Dama Thrush: A Rare Bird Indeed

San Francisco in the late eighties was a place of transition. In this international city you would always encounter people visiting from all over the world. Some stayed for awhile, while a few dug into the city scape.  But it was a rare bird from Southern California that ever made it a permanent destination. 

Erik Bluhm, a friend of mine I had met in college, was one of those rare birds that came up to stay. He had been in a band called The Primates down in Los Angeles before he moved up to the City. One of his bandmates, Brett Miller, decided to follow in his foot steps and brought his newly formed band called Dama Thrush from LA and made San Francisco their home as well.

Their hair was longer and their music was heavier than we were used to but their attitude and shenanigans they got into were right up our alley. Dama Thrush was a band out of time. They followed their own beat and created a following of friends and fans that filled local halls and their basement on a regular basis. 

What ensued during this interview was a wonderful trip down memory lane with four friends of mine that I haven't seen for a very long time. I'm thrilled to share with you images that haven't seen the light of day since the late eighties. I believe it has also given the band a chance to look back at a time when they were together, playing and living exactly how they wanted. 

When they were that rare and beautiful bird that flew into San Francisco...

Julie Pavlowski Green

November 30, 2013

Brian Miller

WHY DAMA THRUSH?

BRIAN MILLER: “Dama Thrush” is a genus of bird. Brett, Denis, and I all worked for an office furniture company, Sutter Furniture. Our boss was Mike Atkinson, whose hobby was breeding exotic birds. Every morning we would meet at his house and get our assignments. One day I was waiting around at his house and saw this bird book. I started flipping through it and saw this bird “Dama Thrush” and the caption read “known for its intricate songs”. When I saw that I thought, now there’s a good name.

BRETT MILLER: I believe it was Brian who introduced the name after leafing through a Bird Encyclopedia book and we all agreed instantly that it was perfect for what we wanted to do musically, as it combined the melodicism of a small songbird with some sort of heavy sound, at least to our ears. In fact, at one point we came up with the idea of researching the natural songs of Thrush birds and writing a long opus based on those melodies, but we never got around to it. Still, one of our first originals, an instrumental, we titled “Noun: Small Brown Bird,” which is, of course, the definition of a Dama Thrush.

Brett Miller

DENIS MARSHALL: You know, we really wanted a unique name to identify with. Of course that set us up for a wide variety of misspellings and incorrect bills with things like Dharma Force. At the same time, it was definitely unique and it certainly made people ask the question, which was somewhat of an unwitting publicity strategy.

The name came about as a result of Brett, Brian and I all working for the same company after High School and playing in this band together as a power trio in Brian’s garage. The company we worked for was a small family owned office furniture company, and Mike, one of the owners and our boss, was an avid bird lover. He had several aviaries in and around his house, where we would all meet in the mornings to get our assignments. I believe that it was Brian who happened to pick up a bird book laying on Mike’s coffee table, started flipping through the pages and found the thrush section. Upon discovery of the Dama Thrush, which was really little more than a sparrow, he said something like, “Wow, that would be a cool name for a band!” Naturally, we agreed and it was on from there.

Denis Marshall

BUD BEBE: Dama Thrush was the band name before I joined.

WHEN DID THE BAND COME TOGETHER?

BRIAN: In 1988 or so. It started as a continuation of the The 1/4" Killers, with the line-up eventually becoming the three piece of Brett, Denis, and myself. We decided to start doing heavy/prog rock instead of punk.

BRETT: Once Brian, Denis and I reinvented ourselves as Dama Thrush early in 1989, we began piecing together some old riffs that Brian and Denis had played in their first band, Tempest, with new material and we soon had a set of high-energy heavy-rocking tunes, but it was clear that we needed a singer much more accomplished than myself, so we began auditioning vocalists, including a teenaged Tim Bluhm, who, a couple years later, would form the best band of anyone I know personally, The Mother Hips, but who was too raw for us to consider at the time (a few recordings exist, however, with Tim on vocals and we kept his lyrics for at least one of our songs, “Tales of Eternity”). We then decided to record a couple of songs on our 4 track and have singers audition by creating and recording their own vocals on an empty track. Some buddies knew this dude named Bud.

Bud Bebe

DM: Chronologically, that is fairly difficult to pin down. Brian and I were in the same grade in High School, and Brett was a year or two ahead of us and had been involved with other bands here and there. It was around 1986 I think when we started to form as a band instead of just getting together after school to mess around in the garage.

