November in the Fall

My Earliest Memories
by Chris

Meeting Jimmy on that Friday in ‘November in the Fall’; It’s crystal clear as he was the first kid I was introduced to and hung out with. Paul was at my bus stop at the corner of Pearl drive and Ruby Lane. I don’t remember having any meaningful conversations with him, but after all he WAS 2 whole years older and I was only a 4th grader. I don’t remember meeting Michael for the first time (strange as it seems). It must have been one of the times I went over the house to play with Jim. My first memory of Mike is playing Yellow Submarine on the St. Pius stage, on his saxophone, before I really even knew who the Beatles were.

I always think of our Martyr “history” in three phases

1) Audio/Tapes: Jim and I (in the footsteps of Paul and Mike) made lots of funny little audio tapes: Interviewing famous people and using snippets from popular songs to answer the questions. We also created original works like “Flemhead Macabee” and “Reed Tardo, The Lizard Eating Mongoloid”.

2) Video: Mike or Paul bought a video camera, I had one too and we made our humorous little videos about life, the universe, everything and our childhood contemporaries. This is where I always felt started to gel as a foursome and developed our individual humoristic styles that allowed the Martyrs to co-exist without killing each other (although there were some near death experiences). One video where we pretended to be a band... This may have been the match that ignited the Martyr flame, but the gas that was ignited came from Gold Frankinsence and Myrrh...

3) Audio/Music: I remember very clearly around Christmas (1985) screwing around in the basement with Jim on drums, Mike on the 2 string guitar from Sears and I took Vocals. We sang some Christmas songs and named ourselves Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. We got together for at least one more session (I don’t remember when, but I’m sure I wrote it on the tape) and recorded some other songs. I asked Mike “Why don’t you learn to actually play the guitar” and he retorted “Why don’t you?” As fate would have it I did: Thanksgiving 1986 I learned G, C, and D from my Uncle and learned the rest from a chord book. Christmas 1986 I received my first Guitar a Fender 6 string.

And then in 1987 the Martyrs were born...