Human Therapy was a weird band, and in fact, still is: never adopted by the LA cognescenti or by its local bretheren of suburban punks, we soldiered on for six years in our original configuration despite a sound that simply had no home in the musical landscape of Los Angeles in the 1980s. We were too brittle and decidedly not Hollywood enough for the hipsters, and too odd and melodic for the prevailing hardcore scene. HT disbanded in 1986 amid no fanfare whatsoever. Our records went out of print. In the pre-internet age, with no place to put its music and history, the band faded from memory for all but a few. Then the internet arrived. Punk became a mainstream "lifestyle genre," desirable to marketeers the world over. By the time Human Therapy got back together for a show in September 2001 Manic Panic hair dye was avaiable at every mall across the country. It was quite a change from our early days back in Glendora, CA when we were quite often having to fight for the privilege of having blue hair or wearing a Black Flag t-shirt. Change is good. We decided after that successful 2001 show that we'd play whenever we felt like it from then on. This led to a show in 2004, and another in 2005, a veritable whirlwind of activity for Human Therapy! It was always an adventure with this band. It all began in 1979 Bill Barragan and I were teammates on a drunken, d**e-smoking Glendora Pony League baseball team, the Rangers (think "The Bad News Bears" in puberty), began to play music together. With Bill on drums and me on guitar and vocals, we did an excruciatingly bad 15-minute version of “Cocaine” and an only slightly better version of The Kinks' “The Hardway." After months of blasting away in Bill’s room, replete with three solid walls of KISS photos and posters and a fourth wall of tennis stars (!), we were suddenly, somehow exposed to the dangerous, dark and sloppy wonders of punk rock. The sea change was on. We immediately decided this new music (new to us anyway, as punk had by then been declared dead and buried in London, New York and Hollywood) was where we belonged. We buzzed our hair off and started buying our clothes at Amvet's Thrift Store in Azusa instead of Miller’s Outpost. Bill and I, and soon a bunch of our like-minded friends, were seduced by the energy and danger we felt just being around punk rock. Another big appeal was that we realized we could actually play punk rock music, unlike “2112” by Rush. So, after brushing up on the ways of punk at the Starwood, Vex, Whisky and the like, we spray painted some slogans inside Bill’s parent’s Glendora garage, cut a hole in the door with a hacksaw, and Human Therapy was born. By the fall of 1981 we had built a small but dedicated following by playing backyard parties and a few clubs around LA. In the beginning, we were ferociously tight and focused. We rehearsed like hell. We didn't have anything else to do, really, and soon we could feel the band getting better, more assured and powerful. Our songwriting also began evolving. Taking a cue from our idols, the Minutemen, we kept our songs short and cut down on the guitar solos. Over the next couple of years we juggled the lineup a few times. Dave Collett was coerced into leaving the Soft-Ons (such a great name!) and joining Human Therapy in 1983, which widened our sound with two guitars. We went through bass players pretty regularly. Kevin Kubota was our first, then came the much beloved Sergio Jimenez, we then briefly had Rocko, Julianna and Tracy, finally settling on 15-year-old high school sophomore Cosmo Gnaulati, who turned out to be the best fit for a bass player we ever had. In 1983 we were one of the first area bands to be signed to an independent record label (Dr. Dream Records, founded by friend turned record mogul Dave Hayes). Later that year Dr. Dream released our "American Dream" EP. From the beggining we gigged like crazy everywhere we could in Southern California and around the Western states, playing everywhere backyard parties, clubs, skate parks, college parties, rest stops ... anywhere we could manage AC power and an audience. We eventually became a pretty good live band, sharing stages with the Cramps, Social Distortion, the Dickies, our beloved Minutemen, Toxic Reasons and, in the worst example of mis-billing in our career, Suicidal Tendencies. We embarked on several small tours around the West from 1981 to 1984. In the summer of 1985 we toured the USA in support of our Dr. Dream single "The Sky Falls." In those days the big punk bands had vans and roadies. We had a 1974 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, our resident photographer/McGyver mechanic Greg Humphrey along for the ride, and a U-Haul trailer we rented for a day and returned three months later. While we were heavily influenced by the jagged, jazzy Minutemen, we also had soggy, '70s rock like KISS, the Stones and the Who to draw from. Our sound was at first frantic, and was both melodic and dissonant, if that's possible, and very, very tight. Most of our early songs clocked in at under two minutes. In the later years started getting more and more into more theatrical, arty-farty bands like the Velvets, the Butthole Surfers and the Birthday Party, and our sound evolved as a result. We had nights in the mid-1980s when we'd stop playing altogether and try to get the audience to sing an acapella "B-I-N-G-O" with us, then launch into a cover of the Pop-o-Pies classic, "Bake Those Donuts with Extra Grease (This Batch is for the Chief of Police)". Our sense of humor and adventure didn't always translate. We had our core group of people that "got" the band and liked what we were doing, but in the later years we were met more and more with confusion and indifference from the homogenized, "uniform" clad punk rock audience that was used to the old straight ahead 1-2-3-4 from the hardcore bands of the day. After our 1985 US Tour we had an opportunity to take the band to the next level. Dr. Dream was ready to release a full-length album. But, when the recordings didn't go well we got discouraged. When the label shelved the planned LP we just didn't have the tools to deal with what I now realize was a mid-career creative malaise. We got burned out and quit, playing our final show in Oct. '86 to a handful of people. After our flameout we all went our separate ways, most on to other bands with varying degrees of success. But we always had a soft spot for the days when we were young, full of hormones, booze and ambition and had nothing better to do than rehearse five nights-a-week. So nowadays we dust off the HT repetoire and do periodic live shows. Thanks for looking and thanks for listening! Mick Rhodes Human Therapy