There's been some tour date changes; I've tried to update my tour dates list as best as possible. Also an alternate set list.
I've recently received a 6.5 inch stack of cards advertising the new album (March 2002) and the current tour. There's not much point in passing them around the Lansing area now, since next week is finals week and people will be leaving the area in droves when they're done (and the only show nearby has already occured). I live on the west side of the state; does anyone in the Detroit area want a chunk of them to pass around to record stores? I'd be happy to give you a bunch. The rest I'll move around when MSU starts up in January. Oh, and I'll scan and post one later.
Here's a bunch of assorted, disorganized Matt Dudenhoeffer quotes from the GK Message Board.
Also, we hope to make it to Russia next year if Sanctuary Records will send us there. That would be cool.
New videos - hopefully early next year.
We would love to play Conan or Saturday Night Live or Letterman or Kilborn. Any of those shows would be great. Our publicist would have to try to book it. If the single does well at radio in January, then, yes, we could get asked to do a show. We have done t.v. shows performing live in France and Italy. Other than that, our only appearances on television have been on MTV and local news.
The first single goes to radio in January of 2002. The record will be released shortly after that.
the new record will be released one day EARLIER in the U.K. than in the U.S. due to the day of the week that records come out.
I checked out Sanctuary Records' weak-ass website a couple days ago and they finally mention GK in a new press release. Took 'em long enough. (In related news, a press release was also issued that Pitchshifter has signed with Sanctuary, though it's not on Sanctuary's site yet.)
I put tour dates on a separate page. Please let me know if you notice any errors. And let me know how the shows are going, if you attend any of them. (Alternately, you can hit the Perverted message board.)
In other news, look what I got last Friday:
From: "Meg Harkins" <.....@sanctuarygroup.com>
To: [me and 12 other addresses]
Subject: Gravity Kills
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 18:35:26 -0500Congratulations!
Out of the hundreds of people who have joined the Gravity Kills Street Team, we have chosen you to be a Regional Street Team Coordinator. This means that you will be in direct contact with Street Team coordinators in order to organize your assault on the music-listening community. You will be the first to know about promotions, contests, and GK news and you will also be responsible for letting the world know about the upcoming Preaching to the Perverted tour and Superstarved album!
Right now, we are putting together the first of many packages of promotional stuff that we will be sending to you. This first package will include postcards with a new GK logo on the front and tour information on the back, please take these postcards and use them to spread the word about Gravity Kills and their new album Superstarved to the far corners of your community. Give these postcards to friends, family, or strangers who might like GK. Please make it your mission to pass them out at concerts, music stores and shows, or send them to friends or relatives who need to know the latest Gravity Kills Tour information.
We all appreciate your dedication and support of our music; we look forward to meeting you out on the road and during the Preaching to the Perverted Tour!
Thank you,
Doug, Jeff, Matt and Brad
Gravity Kills
Before I talk about the show, I'll mention that, according to Matt, the tracklist for Superstarved mentioned yesterday is accurate.
And now the show... My other loser friends bailed on me, so it wa just me and my girlfriend (her first GK show). Before I say anything else, I need to stress that the bass was way too loud. For every band. I'm a guy who wears earplugs at shows, and normally they filter out the extra noise and actually make it sound better (next time you're at a concert, plug your ears and see for yourself), aside from the added benefit of not going deaf. Last night, however, the bass, which earplugs have the least effect on, drowned out everything. I could barely hear lyrics at times. It pounded my entire body in a bad way. It was far beyond the necessary bass volume. Rant over.
The Royal Oak Music Theatre is a darn nice club. I missed the opening band, Ceoxime, but I saw Godhead. They had an industrial goth look going (I wasn't impressed; I don't like goth), and they sounded alright (can't make a good jugdement due to the bass).
Gravity Kills was up next. Here's the set list as I remember it:
I'm not entirely sure of the title of Beg and Borrow, due to the bass making Jeff hard to understand. The new tracks sounded good, though I couldn't hear many of the lyrics (bass thing again). I was surprised by what wasn't played, as well as the relatively short playlist. No Goodbye? Personal Jesus, Superstarved, Down, Here? Can't play everything, but, hmm.
