PunkTalk.com

BLEED THE DREAM BIOGRAPHY

4 members.
Dave Aguilera - guitar
Keith Thompson - bass
Scott Gottleb - drums
Brandon Thomas - vocals
Dave is the longest standing member of the band, hailing from the Los Angeles area. Keith entered the picture second. He made the cross country trek from his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland to take part in Bleed The Dream. He was chosen because of his outstanding talents as a bassist. Next to join the crew was Scott, also a Los Angeles resident. Once the three piece group had been put together, they got serious about their music. They started writing lyrics and having all out jam sessions. They decided that instead of creating a neatly paved highway they would let their music direct them along a hidden dirt path in the woods.

At the start of each song they did not know where it would end. The notes that flowed from their instruments became their map to the end of each song’s path. They let their creativity flow wild, all the while looking for the person necessary to complete their lineup, the vocalist. As January of 2003 approached, Brandon took that role. He had a long standing friendship with Keith and, although they were never in the same band, they played together on numerous occasions. With good words put in from his friend, Brandon was accepted as the final part of Bleed the Dream. He made his way out to Los Angeles to join his band mates and to get started on the band’s first release.

In July of 2003 Bleed The Dream released their first EP on Noize Pollution Records entitled “Awake.” It consists of quality melodic punk and metal. The band recently finished a west-coast tour with bands like Over It, The Higher, and All That’s Left. The guys are currently taking a break from touring, but they will be picking it up at the end of January for a US tour with Pennywise that is set to initiate in Atlanta.

 

Punk rock is an anti-establishment rock music genre and movement that emerged in the mid-1970s. Preceded by a variety of protopunk music of the 1960s and early 1970s, punk rock developed between 1974 and 1977 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where groups such as the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Clash were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement.

Punk bands, eschewing the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock, created short, fast, hard music, with stripped-down instrumentation and often political or nihilistic lyrics. The associated punk subculture expresses youthful rebellion, distinctive clothing styles, a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies, and a DIY (do it yourself) attitude.

Punk rock became a major phenomenon in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s; its popularity elsewhere was more limited. During the 1980s, forms of punk rock emerged in small scenes around the world, often rejecting commercial success and association with mainstream culture. By the turn of the century, punk rock’s legacy had led to the development of the alternative rock movement, and new punk bands popularized the genre decades after its first heyday.

The first wave of punk aimed to be aggressively modern, distancing itself from the bombast and sentimentality of early 1970s rock. According to Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, “In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock ‘n’ roll”. John Holmstrom, founding editor of Punk fanzine recalls feeling “punk rock had to come along because the rock scene had become so tame that [acts] like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans, rock and roll meant this wild and rebellious music”. In critic Robert Christgau’s description, “It was also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth”. Patti Smith, in contrast, suggests in the documentary 25 Years of Punk that the hippies and the punks were linked by a common anti-establishment mentality. In any event, some of punk’s leading figures made a show of rejecting not only mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated predecessors: “No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977″, declared The Clash. That year, when punk broke nationwide in Great Britain, was to be both a musical and a cultural “Year Zero”. Even as nostalgia was discarded, many in the scene adopted a nihilistic attitude summed up by the Sex Pistols slogan “No Future”.

Punk bands often emulate the bare musical structures and arrangements of 1960s garage rock.[8] This emphasis on accessibility exemplifies punk’s DIY aesthetic and contrasts with what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands of the early and mid-1970s. A 1976 issue of the English punk fanzine Sideburns featured an illustration of three chords, captioned “This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band”.

Typical punk instrumentation includes one or two electric guitars, an electric bass, and a drum kit, along with vocals. In the early days of punk rock, musical virtuosity was often looked on with suspicion. According to Punk magazine founder John Holmstrom, punk was “rock and roll by people who didn’t have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music”.

Punk vocals sometimes sound nasal, and are often shouted instead of sung in a conventional sense. Complicated guitar solos are considered self-indulgent and unnecessary, although basic guitar breaks are common. Guitar parts tend to include highly distorted power chords, although some punk bands have taken a surf rock approach with a lighter, twangier guitar tone. A wild, “gonzo” attack is sometimes employed, a style that stretches from Robert Quine, lead guitarist of seminal punk band The Voidoids, back through The Velvet Underground to the 1950s recordings of Ike Turner. Bass guitar lines are often basic and used to carry the song’s melody, although some punk bass players such as Mike Watt put greater emphasis on more technical bass lines. Bassists often use a plectrum rather than fingerpicking due to the rapid succession of notes, which makes fingerpicking impractical. Drums typically sound heavy and dry, and often have a minimal set-up. Production is minimalistic, with tracks sometimes laid down on home tape recorders.

