bio: (taken
from the band's old website)
If memory serves me, I believe Scott and I started Pig Destroyer somewhere in the tail end of 1997, kind of out of the ashes of this other band we were in called Treblinka, which was basically a political hardcore/grind band. We wrote and practiced for a couple of months, played one show with Assuck in D.C., and broke up. Almost immediately after that, I approached Scott about doing another project with this young drummer I knew named John Evans.
I think John was about 16 or 17 at the time, and had only been playing drums for about a year. He was green as hell, but we were very impressed with his enthusiasm and willingness to learn. He also held his liquor really well, which is always a good attribute for a drummer to have. It took us a month or two to hammer out enough songs for a live set and a demo. We recorded the demo live in John’s basement on our friend TL’s 8-track. I think we ended up making around 200 copies.
Our first show was at American University in Washington D.C. with Enemy Soil, Suppression, and Gnob. I think we played first. I remember Scott wore this giant sweater, and when he played really fast the sleeves came down over his hands and flopped around like tentacles. I think I spent most of the set rolling around on the floor for no reason whatsoever.
One of the more memorable shows from that period was at Philly’s now-legendary Stalag 13 with Enemy Soil and Cattlepress. I think that was the first show where we were all really happy with our performance. It was just a classic show from back to front, with Cattlepress pounding everyone into dust and the Soil just totally bringing down the house. That show also happened to be the debut of an amazing band you may have heard of called Pg.99.
A couple months after that show we got booked on this two day fest in Jersey with Converge, Drop Dead, and a shitload of other bands. Our set was quite literally appalling. Everything that could have gone wrong did. I find it kind of funny that even to this day I still meet people who first got into us at that show. We did, however, have a blast hanging out with Black Army Jacket that weekend.
Shortly after the disaster in New Jersey, we decided to record for our split 7” with Orchid. Now, to John’s credit, he was always able to turn it on for the recordings, it was just when we played live that everything seemed to fall apart. So even though the sessions went well, a couple weeks after the recording, we decided it was time to part ways with John. It was a really rough decision to make, as John was/is a great guy and we will always consider him a member of the band.
It was at this point that I decided to contact Brian, who had previously played drums in Enemy Soil during my first few months in that band. He was into the demo and was interested in getting together. Eventually we ended up jamming and it was just unbelievable. We started writing material like crazy for what would eventually become the “Explosions in Ward 6” LP/CD. Shortly thereafter, we played our first show with Brian at Stalag with Benumb and Black Army Jacket.
The “Explosions” CD took a hell of a long time to come out. So in the meantime we did two sessions at Oblivion studios in Maryland, which some of you might know as the place where the mighty Deceased did their last couple records. The first was for the split 7” with Isis on Relapse, where we did a pair of Carcass covers. The second was a batch of originals that would eventually find their way onto both a 7” picture disc on Reptilian and a split CD with Gnob on Robodog.
We’ve played a lot of shows since then. Some of my personal highlights would have to be the Reptilian Records 10th anniversary show with Pg.99 and Daybreak at the Ottobar. I mean, playing a show with your best friends’ bands at your favorite club…it doesn’t get much better than that. Doing CBGB’s with Discordance Axis and Cattlepress is definitely up there too, as well as the series of shows we did with the almighty Thrones last year, which culminated in a performance at the Knitting Factory in NYC.
Late last year we signed to Relapse records and pretty much imprisoned ourselves in the practice space to write and record our first full length for them. It’s called “Prowler in the Yard”…(to be continued)
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