The Legend of Anal Probe Part 1

There is a lot of history with this band, strange since they have done next to nothing…

I signed up to play at the Battle of the Bands before there was even a band.

In 2005 I somehow convinced my brother Mike and our childhood friend Ian to join the band and play Long Beach State (the second largest university in California) As with many things I do, I think I’m funny and in my mind this was no exception and I thought playing this show would be hilarious.

So the day of the event I bought an inexpensive Pearl starter drum kit for like $300 and dry ice. Mike and Ian came over to my place. We wrote a song and rehearsed it a few times just hours before we were set to go on stage. I previously convinced the organizers to let us go on last which gave us just a little more time to write and practice the song even as the event started.

Just before we started loading up my Toyota Corolla my amp blew, the same amp my brother was going to use during the performance. Highly problematic for a band with a drummer/singer and two electric guitar players. Not sure what we were going to do, my dad let us use his 10 watt, 8” speaker amplifier and we were good to go. So we all pile in the car and leave.

As we showed up, it was hard not to notice other bands either leaving the event or unloading for their set. This was at a time when Hardcore music was all the rage, think Avenged Sevenfold before they were Avenged Sevenfold. Everyone was unloading trailers full of gear. Full guitar stacks, multiple guitars, insane bass and drum rigs. Upon seeing this Ian was nervous and wanted to leave. I didn’t blame him at all, we looked like three fools compared to everyone else. I talked him into still doing it for fun, not to care. And at the end of the day, how many pf these people was he ever going to see again? A grand total of two, Mike and myself.

So we walk inside and check in. There were two bands in front of us; they seemed to have known each other and were friendly. They were going trough the list of bands seeing if they knew any of them. I mean listen you are at a Battle of the Bands, you want to win. You want to know who you are going up against, do you need your A game or do you need your AAA game? They get to the bottom of the list and say “Anal Probe?”

Now the way they said it was as if they had a high level of concern. They didn’t know who we were. All they kept saying is “these guys must be really heavy!” I had mentioned before this was in the age of Hardcore music, and these two bands were Hardcore indeed bands.

By now we hear this and feel for the most part pretty confident. Mostly because we were absolutely nothing like what they were thinking. We felt we had the element of surprise, not just on them, on everyone in the concert hall.

We are waiting in the wait room and it was time to meet the sound people. Like this was all professionally done, the people that were running the event were all music majors, recording engineers. You know college students that want to professionally work in the music/entertainment business. The conversation went a little something like this:

So our sound guy says “You Anal Probe?”

We say “yes”

Sound guy “I need to check your gear”

We point to a small cart.

Sound guy “is this all?”

We say “yes.”

Sound guy “who is singing?

I tell him “I am and I’m playing the drums too.”

Sound guy “you have two guitars but I only see one amp.”

I pull out the 8” wonder show it to him and say “I think you need to mic this one.”

By now the sound guy knows something good is about to happen. His eyes got big and he had the biggest smile I have ever seen busts up laughing and calls in the person running the sound at the front of house.

Front of house guy comes down, and sound guy says “This is Anal Probe and we need to make sure they sound better than anyone else!” Shows him our equipment and the front of house guy says “holy shit, we are on it!”

So we all do that bro handshake, you know the clap that goes into a hug thing. We knew there was going to be something special happening that night.

It’s our time to go on. Our equipment is set up and tested. We make the slow walk out, I have a Dixie cup with water and the dry ice I bought earlier in the day. As I make the slow walk with sparse smoke coming form the cup.

We settle on our instruments.

The Hardcore bands that wanted to know who/what Anal Probe is/was were sitting in the front row. They laughed a little bit when they saw us.

Amps on, drum beat happening, “singing” going on. We dominated for about two minutes.

The song ends, Ian runs off the stage as fast as he can.

But something happened.

The entire room of probably 500 plus people go insane. Standing ovation. People could not believe what they saw. It was to the point they were asking us for more, in which I replied “we only just started as a band today, We don’t have anymore songs.”

Which was 100% true.

The sound guys are all going crazy loving it. The other bands mostly didn’t like us, probably because the crowd went ape shit for us and didn’t for them. And as we started taking our gear down, a tall thin guy in a second hand suit and a scarf comes running from the crowd.

“Anal Probe my name is Michael and I need to interview you for the Long Beach Union!”

We look at each other pretty damn surprised. So we strike a deal with him, if they took our official band photo we would do the interview.

I remember the day the newspaper came out, I grabbed as many as I could hold. We were pretty happy.

Oh yeah, we did not win Battle of the Bands. Turns out that the actual contest was a month later and the event we played at as to narrow the field to five. Basically half the people voting really wanted us to participate and the other half were concerned we would shit on the actual event. I guess we will never know.

After that, I graduated, we all had work and in some cases families. It took 15 years for chapter two…