There's a new long-sleeve T-shirt; black with a white design on the front that has the band and album's name on it. Matt says that it might be the new album's cover artwork. I noticed that Jeff seemed to be wearing a belt with Superstarved stars on it. He was wearing a stocking hat, which I think he should lose. Doug was wearing his big furry hat, as usual.
I paid for my ticket, although I guess I was on the guest list and didn't know it. Oh well.
Sat through the first couple songs of Pigface, but... maybe I suck, but they really didn't draw me in. Never really heard them before, maybe if I had I would have enjoyed them more. And there was also that bass thing.
We left early because my girlfriend had to work that night and we had a 1.5 hour drive back home yet. So I didn't get to meet the band. Don't know if they saw me in the crowd. Maybe next time, guys.
By now you've probably noticed that the official site is back up. No updates yet, though.
I got some neat posters in the mail a couple days ago to promote the show this Wednesday. Got a couple glossies, some photocopiable stuff, and a note and bigger print each signed by Martin Atkins. I'm trying to get them around campus, but industrial rock doesn't seem to have much of a crowd here. We'll see.
"Thanatos" says he has listened to the new album, and got me a tracklist! This is unofficial, of course. I'll update the box at the right later this week.
And the tour... I'll be at the Royal Oak Music Theatre this Wednesday unless something catastrophic happens, so I should have a report of the kickoff show by the end of the week. Here's the latest, most accurate tourdate list I can put together. I don't have the info about age restrictions in there yet, but the official site does (quick link). This is a combination of info from the official site, Pollstar, and the Invisible Records site. Note that many of the later dates may still be changed some. I'll be putting up a tour page soon, but for now this'll have to do.
The GravityKills.com webmaster sent me an email today wanting me to pass on the message that the site will be down for a few days. You may have seen the temporary message I put up earlier today. Most of the official site has been mirrored at http://abby-normal.tripod.com, and here is the newest news item:
October 31st, 2001
you may have noticed that the main gk site, gravitykills.com is no longer active and it may be a few days before it is again. There is a problem with our hosting company's connection to the internet, so it's kind of out of our hands. In the meantime, I hope you can ignore the annoying pop-up ads here at Tripod enough to get your GK news and tourdates.
The messageboard, chat and email address will NOT be working during this time, becuase they go through our server. I've just put this page up to keep you up to date with news and such. Most of the pages work, but there are too many images and what not to fit on this free server.
In the meantime, if anyone knows of anyone who owns a hosting company and would be willing to accept the bandwidth that GK.com would suck up, send an e-mail to The Gravity Master
We apologize for the inconvenience...
posted by The Gravity Master
Happy halloween.
Darn grad school... I didn't have time to put this up till tonight.
Let's see... Well, Matt's been posting pretty frequently on the official message board. He's stated that the band is back in St. Louis rehearsing and arranging the set list, he doesn't think the new album will get an explicit lyrics sticker, he thinks that some audio clips of new songs will be on the site soon, and more album details will be up on the site when they have them.
John Tracy has relaunched Guilty.org and, though familiar to many of us, it looks better than ever. If anyone else has a GK site, let me know so I can put it on the links page.
The Perverted message board gets very little traffic. But it's there. Not that I'm suggesting anything.
And finally, here's the revised tour dates. These are accurate as of 11:55am Tuesday night EST, and the changes reflect new info at the official GK site and Pollstar.
First thing: In drummer news, Jeff says, It seems that Brad Booker might become a permanent temporary replacement for us.
And a crapload of tourdates! Major thanks to "Superspy" on my message board for pointing me to this info linked from Underground Inc. or Invisible Records. It looks like this fall will feature, well, technically two tours, but it looks as if they are functionally the same tour, with the dates interleaving with each other. Pigface is headlining, with Gravity Kills and gODHEAD supporting.
Here's the Preaching to the Perverted Tour dates:
And here's the dates on The AMP Music Circuit:
I'm dumb and keep forgetting about the scheduled unofficial chats, but "Greg" from the GK boards let me know what's up. Jeff was there and gave some info about the upcoming album.
