I hung out with my cousin Nate a lot when we were kids, but mostly only during summer vacation. If I had a weekday off school before I was old enough to stay home alone, I was most likely spending the day at my grandma’s house, which was located in the tiny town five miles north of the tiny town I lived in. Both towns were very much in the middle of nowhere,¹ and both were tiny, but Grandma’s town was more of “town” in the sense that the population was mostly centrally located, even though both towns are still officially considered “unincorporated communities.” Nate lived one block away from my grandma, so when I spent my summer days there, I hung out with him (after Grandma and I ate lunch and watched Days of Our Lives), and the two of us often hung out with our cousin A.J., who lived down the hill from our grandma. When I got into my early teens, I didn’t have to go to Grandma’s house anymore, but I still went at least a couple days a week over the summer (pretty much whenever I could catch a ride from someone) because I still liked hangin out with Nate.

In the summer of 1991, he had access to a space where we could hang out and play his cheap guitar through his even cheaper practice amp without having to worry about disturbing anyone. We set up there and made a lot of noise at least one day a week that entire summer. On one of those days we recorded what I suppose one might refer to as a demo tape, if one were feeling especially generous, and had maybe never heard another demo before. Most of it is Nate on guitar and me on drums, in the sense that we turned two 44-gallon Rubbermaid trash cans upside down so we’d have something to beat on with Nate’s drumsticks. We also took turns shouting random things in our most metal voices, which really weren’t very metal at all. I played some of the guitar you can hear on the tape, in the literal sense of the word “play” as a verb, and when I was beating on the guitar, Nate was beating on the trash cans.

Nate’s mom walked in the room while we were listening to our tape at his house for the first time, and Nate asked her what she thought. Without hesitation, she responded “sounds like some kinda mental illness,” which we thought was awesome, and so we decided to name our band Mental Illness. Around this same time, I was reading Metal Maniacs magazine every chance I got, and they had been writing a lot about this scary new thing called “death metal,” which was really only “scary” in the sense that I was scared of everything, and “new” in the sense that I lived in the middle of nowhere, and the news was finally just getting to me. While I was scared of it, I was also fascinated by these bands with names like Carcass and Napalm Death and Cannibal Corpse and Entombed and Pungent Stench, and I eventually talked Nate into changing our name to Vomit, which I thought sounded much cooler and more death-metal.

I suspect my inability to create a proper logo for Mental Illness also played into my desire to change the name, at least a little bit. It contains way too many letters for my novice-level art skills.

The odd thing about my desire to lean into more of a death metal aesthetic is that I hadn’t even listened to any of those bands at that point, I just thought their names were cool. Aside from its existence as a concept, death metal played no part in the music we made. In fact, music played pretty much no part in the music we made. I suppose it’s possible that we made an experimental noise masterpiece, but I’m not familiar enough with the noise genre to know for sure.

“Ballad of Tipper Gore”was inspired by the PMRC, which was our mortal enemy back then. “Brain Damage” is our most progressive song, in the sense that it goes on quite a bit longer than the others. “Natas” is our fastest song, and was definitely inspired by our shared love for Anthrax and Nuclear Assault. “B.N.L./Nuke” is a very percussion heavy song, and was inspired by my high school. Also, not a single one of these songs could actually be considered actual songs, in the sense that they have a structure, or a beginning, or an ending, or would warrant a track number.

There is actually some evidence of musical influence on the tape, if you know where to listen, but I would never blame anyone for not listening long enough to pick out those influences. We were both fans of Van Halen, and their hit “Poundcake” inspired us to run a drill over the guitar pickups a few different times. We also dipped our toes into the blues in a couple of spots, but that was really just a rip-off of Blind Melon Chitlin’, who we’d both heard on a Cheech & Chong tape that Nate swiped from his older brother Kent.²

There also exists an undercurrent of Satanism-as-shock-tactic, even though that scared me at the time. Nate was raised in (and I was raised on the edges of) a pretty backward-thinking church, but that’s a topic for another time. What’s pertinent to our demo tape is that Nate was definitely using it as an opportunity to rage against his upbringing, and I was going along for the ride so my cousin would continue to think I was cool. Today, Nate is one of a handful of cousins³ who still talks to me, so I guess it worked.

Our cousin A.J. is credited in the liner notes as “backing vocals” and “drum tech,” the latter of which makes me think maybe he’s the one who had the idea to turn the trash cans upside down. A.J. definitely brought a video camera to our jam space one time. If that tape still exists, it contains footage of my first (and last) stage dive, directly off the two-foot-high stage and onto some thin-ass carpet on top of a concrete slab. Not my smartest idea, but also not my dumbest.

The summer of ’91 ended up being our last hurrah, in a way, even though we didn’t realize it at the time. Nate is a year older than me, so when I turned fifteen a month before summer vacation the next year, he was already driving, and his dad made him get a job. Chalk it up as another victory for the crushing wheel of existence over the fleeting nature of youthful innocence.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this lil trip down memory lane with me.

1. As far as I know, the town I grew up in never got cable television. If it wasn’t for satellites, those people would still only have three or four channels, and then only when the sun and the wind and the clouds are just right. ↩︎
2. Nate also swiped the tape we recorded our demo on from my cousin Kent, who also happened to be the person who got us into Van Halen. He likely still has no idea how influential he was to a couple of teenage dipshits. ↩︎
3. Out of nineteen first cousins across both sides of my family. ↩︎