Saturday, May 12th, 2007
hgl played their last show on new years day 1988- concluding their set with a version of the rites of spring song ‘drink deep’- “drink deep/its just a taste/and it might not come this way againâ€. no one expected the band would last. rites of spring only played 14 shows before breaking up so hgl couldn’t be expected to do more. there are no proper studio recordings – i try to imagine what could have happened if they had managed to record. and i come up blank. but, shortly after the band ended, guy released a 6 song ep on his peterbilt label (actually distributed by amanda mackaye’s label at the time.. name escapes me..) the record was all live recordings. the sleeve was a manila envelope with a picture glued on the envelope. not all the people in the photo were in the band. the insert was merely a business card with the song titles and a list of names (those in the band and others) not quite written in a way that made immediate sense. outside of washington, dc we heard rumors of this bands existence but we weren’t prepared for the sheer perversity of it all. i recall at the time maximum rocknroll compared them to flipper which i do not think was accurate at all. –you have to understand where i’m coming from here, and in these days of the internet where everything is available at the click of a mouse it may be hard to comprehend. (there are no rumors anymore. myth is dying.) i never saw RoS play (til live videos showed up on youtube) but heard rumors that both the band members and the audience would be moved to tears by the power of the music and at the end of the set the stage would be littered in flowers and broken guitars. and when the RoS lp came out, it seemed to support this. the woodcut artwork, the deeply passionate, emotional songs –‘deeper than inside’, ‘hains point’, ‘end on end’, ‘persistent vision’ and ‘theme (if i started crying)’ where guy sang “and if i started crying/would you start crying?â€. so this is where i stood. i’d heard from those in the know that one last wish was a similar affair only more pop (it was til the early 90s that i managed to score a copy of it from guy picciotto). so when i put the needle on this strange looking hgl record – looking more like a piece of art then an ep – i was pretty stunned.
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