I updated the sidebar at the right with this info. Thanks a lot to Greg for the information, and I will gladly pass the blame to him if any of it is inaccurate :)
I just put up a copy of the black & white GK logo image. This is the copy I've been using; I cropped it from one of the wallpapers on the official site.
On the new-song list to the right, I changed "Suffocating" to "Suffocate". To my knowledge, these are two distinct songs; the former is an older unreleased demo, and the latter is a title from the new sessions which may or may not be on the new album.
I got nothing else. The GK camp is very quiet. Is anyone catching anything new in the Thursday night chats? Does anyone have anything they can contribute? Send me an email.
Thanks to Josh Fyksen for telling me that I had one of my mp3 listings dated wrong. While I was at it, I tweaked the whole page a little. Looks cleaner now, I think.
Not much else, so here's some filler I got from the official GK message boards awhile ago. It's some trivia I saved, meant to post, and then forgot about until now. It seems to have disappeared off the message board, so I only have what you see below. I believe this response was by Matt
Re: Questions for GK concerning the Great NEWS!!
« Reply #11 on: 07/18/01 at 18:10:38 »on 06/29/01 at 17:18:33, Shishers wrote:
This question is kind of off base
I think it's a cool thing to know though
What was the best selling album you have out and how many copies did it sell?
Also, have you won any special awards? Any interestings achievements?I guess our fans deserve to know:
The first record, self-titled, sold just under 500,000 copies. We need to sell a few thousand more to go gold. So, um, everyone re-buy the first record, o.k.? The self-titled is our best selling record to date.
We did receive platinum records for our contribution to the million copy selling "Mortal Combat Soundtrack" that included our demo version of "Goodbye". Our track was considered to be one of the strong draws for the soundtrack not to mention that damn movie.
We have charted 6 singles at Modern Rock and Active Rock Radio (off of the two records combined). We had 3 videos appear on MTV with the "Guilty " video charting at number 14 whenever they used to have there top 25 countdown (way back before TRL).
We were the only band to do the entire Sex Pistols tour as an opening act.
Our proudest achievements are on stage after a great show between us and the audience. Be it 1,000 people or 60,000 people - we try to give every show our best and are usually rewarded by bringing the house down by the end of the show. Those screams and applause of appreciation - that's our greates achievement.
I actually had everything up yesterday, except for the photo index page, duh. I didn't have time to update the front page, but anyone who checked my message board saw my note. But everything's up now - you can check the photos from the Miscellaneous page and the new mp3s on (of course) the mp3s page.
If you haven't checked the official site in a while, go look at the news update.
And if you haven't, go look at the Neil Boulton's GK winamp skin - it's nice (it's on the Miscellaneous page).
Grad school just started; that's my excuse for being so lax.
Someone reported having trouble downloading the newest mp3s. I just fixed it; it was a stupid mistake.
Check the Miscellaneous page for a GK Winamp skin I just posted. This was created by GK board poster Neil Boulton, aka "NeilVsTree". Check out his homepage (see page where I posted the skin) for other slickband-themed skins.
Those Chicago pictures are coming, I promise. By Tuesday morning, they'll all be up, or else I'll salvage my honor via seppuku. Likewise for those two unposted mp3s.
Jeff posted on my message board. Go read! Go read!
The mp3s of the "F### you" show (Milwaukee Summerfest '97) will be up by noon today. (The links are up, but the files may not be there yet.) The story behind the chanting at the beginning is that Jeff got the whole crowd chanting the familiar phrase while the show was being broadcast live on a local radio station. The station's DJ tried to get the crowd to stop, but he was having mike problems and the crowd ignored him.
Some of the mp3s that have been up for a long time have come down to make room.
Pictures from Chicago will be up soon, I promise. Cropping and resizing all of them is a pain in the butt.
Me and a couple guys road-tripped down to Chicago on Monday to catch GK's show at the Metro. Great show; in addition to the expected tracks they threw in an acoustic "Guilty" and an acoustic "Sweet Home Alabama". They also played "Enemy", "Superstarved", and "Personal Jesus", but no tracks newer than that. (I'm still waiting to hear "Poetry and Power" live.) And it was even worth the extra day I had to stay in Chicago because the @#$% alternator died in my car. That's a story in itself. Ugh.
