The Reverend J.D. & The Blackouts
The band formed in early 2010, with Guitarist Jeff Legg, Guitarist Aaron Squyers, Vocalist and bassist Jessie Dwight, and Drummer Chris Komac. Beginning in the late 90’s all of these musicians started playing in different groups around the Seattle – Bellingham area. Chris and Jeff played in Cheep Bastard, Jessie and Chris played in Sinaquanon, and Jeff, Chris, and Aaron played in Headtrip. During these years well all started having families and slowly drifted apart for about 8 years. After leaving California, and returning to Washington, Jeff and Aaron started talking about putting a band together. Jeff ran into Chris at a show with his band at the time, and started putting ideas of who we wanted to start a group with. Chris mentioned that Jessie fresh from the band Triphammer, was looking to start playing again. This turns out to be one of the best decisions we have ever made for a group. As we are all in our 30’s with 15 kids between the 4 of us, we would no longer have different ideas of what we should do as a group. We all understand the commitments of the other members, so no one member wants more than the others. This made for the perfect chemistry we had all tried to achieve in previous projects, but had failed to do so. We made a simple plan: We play specific shows that we choose to do, we target a gig, we prepare, we execute. Within a few practices, we had our first 4 songs. After a few more practices we had grown our set to 10 songs, with 8 being original and 2 cover songs.
We feel we have taken the best musicians, attitudes, and drive from all of our previous groups and put them together to form The Reverend JD and the Blackouts. Yes, Jessie is an ordained minister. We have started our fan club and have named it the Blackout Alliance. We currently have just under 150 fans on our Facebook page. We also have a Myspace page, Twitter Account, Skype Account , and the newest is a Live Stream channel. We plan to record our 5 song ep in late August 2010. It was at our second show in July, that we meet Heather Dalberg, who was fascinated with our song “Shift”. She approached us and asked if we would be interested in speaking about our thoughts on world peace and how the world needs to “Shift” its conscience in a new direction. Please Join us and the rest of the world in trying to “Shift” to a new direction on September 21st, 2010.