I had been an observer really, and had no training as a drummer. I was actually a trumpet player in middle school and in the orchestra and marching band at our High School. What brought my attention to the drums were the cadences that were played in the marching band. Brian’s garage had hosted a variety of makeshift bands and I had watched and listened to them all, thinking to myself, “I could play drums if I tried.” I would set up covert jam sessions with Brian using the drum kit that stayed there and it progressed from there. Eventually that got to the point where we needed a bass player and Brett would come over to play with us.

We wound up writing some songs together, mostly instrumental stuff with Brett singing a little, incorporating some of his earlier music. For the most part we were content with being a power trio, but we were open to the idea of finding a singer and did some tryouts. We interviewed several singers and had fun with that, but none of them really clicked until Bud came along.

It is incredibly difficult to step into an instrumentalist band with songs already written, and attempt to write lyrics for them. Additionally, the feel we were looking for was pretty tough to hit, but here came Bud swinging for the fence. I think that was sometime in 1988. We really hit it off with Bud and solidified as a band. 

YOU GUYS WERE ORIGINALLY FROM SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. WHAT MADE YOU MOVE TO SAN FRANCISCO?

BRIAN: The music scene is LA sucked. It was all pay-to-play, which means if you want to play a place, YOU have to buy all the tickets up front and then sell them yourself. Basically, it was clubs being lazy and greedy. We took a trip to SF one summer and stopped by The Chatterbox on Valencia. We got a feeling for the club scene, which was, you play and you get paid. No selling tickets up front, etc. Plus, the scene was a lot more tight-knit. The city is 6x6 miles or so, and it seems everyone pretty much knew each other. Lots of good contacts and word of mouth could spread fast, a lot faster than LA for sure.

BRETT: LA in 1989 was a drag for us. We got gigs, sure, but they weren’t our kind of gigs (although we did our only radio show on KXLU before we moved). At the time, hair metal ruled the day and most of the clubs had converted to the “Pay to Play” system, which required a band to sell tickets to their own shows and that wasn’t our scene. We had friends in SF from my days back in The Primates and we had been making road trips ever since to hang and get loose so we knew that the SF scene suited us much better so we just up and split LA to SF. It worked out really great for us because we lived together, partied together and farted together for a really good 4 years and gigged all the time and made friends with lots of killer people and played with lots of kick-ass bands and the vibe in SF was just so Rock and Roll and loose with everybody having a good time together and that’s exactly what wasn’t going on in LA but exactly where our heads were at and I wouldn’t trade those times for anybody else’s.  

DM: Wow, what a mess that was. It was fun and adventurous, but messy. The family I was living with across the street from Brian’s house was pulling up stakes and moving up north, part way to San Francisco, to a place called Corralitos not far from Santa Cruz. What that meant was that I either had to move with them, or find another place to live in Manhattan Beach. Having come up against the politics of LA in the music scene, we knew that SF was a music friendly arena so decided to explore the idea of relocating there.

Brett and I went on a road trip that lasted for a week or two with the purpose of exploring the music scene in SF, get some newspapers and look at jobs, try to secure a place to live, and meet up with some friends that Brett had who lived there. It was a wonderful plan that turned into one hell of a party. We actually did accomplish the things we set out to do, and returned with enough information to seal the deal.

I don’t think any of us had any anchors to LA except for family, but it was particularly difficult for Bud who had been nurturing a relationship with his girlfriend at the time. Deciding to put that on hold in order to go with the band was a big sacrifice for him, and I believe it was very hard for him.

We timed our move to happen at the same time that my friends were moving to Corralitos in order to consolidate resources and to help them move into the new home there. Again, that was a wonderful plan that turned into a weeklong party. That was October of 1989, just before the earthquake.

We settled into a 3^rd floor flat in the Mission District, above some friends of Brett’s. We lived and practiced there as a band and as a family getting assimilated into the life of SF. What an adventure that was!

BB: The pay to play thing sucked in L.A., and the guys thought S.F. would be a better place to live, and grow as a band, so we did!

IT’S RUMORED THAT YOU USED TO BE A CHARMKIN BAND IN LA KNOWN AS “THE ¼” KILLERS”. HOW DID YOU GUYS MOVE ON FROM 6T’S PSYCH POP TO A HEAVIER ROCKIN SOUND?

BRIAN: We were a punk band. The songs were fast and mostly I-IV-V based, using that structure to riff it up. As time went on the songs became more intricate and with heavier guitar riffs.