Punk songs are normally between two and two and a half minutes long, though many last for less than a minute. Most early punk songs retained a traditional rock ‘n’ roll verse-chorus form and 4/4 time signature. However, second wave punk bands—including bands from both the post-punk and hardcore punk subgenres—often sought to break from that format. In hardcore, the drumming is considerably faster, with lyrics often half shouted over aggressive guitars. In critic Steven Blush’s description, “The Sex Pistols were still rock’n'roll…like the craziest version of Chuck Berry. Hardcore was a radical departure from that. It wasn’t verse-chorus rock. It dispelled any notion of what songwriting is supposed to be. It’s its own form”.

Punk lyrics are typically frank and confrontational, and often comment on social and political issues. Trend-setting songs such as The Clash’s “Career Opportunities” and Chelsea’s “Right to Work” deal with unemployment, boredom, and other grim realities of urban life. The Sex Pistols songs “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” openly disparaged the British political system. There is also a strain of anti-romantic depictions of relationships and sex, exemplified by the The Voidoids’ “Love Comes in Spurts”. According to Search and Destroy founder V. Vale, “Punk was a total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, right-wing imagery, sexual taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation in such a thorough way.”

With Patti Smith as the groundbreaker, Siouxsie Sioux, The Slits, Pauline Murray, Nina Hagen, Gaye Advert, Poly Styrene, and other punk vocalists, songwriters, and instrumentalists introduced a new brand of femininity to rock music: “They adopted a tough, unladylike pose that borrowed more from the macho swagger of sixties garage bands than from the calculated bad-girl image of bands like The Runaways. They went beyond the leather outfits to the bondage gear of Sioux and the straight-from-the-gutter androgyny of Smith. They articulated a female rage that surpassed the anger of the women’s movement of the sixties”.

The classic punk look among male musicians harkens back to the T-shirt, motorcycle jacket, and jeans ensemble favored by American greasers of the 1950s associated with the rockabilly scene and by British rockers of the 1960s. In the 1980s, tattoos and piercings became increasingly common among punk musicians and their fans.

Preceding the mid-1970s, punk, a centuries-old word of obscure etymology, was commonly used to describe “a young male hustler, a gangster, a hoodlum, or a ruffian”. As Legs McNeil explains, “On TV, if you watched cop shows, Kojak, Baretta, when the cops finally catch the mass murderer, they’d say, ‘you dirty Punk.’ It was what your teachers would call you. It meant that you were the lowest.” The term punk rock was apparently coined by rock critic Dave Marsh in a 1970 issue of Creem, where he used it to describe the sound and attitude of ? and the Mysterians. In June 1972, the fanzine Flash included a “Punk Top Ten” of 1960s albums. That year, Lenny Kaye used the term in the liner notes of the anthology album Nuggets to refer to 1960s garage rock bands such as The Standells, The Sonics, and The Seeds. Bomp! maintained this usage through the early 1970s, also applying it to some of the darker, more primitive practitioners of 1960s psychedelic rock.

By 1975, punk was being used to describe acts as diverse as the Patti Smith Group—with lead guitarist Lenny Kaye—the Bay City Rollers, and Bruce Springsteen. As the scene at New York’s CBGB club (popularly referred to as “CBGBs”) attracted notice, a name was sought for the developing sound. Club owner Hilly Kristal called the movement “street rock”; John Holmstrom credits Aquarian magazine with using punk “to describe what was going on at CBGBs”. Holmstrom, McNeil, and Ged Dunn’s magazine Punk, which debuted at the end of 1975, was crucial in codifying the term. “It was pretty obvious that the word was getting very popular,” Holmstrom later remarked. “We figured we’d take the name before anyone else claimed it. We wanted to get rid of the bullshit, strip it down to rock ‘n’ roll. We wanted the fun and liveliness back.”

 

The origins of New York’s punk scene can be traced back to such sources as late 1960s trash culture and an early 1970s underground rock movement centered around the Mercer Arts Center in Greenwich Village, where the New York Dolls performed. In 1974, the members of a band from Forest Hills, Queens, adopted a common surname. Drawing on such sources as the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, The Beach Boys, and 1960s girl groups, the Ramones condensed rock ‘n’ roll to its primal level: “‘1-2-3-4!’ bass-player Dee Dee Ramone shouted at the start of every song, as if the group could barely master the rudiments of rhythm”.

