Vine lasted less than a year, but we managed to do some interesting things in the little time we had together, which comprised most of 1992. We played 4 shows in Toronto and one in Hamilton. We also sometimes played in our basement, as our friends watched and listened, and sometimes picked up our camcorder, to record us.

Bill, Asif and I had previously played together in The Grendels, in 1989, while students at Western University. We're all from the Toronto area. William is from Richmond, Virginia, and moved to Toronto to play with me. We then asked Bill and Asif to join us. William had played bass in White Chocolate, in New York City, while a student at NYU. In 1989 (or 1990?) the guys in Soundgarden were impressed enough with William's bass playing to invite him to Seattle, to jam, and audition to be their next bassist. He ended up not getting the gig, maybe because he was still a teenager, and also hadn't heard their latest album before jamming with them, but he left Seattle with some new friends, and had nothing but good things to say about the guys in Soundgarden. After Vine broke up, William played bass again, this time with Seam, in Chicago. He played guitar in Vine, never the bass.

There were actually 2 versions of Vine's demo tape. The first one was distributed on analog cassette, and included only River and Nausea. It was played on college radio in Toronto in late 1992 and early 1993, and intended mainly to help the band book live shows. Vine then suddenly broke up in January of 1993. After the breakup, a management team attempted to convince us to reunite, by signing us to a record label. We were lukewarm to the idea, but went along with it in the end, mostly out of curiosity. A digital tape (DAT) was distributed to various people, including Geffen Records in particular. 4 songs were on that DAT: Speed, River, Nausea and Slowburn. Strangely, we never heard from the management team ever again. What happened? Very bizarre. In the weeks after Kurt Cobain died I bought a CD copy of In Utero, and soon noticed that the word VINE seems to be imbedded in the artwork. None of the other band members seem to care very much about my discovery. Maybe it's a coincidence, but I think it's bizarre either way.

The tracks on our demo tape were recorded and produced by the band itself, with no outside engineer or producer, and were always considered to be demos only. We were able to record ourselves for free, during studio downtime at the studio that Bill had just begun working at in late 1991 (after graduating from Fanshawe College, for musical engineering). We had to record everything in one weekend. The demo tape was never put into stores. A handful of friends had copies of the original 2-song demo tape, but most people who heard it would have heard it played on college radio in Toronto. The band broke... up before being able to record a full album.

The cassette cover of our demo tape is displayed above. The artwork was done by Aphrodite, Bill's girlfriend at the time.

Track 1 (Speed) is the only track here that wasn't played by all the members of Vine. It was originally recorded in early 1991, at Fanshawe College, in London, Ontario, as a school project. Bill was studying recording engineering at Fanshawe College, and Speed was recorded for one of his classes. I played the guitar tracks and sang, while Bill played bass. The drums were played by a friend of Bill's, whose name has unfortunately been forgotten for the moment. He was awesome. Only one take was needed. Unfortunately, all the guitars had to be clean for the school project. No distortion was allowed. So we knew that one day in the future we would probably want to re-record the electric guitars. That day came one night in early 1992, in Toronto, soon after Vine formed. I re-recorded the electric guitars and re-sang the song. William also added some guitar in the background, during the chorus. Many people considered it to be their favourite track on the Vine demo tape, so it's included here, even though the full band didn't play on it. Our drummer, Asif, loved it, so he didn't mind including it on our demo tape.

Tracks 2-4 were recorded in October, 1992, in Toronto. They were recorded and mixed by the band itself, as I said, for free, during studio downtime. I had a bad cold, which weakened my voice a bit, but we didn't care, because we assumed that we would re-record all these songs at a later date, for a full album, maybe with an outside producer. That never happened, because we broke up.

Tracks 5-10 were recorded during the summer/fall of 1992, in the basement of the house that we all lived in, in Toronto. These tracks were recorded with a camcorder, using the camcorder's built-in microphone. Video footage of the band playing these tracks can be seen on both YouTube and Vimeo, along with some other tracks. See the links on the right.

Tracks 11-13 were recorded at Lee's Palace, in Toronto, with our camcorder. The battery ran out 6 minutes into Captain, so I faded out the end of the track, to avoid an abrupt cutoff. Captain was a 9-minute song, so the final, very explosive chorus, wasn't recorded. I was pissed off at the time, but I now think that the recording works well enough the way it is. The band never played the chorus the way I wrote it anyhow. I wanted to change time signatures between the verse and chorus, but Asif refused to deal with time signatures, so we sped up the chorus instead. I think it sounds alright, but I'm still thinking of recording a "proper" version of Captain, by myself. There's video footage of some of this stuff on YouTube and Vimeo as well.

Tracks 14 and 15 were recorded at Sneaky Dee's, in Toronto. They were recorded by the sound man. We didn't know he was recording us.

Track 16 (Lucy) was recorded by me alone, in my bedroom, on a 4-track cassette recorder, in the summer of 1991. I lived in Toronto at the time, with Bill and Asif, and a pair of sisters. Vine hadn't formed yet, but the three of us had already played together, in The Grendels. One night, as several of us, and a few other friends, were having drinks etc, I suddenly felt inspired to run into my bedroom and record a song. I emerged 20 minutes later with Lucy, which I had completely written and recorded on the spot. Maybe because people witnessed my quick way of writing and recording music, Lucy seemed like a special song to many people. I had been writing and recording music very quickly since high school, but other people hadn't ever witnessed me doing it. Vine never played Lucy, but we sometimes talked about maybe trying something sometime. So I included the original recording here.

NOTE: This album can also be found on my own Bandcamp page. I go by the name of The Undecidable. There's a link to my Bandcamp page on this page, below the artist bio on the right. Some recordings by The Grendels are also available there.  more