BRETT: The ¼” Killers were a straight up punk band and a direct reaction to the band Ted Edlefsen, Erik Bluhm and I were in before called The Primates (Voxx Records 200.034, 1986), which was part of the Garage Rock, or Charmkin, scene in LA and which inherently had certain restrictions musically that we needed to rebel against. Originally, in 1987, The Killers were 3 guitars and a piece of sheet metal and were extremely noisy. As time went on, however, we began to become more “mainstream” in that we got a real drummer (Adam Sidell, famous for his work with The Imperial Butt Wizards) and I returned to playing bass and took over vocals as Erik and Ted dropped out. At this point, my brother

Brian, future guitarist for Dama Thrush and already a better player at age 16 than any of us “veterans” were, joined the band. A little latter on, Brian’s buddy Denis, future drummer for Dama Thrush who taught himself to play by air drumming to Iron Maiden records, replaced Adam and soon after that the only other remaining original member, guitarist John Atkinson, dropped out and we were a trio. Although we had, at this point, well over 30 songs, it was clear that the talents of Brian and Denis would be better served with more complex music so we abandoned our punk tunes and reinvented ourselves as Dama Thrush.

DM: The ¼” Killers were one of Brett’s earlier musical experiments that may have started out as a “Charmkin” thing, but from what I observed, it progressed into a pretty punk-rock flavored development. At the time that the Killers were doing their thing, the drum kit consisted of things like a metal trashcan lid and a few other pieces of really obnoxious items that made a lot of noise. I was only peripherally involved with that scene, but I believe that I was instrumental in taking the Killers to the next level by offering to play drums.

To be honest, I can’t recall any other members of the Killers besides Brett. His musical interests were (and still are) one of the most diverse of anyone I have ever known. I am sure there were a few more people in the Killers, but I think that DT morphed out of that. The Killers’ philosophy was to make noise and when I got involved, and Brian got involved, the noise turned into something else entirely.

BB: I think that might have been Brett's band before he, and his brother put DT together. They probably got that sound when they started playing with Dennis. They loved punk I think but Brian with his love of all the rock guitar gods, and Dennis with his love for Iron Maiden may have helped with that heavier sound. I think Brett always had that rippin base sound. He did love the heavy sound of Grand Funk Railroad though as I recall so that was an influence for sure, the old 70's rock.

WHAT WAS THE MOST MEMORABLE SHOW YOU EVER PLAYED?

BRIAN: For me it was a show at The Chatterbox. The night before I drank way too much and was incredibly hung over on the day of the show. I just sat in bed watched “The Song Remains the Same” all day. That night when we played, I basically channeled Jimmy Page and (in my opinion) played the best show of my life.

BRETT: Easter 1993 in Berkeley. We loved playing house parties and this one, in particular, stands out, as we played with our friends in both Broom and, what I believe was our only shared show, The Mother Hips. We got there, this huge house with a nice big yard and huge living room set up for the bands, in the mid afternoon daylight and just enjoyed some great vibes with a bunch of people we didn’t know and, as the recordings that exist would attest, every one of us played a super set once the night fell.

DM: That one is a toss-up. There were 2 shows that stood out to me. One of them was the piñata show at The Chatterbox on Valencia featuring “Benny the Thrush”. We had been in the groove for some time now and had made good connections in the community as far as a fan base as well as a very supportive club owner at The Chatterbox. That night we wanted to get a bit off-the-wall, so we had some stage props including a cornucopia of fake fruit, which we had been collecting for some time (I know, weird) and a piñata. The piñata was a bird that we named Benny and we had rigged it with pulleys to drop down in front of the stage during one of the songs, and Bud started swinging at it, bashing it to smithereens. We had stuffed it with all kind of things like candy, condoms, little toys and things like that. It was definitely memorable and about the coolest stage show we could afford at the time.

The second show was the epic party we organized at our flat a few blocks away, that advertised 5- kegs, and 5-bands for $5. That was a monster show and more of a block party in the middle of the Mission District.  We essentially took over the entire block, including our 3-floor building, and set up the bands in the backyard and the basement. We were situated right behind Valencia Gardens, which was some project housing that catered to low-income and fairly unsavory people. As it turned out, they let us know that they didn’t truly appreciate our music/ block party in the form of throwing spark plugs through the 3^rd floor windows, a minor inconvenience. The show must go on, right? And so it did.