By the following year, they were playing regularly at the lower Manhattan club CBGB. “When I first saw the Ramones,” critic Mary Harron later remembered, “I couldn’t believe people were doing this. The dumb brattiness.” CBGB was already the regular venue for another band that played very loud, but much more complex music, Television. The band’s bassist/singer, Richard Hell, created a look including “leather jackets, torn T-shirts, and short, ragamuffin hair” credited as the basis for punk visual style. Early in 1975, Hell wrote “Blank Generation”, the scene’s emblematic anthem of escape; a recording of the song by Hell and a new band of his, The Voidoids, would first be released in 1976. In August 1975, Television—with Fred Smith, former bassist for another CBGB band, Blondie, replacing Hell—privately recorded and released a single, “Little Johnny Jewel”. As critic John Walker describes, the record is regarded as “a turning point for the whole New York scene” if not quite for the classic punk sound itself—Hell’s departure left the band “significantly reduced in fringe aggression”. Yet another regular performer at the club was Patti Smith, a veteran of independent theater and performance poetry, who was developing an intellectual, feminist take on rock ‘n’ roll. Her debut album Horses, one of the seminal punk records, was produced by John Cale and released in November 1975.

That same month, Sire Records released the first recording by the Ramones, the single “Blitzkrieg Bop”. The inaugural issue of Punk appeared in December.[46] The new magazine tied together earlier artists such as Velvet Underground lead singer Lou Reed, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls with the array of new acts centered around the CBGB and Max’s Kansas City venues: the Ramones, Television, The Heartbreakers (started in May 1975 by Richard Hell with former Dolls’ guitarist Johnny Thunders, who would oust Hell early in 1976), Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads, and others. The term “punk” initially referred to the scene in general, more than the sound itself. The early New York punk bands represented a broad variety of influences; though the Ramones and Richard Hell’s post-Television bands were establishing a distinct style, punk rock was not yet defined by the standards of minimalism, speed, and arrogance that later emerged.

Along with Nirvana, many of the leading alternative rock artists of the early 1990s acknowledged earlier punk acts (both famous and obscure) as influences, helping to inspire a punk rock resurgence. In 1994, California punk bands like Green Day, The Offspring, Rancid and Bad Religion had substantial crossover success with the aid of MTV and popular radio stations like KROQ-FM. Although Green Day and Bad Religion were already on major labels, indie record companies like Epitaph also benefited from punk’s revival. Green Day and The Offspring’s enormous commercial success paved the way for bankable pop punk bands such as Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, and Sum 41 over the following decade. The Vans Warped Tour and the mall chain store Hot Topic brought punk even further into the U.S. cultural mainstream.

Following the lead of Boston’s Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Long Beach, California’s Sublime, ska punk and ska-core became widely popular in the late 1990s. The original 2 Tone bands had emerged amid punk rock’s second wave, but their music was much closer to its Jamaican roots—”ska at 78 rpm.” Ska punk bands in the third wave of ska created a true musical fusion with punk and hardcore. The success of Rancid’s 1995 album …And Out Come the Wolves helped fuel this ska revival, and ska punk bands such as Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake continued to attract fans into the 2000s. Other bands with roots in hardcore, such as AFI, also had chart-topping records in the new millennium. Celtic punk, with bands such as Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys merging the sound of Oi! and The Pogues, reached broad audiences. The Australian punk rock tradition continued with groups such as Frenzal Rhomb, The Living End, and Bodyjar. A growing number of bands bridged the divide between punk and the rock styles it had originally rebelled against: “The Hold Steady, The Constantines, and…Call Me Lightning have drawn from punk and classic-rock history in equal doses, merging the former’s spitfire energy with the latter’s sense of larger-than-life grandeur.”

With punk’s renewed visibilty came concerns among some in the punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream. Committed participants in the scene argued that by signing to major labels and appearing on MTV, punk bands like Green Day were buying into the system that punk was created to challenge. Many punk fans “despise ‘corporate punk rock’, typified by bands such as Sum 41 and Blink 182″. Such controversies have been part of the punk phenomenon since The Clash were widely accused of “selling out” when they signed with CBS Records in 1977. By the 1990s, punk rock was sufficiently ingrained in Western culture that punk trappings were often used to market highly commercial bands as “rebels”. Marketers capitalized on the style and its connotations of hipness to such an extent that a 1993 ad campaign for an automobile, the Subaru Impreza, claimed that the car was “like punk rock”. Although the commercial mainstream has exploited many elements of punk, numerous underground punk scenes still exist around the world.

