Rated R

Albums:

Early live recordings from the early 2000s (early 2000s, Orange section )

Info:

Dan Deacon lived on the same dorm floor as me at SUNY Purchase and we were best friends, used to do a lot of weird experimental music stuff together and did performances at a venue called The Cave. Then we met Keith Abrams and soon noticed along with everyone else that he was the sickest drummer we had ever met in our lives. We started a polka band called The Majorcans named after a reference from a Luis Bunuel movie (L'age d'Or) with an old friend of mine named Marcel Alexander on clarinet. I played accordion and Dan played the tuba, which he had stolen from his high school. One day Marcel wasn't there and we were practicing and unbenownst to us Keith was on acid, and halfway through the practice Keith just starting playing blastbeats and complicated shit nobody could keep up with and going fuckin' crazy on the drums so I just started screaming and next thing we knew we were a grindcore band though at the time I did not know what grindcore was. Dan said he had always wanted to have a hardcore band called Rated R because it sounds so corny, then when they play they would be so heavy the other hardcore bands would feel like total pussies. So we became Rated R and established a rule that we would only do improv and play as heavy as possible, and that we would absolutely never practice. We also added our friend Dina Kelberman who was there (and there were some heavy feelings developing between me and her), to come to the shows in a robot costume and dance, though that did not last. This was all the same day, and we decided to do our first show that night in the laundry room. We made Dina a robot costume, made posters and fliers and went around handing them out to anyone who looked like they liked metal or other heavy music. We had a good turnout that night and played for 45 minutes then the cops came and made us stop. My neck did not recover from headbanging for 2 days. We played many shows wherever we could get on the bill. We would sometimes just show up at some local ska show or other unrelated type of music and convince them to put us on the bill. Dan had spent some time touring with a ska band he was in in high school called Channel 59, and had picked up some skills in getting us gigs where we were very inappropriate. There were only 2 or 3 times (one being the video where my brother guest stars as Mister Cripple) when we were not stopped by either being unplugged, kicked off the stage, or the place being raided or shut down by the cops. When I screamed I would also pick fights with people, knock people down, throw furniture into the crowd, etc. Often I would break the microphone and just scream without it and keep attacking people. I would sometime black out and not remember portions of the show and find out of about really fucked up shit I did later on. One time I threw an ottomat into the crowd and it hit a girl in the head who was taken away in an ambulance with a concussion. The same girl came to our next show and approached us to tell us how much she liked us. I have (since stabilized with medication) extreme bipolar disorder and was at the time entering my first manic episode. I had fallen deeply in love with Dina (formerly the dancing robot) but things didn't work out, then she and Dan started dating and that was basically when I started going crazy. But the shows felt like the only time I could express how I was feeling, so the band continued despite the drama. Eventually I got arrested for doing something fucked up while hallucinating, got locked up in the psychiatric ward of a prison for 3 days, then sent to a mental hospital involuntarily for a month where I was strapped to tables and injected with antipsychotics that made me want to kill myself. Dan and Keith told me that they felt they should resign from the band and that Rated R was now really just me because I was the only one legitimately hardcore enough to be getting arrested and stuff. The band played one "reunion show" several years later, but that was it.

Rated R negative one

Rated R Little League Game

Rated R D'Agostino's

Rated R SUNY Purchase ( first show ever )

Rated R Laundromat