Well, first of all, let me start off by saying that regardless of your skill level or where your band stands in the local chain, it crosses everyone’s mind that being in a band is a waste of time, annoying, and will in the end be pointless. Either brought out by frustration of playing with people that you feel aren’t on the same page as you, or conflicting schedules, you eventually just want to call it quits. But if there is one thing that I've learned from playing around with different bands, is that you never leave. You try and stay and work with what you have until it simple collapses on itself so that no one can give you any crap and complain that you weren’t as interested or that the downfall was your fault. Yes, the bassists are always moody, the lead guitarists are stubborn and have huge egos and the drummers are bored and angry, but that’s what you have to deal with it and try to organize and hopefully push it onto a progressive path.
Generation one of Catalyst started off with everyone coming from previous projects with exactly this mindset, angered by the drama that came with putting 4+ guys in a hot room everyday and the lack of music being made. They joined in hopes of taking all their faults, insecurities and dealing with them with music, painting a portrait of their deepest frustrations in an almost therapeutic manner while at the same time, doing something they loved to do. Play music.
Enter Josh and Ephrem; Two artists that resides on opposite end of the emotional spectrum. While josh had his roots in blues and jazz and played bass, preferring to be a pacifist and attaining inner peace with himself and his surroundings, Ephrem’s roots consisted of fast, aggressive metal and played drums even though guitar was his forte, and insisted on dwelling on the negative aspects of life. Only through fate could these two be brought into the same room one day at a guitar club meeting and instantly fall in sync with each other as musicians than as people first. We formed a band within days, finding an old friend of Ephrem by the name of Ryan, named the band Ethereal and we were set with a blues driven hard rock style fit to be our own. We would practice, jam and have deep discussions, the band heading no where but up. We wrote a few songs that Ryan brought in and we jammed around with some local bands such as Icarus and sort of kept each other motivated with a competitive atmosphere, although the genres were no where near each other.
Here began the long standing feud between what was Pre-Catalyst and Icarus, which would see most members revolving in each others bands, and leading up to a climatic end to Catalyst’s participation in Icarus and its downfall. Ethereal hit a snag at this point. Ephrem shared different views with the guitarist, Ryan, and began to poison his moods and destroy his self image, leading up to Ryan attempting suicide and then quitting the band once he made his recovery.
With no guitarist, Ethereal had met its grim demise. Josh then called an old friend to come by practice and see if he would be interested in picking guitar back up and playing for us. Here is where Zac was inducted and became one of the founding members of Catalyst, relearning how to play with astonishing speed. While looking for a singer was the last thing we planned to do, we wrote and rehearsed everyday locking into a tight groove, and actually got something going. We chose not to choose a name yet seeing as we were not ready to be put out into the local scene, though we did toss a few names around, such as That One Band, The Josh Shores Experience, J.A.Z.E, and Death instinct.
We then acquired Zac’s old friend Andrew, who slowly replaced Ephrem as a drummer while Ephrem moved back into the familiar territory of guitar and Generation One of Catalyst was locked down. Around this time, we all had our little substance abuse problems, which weren’t really problems to us then because we saw it as partying with the band, though they never got completely out of hand to the point where we couldn’t play. Actually, there might have been a few times we’d get too messed up that one of us would pass out.
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