Christopher Sweeney, the Theater Director and friend of the band, encouraged Elliott, Tai and myself to play at the Monarch Senior BBQ in May 2002. We eventually decided on the name Serious Bob, and registered to play a four song setlist as one of the opening acts. The first song was “Skin” which has remained basically the same since it’s inception in the hallways of Monarch, where the band was born. It was followed up by a politically-themed cover of “Stay Together for the Kids” by Blink 182, but instead of the normal verses, I ad-libbed about the Bush Administration and the horrors it would inflict upon our generation. The third song was a Beatles cover: “In My Life,” performed solo by Elliott. The set-closer was “Where is My Mind” a Pixies cover, where Tai and Elliott played the same guitar at the same time as Elliott sung, and I screamed the keyboard part from the back of the stage.

At the end of the set, the mood was mostly congratulatory for the two Seniors. The closing act of the night was Turoke, the band that still features drummer Jason Frantz, who would join Serious Bob the next year as part of the full-lineup.

Weeks before the show, Elliott, Tai and I spent a few hours playing instruments and making up song lyrics in Tai’s basement. One of the songs started to take a definite form, andwe recorded it using a simple mini-tape recorder, placed on a table in the middle of the room. The song was called “HAMAS/FBI.” Although the original recording was lost, this was the birth of the Self-Titled Demo.

The resulting track, announcing Serious Bob’s existence to the world, opened up the Self-Titled Demo.

During the original improv that eventually became The FBI Song, the Bush Administration was restricting civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. The smarter and future versions of us would later look back on this as the root cause for the song. Realistically, we were just making music because two of us knew guitar, and I could make up simple rhymes, given the tempo wasn’t too robust.

Download link “The FBI Song” by Serious Bob off Serious Bob (Demo)