| Dave Latchaw - Drums, keys, vocals, guitars, producer Jon Vitas (Weapon X) - Guitars, bass, vocals, keys Scott Stambaugh (Father Time) - Vocals, guitars, keys, songwriter Jon Vitas (bass and guitars): Part 2: When weAponX is not acting like his X-Men namesake and chompin on huge cigars, while guzzling tankards of beer, he is perusing infinite earths, mirror universes, other sides, underverses and oververses, round things that flush sideways and whisks him off to Abbydos or the Ori Galaxy, or any number of unrealized realities. And then when his mind returns to tormented space, he’s thinking up crazy bass or guitar or sometimes even cheap sounding synth parts for Neg Ten songs. Or he is in Hell Cojones, CA with Social Spit or with Jeric and the Jerks. Part 1: Once upon a time there was a website called MP3.com I was the 512th artist to join. At the time, there were only 2 people working in an office on the UCSD campus. One of them a Programmer, and the other a woman named Michelle whose job it was to get bands to sign up. For 2 years, nobody wanted to join the site. But from the time I added my band Social Spit as the 512th band and my Solo Projects “weAponX”, around 2 months, there had been 1500 more bands added. At the time, I had not played with Social Spit since 1993, but I had a bunch of songs that had never been released. I did fine in the Punk charts at MP3c. until poseur-punk bands pushed us out of the top 10. My own material never did well, and I would never buy ads, so mostly nobody ever heard it. Ironically, 5 years after Mp3c. closed its doors for good, Social Spit decided to have our 30th anniversary, which lasted 3 years. But now, we just play a few shows a year if that many. This was maybe summer of 97; I was asked to join the site also as a moderator to assist the site developer in finding problems, so I also acted as a Liaison between bands who had trouble uploading content to the site. I did this job until 1999; they actually paid me for it, and for writing a comprehensive FAQ which they still used part of until the day that site went offline. I probably could have gotten a real job there, but I never pushed for it. It was during this time I met Scott, who called himself “Father Time”. His Modus Operandi was to piss off as many people as possible, in an attempt to get people to listen to his music. I had only heard rumors of this guy, so I decided, “well, I will give him a listen, if his material is good, I might even leave him alone”. But when I put his playlist into my MP3 player, I thought it was the most horrible cacophony I had ever heard. Except for a few songs he did where Zeeza Love sang, she had a great voice but she appeared to be crazy, but what do you expect from a French-Canadian? It was simply the language barrier - she would say things that everyone else couldn’t understand, but I did. But from this point, I prosecuted Father Time, from MP3.com to AMP3.com, from Listensmart to Garageband when it was an infant site. JavaMusic. But MP3.com and AMP3 were the only sites that actually paid artists, AMP3 being the actual first*. But we had some great Flame Wars that spanned at least 3 sites at a time. Finally, I was just looking through the Trademark Database and I came across an Entry for “Father Time” (Which may or may not actually be his real name, but he goes by this name now.) See, my mistake was telling my discovery to two silly girls, who I had told DO NOT tell this information to anyone! So within 5 minutes they posted this name all over the net. This is why I don’t trust anyone with secrets these days. Best thing to do with a secret is to sit on it until you can use it for maximum effect. With that opportunity vanished like vapor, I started leaving him alone. And I made a discovery: I thought his production sucked, but under it, I heard some quality, some good songwriting. So I decided to take one of his songs and give it a little bit of a production, with my guitars and a drum part with better samples. And I discovered I liked what I heard. One thing about Scott is that he can pump out song after song rapidly. Now David, on the other hand I knew as “Dayvel” who made Christmas Midi’s every year. He still does that, but he’s the one who engineers this mess. He is actually a fine drummer, comes from the early-80’s school of San Francisco New Wave and Punk, which I was also part of for a while, being a member of Umbrella Defence which became Fade to Black (after they kicked me out). The Humans. The Avengers, I can relate to all of those bands. But I never was in a Flame War with David. Maybe it’s the intensity of Flame Wars I used to have with Scott that makes this enterprise so ironic. One thing I have found is that Scott can really play keyboards, and he peppers his work with nice little orchestrations or Vox Organ sounds. *But AMP3 went down and is now a redirected address that points to some horrible virus, one so deadly that Facebook bans the address. They had a good idea, include a short ad at the beginning of each song, if you download the song, the ad vanishes. But that site was a disaster and there was always some power struggle between the owner of the site and the company that hosted the site, who thought that they should own the site instead. So they sabotaged it. But the owner was a decent fellow; he paid off all of the bands who had earned, and especially me, who he owed 1500 bucks. _____________________________________________________________________________
