It is difficult to type an introduction to this lost volume of The RemuS Years. After Scott passed, I searched my inbox for past email exchanges just to “hear” his voice again. I stumbled across this unpublished article. I can’t tell you why it didn’t make it to the website, perhaps because in 2018 when this was sent to me, Lone Star Metal was starting to wind down. Family and other activities were simply taking priority. What saddens me is this was a Part 1 and I never followed up for Part 2. Don’t live in regret folks, and cherish the moments you have because the days are evil. I miss you, Scott.– Rusty

Metal Mercy: A Benefit for the Houston Food Bank

When I first started RemuS Radio, I was 38 years old and in a transitional period of my life, everything was new again. I was going out weekly and meeting new people and taking on new challenges and for the most part, I was beginning a brand new life. I was also in the early stages of a brand new personal relationship with a gal I had met online through a Yahoo chat room for the 30 and older crowd – we’ll call her Melissa, mainly because that’s what everyone else calls her too. She lived in a small town in Indiana and wrote for a local newspaper there and although we were a thousand miles apart from one another, she was my first big supporter in my new venture as a writer and promoter of the Houston music scene. We talked daily and when I first started expanding my weekly write-ups into actual columns, she was my first copy editor.

She was a disciplined writer and really had her hands full trying to teach me to write the way that newspaper writers “typically” write copy. It didn’t take her very long to realize though that the style in which I would find most comfortable writing, and insisted on writing, was everything but typical. In time, she learned to bite her lip and muscle her way through editing each week’s write-ups and learned to help me with other things like sentence structure as well as the odd misspelling here and there and of course, the proper use of its/it’s – their/there etc. but more importantly, when to use the word “annual” when promoting a yearly benefit show. Apparently it’s only cool to use that term AFTER the first time it happens. It has to a “first ever” before it can be an “annual” one. Anyway, she also had a head full of great ideas when it came to promoting the Houston music scene and always encouraged me to take creative chances when promoting the website as well as promoting what would later become the RemuS Radio brand.

During the course of one of our many phone conversations she told me about a yearly charity show that the local music community would put on in the Louisville area to raise money for the arts. She felt something of this nature might be a good avenue to promote Houston’s music scene as well as to get the RemuS Radio name out there and although I agreed with her, I was reluctant to take on anything of that nature just yet because….well….I didn’t know shit about producing a show. In fact, I still got nervous approaching bands at their shows and talking to them about RR and asking for their demos. I still felt weird taking out my camera and taking pictures at local shows too because I hated drawing any kind of attention to myself and in those days, a guy pulling out a camera and taking pictures at a show was not at all common. Most of the time, I was the only person there taking pics of the bands so yeah, it was weird as fuck. Today, literally everybody is a photographer……

The idea of producing a charity driven band showcase was shelved for the time being but it was never too far out of mind. I still had a lot of fears to conquer before attempting something that big but I always knew that one day, with Melissa’s continued support, I would make it happen. Early in 2001, Melissa moved to Texas to live with me and having her physically there was the emotional boost I needed to start rethinking the whole “producing a show” thing but first, I needed a benefactor for this show if I was going to use an act of charity to promote the local music scene. I had already casually mentioned Melissa’s idea to several people about putting together a benefit show of some kind and the response had been very positive so getting the bands together didn’t seem like a difficult thing to do, and it wasn’t really, but I needed to fix on a known, high profile local charity to bring it all together and make it legit.

Melissa and I brainstormed over this for quite some time before finally deciding to approach the Houston Food Bank about our idea. Locally, people and organizations have food drives all of the time and it was something that I read about people doing in the local music trade papers and such. The question here though was, how many of them actually worked hand-in-hand with the food bank and how would that kind of partnership work to help them and RemuS Radio? Most, if not all music shows used for food drives (back then, anyway) were more or less impromptu. With that I mean that the bands put on the show and they promote it as a food drive and when the show is over, somebody who worked to put on the show borrows a truck and takes all the food to the food bank and drops it off and the food bank thanks them and off they go.

When you make the effort of involving the food bank in your activities ahead of time it gets a little bit easier. The main thing is this though, they will provide you with promotional materials such as pre-printed poster boards to hang up promoting the event. They will list your fund raiser on their own website and they will also give you these huge, heavy duty collection bins for people to drop their can goods into at the event. More importantly though, after the event they will send a large truck around to collect those bins of can goods and haul it all back to the warehouse. A box full of canned goods is heavy as fuck, you do not want to wrestle with that shit. You will lose…..all day long, trust me on this.

