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The Origin Story: Galbanum, Denial, and Other Questionable Decisions

In the early ’90s, Terry and I formed a band with a rotating cast of friends. We started as Galbanum. Don’t ask me why. Then we became Denial. Also unclear.

We were teenagers riding the grunge wave, covering Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and The Who. We played after-school shows in friends’ basements where kids lined up the stairs because there was no room left on the floor.

Our first real gig? Blind Willie’s in Nashua, NH. A dive bar that smelled like stale cigarettes, beer, regret, and questionable life choices. It was perfect.

We handed the manager a four-song demo recorded live on a Sony boombox with a pinhole mic. He played it through the bar system. It sounded massive. Local barflies nodded along. We thought we’d made it.

We hadn’t.

But we had a Thursday slot.

I was fifteen. I said I was seventeen. Our drummer looked old enough to have fought in a war, so we got away with it.

At one of those early shows, the bass player from a band called Incest Repellent borrowed my rig and promptly blew both my amp head and speaker cab like he was channeling nuclear energy through it. No apology. Just left it there smoking.

Welcome to the music industry.

Eventually, internal drama did what it always does. We showed up to practice one day and the other guys had replaced us.

That was the last conversation.

Fine. Good. Motivation acquired.

The Birth of dirty lil’ trollops

Terry and I went back to my mom’s basement and started over. No more covers. No more chasing someone else’s sound.

We hijacked an old keyboard from my mom, programmed a beat that felt revolutionary at the time and hilariously cheesy in hindsight, and wrote a song called Summertime on Thanksgiving afternoon.

We mailed it to a label contest we saw in a magazine. Snail mail. Cassette tape. Full confidence.

We heard nothing back.

Perfect.

The next day, dirty lil’ trollops was born.

We built our own sound, wrote our own material, and started playing all over New England. We opened for national acts while some of the guys who’d ditched us were still grinding in the same back rooms.

No hard feelings. Just results.

dirty lil’ trollops was never polished. Never safe. Never curated for comfort. It was loud, chaotic, ambitious, occasionally reckless, and fully ours.

Get the full story, lyrics, and shenanigans in the dirty lil’ trollops book, Just Words.

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