History
Before Roadside Monument began, singer Doug Lorig was involved in other bands. During junior high, high school, and college, he performed in the bands Cow Shrapnel, Waterfront, and Sixth Hour, all of which also featured another future Roadside Monument member, bassist Todd Florence.
Roadside was signed to Tooth & Nail Records only about four months after they formed in 1994, because they had good fortune in being discovered by Brandon Ebel. They released their Tooth & Nail debut, a 7-inch vinyl EP called My Life Is Green, in 1995.
Roadside Monument followed up their debut with their first full length Beside This Brief Hexagonal also in 1996. After the release of this album, complications emerged with keeping the band together due to medical issues and other obligations. After the other members departed, Lorig was left to find Matt Johnson (of Blenderhead) on drums and Johnathan Ford on bass. Lorig, Ford and Johnson became the core of Roadside Monument, and its sole members in all future releases. In 1997, Eight Hours Away from Being a Man was released, along with a pair of split EPs (with Puller and Frodus). Eight Hours Away from Being a Man was the album in which they became a prominent band on the Tooth & Nail roster, gaining popularity in the indie rock, emo and Christian underground music scenes.
Roadside Monument broke up after the Cornerstone Festival in 1998, when Ford moved to Chicago, Illinois. They had already written and recorded another album, called I Am the Day of Current Taste, which was released several months after their breakup.
In 2002, Ford returned to Seattle, and Roadside Monument reunited as an indie band. The new incarnation of the band played local shows, toured with Pedro the Lion and lasted for about one year, when Johnson decided to end the band again because of an inability to be a part of a full-time touring band. During this short time that the band re-united they created several new songs, including "Zzyzx" which was recorded during a live performance at Cornerstone 2002, and subsequently released via the band's official Web site.
Read more about this topic: Roadside Monument
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)