It was a great performance, and fans got to chat with the band afterward. I snapped a bunch of pictures, both during and after the show, and I'll have them up once they're developed and scanned. I'll also have the mp3s of the "F### you" performance Jeff mentioned to those hanging out after the show.
The band is right now staying at Martin Atkins' home/studio in Chicago mixing their next album. They said the date of release would probably be Feb 2002, if I remember right.
A post from Matt on the official site's message board says:
Now that we officially signed with Sanctuary, we had to pull the songs off of MP3.com, however, that doesn't mean we can't put songs there in the future. We just have to wait until we sign a publishing deal and work out with Sanctuary what songs exactly will we put up for downloads. Now that we have a label again, everything has to fit into their game-plan if that makes any sense.
On a completely unrelated topic, I set up a Perverted message board for this site. Let's see what inanity comes from that.
Oh, and if anyone wants some GK guitar picks of their own, there's 4 for sale on eBay.
Here's some Matt Dudenhoeffer comments from the message board:
(June 15)
We'll have to wait and see what new success lies ahead for us based upon the success of the new record. The record could be out as early as October, but that date is not set in stone - it's up to the label.
(June 29) (In response to a question about Sanctuary Records)
Yes, Sanctuary approached our management. We visited the label and became interested and confident in the label. Then it comes down to offers and what label is willing to offer what and when. Considering all of that, Sanctuary seemed to be a nice fit. They are a fairly new label distributed thru BMG. They have offices in NY and L.A. and worldwide. They just had good success with the new release of Megadeth, selling more records in one week than they ever did in one week in their career with Capitol. They are committed to working our band and the new record. Corrosion of Conformity and Henry Rollins band are now on Sanctuary. Also, Pitchshifter has been having dialogue with the label. Also, I think a division of Sanctuary now owns the Black Sabbath catalog. Anyway, they seem to be on the uprise and have plenty of money thru their association with BMG. We are excited to be on the label and look forward to working with them to make the new record a huge success.
Speaking of Sanctuary Records, their web site still bears no mention of GK. Everybody email them stupid questions (i.e. "Is it true that Gravity Kills signed to you guys?" "Why don't you have Gravity Kills on your page?") about Gravity Kills in an effort to get them to mention GK on their web site. (Or I suppose you could flame them outright, though I wouldn't encourage it.)
Where's the mp3.com demos? I don't know... Maybe they're gone for good?
Jeff says (from an email),
We were getting ready to finish "Superstarved" with Jason Slater here in St. Louis. Jason had flown in to St. Louis to meet with us and get a production schedule together. After he flew back to Los Angeles, scheduling conflicts started popping up not to mention that Jason is also in the middle of composing the next SRC record. We all decided that in order to complete "Superstarved" as quickly as possible, Martin Atkins would be the producer to come in. We are on good terms with Jason and it is not out of the realm of possibility that we would work with him in the future.
Thanks, Jeff.
Have you signed up for the Street Team yet? I did. Hit the official site for that.
There's a couple of bad links in the articles; I'll fix those later. I also updated the links, which mostly involved dropping some dead ones. Anyone have any new links to add?
Martin Atkins is producing the new album, and not Jason Slater as previously indicated. I don't know what was really up with that, and the GK camp hasn't really stated what was up (i.e. why the change? was Slater ever really involved?). I just know that the GK webmaster says on the message board that Atkins is the producer now. And it looks like the album's name is Superstarved, according to the description of the new T-shirt. Oh, and the new web site design looks spiffy.
Announced on the official site on June 12:
"We just signed our deal with Sanctuary...
We are happy to finally have this behind us so that we can move forward,
complete the record and get it out for everyone that has supported us. We
are now ready to commence world domination.
Jeff, Matt and Doug"
Who else is on the label? Well, here's the main site of Sanctuary Records Group; click on the appropriate button to get to the actual label's site. They got Megadeth, Rollins Band, and Corrosion of Conformity, so GK will be in good company (unfortunately, GK is not named on the site yet). And the sister label, Metal-is records (also accessable from the above link), has Judas Priest and Motorhead. And CMC International (another sister label) has a bunch of older artists who are still around, like Skynyrd, Thorogood, and (heh, heh) Warrant.
