Looking Back with Drew-Beat

We interviewed Drew Beat along with Matt BOLD at Matt's house in K-Town about five years back for a video that was to be included in the planned Livewire Release of a live BOLD set from The Anthrax in summer 1989 (and their final show there). Obviously this never happened, Rev did the discography, and another good idea was scrapped. We filmed the whole interview, and it was probably 3 straight hours of great talk about the band and just NYHC in general. We knew Matt could always recall great stuff. But none of us really knew what to expect with Drew. Would he be into talking about this stuff? Would he remember much? Would he be wearing pirate beatnik clothing and smoking a clove cigarette? Yes, yes, and no were the respective answers to those questions, and the interview ended up being incredible. Drew had a great memory, and he and Matt combined well to tell the whole story.

We are going to post random excerpts of what Drew had to say over the course of how many months or years it takes to get it all up here. We figured we would start with his memories of the Anthrax show that was gonna be released by Livewire and that later era of BOLD. And if you are wondering why we didn't include what Matt had to say, well just stay tuned, because we have something else coming from him shortly.
"Wise Up." -DCXX

I remember that last show we played at The Anthrax, summer of '89... we had a lot of problems at that show with the Zulu situation. Tom and I had said we didn't know if we wanted Zulu to play with us, because he hadn't played with us in a while and Porcell was playing with us on that tour for two weeks and we were solid. This was the only show Zulu could play with us. Tom and I really wanted to sound tight and heavy, and we wanted to show people all the new BOLD stuff the best it could be. I guess this whole thing with me and Tom was that we wanted to really be good and pro, that's where we were coming from at the time, we kinda saw eye to eye like that. Matt was kinda on the fence, because he was more caring about the situation, he saw what we were saying but knew Zulu wanted to play, even if it might be a little riskier. Tom and I just wanted the music tight. Porcelly was really pissed though at me and Tom, he really went off on us, "you fuckin' assholes, you wanna be rockstars! What are you trying to do? Don't give me this bullshit! Just let the kid play!" He was really fired up, I mean he did not want to play over Zulu. So based on that, even though Zulu hadn't played the songs in forever, we had him do it. I mean, if we let Porcell play he probably would have messed the songs up on purpose. Matt was like "hey, whatever you decide." But it made for a great set because we were all amped up with all this tension when we went out there, kinda all pissed off with all this energy. It was a really good show, just really fired up. I haven't heard a lot of the live stuff from that time, but I remember that being a great show...lots of friends, the Anthrax, and the band tension.

I think if Zulu or Tim played on that last record it would have been a hell of a lot different. Because it was really just me, Matt, and Tom writing and playing it. Zulu and Tim had a regression at that time, they kinda pulled back into high school mode at that time, whereas the three of us were trying to have a musical mindframe and push things. I don't think it would have worked with them involved, we kinda pushed them out of it. Those guys went on vacation or some dumbass shit or something and we just planned the recording and it worked itself out. For Tom it worked because it was all him on guitar, nobody was really there to clog anything up from him being able to be creative and go for it. I'm happy with that record, I'm really happy with that record and to me, what I think it did for the hardcore sound. Years later playing with Into Another, I saw bands playing some stuff that I thought was influenced by that record. I could be wrong, but that's what I seemed to hear, kind of a progressive sound. Even though I think for hardcore at the time we were a little ahead of the curve and it was a little weird, things caught up. It didn't make sense when we did it, but it caught up. I was happy about it. It's not a tight record, and I'm sloppy, and the recording isn't great, but I think we were still in an era of crappy recordings. We didn't really have access to the big crazy production. That wasn't our thing. People think that you could get a big produced record, and even though hardcore and crossover bands on Combat Core and Rock Hotel and whatever did it a few years before us, it wasn't that easy and it wasn't cheap. And really, we didn't care. We were just kids who wanted to play hardcore – we didn't care about the slickness, or click tracks or anything professional that came later. We just wanted to play it raw. We just wanted to play hardcore.