BB: Probably the show we played with Cameltoe!!!! I'm not sure they were kind of a blur for me a little... We loved The Chatterbox, and had some good shows there. We did Hotel Utah towards the end of our stint together, and I do remember that show ripped!!! We did a show with Johnny's Problem down in the Tenderloin at some hole in the wall club, and I had a childhood friend who was working for MCA at the time do sound for us, and we blew the place apart!! The cops came!!! In the tenderloin for god sakes, that was memorable. Our 14th Street basement parties were fun also. We didn't have to go far!! The Splat Cave gigs were great also down off of Army Street.

WHAT OTHER BANDS HAVE YOU BEEN IN?

BRIAN: Tempest and The ¼” Killers.

BRETT: In chronological order, to the best of my memory, with some bands existing concurrently: The Yahoosians, Melancholy Carrys, The F-Holes, The Primates, Grimace, The Spectres, The Willies, The ¼” Killers, Dama Thrush, Boner, Mouthfull of Grass, Whopper Breath and Mouthfull.

DM: Aside from The 1/4” Killers in the late stages and DT from beginning to end, that was basically it for me other than jamming with various groups of friends from time to time. My drum set collected dust for many years until I was baptized and became a Christian in 2008. Who would have thought that my hard, progressive rock style drumming would lend itself to playing drums in the Worship band? Let me tell you, it has taken awhile to get used to this new style of music and trying to incorporate my style into it, but I couldn’t be happier. It has taken the conservative Baptist congregation some time to get used to me as well, but they have come around!

BB: After I left the city I moved to small town called Grass Valley up north of Sacramento. I got in a glam rock band called DVS (Devious) and as we progressed out of covers, and such we got heavier. We played the Boardwalk in Sac, and tore up Chico etc... We put out an album called “Survival" that did okay for doing it all ourselves. We did open for Testament in Sac after there "Low" album, and before their tour. That ripped and was the pinnacle for us because we broke up unfortunately shortly after that.

Then there was West Coast Static, Xsatatic, Antarctica. Hyperdrive, all local cover bands with some monetary success. Then I got involved with some friends, and we started Remley in 2004, and that was an all original band. We put out an album in 2007. That was a great band and some of my best writing to date. I'm now in a cover band called West Coast Juice and we play Winery's, County Fairs, etc.

WHO HAD THE BEST HAIR?

BRIAN: I hate to say it because I’m a very modest guy, but I’d say me. It was like an exotic Russian breed of sheep was living on my head.

BRETT: Brian. Not only did he have the best hair in the band, he had the best hair in the whole SF scene!

DM: Hahaha, I would have to go with Brian on that one. Don’t ask me why, it was just so freaking Rock & Roll to see him playing on stage just buried in hair!

BB: Brian had the best hair. It was a toss up with beards... Dennis had a nice full beard probably since he was 12 years old! But Brett had some killer chops!!

YOU GUYS WERE AROUND DURING THE WHOLE GRUNG PERIOD. BESIDES WEARING FLANNEL, DID ANY OF THE BANDS FROM THE NORTH INFLUENCE YOU MUSICALLY?

BRIAN: Not at all. We lived on 70s heavy/prog rock. That and early 80s metal (no glam).

BRETT: Nope. Although I loved (and still do) Nirvana’s “Bleach,” full of killer riffs and great guttural screaming, it had no influence on our music and all the other bands of that genre were off my radar.

Dama Thrush at Morty's 1989

DM: Definitely. What a great time to be on the music scene. I would have to go with Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. We were always very instrumentally oriented, and those bands knew how to write songs. If you want to go even farther north, one of my all-time favorite drum heroes is Neal Peart from Rush out of Canada. DT had an amazingly wide variety of influences and I believe it gave us somewhat of a unique sound that was really fun to play.

BB: The grunge thing was just barely getting going with Nirvana but I saw Sound Garden at the Kennel Club on Divisadaro, which is called the Independent now. I also saw Pearl Jam at the I-Beam (which is gone now) but had never heard of them. I loved that sound but wasn't influenced by them at the time. Alice and Chains is my favorite band from that era and Pearl Jam I suppose.

ARE YOU PLAYING MUSCIALLY NOW?

BRIAN: I play guitar on a daily basis. It’s very therapeutic and just plain fun. As for projects, I just finished working on an interesting project headed by a cat named Jesse Bishop here in San Diego. He’s an 80’s nut and wanted to do a soundtrack to an 80’s movie. So he basically came up with this whole idea and made up a fictitious movie from the time period name “Street Cleaner”. It’s great stuff! 

BRETT: I’ve never quit writing and recording really sloppy versions of my songs in my room, but I haven’t been in a performing band for over 10 years now. Somewhere in my middle 30’s I ran out of steam. I tried to start a new band, ON, a few years ago with a couple friends, and we learned some new tunes and had a few practices but I wasn’t into the work it takes so I killed it. I’d start a new band in a heart beat, though, if someone wants to support me financially. I’ve got hundreds of songs people!

