I guess you could say the adventure began the day I was about to get into my car and noticed a wallet literally laying in the middle of the street. This was in San Diego, mid-’90s. Needless to say I picked it up and checked the cash first. There was close to a hundred bucks in there! The only other items in the wallet were an ID for a Raymond something-or-other that I really can’t recall, and a slip of paper with a name and a phone number. I remember thinking that the guy’s picture on the ID made him look pretty mean but the funny thing is that I recognized the name on the slip of paper. It was an unusual first name that I was fairly sure was one of the clerks at Taang. So I called him up, said hey we’ve met once but I thought maybe you could help, I found this wallet in the street with an ID for Raymond meanface. He thought on that for a moment and realized that it was probably “Raybo” from Bonecrusher. I remembered Bonecrusher from being on a MR&R cover once, but didn’t really know anything about the legend of Raybo. I got his cell number and gave him a call.

Turns out he was literally across the street; I invited him over and we hung out and listened to records for a few hours. This became a daily routine for a few months. He was very into music, knew about lots of cool old bands and was very interested in a lot of the stuff I shared with him that was certainly NOT Hardcore Punk. I remember that Ray really liked “Treat of a New Beat” by the Rousers and also at that time I was playing a lot of Immortal Techniques “Revolutionary Volume 2.” We both agreed that “Industrial Revolution” was the shit. I think we both appreciated that we were both very into “Punk” music but also listened a variety of other kinds of music as well.

Despite his intimidating appearance, Raybo is actually a very personable guy. The other thing I noticed about him was that, unlike so many Punk “vocalists”, Raybo can actually sing. We started off on a whim just doing a bunch of Misfits covers, we had around a dozen worked out with me strumming the chords on a ¾ size acoustic and Ray just letting the deep baritone flow. He does a pretty good Danzig impersonation. After awhile we got bored of the covers and started writing songs ourselves. In addition to having a great natural singing voice, Raybo also has a natural gift for creating simple hooks.

One afternoon we got the opportunity to record for a few hours with Mario at GSD and so we trekked over to that part of town and had a drummer we had never actually met before meet us at the studio. The drummer was the brother of a guy who lived next door to me and we were crunched for time so we thought that having someone come in would be helpful. In retrospect I should have just done the parts myself but we didn’t get very far along with the recordings so it’s all kind of a moot point. What’s posted here are very rough demos, they are missing guitar and just feature drums, bass, and vocals. It’s pretty obvious at times that the drummer had never heard the songs he was playing before – that was our bad. I don’t know what we were thinking on that one. Never bring a Rock drummer in to record Punk tracks, they play too slowly!

We never got back to these recordings and soon after this session Raybo moved out of the neighborhood and that was that. We kept in touch for a little while but I haven’t spoken with him in years. Ray, hit me up if you’re out there!

Unsure of song name:

“Don’t Wanna Be Your Fool:”