Graveyard Rodeo Bio It all began in 1980. Graveyard Rodeo, at this point in time, went through many different band names. Drummer Wayne Fabra, was fourteen years of age, original guitarist, Lee Fucich, was a senior in high school and Wayne was a freshman.TOmmy scanlan was 16yrs old and was a punk on the street with no where to go. Tommy and lee were good friends in school and Lee let Tommy move in. TOmmy never played guitar but Loved music. After ssing Lee play at various jam sessions in peoples back yards Tommy wanted to play. Lee was one of those guys that could play anything and started showing tommy punk songs fro Gen X , and the sex pistols. Tommy adn lee would sit up all nigth, jamming and writing songs. Lee and Wayne had jammed before in his garage. Lee had introduced Wayne to the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Fear, etc. Lee walks up to Wayne one day in school, and says, "hey man, you wanna start a punk bank? And we'll play Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, etc." I said, "Shit yeah!" So the next day, he handed me a stack of business cards and says, "this is our band name, pass these out to everybody you see." The card read: 4th Reich (Our Time Has Come). For booking, call, Tommy Mescaline. I said to Lee, "who is Tommy Mescaline?" He said, "he's our rhythm guitarist, and he's one intense dude. You will like him."

So after passing out cards all day at school, when I got home, I called the number on the card. Tommy and I spoke for hours. He played his guitar for me over the phone. He played "Belsen Was A Gas" by the Sex Pistols. We started practicing in my gargage. For a few weeks, we played Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, The Clash, etc. Then, Lee and Tommy started collaborating and wrote these awesome, Hardcore riffs. Then we had wrote about five or six original songs.

There was a guy named Rico who was going to be the singer for what was to become Graveyard Rodeo , but He was just too scared and shy to do it. Meanwhile Perry Back then was starting to jam with two guys named Larry and richard in the neighborhood and where going to come up with a band called ,"Just Us", but never really took off. Basically It was a neighorhood and people would just get toether and jam the songs they knew and get fucked up . Perry was a good friend of Lee and Tommy's and he came over one night to hear us practice and picked up a microphone and started singing Perry and Tommy were taller than me, and I found them to be very intimidating. I looked at them as my mentors. They wore these old beat-up black leather jackets, army fatigues and combat boots. They did a lot of LSD in those days. I just drank a lot of cheap wine, and smoked pot. We lived the Bohemian lifestyle like real street punks. When we would go to gigs at a place called The Beat Exchange, there would be people wearing knee high Doc Martens. The old Oi, Skinhead Docs, not the fashionable ones people wear today, (Doctor Martins) they're called now, how fucking gay can you get? People would have safety pins stuck in their faces with dog chains connected to them going to their pierced ears. Swastika arm bands, army fatigues, Vietnam trench coats. The Nazi regalia people wore back then wasn't a white power thing. It was like a symbol of power and aggression, and anti-government issues. I guess you could compare it to like with the biker gangs and shit. They wore it to represent the elite of the core. The women were real freaky looking. A lot of the girls were skinheads and they would wear all of this skin tight bondage leather and carry bullwhips with them. It was a very intense time in music, and rarely documented. There was no "rock star" bullshit, or talking shit about other people or their bands. It was a brotherhood, a union of people against the establishment. Back then longhair was not acceptable. People were very militant back then. There was a group of straight edge skinheads here too, just like in Washington D.C., Punkers, Gothic Punks (way before this new fabled Vampire clubscene of wanna be Vampires and Satanists) this bunch was the real deal, Freaks, Mods, Rockabilly's, and just weird people were a part of this short lived culture.

Shell Shock (originally called The Snots) Stephie and the White Socks, the Red Rockers, believe it or not, the Red Rockers were one of the most intense Hardcore bands at that time. Most people knew about them when they were commercial. Mike Williams sang for a band called Teenage Waste, then a few years later Suffocation by filth. Graveyard Rodeo then changed from being called Fourth Reich to Bob's Barbeque. We played a lot when we changed our name. The Rose Tattoo was a bar directly across from Tipitina's. It was a bar where all the neighborhood blacks hung out, and on the weekends, Hardcore bands would play there, and when they saw us, they would all get up and leave, and the bar would be temporarily segregated for that night. They were scared shitless of us all. We played there a lot with a band called the Sluts. Their vocalist, David Turgeon, was one of the most intense singers I've ever seen or heard. He had a voice that was so loud and raw, you would literally hold your ears when he sang. Jed's had closed up for a while, Jimmy's stopped booking punk bands for a few years. One weekend, we played a show at the Rose Tattoo with a band called The Goners. Tommy calls me up before the show and says, "we changed our name tonight. Tell everyone, we are Graveyard Rodeo." It clicked. Everybody loved the name.

