THE TIMELINE OF DECIMATED
The year was 1994, I met Mike Laatsch from a mutual friend Dale L.
He was telling me about this young dude who could rip it up on guitar. So I met Mike and it was on from there. Our talent was about the same and so was our musical direction~
Through Mike I met a fellow by the name of Jason Cavanaugh. He was already jamming with Mike, and they had kinda learned together how to play metal thru the years shit from GNR, Overkill to Slayer. They use to jam with a guy named Chris Obertine.
I jammed with Mike and Jason for years going thru singers like you couldn't imagine.
We would have a friend end up singing for us. Some of those guys were: Dale L, Sean Dashkovich,
Shane AKA Shitpacker, Randy Leonard, and Jason"Trahn Cahn Cook" Tran.
What really got us into getting serious is when John Manns came around. A metal head whose musical interests were the same as ours. We practiced at his house doing mainly covers and a few origionals, that was the summer of 1995, it didnt last long (about a year) due to his work and family schedule. Ripped and Torn , Atrocity, and another song I forgot the title, these were our earliest origional songs we all wrote together.
We jammed our asses off for years with no singer doing origionals and covers playing occasional parties, Mike or I would do the singing in the meantime. As far as a bassist, I sold my guitar gear for bass gear in 1997 and did the job for 9 months till I got sick of it. And sick of playing "97" I went back to guitar as soon as I bought all new guitar gear.
By then I met Matt Kornick (Chewy) thru his brother Hank, who later became our Bassist. With a full band now (Mike and I singing) , we never had a name for ourselves. This lasted about a year and our drummer Jason Cavanaugh took a break for college.
Then I met this dude named through work, Arvid Benjamin and introduced him to Mike, he was a singer and he introduced us to a guy named Damon Garfield, who played drums. So we formed a band and the title was DiVision. We came up with a 12+ song set list after 9-12 months of playing, we played one party and it fell apart shortly after that. We basically got sick of our singer wanting us to follow in the steps of Slipknot, korn and other gay ass shit we can't stand, amongst other bullshit, we had to call it quits!
Some time passed and Mike , Chewy and I continued to write music. Damon Garfield came back in the picture to jam with us. We hired on our friend Matt Williamson to take over vocals and we jammed for 5 months till Damon (drums) and Matt (bass) quit.
We jammed with Chris Richards (Bassist) and Damon off and on just killin time.
Mike found Chris Aikens (Bass) and Genaro Rodriguez (drums), this was 2004. We formed together in Late 2004 with Matt Williamson calling ourselves Decimated. We were doing shows around here and the occasional party gigs just to get the name out. Matt Williamson our singer had to call it quits in early 2005 due to health reasons.
Months after being stuck in the mud with no singer, we met Dennis Sanders November 2005 thru an ad at mid michigan music. We had written new material and kept some old, and he wrote new lyrics to all the music. We made our first Unofficial Demo in January, with the help of Torrie LaFrance producing it. That can be found at my pure volume page. Also in January our bassist Chris Aikens, and friend Torrie L. moved to Louisville Ky. to further their careers in the music industry. We played shows around here (w/out a bassist)to get our name out and traveled to Louisiana to rock out 3 Mardi-Gras shows. Chris Richards stepped in a brief time playing bass but couldn't commit full time. Dennis left in April of 2006 shortly after our last gig. He packed up his ego and moved back to Lousy-ana to further his career in music since he, "saw no hope for anything or anyone coming out of Bay City, Mi."
In May 2006 I tracked down Shane Sawyer, a Veteran Death Vocalist of the Bay City scene. He wrote lyrics to music we had already, and to new music we wrote. In April we started our Official Demo with Mike from Delicious Grooves studio in Linwood. His vocal style as Death, has brought us musically to an extreme style of thrash speed metal and death mixed.
In early August we ran into Gary Rosebush, another veteran of the Bay City music scene. He is an old friend of ours and he is a great guitarist that we've jammed with back in the day. He agreed to play Bass for us in Decimated. By the end of a couple months we were all getting tighter and getting our shit together for our CD project. Which is still in the works.
October 27th we played our first (party) show together, with Save The Roaches.
This was a Halloween party Jessie and I had put together which turned out killer!
We knew we were ready to get the ball rolling.
We are working on getting more gigs.
And getting some merchandise up.