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The Start
The Contract
The Name
The First Recordings
Steve Weinberg's Multitrack
Making The First CD
Album 2: Touring With Josh And Pete
O'Captain
Currently
The Start
The Josh and Pete Band started their band in 9th grade (2001). Originally the band consisted of 4 people. The band Started with 2 other high school buddies, Adam Strauss, and Greg Goldstein. They attempted to play covers of Beatles songs such as "In my life". Josh and Pete were not good...but Greg and Adam were worse. Adam could not hold a beat and played similarly to Animal from the muppets mixed with a train engine starting up. Greg just had no potential. But alas they practiced twice. Josh and Pete decided to leave that band and find two more members thus creating phase two of the Josh and Pete Band.
The Contract
The second phase involved another four members: Josh, Pete, and two other high school buddies, Karl Reiders and Aaron Shapiro. They were much better than the first two players. So good, in fact, that Josh and Pete decided the other two should sign a contract saying they were obligated to never leave the band. They signed it. After signing the contract they both quit two days later. But for that brief period of time they were called JPAK (Josh, Pete,Aaron, Karl). After this incident they decided to just become a recording duo, and so the first true Josh and Pete Band was born.
The Name
The Josh and Pete Band started their amateur recording in 2002. During this time they were struggling to find a better name to suit them. They went through such names as "The Narcoleptic Jumping Chameleons" and "Three Terrible Surgeons and a Preist". It was then they realized that "The Josh and Pete Band" had a good ring, was funny, and truely said all it needed to say about their band. So now all they had to do was make songs.
The First Recordings
At first, Josh and Pete recorded onto a dinky tape machine and it made everything sound awful. They would pretend that they were a british band, creating skits in between poorly performed songs. Their characters were stupid morons who could not play their instruments which, at the time, closely reflected their real life personas. The skits would also include audience members angrily wanting to go home but being trapped in the concert venue by gaurds. The angriest member of them all was named Johnny the Heat (after a song they wrote). They eventually used the computer to put it onto a CD (by playing the tape recorder right next to the computer microphone) but the quality was awful . They had the idea to sell these terrible recordings to their friends but realized they might need to take it to the next step for anyone to take them "seriously."
Steve Weinberg's Multitrack
Being Highly influenced by pink floyd and particularly The Beatles and their harmonies, Josh and Pete realized that they would not be able to produce the sound that they wanted to with just the two of them. But they also did not really want to find anyone else since it had proved to be disasterous in the past. They came to a solution: The multitrack. This meant getting a recording device that has many different tracks that can layer on top of each other so that a band of two can appear to be a band of 12 after the recording. But where to get that kind of machine? Josh and Pete asked around and finally came to a school associate named Steve Weinberg. Steve had a multitrack and offered to lend it to them for 1 month in exchange for the very *cough* generous price of 30 dollars and 4 spanish homework assignments .
Making The CD
Josh and Pete used this new multitrack to make an adequate, poorly performed, poorly put together, yet well recorded LP. Upon finishing this album, Meet The Josh and Pete, they couldn't quite figure out how to get it from this new recording aparatus onto a CD. They heard that a kid from their school had a father who owned a recording studio. So instead of doing the logical thing and asking him if they could record in his father's recording studio, they simply asked his father to put their strange jumbled recordings onto a CD. So this poor man had to sit through eighty minutes of listening to Josh and Pete yell into a multitrack and perform stupid songs only using a piano and guitar (with an unnecessary amount of vocal harmonies).
See at this point Josh and Pete still didn't really understand layering instruments. Josh didn't have rhythm and pete didn't know how to play the guitar yet. So this poor poor old man had to sit through 80 minutes of that. Nevertheless, Josh and Pete decided to sell this CD. Using all of their friends as resources, they managed to sell 300 dollars worth of CDs. They even got positive feedback as people said the cd was very "special and humorous". This was enough encouragement to continue their project for the next 10 years.
Album #2: Touring With Josh and Pete.
The next year in 2002, they decided to create a second album. Unfortunately, they didn't have Steve Weinberg's multitrack any longer. So they decided to invest in their own. Not having any money and realizing that any decent multitrack would cost way too much...they went to ebay. They found a man named Burt who was trying to get rid of his multitrack. Josh and Pete snatched it up. Unfortunately, this multrack was much worse. It was missing buttons, and the play button wouldn't work, nor would the record button. They managed to get through it and actually learned a bit more about rhythm and talent. This album, though still as stupid and skit-infested as the first, was actually cohesive and paved that way for current songs such as Island Song. They made another 300 dollars on this album.
Break time! Four years later...
O'Captain
The next 4 years Josh and Pete worked on other projects. These included: Playing in a blues brothers cover band, writing personal songs, going to seperate colleges, and living different lives. In 2007, Pete joined Josh at Emerson College. They started writing some songs together and seperately again but then realized that their songs were interlocking in theme. They created the concept of O'Captain, about a lone captain trying to find himself on a sea adventure. He stumbles upon a strange town called Slimey Time Village and wackiness ensues.
Currently With The Josh And Pete Band
They met up with their college buddy and bass virtuouso, Alon Hafri, in 2008. He Joined the band and they decided to make it a live act with their new found talents. They started playing out in the public in the fall of 2008, gaining quick attention from the press. They have played many venues around Philadelphia including World Cafe Live, The Fire, The North Star Bar, Mill Creek Tavern, the M Room, and many others.
In the fall of 2009 they met their now perminent drummer, Doctor Lemonade, and have been a fully cohesive band ever since.
Their classic rock influences mixed with a seriously silly undertone, creates a diverse and enthusiastic sound. An eclectic musical experiment sure to inspire you to dance.