“We fight with our friends in a beautiful way.”
Starts simple, becomes beautiful, grows epic.
Jim LaPietra (vocals & guitar), Eric “the” Taylor (drums), Brian Barrett (bass, keyboards)
There was a group called Empty Grave.
I first met Jim LaPietra in 1989 when the band, with his brother John on bass and their high school friend Andy A. on drums, performed on a live radio and cable access show called Uncle Kong’s Thud Factory. Their sound was “the Cure meets U2,” and the band’s allusions to Christianity were infrequent and mostly a function of age and the need to appease more fundamental family members.
At the time, I was a camera operator for the show and then became their camera operator. It was a good excuse to get into clubs and shows for free – especially since I was seventeen years old. Over the years I would design, and often physically produce, their t-shirts (most of which were bad – just horrible – until the later years, when I improved enough to be “not completely garbage.”), tape covers (technical design and production), and posters. I also handled the mailing list with a database of 1,000 physical addresses, constantly updated with returned postcards (1990-1995).
The band was plagued by line-up changes. The first one, when Andy A left, “the” Taylor joined on drums, and I started playing keyboards. While I had been programming electronic sound design on a computer for a while, I didn’t know any of the keyboard notes. I couldn’t hide in a cloud of “soundscape possibilities.” I was broke, and the live gear I could scrounge from others’ kindness was limited. My second show was opening for A Flock of Seagulls.
As the years went on, Rob Kordish joined on lead guitar, Matthew Jay (later, Barrett & Airheart) added percussion. After John left, bass was Erik Gregory and then Ben Harris.
Our sound evolved into something bigger—progressive, cinematic, unpredictable. Sudden time signature and key changes, unique structures—some songs didn’t have a refrain; others, probably too many. Six–to–eight-minute runtimes became the norm.
These weren’t noodling jams. They were precise compositions. We sometimes would string all our instrumentals into one big, non-stop, 30-minute, epic tone saga.
We had shows outdoors in spring under thunder and lightning, summer under the city fireworks and annually at the lake pavilion, and in winter surrounded by columns of fire.
To be honest, I kind of sucked that entire time, and it didn’t matter. My parts were simple, and for most shows, no one could hear me. In 1994, I didn’t so much quit as just give up. It came as a complete surprise to me that the entire band dissolved immediately.
We didn’t know it at the time, but a syndicated conservative talk-show host started using one of our songs as his ad bumper, and kept using it for more than four years—on an AM station you could hear across most of the eastern U.S.
After a hiatus of half a decade, we got a shout-out in Spin Magazine (Oct, 1998) in a spread about Rochester native, musician, film-maker, and long-time fan, Matt Zane, focusing on his band Society One and his creation of the Backstage Sluts franchise. Among paragraphs that seem to just repeat the words “sex, drugs and rock-n-roll,” it mentions his new record label InZane Records signing Empty Grave, described as “Nine Inch Nails meets U2 meets Marylin Manson.”
The rest of the band made an album for InZane with the producer of Stabbing Westward. Matthew Jay was on bass, and for the handful of shows they played in that iteration, he was able to cover all my old keyboard parts on a Torus pedal synth with his right foot.
Then, after another decade, three of us got back together with a couple attempted name changes for a reunion stint in 2010 which included performing at Rochester’s Park Ave Fest three times, Infringement Festival in Buffalo, the House of Guitars and the Taste of Rochester, where we finally had multiple cameras I could edit together.
I played a MIDI bass, and that covered my old keyboard parts.
We also recorded an EP with Rupert Greenall, the keyboardist from the Fixx.
Every once in a while, I hear from musicians who say Empty Grave inspired them to start their own bands. From what I understand, a couple of them went on to form Jars of Clay. Other than something I heard said in passing, the only ‘evidence’ I have is circumstantial—they were local kids from Fairport High School, and back then, we had fans in Fairport. It was within range of the 40w radio station that played us regularly. That, and I suppose I can hear a bit of the influence.
The Record Archive had an art showing in 2013-ish. A curated collection of around 150 posters from the owner of Monroe Poster Shop. I designed five of them. The one below is from 1994.
