Sick Feeling put out a record in January of 2015, and it was off streaming entirely by 2018 or so. It’s now back on streaming, just in time for then ten year anniversary to not be the eleven year anniversary.

I met Don Devore through our mutual friend Sam Velde, in a booth in a bar in New York.  I’d met Sam the month before, taking care of my sick Dad and helping out my Mom in Berkeley. We linked up a second day in a row, and he asked if I wanted to do a hardcore band, I said yes, and he asked me for my list of band names. “Everyone’s got a list of band names.” Sick Feeling was the easy winner. My Dad had woken up one morning with one, and got the diagnosis a week after that. He would pass before we recorded the demo. We kept hanging out that night, and the next day I texted my friend Alan Yuch, who played drums, to come to the party we were at, he was in. Our first practice Alan and I sat in a cluttered space, Don walked in rubbing his face. “The thing about us is we’re going to be perfect.” We wrote a three song demo in a week or two, found a bass player named Danny Wood, and then did nothing for six months. Then we finally got it together, the shows came in fits and starts. 

Don’s roommate Geoff Rickly graciously offered to put out our music. A mysterious figure was financing his label, very hands off. We were having trouble getting booked so we built a 12’x’12’ soundproof box in a gallery and had an art show. The artist Kamau Patton kindly agreed to turn the music in the box into a soundscape for the gallery. Our friends showed photos. Groups of 5 or 6 chose one of our songs (we had like sick or seven at that point) off the “menu” and we did that, and so on and so forth for three hours straight. Apparently the art show was good, but we never left the box. After that, Ethan from Terrible asked if we wanted to be on Terrible, and we all came to an agreement to do the thing together. 

I don’t remember writing the album really, just an endless montage of the practice space. I remember the band practiced a lot more than we played, and it always sounded good and wild, and the space was always dark, and we always started sometime after nine. Everyone in the band was having a hard time off on their own, I think the practices were good for us as people. I do remember writing a bunch of the good lyrics walking around this affluent North Chicago suburb my aunt lived in. 

Recording the album was cool. There was a Ms Pac Man machine. Don sold me on using an SM7B explaining that “Michael Jackson used it for Thriller,” Which is true, and it stopped me from complaining before I started, and I was about to start. It was a good feeling. We mastered the record on the Neve that George Martin used for the White Album. I read later that George Martin was disappointed with the mix on the White Album, and we didn’t like the mix for our record either. Stuart Richardson swooped in and mastered it on his laptop in Florida and it was exactly what we wanted. Thank you again, Stu. 

Danny, the bass player who was the last to join, was the first to leave, and he was fair for doing so. We kept writing songs, talked about a second record, I wanted it to be our ” Ray of Light.” Looking back, that was a pretty stunning mix of delusion and grandeur to vocalize after putting out a record that was reviewed everywhere and embraced nowhere. We did not put in the road time. You do a thing a lot for a while, then you do it a little less, and then one day you realize you don’t do it anymore. For years after, the occasional friend would send me a picture of the record in a store. They’re like $7 tops if you want one. 

What happened with Collect Records is part of public record. Very much at the top of the discourse for a year or so, it’s nestled into the appropriate slotting of “curious stories”. With the dissolution of Collect, the record went off streaming, and we just let it sit that way. We didn’t all stop having problems and other lives when the band kinda just stopped. I didn’t have the masters. Ethan didn’t have the masters. Geoff didn’t have the masters. I thought I’d asked Norm, who was, aside from everything else, Collect Record’s label manager,  but I hadn’t. Of course Norm Brannon had the masters. Thank you Norm. 

The whole thing kind of blends together. The highs were cool, the lows were cool too.