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Another 15th Anniversary This Weekend
Mon., Jun. 25. 2007 1:59pm EDT
Although we're holding our 15th Anniversary Celebration concert this weekend, the first official ApologetiX concert was actually March 27, 1992. We just didn't have any shows scheduled near our hometown of Pittsburgh PA in the past three months, so we had to wait till now. The end of June does mark another 15th anniversary for ApologetiX, however.
On Sat., June 20, 1992, we played our fifth official concert as ApologetiX -- our third at the legendary Paradise Club in Irwin. Our bass player at the time, Jerry Hayostek, had his friend and local sound guru Henry Yoder on hand to mix and record the concert. We had the rough tapes back into our hands in time to listen to them repeatedly on our trip to the Creation festival in Mt. Union PA from June 25-28 (J. and our first drummer, Jeff Pakula, both went).
As soon as they returned, J. trimmed the results down to a 90-minute cassette tape, which began circulating among Paradise Club patrons and other fans. We titled the tape "Get Your Wigs," a spoof of Aerosmith's "Get Your Wings," and a reference to the fact that Karl and J. had played the second half of that concert in wigs and spandex under the assumed identities of Randy Hezekiah and Leah Zebulon, two hair-band escapees from the '80's.
It would be the first of many ApologetiX releases. In those days we duplicated our cassettes by hand using a high-speed dubbing device on J.'s boom box and gave them away. Although we didn't keep track of how many cassettes we made back then, we'd estimate it was a few hundred. We bought the blank cassettes ourselves in those days, so it was an expensive labor of love, but it turned out to be a very worthwhile endeavor.
Soon after, we received our first airplay, when a DJ named Mike Murr at California University of Pennsylvania began playing some of the tracks, including early renditions of "Lions" and "Read Ephesians." It would be a prolific year for ApologetiX. On November 21, we would release our first 90-minute studio cassette, "Parable Guy," followed shortly thereafter by our second 90-minute studio cassette, "Want It: Dead or Alive," on December 31.
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