Post by: Bryan Stealey
Town: Morgantown
Website: Reversing the Numbness

I love music, as anyone who ever visits my Friday Music posts will know. (If you’re the same way, consider swinging by RtN and helping make a weekly play list. It’s an open invitation.) While I don’t make it out to see local live music like I used to, I still like thinking about some of the bands I was into in college in the early to mid-’90s. I love when I find traces of this music on the internet.

Here’s a video of the Joint Chiefs from 1995. These guys were hugely popular back in the day and just did a little three-show reunion tour in Morgantown, Charleston, and Huntington (I believe) a few weeks ago.

I was very stoked to find out that Steve Rubin, the guitar player from rock-hip-hoppers Circle 6, has posted all of Circle 6’s recordings online at Eight Track Mind. Go listen! With Steve on guitar and the incomparable Billy Resh on the mic, Circle 6 always put on an awesome show in a similar vein to Rage Against the Machine (but with a little more rap). At one point Steve and I had a big plan to get some guys together and do a show covering both albums of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but we never did get around to it.

Eric Lewis and I did play a lot of Pink Floyd, but it was his gigs with his band Once Hush that I remember the best. He was my roommate and the guys in the band were some of my best college friends, so I probably saw this group a hundred times. I never felt like they got the credit they deserved, because they were all fantastic musicians and they wrote really good pop songs. You can hear some of their stuff on the Once Hush MySpace page. Eric and singer/guitarist Greg Riordan are still making great music.

So many other bands, I can hardly remember them all. Rasta Rafiki. Jolly Gargoyle. The Karl Shuman Band. Lester James and the White Flames. The Recipe. The Groove Tubes. The Tide (featuring Eric Hopper). Todd Burge (who’s still the pride of West Virginia) and his bands 63 Eyes and Triple Shot. Brian Porterfield (also still going strong with his band The Love Me Knots). Sandra Black.

That’s just the beginning of the massive collection of quality bands that graced Morgantown in the early to mid-’90s. Dozens — probably hundreds — of bands have come and gone through this town since, and I missed out on most of them. I think I got to see The Argument once before they broke up, and the same goes for The Emergency, though I think they’re still together. I’ve seen one-man punk band J. Marinelli a couple of times, and Billy Matheney and the Frustrations as well. I’m sure there are excellent bands in this town I don’t even know about.

I’ll end with one more Youtube video of one Morgantown’s most world-renowned bands, Karma to Burn. They’re no longer together, but their legacy of instrumental rock lives on in fans across the globe.