In kinda-related news, Pitchshifter have signed with the same management as Gravity Kills (according to blabbermouth.net). All I know is that the Pitchshifter/GK show I saw back in '98 rocked. I wouldn't mind seeing that bill again.
First of all, I've got new live Gravity Kills mp3s! Download mp3s of Personal Jesus, Enemy, and Kum Ba Yah as recorded at the 25Nov00 show at Mississippi Nights in St. Louis, MO. They've been added to the mp3 page.
Next up, a whole list of new track names of songs that may appear on the new album. This comes from the rock news site Blabbermouth.net, who claim GK guitarist Matt Dudenhoeffer as their source. (Why didn't this info hit the official GK site or message board? How come it's only on a news site that most people may not know about?) Blabbermouth definitely is giving solid coverage to GK, though - 4 or 5 news items since February. I added it to the links page. A passage from the site: Although many of the songs will reportedly feature a "heavier" direction than anything the band had done in the past, the album as a whole will be "more diverse than that," according to guitarist Matt Dudenhoeffer. "Not every single track will be 'heavy'".
The new album is being produced by Jason Slater from the band Snake River Conspiracy. The working title (but not the final name) of the album is Superstarved.
And here's the complete list of known new track names ("Naked" is mentioned in GK's tour diary, for those who are wondering where that came from):
I've taken "GK light" down. Not 2 days after I had put it up, the GK webmaster put up a version of his own. Of course, that was like a month ago. Also, in the chat today I found out that a redesign of the official site is going up soon.
That's all I got today. You should know by now the new band news. Check the official site for that.
Earlier this week I got fed up with the resource-intensive main menu at gravitykills.com crashing my browser, so I copied the frameset and pointed the middle frame at a new menu. I figure that some other people, especially those with older computers, might be having the same problem, so here it is for anyone to use: GravityKills.com "Light".
NOTE: I have not unfairly copied stuff from the official site. Except for the menu, GK Light pulls all the the files straight from the real GK site's server. If you know HTML, have a look for yourself. If anyone affiliated with the official site wants me to remove GK Light, I will.
I also added a new article about Jeff getting whiplash in '98.
Oh, and check the official site for a couple new tour dates.
Charles Whalen rocks because he sent me a scan of the Metal Edge magazine page that refers to Gravity Kills. You can check the scan here, and it has a permanent home on the Articles page.
The box in the upper-left is titled 11 Most Anticipated Albums of 2001 (because why should you stop at 10, when you can go to 11?)
, and GK is listed fourth in the alphabetical list. They are not ranked fourth, as previously reported.
It's great to see GK mentioned in current wide-circulation music magazines. GK's been away for awhile; I'm sure more than a few have forgotten them or written them off as one-hit wonders. Name-dropping like this will put them in people's memory again.
Still waiting for Jeff's (lead singer) approval on the mp3s that I want to put up, so nothing yet on that front.
A source has told me that GK is not signing with Sanctuary Records. I can't vouch for the validity of it. It's probably best to treat all label rumors as just rumors. They'll probably announce it soon anyway.
By the way, I may have some new mp3s soon....
Man, I got scooped on two counts! A new fansite just popped up, so go check it out. It's called Killing a Nation. Not much there yet but it sure looks nice.
Here's the two news items I got from the aforementioned site. Give its webmaster all the credit for these:
Pitchshifter, Gravity Kills and Biohazard are all rumored to be eyeing possible U.S. recording contracts with Sanctuary Records. This is the same label GK talked about when I hung out with them at their December show in Detroit.Oh, I added a streaming interview link and a streaming live show link to the MP3s and Articles pages.
On a completely unrelated note, Joey Ramone (aka Jeffrey Hyman), lead singer of the Ramones, died on Sunday of lymphatic cancer at the age of 49. Being born in '79, I can't possibly understand the impact the Ramones had on music back in the '70s, but plenty of other artists have cited them. The first rock concert I ever went to was I think in '93, it was the Ramones and White Zombie touring for "Adios" (I think) and "Astro-Creep: 2000" (respectively) at the LC Walker Arena in Muskegon. The audience was evenly divided between black leather and black T-shirts and the Ramones set consisted of 20 songs in about 45 minutes. It was great.
