I first saw Hed1st play about three years ago in a small biker bar located just off the highway in the nowhere town of East Greenbush, NY. Mothers Roadhouse, rumored to be a Hell’s Angels hangout, was the kind of place you didn’t go unless you had a reason. A roadside sign welcomed the passers by, but the long sloping driveway that led to a muddy parking lot populated by nothing but a few Harleys said ‘beware’. Getting out of the car I was filled with the kind of nervous anticipation you save for those special moments you know you are going to remember for the rest of your life. I had no idea what I was walking into…
Hed1st began booking weekly shows at Mothers and it seemed like every punk band traveling the east coast played there one Friday or another. With many of their songs lasting longer than two minutes, their sound is more reggae punk than 1-2-3-4, where the standard guitar, drum and bass are occasionally joined by a notable violin or trumpet. They have been known to drink more beer than their audience but their live sets are filled with a truth seldom seen in live performance today. I became friends with Doug, Matt and Geoffrey over the next few years and when I heard they were putting out a new full length, I called them up.
Tell me about the new album.
Doug: It’s called Pot in the Parking Lot. The title is about Mothers Roadhouse, a biker bar that we used to play at all the time. It’s a bunch of songs off the old ep and some new ones.
Geoff: Songs that we have been playing for a while but we haven't had the means to record. We thought Mothers Roadhouse would be a good muse because we had been playing there for so long. She closed down in the summer of 2003 and we haven't really had the chance to pay our homage yet. We're hoping to do that with this record.
How is this recording different from the others that you've done?
Geoff: Oh shit. On so many levels it’s been different.
Doug: We have a new producer named Rick and the studio is sweet. In comparison to the first cd that we recorded in four hours at a studio in Rensselaer or the EP that we recorded at WRPI.
Geoff: RBO studios, Averill Park, NY. It’s a big hall, the equipment is amazing. It’s fucking fresh. Also, our usage of old school street punk and street rock and roll and refining our reggae-ness.
Doug: And adding other styles like the hardcore and hip hop [influences] that are on it. Just to switch it up a bit so people know that we can do anything.
Geoff: A lot of the same anti-message we've had on the last full length or the EP. Our friends, bud, booze, hanging out. We're all a little older now, we all have jobs, looking at the career thing, so a couple of the songs are about the struggle of making the jump from being headstrong to having to get more practical.
Tell me the story of how the band was formed.
Doug: That’s a tricky one.
Geoff: We can't say too much about that.
Doug: We don't want to incriminate anybody. Lets just say we all met trying to score some herb and we realized that we all played different instruments. So we started getting together, smoking weed and jamming at Matt’s house. He didn't really do too much at the time. I had just dropped out of Hudson Valley Community College. It was my second year of community college and I realized that school sucks and I wanted to be in a band instead.
Geoff: I had just moved back from Rhode Island, I'm from Albany originally but I lived there for a year. I had just enrolled in culinary school and was looking to get music started again because I hadn’t been playing in Rhode Island at all.
Where does the name Hed1st come from?
Doug: Before I started going to Hudson Valley I spent a year going to school in Westchester, outside of NYC. I knew a few kids but I didn't really have a band together so I spent a lot of my time thinking of cool melodies and names of bands. Hed1st is just one that always stuck in my mind so when I met Geoff and Matt in 2000 that was the name I suggested. I thought it would just be head first but when they decide it should be hed1st I thought it kind of rolled off the tongue nicely.
Geoff: Plus it’s a very graffiti-able name. The whole idea of taking everything head first, it had a nice underlying plot to it.
Doug: There are a lot of ways you can look at the name of the band and just toy with it.
What other bands have you been in?
Doug: Aside from Hed1st I was only in a couple of high school bands. They were really bad. I played one show with each band and we sucked and that was about it. After I graduated, I went to college and didn't do anything musically until I met the guys.
Geoff: Matty was definitely a guitar player before he told us he had a drum set we forced him to play drums. It is not by his own choice that he is behind a drum set. He started playing when we started the band so you gotta give him mother fuckin’ credit. I was in the Rif Rafs most recently, an Albany punk band. I was in the Mixers where I played trumpet, an old school ska band. They were really good and I was way too young but I worked it out somehow and I was in a high school ska band called the Conspirators.
Doug: There’s a funny story about the Conspirators. When I was about 15, before I had been in any other bands, I went to a place called the Underground which was just a small café.
Geoff: An all ages club.
Doug: Yeah, and I went there when I was 15, there was a band called the Conspirators playing and I skanked my ass off all night. When Hed1st started, Geoff and I got talking and I mentioned that night to him and we both realized that he was in the Conspirators when I saw them play. So its funny that four years later we met up again.
Who is Jon? [the title of the song featured on the one cent comp]
Doug: Jon is my best friend from the later years of high school and I still hang out with him. He's from Pittsfield, Massachusetts where I went to school my senior year. After I came back from Westchester, I hung out with him everyday at his squat, the attic of this abandoned building. We'd go skating during the day because neither of us really worked. I had a weekend job but that was it. So we'd go skating everyday and hangout at the squat. To this day we get really drunk and just wasted and have a good time. So he's one of my best friends.
Tell me a story about Mothers, something that sticks out in your mind.
Geoff: Oh shit, couple of times…
Doug: I’ll start. Mothers Roadhouse was a Hell’s Angels bar in East Greenbush. It closed down in 2003. A woman named Fran owned it and we played our first show there in 2001.
Geoff: You gotta keep in mind this is like a 63 year old southern biker woman from Arkansas.
Doug: We played our first show there new year’s eve 2001. She said to us, “y’all boys can down anytime you like and play shows.” So eventually it got to the point where we were playing shows every weekend; setting up shows with bands that were on tour. Pretty much just getting fucking hilariously wasted. It was dollar drafts, free beer for us because we set up the shows. Sometimes we had 150 kids there and sometimes there were three kids dancing. But it was the weekend headquarters to play shows. Fran was the owner, she would have church there on Sundays and she would preach there. And the rest of the week she’d serve beers to the bikers and anyone else who would not be too sacred to go down there because it was a Hells Angels bar. And every time we would play she would be drinking coors light with salt. Dancing her ass off at every single show, she loves us.
Geoff: One night we were playing, I think it was a biker party of some sort, and there was a very drunken biker woman there. And for some reason she was either all about us or all about the fact that she was drunk. It was the first time that anyone had ever flashed us and it was definitely like a 53 year old biker woman that showed us her boobs. That is the best story that comes to mind immediately.
Doug: That was awesome.
Geoff: A little gross.
Doug: I don’t remember that story at all, but I’m with it.
Geoff: You’re a liar.