Posts Tagged ‘rahne’

Yep, that’s me, approximately AHEM AHEM years ago at 19 or 20, playing guitar and singing with Rahne, my Nine Inch Nails-like musical project about which you’ve probably read too much here. I had no idea this photo existed until my old bass player, Brian “Sterling” Kirsch, posted it on Facebook somewhere.

This is when Rahne was still just me and Sterling backed by a cassette player (fancy!), and our shows were more about dress-up than, um, music. I mean, the music was serious, but so was the planning that went into glamming up. This particular image was shot at Cyber-City Cafe, which was a gay-owned and very gay-friendly internet cafe at Flamingo and Maryland Parkway. And we were a gay-friendly band. That probably explains why this night, I wore a tight baby tee that read “SLUT” (now I remember!) on the front. I believe later I added the Rahne logo above it. And I think I still have it somewhere.

And yes, I was wearing sunglasses at night.

Somewhere, I have this show recorded on cassette. It includes a terrible cover of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” long before everyone else covered “Darling Nikki.” If I find it, I’ll attempt to share a digital version with you. Because you’re full of self-loathing.

We’ve looked at the genesis of my not-quite-musical capabilities leading up to the failure-to-launch career of The Jason Only Project and the mentally challenged exploits of all that is Baug. Now, as we continue this wordy journey through my noise making evolution, we return to a band which I’ve discussed here previously, Rahne.

I was at a rehearsal studio recently to interview local band Cherry Hill for the Las Vegas Weekly. These guys have been around the Las Vegas music scene as long as I have, so we shared a number of common experiences with venues, gigs, studios, etc. from back in the day. I figure some of those remembrances are as good a place to start as anywhere.

Yes, I was wearing all black leather. Why do you ask?

As I mentioned in the last post about Rahne, the band was plagued by issues from the start, beginning with the, um, lack of stable band membership outside of yours truly. Despite only releasing approximately less than 15 songs publicly across two cassette-only albums (“Beautiful Sadness” and “Dead Air”), one cassette single (hell if I remember the song) and one live cassette (“The Anti-Goths Live”), I actually wrote and, for the most part, recorded about 50 original songs during the 18 months or so that Rahne existed. The original demo tape I handed to first drummer Phoenix Ladd must have had 15 songs on it by itself. I guess my point here is that I spent a lot of time writing and recording, but not so much building the band, networking or rehearsing. And I think that project never reached its full potential because of it. Well, and because of other factors …

When Rahne was just a two-piece group backed by a tape machine, we could practice anywhere. Usually it was in the University District apartment I shared with best bud Jason Feinberg, which also doubled as headquarters for the multi-band collective to which we both belonged, Still Hour Productions (itself a story for another blog post). Sometimes it was at bassist Sterling’s cinder-block-walled apartment a few blocks away. But when Brian Pfiefer and Ryan Couevas joined the band on drums and second guitar, respectively, we had to find a new place to practice.

We bounced around various hourly rehearsal studios, including a stint at the Noiz Factory, a ramshackle space in Vegas’ warehouse district. It was there that Sterling’s drug problems became more of a problem than even before. The weathered musician had some issues — I recall him always having to borrow bass gear because he often had to pawn his stuff, presumably to pay for his habits — and by the time the full band was paying for practice space, he’d waste our time/money by showing up … and then passing out. After a while, we brought our friend Dru Broils, bassist of Morgana Athena, to rehearsals with us, where he’d often fill in on bass when Sterling was incapacitated. This was some mild foreshadowing, of course, because eventually that group of musicians — in a different configuration — would comprise four-fifths of Morgana’s lineup a year later.

Not much new material was debuted in the four-piece Rahne lineup. All of our music, up to that point, was developed in one way: I wrote and recorded songs, and then gave them to the guys to learn. It was very Smashing Pumpkins in that way. But once the final lineup was in place, we really only “wrote” as a group one new song, “Asphyxiation,” which was this quasi-metal thing that came together during a jam at our pal Dave Taylor’s grandparents’ house, and I think we only practiced it that one time before debuting it at a show. Otherwise, I delivered one more song to the band during the fall of 1996, “Salvation,” for which Ryan came up with about the most awesome Church rip-off guitar riff ever, and one day, I’ll grow the balls to ask him permission to use it again.

We only played a handful of shows throughout the end of ’96 and beginning of ’97, culminating in a tech-problem-plagued spring show at Cafe Espresso Roma in which we played with Morgana Athena. At the end of the show, I pretty much declared the band “dead.” At least one or two of the other guys were going to quit anyway, so it worked out, and of course, there’s some minor irony in the fact that Rahne broke up after playing its first show with Morgana Athena, after which the latter essentially swallowed the former.