Dave Latchaw (drums, keys, guitars, producer): Dave is a quiet guy except when banging on his drums, so he passed on adding his side of the story to this bio. The second time around - Dave Latchaw is an ancient wizard who lives in a giant pumpkin in the heart of an enchanted forest with his cat Shadow. He enjoys drums and watching videos about quantum field theory on youTube. _____________________________________________________________________________
Scott Stambaugh (vocals, guitar, keys, songwriter): Part 2: Well we've developed a big of following since the previous bio, pushing 48,000 followers on Twitter. We've done numerous songs to expand the range of the band in these last few years also. Perhaps our most magnficent stretch was releasing Wild Tomorrow, Missing Link and Year of the Snake one after the other. No band of this era even comes close to that. Our working methods have evolved a lot over time, sometimes I almost think we actually know what we're doing. The band shows no signs of slowing down at this point and that makes me very happy. oh one other thing, the band had it's most magical moment the day Joe Biden was awarded enough electoral votes to win the presidency. We had the song Ding Dong Motherfucker ready for that event and it went over like gangbusters, as they say. Part 1: The road to the internet band Negative Tendencies has been a long one. I’ve known Jon and Dave for a long time, had worked with both, previously. Jon, more known to me as WeaponX, is a guy I first ran into on the mp3.com bbs, he was a moderator at the time. My friends and I were involved in a sort of clan war with this group of folks led by a country artist named Mickey Dean and the ever-present Paisley Face. I tell this part cause it led to meeting Weap. We were pounding away at the control of the community exerted by Mickey Dean’s group and he called in this rapper supposedly to handle us named Crack Emcee. I listened briefly to Crack’s music and didn’t really take him seriously. In a discussion with Mickey I said something about him bringing his boy in to fight me. Thing is though, I thought Crack was a white guy and they jumped all over me for calling him a boy, saying I’m racist. This is where WeaponX came in and literally went on full attack on me for months. He would post swastikas after every post I made there. He followed me to other communities and smeared me there. He even hacked my website and gave my real name and home address to some of my enemies which kinda blew my mind. Anyway it started to ease up, Weap got tired of fighting with me I suppose, and I released a song called Girl, Turn Yourself Loose on Me. Weap hated it at first but I think it kind of grew on him, became a love/hate sort of thing. Not long after that, WeaponX and I worked together moderating the popular Mosh Pit forum and had an understanding since then I think. Awhile later Weap produced my song All Along (which I still consider one of my best songs to this day) and the song got enough plays to be a sitewide #1 All Genres at Artist Launch. Unfortunately at the time that site was corrupt and we found out from one of the site admins that we easily had the most plays but we peaked at #4 because they manually put 3 of Ana Lovelis’ songs above ours. Weap is a great musician, plays bass and some guitar for Neg Tendencies. He was part of the fairly well-known band Social Spit, whose biggest claim to fame I believe was getting their album banned at Walmart cause the cover was so risqué. Dave Latchaw I first met as DayVel who was best known for selling a ton of Christmas music he did on keyboards at a site called Java Music who couldn’t pay him for all he sold and they eventually went out of business. His version of 12 Days of Christmas is kickass btw. My first encounters with DayVel were in a yahoo chatroom related to mp3.com, I remember him as sort of a gruff guy who wasn’t that nice to me for whatever reason, probably cause of my general outspokenness. He was always in these communities and once he heard a song of mine he liked called I Believe In Karma and offered to help me make a better version of it. Anyway he did so and it was very popular, he later did the same with Heads Turn which was also very popular, they both got to #1 on the sites I was involved with at the time. Later he helped with my Sex Pistols homage called Blameless and took that song to the next level. So I was friends with these guys on facebook for years and knew Dave loved to drum and asked if he’d be interested in working on a new project with me, as one of the criticisms Father Time often gets is that he uses a drum machine. Anyway Dave agreed and suggested we ask WeaponX, he had worked with him before also, and I thought it was a good idea and did so, thus our band was born. Not long after this I was given a timeout on some music forum for dissing some artist and got a note from the moderator saying "Please control your negative tendencies" and this amused me enough to buy the domain name and suggest it as a band name. It was very slow going, I sort of gave up many times but you only ever get anywhere with patience and finally I started to get back mixes of the first 6 songs I put up for the group. Btw, about those songs, all but one (Take My Love) were songs from the late 80s to early 90s. I saved them, thinking they were kind of special songs because I didn’t really trust my own production, always thought someday I would record them in the studio. There are many more songs from that same batch left to do up. One of the songs on the EP, More Than Just Words, actually required me to go on EBay and buy a piece of equipment I owned back then called an ART SGE for a special guitar effect. There was a long pause before our magnum opus, Ego Draino, finally came out to universal acclaim from our facebook friends. :) Anyway I am thrilled with the resulting CD and hope we make more music down the road. |