The Unofficial Cantankerous Page (RIP)

The picture you see below is compiled of some footage thieved off of an old video tape. The pictures are kind of blurry, but fuck it, we were all pretty much young and ugly anyways. Just to set the stage (no pun intended), this is from a show in Salt Lake City around 1991. We opened for Sick Of It All and DRI. If you look close enough, you can see DRI's drum set behind us. When they're playing you definitely set up in front of 'em, even back then.

The kids in the band were:

Jim Barr - shouting and lyrics (me)
Mauz (Matt Parillo) - axegrinder
Tim Abshire - axegrinder
Mike Kelly - four strings of terror
Eric Bassford - sticks and skins

Discography (Don't worry it's short)

Lyrics (click here)

I've seen the 7" at used record stores for as little as $.99 and as much as $4.99. The split is a little more valuable only cause Confrontation is on it and there was only a 1000 pressed (I think). Plus the split has a killer fold out mural by John Zunich.

Some of the bands that we played with are: DRI, Sick Of It All, Downcast, Head First, Carry Nation, The Mentors, Das Klown, One Thin Dime, Reality Control, Amenity, Boy Wonder, 3 Blind Mice.We always had fun, we weren't straight-edge, but we weren't drunks either. Well maybe I was on occasion, but that's a whole nother story. We were together for a couple of years, maybe three. We started out as a band called Dead Wrong and quickly changed our name to Cantankerous for reasons I can't remember, it just seemed cool.

I now have a completed tape chock full of all the studio recordings ever made complete with a color cover/lyric sheet. If you would like a copy, send me an email and we'll work something out.  By the way, I've never described our sound! My vocals were compared to Cliff of Bl'ast. My belief is that this comparison was solely due to the fact that my lyrics were decipherable even though I shouted. Our sound I've never been fully able to describe. I can just relay our influences in that we liked to mosh so there were some slow grungy parts, but we liked to play some fast stuff too. We were definitely off-beat with lots of starts and stops, and we took pride in the fact that noone would really know that our song had actually ended.