The Guilloteenagers

About the Band

It all started in 1971, when The Guilloteenagers first got together in a basement in Dingley Dell, MA. Back then it was Ali and Matt on bass and guitar/vocals respectively and Terry on drums. They played the local club circuit and hit the Boston clubs when they could.

Then in 1976 they got their big break. A gig opening for Raging Slab. Their manager was so impressed he offered to help shop them around to the labels. After that it was only a matter of weeks before they got picked up by Epic. They were heady days. Rock was young and raw; drugs were cheap; booze flowed like breast milk in a maternity ward, and the label paid for it all. They went into the studio right away and spit out a full-length and an EP in a week. They went on tour in support of the Slab again to build support for their up coming album. Unfortunately while the engineer was giving the final mix a once over he overdosed on heroin and his lit cigarette set the recording studio on fire destroying the only copy of the recording.

After their short lived national tour the Guilloteenagers went back into the studio to record again. This time they were less ambitious and stuck to only one full length, consisting of mosly the same songs they recorded before. This time the record was finished and a single was released. The A-side was a short-lived radio hit called "3 minutes". The B-side a little unknown track written and sung by Terry called "Drive Fast, Drive Drunk".

The initial response to the single was great, in part due to the rariety of the release. The label didn't expect the band to do well; citing a rumored gypsy curse placed on the band during that first show opening for Raging Slab, so they didn't press many copies. So when people wanted the record and couldn't get it at their local record store, it just made them foam at the mouth for it. To keep riding this wave the label refused to release any more copies of the single and booked the band for a huge world tour, playing with the likes of Rubicon, Iron Horse, Rick Derringer and New England. Ticket sales in 1979 were strong so the label beefed up orders of the full-length record, but they got greedy. They didn't want to pay the extra shipping to get the vinyl from the factories overseas so they overloaded all the boxes and fudged the weight on labels. The result was an overloaded plane that crashed in the Appalachian Mountains yet again destroying every copy of the record.

Things got shakey after that. The band continued to tour amid rumors that they really were cursed and would never release a record. The tour was hit or miss. If Terry had the right combination of Cocaine, booze, and crank he was on point all night, but when he was off he was WAY off. Shows were cancelled, others ended mid-song with Terry stumbling off stage. The European leg of the 1981 tour was cut short and the South American tour cancelled entirely. They put Terry in rehab for a few weeks and prepared to play their scheduled North American dates in the early 1982.