Quicksand

Quicksand - Slip (1993)


Quicksand - How Soon Is Now [Smiths Cover] (1993 - B side from the Dine Alone Single)


Quicksand - S/T EP [only one song, Clean Slate] (1991)

Nothing gets me hotter and hornier more than Quicksand. And frankly, you can take Manic Compression and stick it where the sun dont shine. Eh, its good, but nothing close to the power of Slip. The funny part is when I first purchased Slip, I didnt like it. It wasnt heavy enough.

I entered middle school with a healthy dose of classic rock under my belt. (Thanks mom!) and this in turn led to a middle school obsession with hard rock music, namely Motley Crue. I really didnt think anything could be better than Motley Crue. That is, until Guns and Roses came along with Appetite for Destruction. Now, my young mind couldnt grasp all the stops this band had pulled out; It's So Easy meant nothing more to me than "ease of use", like, "that math test was easy!", and I certainly only thought of Mr Brownstone as some cranky old man that lived next door and clearly couldnt put up with these young ruffians rocking out all the time. Ha! Yeah, I think around that time my friend Wayne attempted to get me into Slayer - Reign in Blood and that was just too soon for me. The satanic cover art scared me. I come from a catholic family. The fear of god was born in me and took many drugs to finally be quelled forever, but in middle school, evil was ever present. The few kids smoking pot, the even fewer girls having, gasp! sex!. These were different times, the very end of different times as it turns out. But I digress.

So Slayer was out. Megadeth and Metallica? They were in. Metallica especially. I was getting into the sound of palm muted guitars and Metallica had them in spades. It was around this time that I started listening to Seton Halls WSOU Pirate Radio. The metal shows were on late at night and me, being a youngun, had to hit the hay on the earlier side. So I would set up a tape and dub one side of a tape hoping to get something good. The next morning I would be all excited and head to the bus stop with my monolithic walkmen, which was about the size of an average lunchbox and I would be all giddy as they played bands like Overkill, Iron Maiden, King Diamond and the likes. These were great times. (Consequently I revisited Slayer around this time and found much to like and little to be scared of. I just needed to ease myself into it. I even think it was my fast growing love of Slayer that helped me digest Converge only a few short years later)

The most memorable of these occasions was when I heard a spot by a band called Biohazard; "We are Biohazard, from Brooklyn, NY and you are listening to WSOU Pirate Radio." They sounded so badass. The song was Blue Blood and in that same show they played some Sick of It All. I should mention that this is now falling around the end of 8th grade. Motley Crue, as epic and amazing as they were, had fallen by the wayside in favor of heavier music. It only took a few hardcore songs for me to develop an obsession with heavy and fast palm muted guitars mixed with attitude. I was also starting to become more serious about skateboarding. So this angsty badass sound resonated in me even more so than ever.

I owe a lot of my musical discoveries to Thrasher Magazine. Without them and WSOU I probably would have never of heard of hardcore or punk music. Or maybe just much later than I did. I didnt have an older bro or sis to get me into things, so Thrasher was my sibling. I couldnt go on line and surf the net to find out more about Sick of It All or Biohazard, and I didnt have anyone to ask, but it was clear that my life could not go on unless I had a real solid copy of this immense sound. It was almost as if it were a dream, I didnt really hear it, and I half expected it not to exist.

It must've have been the incredibly shitty Bazaar Mall in Mount Kisco, New York that produced the fruits of my searching labor. There I found a tape of Blood, Sweat and No Tears. The faux shattered glass graphic with the photos of people going apeshit and the awesome type face. I was kinda scared, but I purchased it with my friend Fooch. (I still have that tape. One of three that I can let go of) I can say with almost complete honesty that I never looked back from that day. Hardcore was what I wanted and all I could do now was find more and skate like no tomorrow. This led the march to bands like Minor Threat, 7 Seconds, Dag Nasty and The Circle Jerks. Between my friends Fooch and Joe, we amassed a nice little cluster of bands. Fooch tended towards the more brooding and brought in Type-O-Negative. Joe tended toward the punkier and introduced us to NOFX, Pennywise and Green Day and I managed the straight and narrow, searching in vain for Youth of Today and Gorilla Biscuits.

It wasnt until 1993 that I found the holy grail of musical existence. And that came in the form of Trash American Style. A one stop shop for everything underground. They even preferred to work on a barter system! They had 7"s from bands I never heard of, LP's and CD's, used and new, and stickers and anything a little punk grommet could want (and a lot of GG Allin stuff as well, which always irked me). The first thing I bought was Youth Of Today's Break Down the Walls. I went back maybe a week later and bought Start Today and thus ensued a weekly habit of purchasing records from every band that sounded cool, had a cool record cover, or was on a label that I knew was good. I ordered catalogs from every label that I could and ordered as much as my meager bookstore job would allow.

But back to the matter at hand. We're still in 1993, and obviously I had heard that Walter Schreifels had a new band. Not so new in 1993, but still new to me and most of the world. I bought the tape with Fooch again, and I remember giving it a listen for the first time in Irvington NY. We were being hooligans and doing really bad graffiti and I just wasnt into it. I felt like I had wasted my money. Where was the punch? Where was the heavy? In any case, I found the song Freezing Process to be pretty intriguing and I slowly started getting really into it. I think Unfulfilled was the next song to catch my ear and my friend Joe was all excited about Too Official and Transparent. Thus began our love affair with Quicksand.

We went to see them play with Rage Against the Machine in NYC in the fall of 93. I had hurt my knee earlier that year and pounding around that night I did what has now become the bane of my existence and popped my knee cap out. My enthusiasm outweighed my pain and I managed a hobbling bounce for the rest of the show. State of the Nation played that show as well, and of course I purchased that too. (wonder what ever happened to that album?) It wasnt until early the next year that I got to see Quicksand again, this time headlining, with Orange 9mm and Foundation opening for them (the old band Foundation, not the new one) Well that was a hell of a show! My knee didn't pop and I got all frenzied while Chaka and the guys from Foundation got all frenzied too. I really felt like a part of some amorphous powerful being of angst and change. It was immense and I still cant stifle the smile that comes to my face when I think of how that opened up the world of hardcore to me. Not just in the sense of songs and listening, but the fact that other people were into this, other bands were like this and the shows were cheap, you just had to pay attention and find them and maybe travel a little bit. Man, Quicksand set off some of the best days of my life. Skatebording, seeing shows, buying records. That was the life.

Enjoy these. I have never heard another band like it my life. And even if I did, it doesnt have that history attached to it. I want to be 75 years old and still smile about it, listening to Freezing Process or Unfulfilled and getting my creaky bones moving again.