Words by Big D And The Kids Table front man David McWane
1998, a year after the release of Shot By Lammi, Big D and the Kids Table started playing shows all around the east-coast. We never paid ourselves and we wouldn’t for many years to come. We wouldn’t even use the money to buy ourselves food, we just put the money back into the band – gas, merch and saving up for our first van. One Boston night, a fan showed up to a show named Shawn Flores, he came with gifts – printed Big D t-shirt and Big D patches. He told us that the ones we printed were crappy and that the ink ran off in the rain. We have been printing our merch with Shawn ever since. Steve Foote and myself decided to start building on the idea of Fork In Hand records. We started finding bands like ourselves that could appreciate a little help. Steve and myself knew how these bands could get their music recorded, print a CD, print some merch and book some shows. The first three bands we decided to help were Kicked In The Head, The Sellouts & The Mission 120. We started booking this line up in every VFW, church or basement. Fork In Hand records was now a well known underground Boston label. Steve and I never took a penny, we just put all profits into F.I.H. band’s music.
People kept talking about our “explosive” live show, so we decided to capture that energy in a Live EP. You can hear Kicked In The Head’s Matt & Gary announce us at the start. Big D couldn’t believe that we now could actually record live club recordings and print them on compact disc. The next year the label Montalban Hotel offered to print a 7” vinyl release with the band Lounge. Again we were dumbfounded, ‘someone wants to print us vinyl and we don’t have to pay for it or do any of the efforts to make it happen. And it’s green!?!?’.
All this time we were writing our next full length album that would be released the following year.
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Tune in next week for another Big D “Behind The Album” piece. They’ll continue weekly until all 34+ Big D albums have been covered!