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Excerpt from the liner notes of Best of Bill Buck to 2000

My young musical life was forever changed one day by guitarist Tony Laurenzano, a senior who was a few years ahead of me in high school. He invited me to a jam session with "this dude Jerry, some freshman." Jerry Barr ended up becoming my formative drummer as well as a great bandmate all through high school. We wrote material and honed our jam band skills for about a year and finally started auditioning a short line of bizarre bassists -- with no success. We started playing friends' house parties, sans bass player. Two dudes, just me on guitar/lead vocals and Jerry on drums and the occasional friend on guest vocals or miscellaneous instruments. Jerry's parents were the greatest: they plastered the walls of their garage with sound-proofing carpet and endured house-shaking heavy metal, thrash and experimental jams, all the while helping to fend off the neighbors with a policy of assertive diplomacy -- as well as bribes of home baked cookies!

After auditioning the four available teen bassists in our small town, we finally found our match: a spunky outlaw by the name of Jeremy Torres. He brought a new playfulness to the band, and even inspired us to write an ode to Jerry's childhood stuffed clown toy Stimpy. (The song was popular among the girls, who thought it was cute.) Jeremy used to bring his family's Japanese exchange student to our rehearsals. By a fortuitous twist, Ryuichi was a guitar maestro and was a true clown, reminsicent of that Japanese kid in the movie Sixteen Candles.

This era was potent growth for us; we grew up together as musicians. On Friday nights, jamming with no agenda, with or without our friends listening, we created and perfected our craft. I watched Jerry's playing skyrocket through hundreds of hours jamming together and I learned how to merge with the beat inside the music, to watch and anticipate the drummer, and to celebrate improvisation in music.

These were good times and we budded -- as did the local music scene, aka the Orcutt Skate Thrashers (OST). The song "TV Deadhead" was one of our crowd-pleasers. The live version featured on the CD Best of Bill Buck was recorded at one of our gigs in "L.A." -- Little L.A., that is... OK, Los Alamos, a cowtown off Highway 101 near Santa Barbara. A going-away party for bassist Jeremy Torres brother "Critter" who had joined the military and was shipping off. All our friends were there: an out-of-town party -- every band in the scene was making an appearance (all three of them). And my cousin Drew's band from Ventura even came up, creating a stir with their urban punk and evil, debaucherous vibe.

To record this show, I gave my portable cassette tape recorder to Mike Fisher, who carried it with him out in the audience; his ramblings are captured on the historic tape, which is as funny as it is authentic to the times. After my pal Steve Reid spilled Mike's cup of beer, Steve held onto the recorder for a while while Mike went to get a refill from the keg... This tape really captures the moment! ...Through the show, everybody came up and said sh*t into the mic -- and in addition to capturing the sound quality of our music, the hilarious chatter and antics of the party can be heard throughout: 200 friends and scenesters just being high school kids... Anytime I want to remember what those days were really like (which admittedly isn't very often), I listen to this recording!

Where were we playing that night? Well, in those days, if you weren't playing someone's living room all you had were Lion's Club auditoriums and Grange halls (complete with deer head trophies). Tonight was no exception. I'm sure the small town America we played to was somehow forever altered by the mind-expanding, restless groove of A Pocketful... But whatever the case, we all had a blast.