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(third-person)

Formed in 1991, Crank was the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist / songwriter T. Hallenbeck and vocalist / malcontent / roustabout Bruce Kolbe, who had been friends since their similarly inconsistent college careers in The Great State of Ohio in the late 1980s. The two were responsible for the magnificently terrible Goats of Misery, in which Hallenbeck played bass and Kolbe "sang," or rather recited poetry written on the backs of envelopes and scrap paper into whatever sound system was available while the rest of the band, guitarist Peter Ullian and drummer Greg Johnson, either worked its way through rehearsed music or made it up on the spot.

After relocating to the California Bay Area and recording two albums and touring with Harm Farm, Hallenbeck discovered that Kolbe was living nearby in San Francisco. The two soon established a strict regimen of haunting every dive in the Mission District and lurking in the basement of Hallenbeck's run-down rental house in Oakland. During this phase, they decided that the magnificent terribleness of the Goats of Misery should be resurrected in a better-focused and more aggressive form.

Always a proponent of recycling, Hallenbeck contacted two individuals he'd met during Harm Farm's marathon drummer auditions some months before: drummer John Miller and Pete Geckeler, who was known to be guitarist as well as a percussionist. The four began to spend Saturday nights at an Oakland practice space making a great deal of noise and sometimes putting together actual songs.

This early quartet version of Crank played only one gig, at Nightbreak in San Francisco. Shortly after that, Hallenbeck went on tour with Harm Farm again and Kolbe moved to Kentucky to start law school. After Harm Farm decided to break up, Hallenbeck found himself back in California with nothing much aside from a crummy day job, so he convinced Geckeler and Miller to continue playing together.

After several months, the power-trio incarnation of Crank was actually starting to get some decent gigs when Geckeler moved to St. Louis to start law school, causing Hallenbeck to wonder if the band name should be changed to "Junior Attorneys of America." Geckeler's departure signaled the beginning of Crank's status as a sort of home for wayward guitarists - over the next few years, guitar duties were filled at various times by Sean Griffin, Josh Garey, Tyler Oliver for about a year, and later Simon Scott. After Scott joined the band, the lineup solidified and Mark Lamb was also brought in on guitar, making the band - oh my! - a quartet again.

(first-person)

It was during this last phase that Crank did its one and only album-length recording, entitled Your Band Sucks. Although the band poured a great deal of creative energy into this recording, it was almost a swan song, since most of us were involved in other bands or starting to think about things like real jobs, families, and the like. By the completion of a subsequent untitled demo in 1998, we were hardly rehearsing at all. Instead of burning out, I guess we just faded away. It fits, though - Crank always lurked in the corner, never quite getting it together, perpetually overshadowed by other projects even when we were all in our mid-twenties and still diehard gung-ho about being rock-'n-roll musicians. But we had some good moments.

Bruce Kolbe, who never quite realized that he was one of the Prime Movers of all these years of zig-zag, stop-start activity, took his own life in the late 1990s while living in Kentucky. Suicides always seem sudden but they always have a long and secret history. Of course, we all know that already. He was a real oddball but I still miss the guy. Okay, this is a good place to stop. I hope you enjoy the music. Thank you for reading.

- T. Hallenbeck