Reserve 34. 1996 - 2002.

April 27th, 2002. 6:35 PM

Some people will remember high school, or travelling, or getting so blitzed they didn't know who they were. These people will look back on those days as the golden years, when endless opportunity lay in front of them and they knew absolutely everything. For Jarod, Sky, Matt and I, it'll be a little different. We will remember those three things (some not too fondly), but we will look back upon a much more unique coming of age, our growing up, which was Reserve 34.

At this point I could give an in depth history of the band, but that'd take up hundreds of pages, and I have to get to our last show in about 15 minutes. I will, however, say that Reserve 34 is a product of our environment, a tool for our survival in one of the darkest, most isolated and most beautiful cities I've ever seen. With this band we built a place for us to fit in, a home. We had a life, a focus, and a reason for being outside of the doldrums of school and oppressive rainy afternoons. This band was built on the ignorance of its members that came about as a result of Vancouver's isolation in the musical scheme of things. It wasn't until a fateful Boxing Day in tenth grade that we discovered bands like GB and were absolutely floored (I know you knew of them before this Greg). Even then, it wasn't until 1998 that we realized that bands were still playing this style. As far as we knew, we were the only ones. Everything we did was a first and was disastrous, but also extremely awesome. We booked two tours with one functional number, drove in a van that leaked a litre of oil every 20 minutes, and made less than half of our usually cancelled shows. We built this for us, on our own. It was a result of trial and error, and it probably saved our asses. This was ours.

Growing up was a blast...

Lucas McFadden

Reserve 34's final 7", Game Over, and the Rain City Games CD are available on (em) records. Download "Reprogram" from Game Over in MP3 format.

Contact: mattsmith34@hotmail.com