DM: Yup, I play just about every Sunday in church with the praise band. It is cool because I get to play with a wide variety of musicians in a variety of different musical genres that cover everything from old hymns to the latest rocking Christian music, to Christmas and holiday shows, to orchestral and choral arrangements. The church has invested in me by purchasing the best electronic Roland drum set available, and that has been an interesting transition. I believe they did that for a couple of reasons. One, because the drum set they were using was very old and starting to break down. And two, I tend to get excited when I play rocking songs, which tends to increase the volume, and they wanted to have a little more control over the sound hitting the congregation. In any event, it is a very nice kit and I have come to enjoy playing it a lot. I just wish that the sound the congregation hears was as awesome as it sounds in my headphones!

BB: Yes. I also do some solo acoustic stuff. Some covers but mostly original. I call the style Contemporary Folk. At some point soon you will be able to see my "Sour Mash Symphony" on You Tube.... Really that's just me drunk playing my acoustic guitar alone in my living room!!

DO YOU HAVE A TOM GUIDO STORY TO TELL?

BRETT: Dama Thrush was no more by the time The Purple Onion opened but my next band, Whopper Breath, with Ted Edlefsen and Noah Marceron, played there often and always had a super good time. Tom Guido is a one-of-a-kind kind of dude for sure and we can’t have too many like that. 

WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORIT DAMA SONG AND WHY?

BRIAN: That’s impossible to answer. That’s like saying “who is your favorite child”?. We wrote all of our tunes with love and passion. There were no fillers, and any tunes that never really worked out or were not fun to play, we ditched (only happened a couple times).

BRETT: Black Sheep. Musically it is very diverse. It intros with a loose interpretation of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, builds slowly into some heavy riffs, eases into a mellow verse, then propels itself into what is probably my favorite Thrush riff ever during the chorus…just a super fun song to play. Also, this is the song Bud absolutely nailed when he auditioned by recording his own vocals over our demo tape by pulling off a gut wrenching ascending scream that was, unbeknownst to him at the time, of course, very similar to a scream done by the singer of a super heavy group from Ohio called Granicus that we were into. As soon as we heard that there was no question that he was the dude for us and he proved himself to be a really creative vocalist with a huge range who put all of himself out there every song of every show.

Dama Thrush (and my cigarette smoke) at Morty's 1989

DM: This is really tough to answer. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 original songs (I lost count) and they each have a special meaning to me because they articulate times, places, things, ideas, emotions, people, events and all of the things that songs tend to do. Hearing them again has brought back some really fond memories to me because I felt the need to refresh my memories before answering this question.

Having done that and wrestled with the idea of having to pick one of them, I think I am going to go with Spinning through Space as my favorite. It was one of our earlier tunes and from what I can remember, Brett wrote the lyrics for it. I did not know it at the time we wrote it and played it hundreds of times, but as I look back on it and the turbulent times we were living in, it was actually right on the money. Indeed, it was somewhat prophetic for me. We were definitely 'spinning through space'. I know I was personally, and though I didn't know it at the time, I was 'on my way to find Jesus'. If I had continued on the path I was on, I would have found heaven as well.

Benny the Thrush

This was one of the songs that Bud really grabbed onto and made his own. Just another example of how hard he tried to make a smooth transition into an already tight band. I am sure that we played it at every show we ever did, and I think it was symbolic of where we were, and as a result, we never stopped spinning until we fell apart.

BB: I loved "A Little Understanding" because it was real personal for me, as were a lot of the ones I wrote with the guyz.

WHO DO YOU THINK INFLUCEND THE BAND MUSICALLY THE MOST?

BRIAN: It’s gotta be a combo of these three bands: Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, and Megadeth. If I was to pick just one, I’d say Deep Purple.

BRETT: Black Sabbath…not so much for their riffs, which, as most of your readers will know, were really evil sounding, but more for the way they arranged their songs and their overall approach to composing as a band. For example, Sabbath often employed the technique of using isolated instrumentation, whether it be bass, drums or guitar, to lead into the next part of a song. They also used a lot of what we called “slammers,” which is when the drums and bass hit heavy accents while the guitar goes a-riffing during intros, transitions, power endings and/or sections of the guitar solos. Although there were lots of other bands that we were into that employed the same tricks (Grand Funk Railroad, Deep Purple and Mountain come to mind), I think Sabbath was the biggest influence because when we heard them, we heard a band that had no rules…where everybody got to jam, and that became our mantra as well. No one ever told anyone else what to do in Dama Thrush. There were no rules or limitations.

