Parasytz
Dave Arnold Bass
Kevin Rhodenbaugh Drums
Matt Walden Guitar, Vocals
Troy Stodgell Vocals
Active: 1984 - 1985
Location: Kokomo, Indiana
Notes: Sit down all you young (and old) Punkers and listen to Grampa Jello tell you the tale of the Parasytz. Now remember, Grampa Jello has had a few short-term memory lapses since the 1980s so bear with him here.
Now where do I begin? 1984-ish. Those were simpler times. Now remember all you young-uns, we didn't have all the luxuries like you do now. We didn't have the internet or Starbucks coffee, CDs were still a few years away. We actually had to copy music off each others' cassette tapes!! I'm pretty sure I still have Randy Graff's Bad Brains on cassette somewhere around here...
So what were young Punkers to do for fun? Make music of course. Music to drink Little Kings to. Music to copy. Bad bad music to play at the ISIS theatre. What? Yeah, used to be a porn palace, that's right. -heh heh
Now if I recall, the Parasytz (formerly AWOL) had just changed drummers and Matt Sommers had just left the band. One fine day during practice it struck us (thunk) that we needed a new name. A bad name An icky name. So we became the Parasytz.
Kevin Rhodenbaugh became the new drummer. Kevin and I always were close, and he is a musical genius. Dave Arnold was our bass player. Dave was just learning to play bass at the time. Dave was the one that always got the girls, with his "Peter Throb" alter-ego. And I was just learning my power chords on the guitar. A lot of what you hear on the recordings were the standard "open" chords you learn first. Troy Stodgell, who had been involved in AWOL and other earlier projects, was our front man and was used to writing lyrics and singing. We all tried our first hands at writing music and lyrics in this band, if I remember.
We played some of Troy's material (and probably Matt Sommer's) left over from AWOL. We played a couple of the first songs I had ever written. I honestly don't remember what else. I'm sure we covered the obligatory Ramones and Pistols... We played for only a short time before disbanding, but one of these shows was the first "Punk Night" at the ISIS theater. Some of us got to know the manager of the ISIS and he agreed that if we met a certain number of people attending, we could have Punk Night every week. I met with the manager before we went on and was able to announce during our set that we had met the goal. Punk Night it was, every week. That was a really cool night.
I'm not sure I remember what happened when we broke up. We were playing a show at the ISIS with A.S.S. and we just generally sucked that night. A.S.S. was in excellent form, making it feel worse than it probably was. I think we all just decided to throw in the towel that night. I remember it being a pretty mutual decision.
Well that's it, that's story time for tonight. Come round here tomorrow and I'll tell you all 'bout Ronald Reagan and that chimp Bonzo. Now Reagan had a relationship with Bonzo. A close relationship, a wet relationship, an explicit relationship....