Admittedly, I was going through some personal issues at the time that didn’t help things, and after a fairly major life adjustment a few months later, the next chapter of my musical journey was ready to unfold. But that’s for Part Four of this series. Until then, I leave you with a live performance of one of Rahne’s earliest songs, “Jesus Hitler,” from our show at Backstage at Boomer’s in December 1996. When Rahne started, all of my songs were about either religion or Nazis, so this is pretty much the apex of combining the two. As raw as it is, I kinda think I was at my peak lyrically (I rhymed “wants” and “cunts,” come on!), so, you know, try to sit through all four minutes of it (there’s a pay off at the end):

Two kids wearing a lot of black

Through the magic of the internets, a friend recently posted some old photos of an early performance from one of my first bands, an electro-goth-rock project called Rahne. I knew these photos existed, but I never knew what became of them. Ah, Facebook, you’re a bastard, aren’t you?

Rahne started off as an outlet for the bad poetry which I’d been writing and reading at open mics since age 16. If you check out the photo to the right, that’s me on the right being all emo with the guitar, and Jason Feinberg on the left, looking like he’s intensely working the pitch wheel on the keyboard. We’d been writing and performing music together since high school, but it was mostly Jason jamming out on the guitar and me crooning over it. I didn’t really play any instrument, fancying myself more a Jim Morrison type of poet-singer.

Well, my predisposition to doing everything myself started early, and when it came to music, that was no different. At about 18, I started tinkering around in my bedroom with an old-school Casio keyboard, dubbing rough melodies and sounds over pre-programmed rhythm patterns to create nascent songs to which I could custom-fit my angst-filled, teenage lyrics.
Eventually, Jason and I got an apartment together, and with that came his MIDI-capable keyboard connected to a Macintosh computer with sequencing software. Even for 1995, this was a dream set-up. It was like a whole new world opened up to me. I re-recorded some of those early demos, and started writing new songs quite prolifically. I also had access to one of Jason’s guitars, and painfully at first, taught myself enough guitar to record some rudimentary two-string chords on the new songs. The sound went from New Order-ish to Nine Inch Nails-ish, and I was cocky enough to think the songs were good enough to take to the streets, and so I made up a few demo tapes and went about recruiting a live band.

Jason reluctantly agreed to play guitar, as I was not skilled enough to do so myself, let alone play AND sing at the same time. I ran into an old friend during a show at the Huntridge Theater one night, Phoenix Ladd, who played drums in the all-girl punk band Jenn’s Cancer. I gave her a copy of the demo, and surprisingly, she was willing to pound the skins. Additionally, she had a friend, Jane Pastor, who could come in on bass. I thought it was a pretty good lineup, if it worked — two girls, two guys, a lot of attitude.

Jason and I grabbed our equipment and drove out to the northern edge of the Las Vegas Valley, where Phoenix lived with her family. It was a sprawling ranch house, perfect for late-night rocking. We met Jane, we hung out, smoked cigarettes, whatever, and eventually got around to trying to “jam.” Of course, I was providing the songs in full — all the drums, guitars and bass had already been worked out — the band just had to follow. I remember how awesome it was to hear Phoenix — who, at the time, was a pretty rudimentary punk drummer — bring the digitally sequenced drums to life, and how good it felt just to be performing, even in her makeshift practice space.

However, Jane disappeared and Phoenix decided to move to Seattle or Portland to attend school. Rahne was falling apart before it even started. But did that matter to me? Of course not. I booked a gig with a few other friends at a Cafe Espresso Roma in the middle of December 1995. It took some arm-twisting, but I managed to convince Jason to play guitar along with me. However, he didn’t have time to learn the songs (silly college finals!) and showed up to the gig with a brand-new guitar that kept slipping out of tune, so Rahne’s debut appearance was pretty much me poorly playing and singing five or six moody gothic rock songs while Jason noodled out of key on his metal guitar.

But glutton for punishment that I am, I persevered.

Jason and Pj get gothy on your ass.

We regrouped. I got better at guitar, even beginning to make regular appearances at open-mic acoustic nights. Jason switched from guitar to keyboards. A lot of goth acts at the time (and historically) were two- or three-person deals, often backed by a drum machine or other sequenced tracks. We went the lo-tech route. I dumped all of our drums, bass and effects for performance onto a cassette tape, and we’d run the tape player through the P.A., while Jason played the keyboard parts live and I played guitar and sang. And when we reappeared at Enigma Garden Cafe the following March, it clicked. We played two sets with something like 16 songs and managed to stimulate the packed venue.

By the time we played our third gig, a bass player in attendance named Sterling offered to join the band, and by the next gig, Jason had bowed out to work on his own project, Wail of Sumer, and it was just Sterling and I (along with our magical tape deck) for the rest of the summer, until we recruited a new drummer, Brian Pfeifer, and a second guitarist, my high school pal Ryan Couevas.

That new incarnation of Rahne afforded me the freedom to expand our musical oeuvre a bit, going a little more mainstream rock, and even a bit funky (I was on a Prince kick at the time). It alienated the goth fan base somewhat, but also allowed us to move from the Vegas cafe scene to the bar scene … before imploding for a variety of reasons in April 1997.

When all was said and done, in its 16-month existence, Rahne produced two “studio” cassettes, one live tape, a few singles, nabbed some college radio airplay and goth club spins, and among some better press coverage, was named “Worst Rock Act in Vegas” by Andrew Kiraly at the CityLife (tying with Bangkok Shock). That’s not a bad run for something that started as me tinkering with a Nintendo-sounding toy on the floor of my bedroom.