Artwork by Julie "Newmar"

DM: I have to assume this is regarding which one of the four of us as band members as opposed to outside musical influences?

What a great question that does not have an easy answer. As I said before, we all brought something to the table and we all took collective ownership of the material. We wrote together, each bringing our own influence into it. I think that Brian and I were very much on the same page musically, having grown up together and gone through High School together. We listened to the same music like Led Zeppelin, Guns n’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Rush, Kiss, Van Halen, and all of the Heavy Metal kings at the time. I loved some of the alternative stuff happening at the time like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Soundgarden, stuff like that, and I think that influenced things some.

Brett definitely brought his own interests and style to the band as well, and I was able to mesh with him in a beautiful way as the rhythm section. His tastes went back much farther than mine, and it was truly a process of discovery as he would pull out records of bands like MC5, Lou Reed, Captain Beyond, and Grand Funk Railroad.

Bud, as I said before, took on the challenge of blending his style with ours and did so in a pretty amazing way. He brought something of a southern influence to things, but that was more of a spicy ingredient than a direct influence. He loved Alice Cooper, Bad Company, Guns n’ Roses, and brought that to the table. He was also classically trained and loved to dance and get crazy on stage, which was one of the elements we were missing and looking for. Bud definitely rounded out the band, and so was an integral part of the influence.

I guess that is the long version of saying that there was no real leader of the band.

BB: The Brothers probably, although we all had a hand in it. I did come in as the singer after at least 10 or so songs were already written.

WHAT IS THE BANDS DISCOGRAPHY?

BRIAN: Demo tapes! We never released anything. But one of my current pet projects is redoing Thrush songs with modern equipment (and better playing on my part). I hope to release a CD one day.

BRETT: Surprisingly, we don’t have one. Not one song ever released. As an avid music collector since my early teens, however, I know there is a market for any band that kicked out some jams, as I believe we certainly did, so it is my hope that some retrospective releases would be valuable to not only help document the early 1990’s SF scene that we were a consistent contributor to, but to fans of heavy rock everywhere. Also, Brian deserves to be recognized as the truly amazing guitarist that he is. He is a first class shredder for sure and I have a good ear for such things.

DM: Makes me wish that we had one to be honest with you. We struggled forever to get some good, solid recordings done and compiled into something that could be produced, and just never got there. Most of what we did was done in-house by the Miller boys and their Fostex 4-tracks. Brian spent a lot of time with fancy MIDI gadgets and other methods to try and clean up the things we had recorded. We ultimately wound up with a compilation of music that we had tracked over the years and though it is enjoyable to listen to, was never of the studio quality to produce.

BB: I have all our old cassetts but the boys will have to answer that one cause I have no video or masters of our stuff.

WHO IS TED AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

BRIAN: I can only answer the second part. Why should you care? WHY? Do you care about listening to and being exposed to awesome tunes? Do you care about partying until you puke? That’s why you should care!

BRETT: Ted Edlefsen has been a very special friend since we started our first band together, with Erik Bluhm, in the summer of 1983. We continued to play together for 20 years or so in bands that included The Primates in LA, and our last two in SF, Whopper Breath (with Noah Marceron on drums, also famous for his work with Cameltoe & The Solvents) and Mouthfull (with Aaron Nudelman on drums, most famous for his guitar work with Wig Torture, Mensclub &, currently, Hot Lunch). Ted is an excellent heavy guitarist and fans of punk and heavy rock will enjoy listening to him shred, but, as he pertains to The Thrush, Ted was an integral component of our live shows (even though he still lived in LA), as each audience was informed of a new Ted “factoid” written across my t-shirt.  

DM: Ted was (and still is) one of our greatest supporters and friends. He had been with us from the very beginning even before I had anything to do with the band. He and Brett were in a few bands together and Ted (being a fanatical Motorhead fan) just loved our music and the people in the band. Ted was with us if not in body, then in spirit, at every show that we ever did, not only in LA where we grew up, but in SF too where he was loudly and proudly displayed on one of Brett’s many infamous white T-shirts.

Before each performance, Brett would design and make a new T-shirt that had something to do with Ted, and was again, one of those witty advertising campaigns that made people ask the question. That was a way to keep Ted with us away from home. You should care because Ted ROCKS!

BB: Ted was Brett's friend and a heck of a guy.