Hardcore punk, characterized by fast, aggressive beats and often politically aware lyrics, developed in the United States in the late 1970s. According to author Steven Blush, “Hardcore comes from the bleak suburbs of America. Parents moved their kids out of the cities to these horrible suburbs to save them from the ‘reality’ of the cities and what they ended up with was this new breed of monster”. Hardcore was the American punk standard for much of the 1980s.

Described by critic Jon Savage as “a rush of claustrophobic nihilism”, hardcore emerged in the southern California punk scene in 1978–79, followed shortly in Washington, D.C., and then spreading throughout North America and internationally. Among the earliest hardcore bands, regarded as having made the first recordings in the style, were California’s Black Flag and Middle Class.[95][96] Bad Brains and Teen Idles launched the D.C. scene.[94] They were soon joined by such bands as the Minutemen, The Descendents, Circle Jerks, The Adolescents, and TSOL in southern California, and D.C.’s Minor Threat and State of Alert. Some second wave punk bands, such as San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys, redefined themselves as hardcore. A substantial New York hardcore scene emerged around 1981, led by bands such as Agnostic Front, The Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law and Sick Of It All. Other major hardcore bands included Minneapolis’s Hüsker Dü and Vancouver’s D.O.A. By 1981, hardcore was the dominant punk style in California and much of the rest of North America.

The lyrical content of hardcore songs, typified by Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia”, is often critical of commercial culture and middle-class values. Straight edge bands like Minor Threat, Boston’s SS Decontrol, and Reno, Nevada’s 7 Seconds rejected the self-destructive lifestyles of many of their peers, and built a movement based on positivity and abstinence from cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. In the early 1980s, bands from the American southwest and California such as JFA, Agent Orange, and The Faction helped create a rhythmically distinctive style of hardcore known as skate punk. Skate punk innovators also pointed in other directions: Austin, Texas’s Big Boys helped establish funkcore, while Venice, California’s Suicidal Tendencies had a formative effect on the metal-influenced crossover thrash style. Toward the end of the decade, crossover thrash spawned the metalcore fusion style and the superfast thrashcore subgenre developed in multiple locations.

PLACENTIA, California (AP) — Brent Liles, a former bassist for the 1980s punk rock group Social Distortion, was struck and killed by a truck while riding a bicycle, authorities said Wednesday. He was 43.

Read the CNN Punk Bassist Article.

In the UK, a wide variety of post-punk bands emerged, including The Fall, Joy Division, Gang of Four, and Public Image Ltd. Some bands classified as post-punk, such as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, had been active before the punk scene itself had coalesced; others, such as The Slits and Siouxsie & The Banshees, transitioned from punk into post-punk. The music was often experimental, like that of the New Wave bands; defining them as “post-punk” was a sound that tended to be less pop and more dark and abrasive—sometimes verging on the atonal, as with Wire, and Subway Sect. Drawing inspiration from such art rock sources as Captain Beefheart, David Bowie, and Krautrock, post-punk also explored new lyrical approaches: The Fall’s Mark E. Smith wrote “oblique observations of Northern underclass grotesquerie”.

Post-punk brought together a new fraternity of musicians, journalists, managers, and entrepreneurs; the latter, notably Geoff Travis of Rough Trade and Tony Wilson of Factory, helped to develop the production and distribution infrastructure of the indie music scene that blossomed in the mid-1980s. Smoothing the edges of their style in the direction of New Wave, a number of post-punk bands such as New Order (descended from Joy Division) and U2 crossed over to a mainstream U.S. audience. Others, like Gang of Four, The Raincoats and Throbbing Gristle, who had little more than cult followings at the time, are seen in retrospect as significant influences on modern popular culture.

A number of U.S. artists were retrospectively defined as post-punk; Television’s debut record Marquee Moon, released in 1977, is seen by many as the seminal album in the field. The No Wave movement that developed in New York in the late 1970s, with artists like Lydia Lunch, is often treated as the phenomenon’s U.S. parallel. The later work of Ohio protopunk pioneers Pere Ubu is also commonly described as post-punk. One of the most influential American post-punk bands was Boston’s Mission of Burma, who brought abrupt rhythmic shifts derived from hardcore into a highly experimental musical context. In 1980, Australia’s Boys Next Door moved to London and changed their name to The Birthday Party, which would evolve into Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. King Snake Roost and other Australian bands would further explore the possibilities of post-punk. Later art punk and alternative rock musicians would find diverse inspiration among these predecessors, New Wave and post-punk alike.