Douglas Cameron Remedies CD

It all began in early 1991 in Seattle. A few of us, friends in the local scene, were getting together to jam in the basement of our rented slacker-house at 717 Denny Way on Capitol Hill (now an apartment highrise). We were burned out on our puttering bands, but were rediscovering the joy of rocking thanks to those many Hefe Weizen-powered evenings.

In July of 1991 we booked two four-hour sessions at Reciprocal recording studio in the Ballard district, hoping to capture some of that power on tape. Unfortunately, though we'd jammed plenty we hadn't really written any songs. As a result we wasted about half the first day trying to pull inspiration out of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was meant to be in tribute to Bachman Turner Overdrive, one of our childhood fave's. We'd heard they always ate KY-fried in the studio. But we just got stomach aches.

Maybe it had provided some help, because we somehow managed to piece together five tunes in the remaining hours of our session. We also came up with a band name. While listening to the rough takes we were also brainstorming for a name to write on the edge of our Ampex tape box. Something like Motörhead. After a time someone shouted Pothead! Pure chance, of course.

Goin' to EuropeOnly two weeks later Brad and Jeff packed their entire belongings into a storage locker. They were going camping in Europe with two friends from Bonn, still Germany's capitol at the time. The girls picked them up at the Amsterdam airport in a VW Golf they had rented for their vacation. The original plan was to drive through Yugoslavia to Greece. But the war had broken out in Yugoslavia so they decided to risk France and Spain instead.

We ran into a German punk band at a campsite in the Basque land. They had graffiti'd their band name, which included Accused, onto the side of their old Deutsche-Post van. The name caught our attention and we decided to strike up a conversation by asking if they had heard of the Seattle (an unknown village still) band „The Accused'. Anyway, we learned that they had packed their backline, a PA system and a generator into their van and were simply traveling around, setting up in parks or wherever and whenever they found an opportunity to play. We were convinced that touring would be the perfect way to begin establishing our new band. For months we'd been discussing the practicality of touring in a land where hundreds of larger cities sat in close proximity to one another, in contrast to Seattle where you had to make a long and costly trip to get beyond Portland, Oregon.