| on the first day of school my 8th grade year (august 16th, 1998), i (drew ryan) walked into my first period 8th grade algebra class and sat down in front of a brown-haired kid wearing a 311 t-shirt. my first thought was "i think we're going to become pretty good friends." as the year progressed, fletch and i hung out all throughout the school day and into the weekends where we'd stay up as late as we could friday night, wake up saturday and play music in my garage until my mom yelled at us to stop. eventually, we developed a name (pipe-down) and continued to play our instruments very poorly. i had just got a drumset that year in school, and fletch was still new at the guitar, but nothing was more fun than to poorly cover blink-182 and marvelous 3 songs. high school comes around and fletch moves off to cordova, and i stayed back in bartlett. fletch met some new friends; of these friends was a guy named dustin prude. dustin invited us to a bible study led by an upperclassmen named jeph phifer (guitar and vocals; 1999-2000). jeph had a punk rock band named shelly with a guy named jared filsinger (bass; 1999-2001). they weren't very good and neither were we, so we decided to merge bands and keep the name pipe-down. we played a few house parties and church gigs and even recorded a 5 or 6 song demo. jeph grew distant and quit the band to form a new band, but jared, fletch, and i became the best of friends. instead of us spending our weekends at my house, we'd spend it at jared's house. we almost spent our entire summer there because jared would be too lazy to drive us home. after a slew of shows and a studio session before our 10th grade year (jared's 11 grade year), we decided it would be best for jared to leave the band. fletch met a guy named michael "mikey" brandon (bass; 2001-present) in his math class at cordova, and they became pretty good friends. fletch also discovered that mikey was a bassist, so we quickly invited him over to play with us in my garage. our personalities seemed to fit very well together, so he soon joined the band. we played as a three-piece band for quite sometime... we had some original material, but we still played our favorite songs from blink-182 and other punk rock bands. junior year rolls around and dustin (guitar; 2002) joins the band. that was a crazy year in the world of pipe-down. many, many shows were played and many, many songs were written. our style changed from a simple poppunk band to amore melodic pop/rock band. dustin stuck around for a year or two, but decided it would be best to split ways with the band. our buddy chad turner (guitar and vocals; 2002-present) played in a band called the smile brigade. the smile brigade played tons of shows together, and when we found out that TSB was breaking up, we jumped at the opportunity to ask chad to join the band. we decided that since the band has gone through so many members and musical changes and growth, it'd be appropriate for a name change. the holiday was born. actually, it wasn't really born... it was sort of a mutation off of pipe-down... but it was bigger... stronger... definitely more attractive... and just flat out better. the holiday decided to keep only a few of pipe-down's old songs... other than that, we wrote a whole new set of songs. we played shows. wrote more songs... dropped more songs... and just got tighter as a band and as friends. we recorded a 5 song ep called starting over and released it during the winter of our senior year (late 2002-03). we sold over a hundred copies the first night (that may not sound like alot, but when you were only expecting to sell about 15 or so, it's mind-blowing). now, the holiday continues with their musical journey... writing more and more positive pop/rock songs for the masses to hear. |
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