Now, what bands can I assemble to really make this event pop? I mean, everybody that I spoke to was hip about doing it but when I say everybody, that encompasses a lot of bands playing various genres of music and you can’t do a show with that many different kinds of music and expect to keep people at the venue all night. I had already been around long enough to see how people who come to shows to see their favorite bands then leave without supporting the entire bill. It still happens today for crying out loud. I had bands volunteer that played straight up Metal, Prog-Metal, Industrial Metal, Rock n Roll, Grind Core…..how the fuck do you package that up and make it palatable?

In the initial planning of the show I was just going to try and mix the musical styles the best way that I could as a one night only event. Melissa and I put our heads together and decided that Saturday June 9, 2001 was as good a date as any to book this show. It was still a few months off and gave me time to get the show booked into a bar, solidify the lineup and set times as well as workout all the logistics related to getting a PA for the night without having to pay for it……..easy stuff(eye roll).

The logical place to host this event was Bobby’s Xtreme Sports Bar – It was where my love for the local music scene gave birth earlier the previous year when I first saw The Metal Gods perform and vowed my allegiance to promoting local Rock and Metal. It was a good sized bar with a big enough stage as well as a staging area for all of the bands and besides, Bobby Thompson was himself a huge promoter of local music and I had developed a good relationship with him so…..fuck it. We’re doing it there.

Next, I scheduled a meeting to meet with the events coordinator at the Houston Food Bank, Ms. Ana Marie Colchado. She was a tiny little Italian woman who at first was a little bit apprehensive about these shows but eventually came around and embraced the culture, even if it was only once a year. She not only embraced our yearly efforts, but also became a little bit “metal” in her own mind by sporting a tight leather skirt to the shows each year.

What you learn from an association like this is that the Food Bank wants to ensure that every event they partner with shines a positive light on them and all the good work they do and they do a lot more work than you think. It’s not all about just feeding Houston’s poor and downtrodden though, they took two major hits the year we first did our show with them (2001). Hit number one occurred the very weekend we had planned to put on the first ever Metal Mercy show, June 9^th. Do you know who had the nerve to come into town that same weekend and totally fuck up our plans? Tropical Storm Allison, that’s who. 

Over the course of six days, 39 inches of water fell in Houston alone and now, after Hurricane Harvey, it is the 2^nd largest recorded rain event in this city’s history. It is still this costliest tropical cyclone that was never a major hurricane on record in the Atlantic basin. The storm also killed 41 people directly, including 27 who drowned. This ties Allison with a tropical storm in 1917 as the second-deadliest tropical storm to affect the US; only surpassed by the 1925 Florida tropical storm which killed 73 people. This deluge of rainfall flooded 95,000 automobiles and 73,000 houses across Harris County as well as destroying 2,744 homes, leaving 30,000 homeless with residential damages totaling to $1.76 billion.

Well, needless to say we had to cancel the show that weekend. I woke up hearing rain falling but hadn’t turned on my TV yet. Greg Gill called and said we should cancel the show. I asked why and he told me to turn on my TV.

I was devastated and canceled the show immediately vowing to reschedule down the road. 

I honestly can’t remember what the original one night lineup looked like, I’ve slept and drank a lot since then so I can’t retrieve that information. However, through the course of trying to reschedule the show it took on several incarnations before Melissa and I finally decided it needed to be a two night affair and with that additional night, we could better accommodate the various styles of music that were being offered for this benefit. We still didn’t have a date though and after a while I figured that in order to allow myself adequate time to properly plan this event with some elbow room to deal with any changes that might come up, we’d schedule the show in October to coincide with the 1 year anniversary of the birth of RemuS Radio. We set a date of October 5^th and 6^th and I began to run these dates past all of the bands to check availability and to begin putting the bill together. As much as I would have liked to have put every band on the bill that wanted to participate, I just couldn’t do that. As would be the case for almost every show I produced after Metal Mercy 1, I had more bands than I needed and some bands would get cut. However, I made it a point to include those previously cut bands on future shows whether they were Metal Mercy shows or not. Metal Mercy was just the beginning of a long line of shows that I proudly produced and I was lucky enough to always have bands eager to do shows with me. I tried my best to always let them know how much I appreciated their willingness to partner up with me in these ventures and on a few occasions, the bands actually made a little bit of money. Also, of all the shows that I produced between 2001 and 2005, 98% of them were a joy to be a part of but to be sure, the yearly Metal Mercy shows were always my favorites and were always epic.