected the latter.)
CW: I can only speak for myself and my lyrics. Although it's mostly screams and mumbles and sounds like nonsense, I've actually always been a bit obsessive about my lyrics meaning something, at least to me.
NS: As a young hardcore fan during the time you guys were around, I felt like there was a current of progress and change in the hardcore scene of the time. It was hard to define, but it was there in all of the bands doing the chaotic thing, the emo thing, the math-rock thing, etc. Were you guys aware of it at the time? (Personally, I considered you guys part of it, but I have no idea what it seemed like to you at the time.) What was your perspective on the scene, both in Richmond and in general, at the time you guys were around? What bands did you consider your peers at the time?
CW: Straddling two or more genres and/or scenes has been a common thread in most of my bands. Hose was lucky to be able to play with AVAIL alot, but we could just as easily share a bill with Kepone. There was so much experimentation back then and the definitions of which you speak were by-products of musicians just going for it. I mean, if you were on stage screaming and pouring your heart out that was emo whether you meant to be emo or not. If you were jumping around and falling down on stage it was because you were lost in the moment. Math rock, I think, was just the natural progression of punk rock. Punk rock was the art of fucking with regular rock to make it weird. Math rock was just fucking with punk rock because punk rock wasn't fucked up enough anymore.
NS: Let me ask about the prank built into the Majesty LP--specifically, the way it was set up so the listener thought they should play the side with "Ego" on it first, and the way that song would seem like unlistenable noise to the average listener. I actually knew people who heard that first and thought you guys had lost your shit and started to suck, and never even bothered to play the other side, with the real songs. So my question is... why'd you guys do that? Why put an experimental noise version of "Ego" on the record instead of a more conventional version? And why mess with your audience that way?
CW: pretty much to weed out those people. If someone is stupid enough to not listen to the rest of a record because there's 10 minutes of what they consider "unlistenable noise" at the begining then fuck them. If no one gets killed in the first 10 minutes of a horror film do people walk out of the theater? Let's face it, it's like my wife Alicia always said: noise is much more fun to make than to listen to. But it's art. It's challenging. Why not make it? To know that there are people that really did [react] that [way] is just fucking awesome. It means that our hypothesis was correct. Joke's on them.
[Explanatory note, 2010: For those who aren't sure what song we're talking about here, "Ego" is the final song on the Cadillac Flambe discography CD, and is not credited on the track listing. During live performances, it was a long, drawn-out jam of a song, but sounded a lot more like Hose.Got.Cable's standard material. The version on Majesty and the discography CD is more of an experimental noise track, and acts as a bit of an endurance test.]
NS: When and why did Hose break up?
CW: Hose broke up in 1995 because it was no longer any fun.
Nudibranch, 1996
NS: I know very little about Orlock, but in certain circles that band is legendary. You guys released a demo and two 7 inches while I was... I don't even know, looking the other way or something. I never heard you til after you broke up, and I never saw you guys play. So, what's the story? Who was in the band, how long were you together, and what happened to make you appear and disappear so quickly?
CW: After hose.got.cable I played bass in Nudibranch, which was a real honor. Flossy, who was just the most amazing singer, quit, and we continued on as Gingwin with me and Perry Saunders (guitarist) sharing the vocals. Gingwin actually toured, making it out here to Milwaukee even, but only put out a cassette demo which is probably owned by more people in the midwest than in Richmond. Gingwin sputtered and stalled. My wife Alicia and I conceived Orlock as this fun punk/metal thing but with strong female vocals, something that was, and still is, truly lacking in music. We really wanted Becky Sanchez from More Fire for Burning People to play bass and More Fire drummer Bret Payne to play drums but that didn't work out. We asked David Seaman, the drummer of Nudibranch/Gingwin, to play, and Perry from Nudibranch/Gingwin joined on bass. We did a fair amount in a short time. Two seven inches, a song on a Food Not Bombs cd comp and a US tour all in about a year. Alicia and I were married and David and Keith were best friends, so on tour we became these competing teams. That was a pretty odd tour, in that half of the shows we played were really blown out and awesome and the other half were empty. And many of them fell through completely. What would have been our last show in Minneapolis was a house show. We arrived to find out that the dude had been kicked out of the house...for doing house shows. We drove straight from MN to VA and broke up.
Orlock, "Spanking," 1996
NS: What have you been doing since Orlock? When did you move to Wisconsin? And what's The Wade Brigade all about? Do you have any other current musical projects?
CW: After that Orlock tour Alicia and I decided it was time to start having kids. We have three, boy-girl-boy ages 4-8. Our kids are awesome and creative and way more rewarding than getting in a stinky van. We focused our energies almost entirely on our kids for the first few years, doing some art and music here and there. In the last couple of years, however, we've been more prolific, musically. We do some video as well and Alicia is always doing photography and painting. In 2005 we did an Orlock show in RVA with Trevor Thomas from Hex machine on bass and Bret Payne on drums. But mostly we've been 'recording artists' as it's a more appropriate way for us to do what we enjoy without sacrificing our family life.
It's very important to us that we are able to create but we're unwilling to let our family slide in order to do so. We moved to southeast Wisconsin on April 1 of this year. Right before we moved we bought a Mac, which has streamlined everything in regards to recording music. In other words we're able to do more in less time and with less effort. So we win either way.
The Wades, "Movement," 2005
Our friend, RVA artist Seth Ganz, came up with the name Wadebrigade and envisioned a website that would encompass all-things-Wade and serve as a way to keep our friends informed about our family, music, art, etc. Patrick Power hooked it up and we worked together on a design that represented the duality and equality that Alicia and I have in everything we do. It's a repository of Wade-related stuffs: mp3's, images, videos and writings. The main page is our, can I say this word...'blog', which is updated regularly. Right now our name for musical projects is simply The Wades, but I think it's always been obvious that when our kids get older we'd pull a Partridge Family and I think then we'd call ourselves Wadebrigade.
But yeah, everything we do is represented on wadebrigade.org. If not, there's a link that will take you there. [2010 Note: As I said at the beginning of this interview, wadebrigade.org is sadly defunct, at least at the moment. If anyone out there can help me get back in touch with Chris so we can update this article, please let me know by emailing me.]