Say that three times fast. Then go look at them. Right here on the Miscellaneous page.
By the way, you don't even know how much I've played with this site this week. I made it so it looks right in IE, it's readable in Netscape 4.old, and now that the frames are gone, you could even read it in Lynx.
I got rid of all the frames and I did a bunch of other stuff on my end that'll make doing this page easier. That's really all I have at the moment. Tell me what you think of the slightly new look.
Thanks to Nathaniel Graham, I have an mp3 of an acoustic version of Here, from the 15Dec00 show at the Main Event in Toledo, Ohio. Get it at the mp3s page.
In other news, GK flew to NY last week to meet with a label. They said that they'll probably sign with them, but they can't say who that label is yet. Also, they think they might do another tour this spring. All this and more came from the official GK message board (which seems to be down at the moment while I am writing this).
There have been a couple of neat posts from Matt on the message board.
Here's the text of the first one (this has been up for a couple days now):
If everything goes as planned, Gravity Kills is supposed to fly to New York this week (Thursday I think) to meet with a prospective record label. If all goes well, we will be posting good news of a new label deal. We'll keep you posted here at the website. Stay tuned!
Here's the text from the other one that's just an interesting anecdote:
;D
Fun Fact:
Howard Stern used to play Gravity Kills music for intos and outros on his show. He once said on the air that he listened to nothing but our first record over an entire weekend. We took it as a compliment and sent him a cool Gravity Kills leather jacket with a G.K. logo on it. There are only 5 of those jackets (coats) in existence.
Wanna link to Perverted?
Here's a roundup of all the known song names for the new GK album: Enemy, Forget Your Name, Naked, Personal Jesus, Superstarved, Shake, Shame, and Suffocate.
Earlier this week I added www.guilty.org to the Links page. Go check John Tracy's site out - he'll have an initial version completed soon.
I found I had more web space to blow, so every single one of the live GK mp3s are back up. Anyone have any they'd like to give me? I have some more room where I can post them...
Check out the gavel on the Miscellaneous page.
Shake is up in demo form on mp3.com! It sounds real good, though I don't think I'm fond of Jeff's distorted voice right at the beginning. I nitpick everything though.
I put up a couple new articles that I've found here and there; the new ones have an asterisk (*) before the date if you'd like to read them.
If you've been to the GK message board, you've probably seen this, posted by Matt (who's a posting machine on that board):
The band is still working hard on the new record. Our management is considering offers and speaking with many different labels in the meantime. We are still considering posting demos on MP3.com in the near future, but must get some answers on legal issues and are weighing the pros/cons of doing so. We'll keep you updated here as to the progress. Please stay tuned - we are SO excited about this record and can't wait to get it out!
Click here to read it yourself.
I didn't know there was a new message board up -- I had the old one bookmarked and was wondering why people had stopped posting there. Regardless, Matt says that they'll be putting demos on mp3.com and we can vote on which ones will go on the new disc. The Gravity Master in another post confirmed that the mp3s will go up tomorrow.
Opera is the only browser that's mostly up to standards (better than both Mozilla and IE, and it's free, too), so I didn't know that other browsers completely screwed up the menu images. I changed some stuff up, got rid of the ugly menu images that wouldn't display right, and fixed a couple other things so now this page should look close to okay for everybody.
Yeah, web design news is boring, but that's all I've had time for. There's no GK news either. Wish they'd let out a status report. Maybe I'll send Jeff an email...
Perverted is back, and way behind schedule. After staring entirely too long at specs for HTML4.0, CSS2, and PHP4, this is what's done so far. The pages that are complete are coded a lot cleaner, and the PHP scripting will make automating this site easier.
The buttons above (which I've decided are ugly and will change later) just link to the old Perverted pages. Some of the images are broken. I'll spend the next couple of days fixing those up. I think all the content is still available, though. If not, email me.
To be updated also soon: the songlist, some links, the interviews at www.thepitfiend.com and www.theindustryonline.com, some other stuff, etc. Keep an eye out.