Category: Life

 

   Well, way back in the day, around 9-10 years ago, up on the Iron Range in Chisholm, there was a dream. A dream for ska and punk. And who was there to answer the call , none other than “Skawed Off 12” , which was actually 10 players that got together over a couple summers and played their asses off. 

I have been scanning in some old pics that I have in an album here, and ran across the old SO12 pictures. Regis Park Concert, Side Lake Parade, Hibbing Parade, St. Louis County Fair Concert. Man, those were the days. One of the best times was at Raskovich’s Grad Party, which sadly, I have no pictures (and a pretty hazy memory of too). Curtis Speiring’s grad party with 4 kegs wasn’t to shabby either. Can’t forget Magania’s Cabin party. How many times did the sherrif’s bust us?

What would be fun, but I doubt it would ever happen, would be a Skawed Off 12 reuinon, not even to jam, but maybe just Bimbo’s wings and beer, as we did many many times over the summer. It would be even better if we got together and jammed. I know some of us still play music, some are out of state, married, moved on to careers and “real life”, but for the summer of 98 we had a great time, the old van,  my garage, just having plain old fun. Practicing every day, at 5:30 till the cops came, and then hanging out even more. Practicing on Saturday’s when we had to play that night. Just awesome. And I can’t forget the first time we played, at the talent show, RBF and Limp Bizkit. Awesome! Me and Zales listening to LTJ and Mustard Plug, RBF , 1000 times and transposing it into Noteworthy Composer – I still think I have the sheets printed out somewhere in a closet. Fun stuff.

One can only hope to have as good of memories as I do of that summer. Hopefully one day we all reconnect and catch up on our lives since then. Maybe the old members will Google “Skawed Off 12” and find this post, actually that is one of my intentions. We used to have a geocities site waaay back in the day, but I think they shut it down for lack up updates (and probably because they got bought 5 times by different companies).

At least now I have some of the pictures backed up electronically, I will put them up on flickr eventually. I also have some mp3’s that we totally hacked of cable access (one of our shows was recorded) using a vcr and microphone. I should try to dig those out and get them up here too.

Great times.

From left to right: 
Joe Gornick (trumpet), Tim Breitbarth (trumpet), Brea (Macyinski) Marsh (tenor sax), Kevin Zalec (trombone), Alexander Kestly (trombone), Peter Kruchowski (tenor sax), Steve Novoselac (vocals), Tim Skallet (drums), Adam Dosch (guitar), Andrew Kestly (bass)