We always had a heavy sound, way before metal and Hardcore crossed over and became the new "in" thing. Bands like Mad Monk, aka, Chaos Horde, originally called, Bastard Child, They were influenced by us a lot. John Sanchez, the guitarist, at one point, even wanted to be our guitarist, but he was spooked by all the evil,death and occult stuff that we stood for. We were influenced by Discharge, Dead Kennedys, Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Circle Jerks and old Gang of Four and the Plasmatics. Hardcore was greatly influenced by the British and American punk rock. Also hard rock and new wave. So all the bands before '84 - '85, were strictly Hardcore. We never even called it punk, just Hardcore and Hardcore it was. Over the yers they've played with D.R.I., Corrosion of Conformity, Raw Power, Saint Vitus, The Offenders, The Brood, Circle Jerks, Butthole Surfers, Agnostic Front W/ Singer John Bloodclot, Negative Approach, Batallion of Saints, to mention a few. I can honestly say, that Graveyard Rodeo was the Louisiana Sludge, Punk Rock, Hardcore, Doom, Death, Band that all well known Bands now in the Southern Hemisphere are greatly infleuenced by.. The Sluts, Shell Shock and Teenage Waste, Disappointed Parents, etc., all have influenced the Louisiana underground music scene. Graveyard Rodeo were the pioneers that sowed the seeds for Southern Doom, that now has made a name for itself. Ask anyone from that point in time.

When 1985 came about, Pepper Keenan, joined Graveyard Rodeo. We saw him playing at a party in someone's backyard. Just him and a drummer playing Metallica and AC/DC covers. Graveyard Rodeo launched Keenan's music career. Crowbar, Exhorder, Down, EYEHATEGOD, etc., are all Graveyard Rodeo influenced one way or the other. There's no denying it. Chris (Whitey) Simms sang for Graveyard for a couple of years. He had a great stage presence and singing style and had a persona like Iggy Pop and Henry Rollins combined. He left for Chicago for personal reasons, and eventually sang for a band called, Leaving Trains. Rodeo took and interest in some of the newer bands that were coming out. When bands like, Venom, started popping up in record stores, everyone went nuts. We would sit in our practice room listening to Venom, through the PA system with our jaws practically hitting the floor. This band influenced and changed our sound, definitely for the better. All the bands around town started listening to Venom and Slayer. Mike Williams turned me onto Bathory.

Music was constantly changing at this time period. Bands were growing their hair longer, buying bigger amplifiers, experimenting with the occult. It was an awesome time in our lives. Everything was fresh and new. Everyday was a surprise. Every drug high was a divine intervention. Fucking strange skin head chicks in bathrooms and vans, getting blow jobs backstage, Rodeo went through several different guitarists after Pepper left. John Swank, from Stephie and the White Socks played with us for a while, Lee would play with us when he had time. He was phenominal. He could get feed back from the lowest volume on his guitar and control it like it was part of his body. Tommy would invent his own chords and arrange them in weird ways. That's why Rodeo's sound is unlike any other band. Craig Alexander played with Graveyard for a short time. The final line up of full time members was, guitarists, Gary Gennaro and Brad Christiana,Guitarist Brad Christiana who was with us for 5 or 6 years worked in a funeral home as a apprentice embalmer And When Guitarist Gary Gennaro joined the band, he had to go through a weird initiation which included going to an unmentioned graveyard to open a crypt an retrieve human remains and bring them back to the rehearsal room. Gary and Brad, learned the Rodeo style, mastered it, and used it to their advantage.

Rodeo had finally signed to a label called Century Media and did an awesome tour of Europe, which merited them a great response. Playing venues of four to five thousand people a night. They would try and beat down the bathroom doors where we were showering, to get our autographs. TV stations, in Prague, Czecheslavakia, were following us into restaurants, wanting to talk to us. It was crazy. Sick of It All, was the band that we toured with. They even said, they never saw a band get this much attention the first time touring. Things seemed to be going great. However, there were personal problems within some of the members of the band, dealing with drugs, alcohol and emotional issues and after the tour everything came to a head and some members went to do their own thing.

Drummer Wayne Fabra was lead vocalist in The infamous Satanic Black Metal band...Christ Inversion, which featured Phillip Anselmo on guitar. Phillip and wayne stuck together for 10 years doing various music projects, they also temed up with Killjoy and reunited the name Necrophagia, which garnered a lot of underground popularity. They even appeared in 3 different cult classic horror dvd's, doing theme songs for each film.. Eventually due to personal differences and constant touring, Phillip and Wayne left Necrophagia to pursue other projects. . Gary G. And Tommy decided to move forward with Graveyard Rodeo, recuited Marc Brignac, Valume Nob, Gary Hebert New religion and Christ Inversion, and Jay, and put out our second album entitled, "on The Verge", followed by the video for,"Blackstone" The video was on rotation in europe.we had alot of great shows including drummer TOmmy buckley from Soilent Green Filling in for Gary H, Tommy and Gary G. realized it just wasnt Graveyard Rodeo with out the rest of the guys and decided to disband in 1997.Since then, years have gone by, until recently when I, myself, Wayne, called up Gary and told him I wanted to play drums for the reunion show at the Raise the Dead II Festival, this coming October.

Truth is, after talking, Gary and I realized that we all had changed for the better. I always loved these guys like my brothers. Even when there was bitterness and hatred. Things are all in the past and the guys have put the past behind them. It's time now to show everyone who we were, and what we have become. It's time to take this band to the top and give it the credit and respect it has for so many years deserved. We will blow everyone's balls off with an even louder, darker, heavier sound then ever before. It's time we kicked everyone's ass and take their names. It's time to set the record straight and show all those old and new how the old school operates. Graveyard Rodeo is back, with a fucking vengeance!