Three Beasts In Heat was half of my Senior Project in Music along with my solo outdoor guitar feedback performances of Sonic Boom.

Leon's Sanguine Delight was a side project that started around Fall of 1984 and ended Winter of ’85 or before my senior year when I formed Three Beasts in Fall of ’86. Dan and Steve kept jamming in various off-shoots like Toadflesh Easterbasket.

Regarding the two bands and how they relate: Steve Chun and I entered Bard in August 1983 for the three week Language and Thinking (L & T) seminar requirement as freshman. We were in the same lame L & T class together and immediately started hanging out and jamming a bit here and there, nothing serious. Steve was really into the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead. He loved jam bands and like myself, was from Bergen County, in North Jersey. He grooved on bass and guitar.

My freshman year I was also building a singer-songwriter/improvisational duo with Daniel Harnett who had also entered '83 and came out of the High School of Performing Arts in NYC. Daniel was/is multi talented in acting, singing and songwriting/poetry and drawing/art. More on Daniel later.

Dan McBride and Doug Eich entered Bard the following year in 1984. My sophomore year I was living in the Infirmary wing of Robbins dormitory downstairs, when one day, in either late August or early September, the very beginning of the school year, I heard this auto-wah/envelope-filtered guitar blasting out from above my head on the 2nd floor.

I had never heard anyone at Bard during my freshman year playing anything remotely as musical, and specifically evoking Jerry Garcia, and Bob Weir when he turned off the auto-wah and played rhythm jams. There was this crisp, solid tone of the envelope filter used on the Garcia-esque riffs that just kept going and going. I must have listened for about ten minutes straight just admiring it all.

I was so intrigued by what I heard I had to go upstairs to hunt down the culprit. Upon locating the room in the upstairs corner adjacent to the roof above the infirmary, I knocked on the door and met Dan McBride with an Ibanez Artist slung around his neck playing a Roland amp with either an Ibanez or Maxon AF-201 type envelope filter.

It took all of five minutes or less to know that we'd be hanging out a lot. And that's an understatement depending upon the particular event recalled. Dan was from Sudbury Mass. and had grown up and played in bands with bassist Mike Gordon of what was soon to be Phish, based up in Vermont.

Steve Chun was a Literature Major and so was Dan. I introduced Steve to Dan pretty soon after meeting Dan when we saw Steve in the paranoids one morning in Kline Commons. I said, "Steve, this is Dan, Dan this is Steve, you're both lit majors, dead heads, and now you'll be friends for life!" And you know what? They have been friends since that very day. Their band Shooky Bones was created right after Dan graduated in ’88.

Steve was really into the great improvisational jams of the Allman Brothers and the Dead. Doug was around too, and eventually Dan's room became the locus for many jams with many folks.

By Spring of ’85, Dan and I had been regularly jamming together, occasionally with Steve on bass and Doug Eich on drums. This group formed more less around our common friendship with Dan, hanging out in his room and jamming on extended improvs.

Dan was like a genteel host for many who normally wouldn't be in the same social circles and sometimes his room would have so many folks hanging around they’d be spilling out into the hall. I have a recording of a percussion jam in his room with about eight people tightly crammed against the walls.

Because his dorm room was adjacent to the roof, we’d audaciously hook up our gear’s electrical connections through his open window and just fucking crank up right there with that amazing westward vista overlooking the fields towards the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains.

We could not do it on especially warm days because the roof’s tar would soften and possibly stick onto floor pedals and amps. He actually stayed all four years up there on Robbins second floor above the infirmary wing, with his first two years in the front facing room, and the last two years in the rear facing room, which was one of the best rooms for expansive, scenic vistas on campus.

When viewing the photos of us jamming out on Robbins roof, understand that that experience was completely unique to us during our years at Bard due to Dan having both rooms, front and back adjacent to the roof above the infirmary.

There were no other bands or students jamming out on electric instruments up there, because the roof did not have any electrical outlets, except for one in the lantern light socket. Only the dorm rooms had the nearest outlets. And we absolutely overloaded them with multiple extension cords. And speaking for my own set up, I required at least seven outlets as my rig evolved over the years.

I think we may have even shorted out a circuit once or twice.

We tried forming a band with a singer by adding Daniel Harnett on vocals. We managed to get on an upcoming gig at Kline Commons but we had no tunes, and Daniel Harnett and I didn’t think any of our original, quirky, dorky songs would hit it with the band. No more Gammaseelawacka.

So we decided to just do cover tunes: Rock Me Baby, and Bertha by the Grateful Dead. Because we also couldn’t come up with a name we all agreed on, I offered up the lousy name of "Consent" and we all agreed, stupid as it was. Thankfully there’s no cassette tapes of that particular configuration.

For the September 1985 gig at Sottery Hall, Senior Ben Fiering ’86 asked if he could sing a couple of Robert Johnson tunes with the band. Ben had been one of my mentors as a Sophomore living in Tewksbury with the entering Freshman in 1983.

He introduced me to incredible blues artists and gave me some blues rock albums by John Mayall, Jeff Beck and others. I don’t think Ben was ever in a band, but he loved playing harmonica and really loved the blues, so I was happy to have him join us for a couple of Robert Johnson tunes.

Plus, when he took over the entertainment committee, he brought John Lee Hooker, James Blood Olmer and Sun Ra and his Arkestra to our lowly, unworthy, liberal-artsy college. He absolutely enlightened my musical world.

Dan McBride always had an expansive and eclectic taste in all musical genres. He had the best record collection for classical Indian music because he was studying the sitar for a couple of years. He was also an avid bluegrass fan.

But he also expanded his tastes to include the absolute best recordings of free jazz innovators. We spent many many hours ingesting the impossible runs of Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, and Charlie Haden, just awestricken by the originality and dexterity. We had no earthly hope in playing any of it, but it sure was an ear-opening blast of supreme originality.

Dan suggested L.S.D. play Dave Brubek’s Take Five. He wrote out the chord chart and played the lead melody. I told him I’d be happy just playing rhythm and I’d just wing it when I soloed.

In the spring of ’85 I had been writing some guitar tunes and recording them on my Tascam Porta-One cassette four track recorder. Both Dan and I had one and we recorded some multitracks together. Dan even assisted in producing my Music Department Sophomore Moderation project when I double majored in Studio Arts and Music.

One tune I wrote with Dan in mind, as a platform for an extended jam: Flight Back. A simple chord structure in E minor with a mild, groovy rhythm, and lots of opportunity to completely stretch it out for both of us, swapping and commingling rhythm and lead duties.

Flight Back is used for the intro tune on the Leon’s Sanguine Delight gig at Sottery Hall in September ’85, and as the ending jam, sort of a Dead-esque thematic ‘donut’.

As I eventually introduced Flight Back to Larry and Mike for Three Beasts In Heat, I knew I’d have to ask Dan to join in anytime we played a ‘gig’. Which is why Dan is on the Three Beasts Sottery gig in March ’87 coming in during the end of a spacey meltdown with Mike and Larry and starting the first chords of Flight Back.

We really enjoyed jamming on that tune. It sort of calmed down or tempered the whole ‘in heat’ aspect after about 30 minutes of the three of us aggressively blasting out semi-improvisational, hard core psychedelic sonic riffs with waves of dissonance and feedback, blasting bass runs, crashing cymbals, and rapid drumming.

As for the name of the band, the four of us (Dan, Steve, Doug and I) agreed that we needed some name for our group, (and it wasn’t going to be ‘Consent’ ever again), so we tossed around some ideas.

I have to say I was in a particularly inspirational and cynical mood when I configured and uttered “How about Leon’s Sanguine Delight?” to the dudes and it seemed plausible. An ironic statement with a sly message, almost punkish. It seemed very Bardian, and we all basically had contempt for Leon and his foppish, grandiose, self-absorbed, narcissistic personality disorder.

That singular L.S.D. gig at Sottery on September 28th 1985 encapsulates the general vibe of “Sodomy Hall” circa the mid ’80’s. There were about four bands playing that night with Tom Pandeleon’s Racer X headlining.

We were lucky enough to land the opening slot right as it was packed wall to wall with lots of raucous Bardians and locals sloshing about in puddles of spilled keg beer, screaming their heads off, breaking bottles and generally decaying brain cells everywhere.

One annoying moment occurred as Ben joined us onstage to sing.

In the middle of my solo, an especially flabby, chubby, coked-up, nicotine addicted, drunken alcoholic, delusional, psychopathic Bard Senior ’86 (who shall remain nameless) with short quaffed greasy blonde hair, thick horned rimmed glasses, penny loafers, preppy Izod polo shirt, wearing chino trousers with curious stains circumambulating about his crotch, groin and buttocks, that fancied himself a half-assed guitarist, who was especially known on campus for practicing his ugly, expensive Ovation in the Kline Commons Men’s room lavatory, bathroom, shit stall, because, as he stated, he ‘loved the acoustics’ and not just the dank, pungent, poignant aroma of emptiness and desolation, decided to come up on the band stand and go right up to my face and air guitar mimic me as I was playing, with his contorted, angry, mocking maw, his fingers furtively flying about on his fantasy Fender.

Luckily for him, Ben, my dear friend from my freshman year in Tewksbury, knew instinctively to grab and lead this pathetic, lost soul away from what could have been his most unlucky mojo day. Who would dare attempt to interrupt an ineffable Robert Johnson tune, even if it was unintentionally mangled up by liberal artsy college kids?

After Ben’s cameo appearance, we immediately started jamming out again on Flight Back and went in and out of that jam with a few spacey meltdowns. I, admittedly, overindulging in the digital delay effects for way too long, but regardless, we finished out the set to great approval from all the wasted attendees.

James Moske even wrote a Bard Weekly review (Vol. 3 No. 2 1985) of that Sottery gig party making positive mention of L.S.D.’s performance. L.S.D. was basically a one-off group for that gig only, though Dan eventually played Flight Back with Three Beasts In Heat when I formed that band the following year for half of my Senior Project in Music.